Sudan and South Sudan’s slow, deadly war of blood-for-oil reserves has ensnared Africa’s slyest empire builder: Communist China. The two Sudans’ complex background helps illustrate China’s emerging diplomatic quandaries in resource-rich but politically fractured sub-Saharan Africa.

In July 2011, South Sudan separated from Sudan. Independence, the result of a legitimate southern plebiscite (guaranteed by the 2005 peace agreement that ended the north-south civil war), left South Sudan with 75 percent of the former united Sudan’s oil fields.

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