Introduction

Summary

Everyone knows that Africa is very far away from us. But emotionally, it is so close to us. We all want to learn more about Africa, despite how little we knew in the past … We are meeting many people for the first time, yet the friendship born of a shared struggle had long bound us together.

Han Beiping, 1964

Han Beiping’s comment captures the paradox of dominant Chinese perceptions towards Africa and its people. A journalist and member of China Writers Association, he had visited Africa twice in the early 1960s, which made him a rare first-hand Chinese observer ofnewlyindependent African countries. Han vividly recalled the moment he stepped down from the aeroplane in Cairo: ‘a cold gust of wind hit my face and I started to shiver … Did you presume everywhere in Africa was hot?’ Another kind of warmth he went on to be impressed by was that with which he was received by the locals, who had made him feel at home and at ease. He portrays the bond between Chinese and Africans as forged through a shared struggle against imperialism and colonialism along with courageous nation-building efforts. Such claims, which tend to be dismissed as mere propagandist slogans by today’s media, in fact reflect the historical baggage that contemporary actors in China-Africa relations must shoulder in their engagements with each other.

Few topics on China’s remarkable ascension to the status of global superpower have captured the interest and imagination of both popular and academic audiences more than China’s renewed levels of engagement with the African continent. Africa has become a major platform from which to analyse and understand China’s growing influence in the global South. Since the mid-2000s, research on ‘China in Africa’ has generated a wide body of scholarship ranging across a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including political science, international relations, economics, anthropology, and sociology. Even so, the history of Chinese relations with Africa remains largely under-represented. Considered either too recent to constitute ‘factual history’ or insignificant to the formation of contemporary metanarratives, historical relations between China and Africa during the Cold War are often discussed briefly and in reductionist ways before paying lip service to the presence of ongoing changing dynamics.