Kenya’s formal relations with the PRC date back to 1963. A year later, Kenya’s frst Vice President, Jaramogi Odinga led the country’s delegation to China. By the mid-1960s, however, Kenya’s relations with China—just like Ghana’s— suffered due to its domestic strife between the left and right wings of the ruling Kenya Africa National Union Party (Chege, 2008; Kioko, 2012; Mulati, 2019; Onjala, 2008). They recovered only after China’s Mao Zedong and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta died in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Thereafter, Kenya’s in teraction with China expanded, featuring Jiang Zemin’s visit in 1996 as the frst Chinese presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa (Onjala, 2008). More re cently, Kenya became an important part of the Xi regime’s BRI (Xinhua, 2019).
Normalisation of state-to-state relations facilitated the growth in Kenya China trade, which expanded from US$26 million in 1991 to US$136 million in 2000 (Onjala, 2008). Overall, between 1996 and 2008, amongst Kenya’s trading partners, Chinese exports to the country increased the most, by a whopping 2,084%. Likewise, Kenyan exports to China increased the most at a staggering 3,730% (Fiott, 2010). By 2011, China became Kenya’s second largest trading partner (Kamoche and Siebers, 2015) and since 2015, also the largest investor and contractor (Daily Nation, 2018). In 2020, Chinese exports to Kenya amounted to US$5.41 billion, while Kenya’s exports to China stood at US$139 million. However, over the past decade, Kenya registered an annual trade defcit with China of US$4.6 billion (see Figure 1.2).
Over the past two decades, China has also become Kenya’s major aid donor. Chinese aid increased from 0.08 percent of Kenya’s foreign aid in 2002 to 13 percent (US$56 million) in 2005, transforming China into the country’s second largest donor, behind the European Union (Chege, 2008). By 2015, China also emerged as Kenya’s largest external fnancer, holding 57 percent of the country’s debt (Sanghi and Johnson, 2016). By early 2018, China held 72 percent of Kenya’s debt (or 534 billion Kenyan shillings), almost ten times more than France, Kenya’s second largest lender (Business Daily, 2018). At the same time, Kenya became Africa’s third largest indebted country to China, behind Angola and Ethiopia (Kangethe, 2018).
Kenya also receives a large portion of Chinese FDI and infrastructure fnancing (Sanghi and Johnson, 2016), funding such landmark projects as the US$467 million Lamu port’s three berths and US$3.6 billion Nairobi Mombasa Standard Gauge Railway. In 2014, the railway project represented the single largest China Eximbank fnancial fow to any African country (Eom et al., 2017; Kalinaki, 2014). In 2015, Kenya became the ffth largest SSA market for Chinese construction companies in terms of gross annual revenue (behind Algeria, Ethiopia, Angola and Nigeria) (Ehizuelen, 2017). Three years later, it joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as the sixth African country (after Egypt, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Sudan and South Africa) (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, 2018a, 2018b). As China’s BRI partner and recipient of Chinese aid and investment, Kenya plays an important role in China’s African strategy. It is, thus, not surprising that China’s embassy in Nairobi is its largest in Africa in terms of number of employees (Mulati, 2019).
Kenya’s cultural and people-to-people exchanges with China also four ished. In 2019, Kenya hosted 84,000 Chinese tourists, up from 69,000 in 2017 (Daily Nation, 2018; Xinhua, 2020). In 2004, the University of Nairobi (UoN) established Africa’s frst Confucius Institute (King, 2010). Thereafter, three more Confucius Institutes and several Chinese classrooms were set up across the country. Kenyan students gained educational opportunities in China as well. Since 1982, when Beijing launched its scholarship programme, over 1,000 Kenyan students have benefted from such China-sponsored education. In 2018, more than 2,400 Kenyan students were studying in China (Daily Nation, 2018).
Together, both Ghana and Kenya are among the most stable democracies in the region, conducting regular and peaceful elections. They both have passed the Huntington (1991) two-turnover test more than once, allowing the judiciary to settle electoral disputes. According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, Ghana is the ffth best African democracy (after Mauritius, Cape Verde, Botswana and South Africa), boasting the highest African press freedom and ranking 23rd out of 180 countries. Kenya ranks as the 15th best African democracy and—like Ghana—scores particularly high (6.67) on political participation, second only to South Africa’s 8.33 (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2018; Reporters Without Borders, 2018). Both countries guarantee freedom of press. Both countries’ macro-economic relations with China have continued to grow over the past decade and both are important states in their sub-regions (east and west, respectively).
In sum, given their long-standing and steadfast diplomatic partnerships with China, burgeoning economic relations with the PRC, as well as high levels of citizens’ political participation, media and personal freedoms, both Ghana and Kenya represent promising SSA case studies not only to investigate key drivers behind their China strategies but also the domestic contests over China-related policies and related constructions of China as a threat or an opportunity. Their unique historical experiences as well as geographical, political, economic and socio-cultural diversity provide rich comparative contexts, enhancing generalisability of the fndings to the rest of the sub-Saharan region. This endeavour is the frst in the Africa-China scholarship that uses an IR holistic constructivist approach (proceeding from or focussing on the domestic context) to explore African constructions of China in SSA through the lens of a comparative method relying on Ghana and Kenya as case studies.