Contextualizing China—Africa Relations

Abstract

In much of the recent media coverage concerning China’s contemporary relationship with Africa there is often little if any recognition that the historical connections between China and Africa run deep and that contemporary China-Africa engagement builds on a longer history of cooperation and interaction. It is as if China’s interest in Africa is somehow ‘new’ and sudden, purely opportunistic or that it has come from nowhere. Yet China has long had a presence in Africa (Yu 1965; Ismael 1971; Larkin 1971; Eadie and Grizzell 1979; Jinyuan 1984) and Africans are also an important part of China’s history (Brunson 1985, 1995; Snow 1988; Winters 1984). This chapter traces the longue durée of China’s historical encounters with Africa, not by offering a simplistic chronology or by focusing purely on the history of formal diplomacy after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 but rather by looking at the long-term history of connections and encounters between China and Africa and by rejecting the linearity and seamlessness implied and imposed by the totalizing discourses of official history. These kind of official narrations of China in Africa have particular kinds of ideological uses in the contemporary historical moment and often seek to trace this history to some founding moment or point or origin.

The essence of Zheng’s voyages does not lie in how strong the Chinese navy once was but in that China adhere[d] to peaceful diplomacy when it was a big power … Zheng He’s seven voyages to the West [explain] why a peaceful emergence is the inevitable outcome of the development of Chinese history. (Xu Zuyuan, Chinese Vice Minister for Communication, cited in Xinhua (2004), emphasis added)