5 - China’s ‘Return’ to Africa and the Past in the Present, 1989–2019

Summary

China’s rhetoric on its involvement with Africa has retained substantial continuities with the Maoist past, when virtually every other aspect of Maoism has been officially repudiated.

Julia Strauss, 2009

In the last decade, based on a reductionist framework of ‘China in Africa’, politicians, journalists, and academics alike have deployed the rhetoric of a Chinese ’scramble for Africa’, ‘empire’ building, or simply neocolonialism, to characterise what is a much more complex relationship. This vast body of literature, while demonstrating China’s renewed interest in Africa, has a striking tendency to engage simplistically with the historical aspects of this complex relationship. Most recently, Ching Kwan Lee has proposed that the unavoidable, spontaneous series of ‘events’ related to ‘China in Africa’ are embedded in powerful self- reinforcing logic and an abstract temporality of capitalism. But does this momentous global China involve the expansion of capital alone?

If capitalism has become one agent of change, so have ‘non-interference, mutuality, friendship, non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism’. China’s renewed economic interest in Africa, while certainly driven by its own ‘variety of capital’, co-exists with other historical orbits. 4 This chapter will analyse the - often blurred - boundaries between ‘Communist China’ and the capital-driven global China within the official rhetoric of China-Africa relations. Three key sectors (mining, health, and construction) will be discussed with reference to specific projects: Chinese copper mining in Zambia, Chinese medical practices in both Kenya and Zambia, and the recent Chinese-built Mombasa-Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). It is evident that in all these cases the historical legacies of brotherhood and solidarity have remained, despite the dominant contemporary narratives which have come to surround China’s capitalist expansion. In a nutshell, one could say that there is a significant degree of hybridity between ‘capitalism goes global’ and ’socialism goes global’. Indeed, the hybridity between ‘centralised control’ and ‘decentralised improvisation’ determines the nature of Chinese state company operations in Africa. This chapter diverges from the previous chapters: its goal is to articulate the meaning of this recent past through the lens of present-day narrators. A wide range of Chinese, Kenyan, and Zambian actors exhibit the strong tendency to narrate the past in the service of a particular reading of the present, as they reproduce and reconstruct historical narratives surrounding China-Africa relations in the new millennium.