China's interest towards Sub Sahara African countries is increasing year by year because of its growing need of raw materials, and in particular of oil, which are essential to sustain its internal growth based on a strong process of industrialization. Trade is a crucial aspect of these relationships: in the last years the trade flows between China and Sub-Saharan Africa have increased exponentially making China the third Sub-Saharan Africa's trading partner after Europe and USA.
In this paper we investigate whether these growing trading relationships with China are hampering the Intra African trade development which could be an important tool to improve the Sub-Saharan Africa growth. The theoretical starting point for the empirical analysis is a classic gravity model integrated with further explanatory variables and tested in three different model specifications. We have found a significant impact of China in every model specifications with a negative total effect on intra-African trade.