The remarkable figures showing the growth in China’s investments in Africa, its wide range of interests and the political and strategic advantages of its new global role are well known. Encapsulated by the effective slogan “win-win” and an anti-imperialist mantra, the Chinese presence in the region has resulted in a “soft power”, both an institutional strategy for spreading cultural values and private initiatives for adapting to the host country. With the opening of these cultural arenas of interaction, which differ depending on the context, the interests and the paths followed by migrants were abandoned in favour of macro-economic analysis. Since, the attention they attract is as much a due to the need for a better understanding of the local context as of practices for building a “subordinate globalisation” (Marchal, 2008) on a world-wide scale. The EsCA project is an expression of the desire to combine the knowledge of specialists on China and Africa, by working in pairs using a comparative approach, to analyse new cultural interactions and their various elements, constructions and effects. Three themes will be closely examined in both their material and virtual dimensions (web exploration): traditional Chinese medicine, cultural institutional and semi-private arenas of interactions (Confucius institutes, Chinese and mixed associations) and the geopolitical uses of the immaterial cultural heritage. These themes will be studied in three African countries – Mali, Cameroon and South Africa – due to their significant cooperation with the People’s Republic of China. Analysis of the virtual field will be facilitated by tools adapted for internet investigation, developed by the FMSH’s TIC Migrations programme (ANR Contint, E-diasporas Atlas).