The existing scholarship on Africa-China relations features predominantly Sino-centric and unitary approaches that consider sub-Saharan states as uni form entities, speaking with one voice and largely reactive to Beijing’s benevolence or geopolitical strategies. By downplaying African agency, it presents China’s African partners as either benefting or suffering in the course of their engagement with China. As such, it ignores how African domestic actors constitute the identities and interests of their states in the context of interacting with China. Furthermore, it pays no attention to their perceptions of China, as if African images of China do not matter. Furthermore, it is mostly atheoreti cal, relying on the description of what happened, where and why. Lin (2007: 74) exemplifes above perspectives, when noting:
From 1956 to 1978, China aided Africa with billions of dollars despite the fact that China’s own economic situation was precarious. History has shown that aid alone is unlikely to signifcantly transform the real ity of African poverty. Thus, in the 1980s, China attuned its economic assistance to Africa by attempting to help Africa help itself. Improving Africa’s ability to self-develop was seen to be more useful than free economic aid. […] Cooperative and joint ventures helped to bring new technology and management practices to projects in Africa, while pref erential loans pressed African nations to use money effectively.
The present study is inspired by the Afro-centric overlook of the relationship. Focussing instead on how variegated African entities construct the identities and interests of the PRC, it fips Gros and Fung’s (2019) study—which looks at China’s construction of its own identities and attendant implications for its Africa policy—on its head. It follows the advice of Alden and Hughes (2009: 14) by not presuming the state as the only unit of analysis in the Africa-China relationship. Its domestic-focussed constructivist approach dissects the presumed character of the state as an opaque box, revealing that not just China but also African countries are not unitary entities with singular insulated voices. Instead as states, they encompass varying actors with distinct identities and interests who compete over what the state’s identities and interests should be. This domestic competition maps out the range of the state’s policies in interactions with Beijing and the PRC.
Whereas French (2014) and Matambo and Onwuegbuchulam (2021) consider the state and non-state spheres as discrete dimensions of the Africa China relationship, this book establishes from its constructivist, non-unitary and Afro-centric approach that a relationship exists between them and are therefore more appropriately described, if not instead, as two sides of the same coin. They are not just discrete, rather they shape each other at least from the African perspective in the relationship with the PRC. Specifcally, Matambo and Onwuegbuchulam (2021: 236) observe that there are few studies that explore China at the state level and ordinary Chinese in Africa as "discrete dimensions of the ‘China in Africa’ discourse". This book from its Afro-centric perspective observes that rather than be rigidly separate, state and non-state actors—at least in the case of Ghana and Kenya—shape each other in the relationship with the PRC. Non-state actors have an infuence over the policy options at the disposal of African state elites in the China relationship.
Emphatically, this book bridges the divide between African state and non-state elites in the China relationship, showing that both kinds of actors determine and shape the Africa-China relationship. The book establishes the relationship between what Park and Alden (2013) label the "downstairs" (non state) of Africa-China relations which have been historically treated in the literature (by the few studies) as separate from the "upstairs" which focusses more on state-realm politics. From the African perspective, the relationship is one of interactions and contests which result in simultaneously antithetical (friend/foe) responses towards the PRC. Effectively, the relationship keeps the PRC and its diverse entities, be they state or non-state, in check in the equally complex architecture of African nations.
In sum, only recently have students of Africa-China relations begun to examine the African narratives and agency in relations with China. This study adds to this emerging scholarship by proposing a constructivist framework and methodology to explore African domestic debates about China. Departing from the unitary and Sino-centric approaches, it throws new light on the relatively under-explored African narratives, advanced by various state and non-state actors in Ghana and Kenya. In doing so, it seeks to demonstrate that African polities feature diverse and often conficting perspectives on China and China strategies. Such intra-African debates defne the parameters of a desirable state action in interactions with China allowing the wider public to participate in foreign policymaking, however tenuously. In effect, diverse African agents guided by their identities and interests compete over China-related policies. It is their multifarious and often incompatible interests that render sub-Saharan states’ China policies contested and occasionally contradictory. Overall, they shape the interests of African states in China engagements by mapping the contours of African policymaking as they set the parameters of permissible, legitimate and desirable courses of action in interactions with China and its manifold entities. Ultimately, this book will demonstrate that Africa’s domestic context of an ostensibly staunch friendship with the PRC is far more complex and nuanced than commonly assumed. It is also a timely reminder not to reduce African voices to a footnote when exploring Africa China relations in particular and China’s emergence as a global power more generally.