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English abstract While the People’s Republic of China in 2011 imported 80% of all Sudanese oil and developed a complete oil industry in the Republic of the Sudan, Sudan itself over the past decades has struggled to establish political stability. Against this context, this study investigates the following research question: is there a relationship between China’s economic engagement and political stability in Sudan? The study does so by conducting a series of linear regression analyses correlating measures of political stability with economic relations with China for a sample of oil exporting African countries. The analysis utilises two political stability indicators and three economic indicators: the ‘political stability’ dimension of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and five aggregated datasets of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). The three economic indicators consist of oil exports to China as measured by the United Nations Comtrade database, Chinese loans measured by the Boston University Chinese Loans to African countries (CLA) dataset and Chinese expenditures on development finance measured by the AidData – Global Chinese Development Finance (CDF) dataset. Prior to the analyses, a literature study frames the context in which Sino-Sudanese relations have developed. It addresses China’s foreign policies that lie at the basis of the People’s Republic of China’s economic engagements in the Global South over the past 30 years: the Going Out policy and the Belt and Road Initiative. The place of the non-interference principle in China’s approach to the Global South is also briefly addressed. Next, it addresses Sudan’s conflict-struck history and oil as the engine behind its economy, and as a point of contention. Lastly, by connecting the histories of both countries, relevant economic engagements are identified and lead to the three economic indicators utilised. The study finds evidence indicating significant bivariate correlations between the political stability of African countries and exports of crude petroleum to China, as well as the annual frequency of Chinese development finance. Chinese loans, however, are not found to be significantly correlated with political stability. In addition, we find that past oil trade flows are strong predictors of current oil trade, but we detect no such evidence of autoregressive correlations for loans and development finance. While the political stability of a country is a relatively strong correlate of oil trade, its correlation with loans and development finance is much weaker. We also find that African countries to a certain degree are substitutes for oil exports to China, Chinese loans and development finance. The findings support the suspicion that China’s non-interference principle does not imply immunity to political instability.