African students are clearly a key foreign policy issue for China. Indeed, ‘Exchanging students between China and Africa is one of the oldest forms of China-African cooperation’ (China, MOE, 2005: 12).

In the White Paper on China's Foreign Aid they are mentioned as having been part of the aid agenda since the 1950s. The total number of students trained by 2009 is mentioned precisely as 70,627, and the total number on China scholarships in 2009 was 11,185 (China, 2011a: 14).

Students from Africa were not referred to as a category in Zhou Enlai's eight principles of foreign aid, enunciated in early 1964 in Accra on his African tour (China, 2000), but they are routinely claimed as an element in China-Africa education cooperation. Thus in the volume published in 2003 in conjunction with the Forum on China-Africa Educational Cooperation, the theme of ‘Exchanges of Students’ took by far the largest part (40 pages) of the seven modalities of educational cooperation used by China for Africa. Again, there was a special concern shown for the history of this particular mechanism, stretching back to the first students, at least in modern times, who came from Egypt to China in 1956. But there was also a powerful ethical claim made about this category of educational cooperation as we noted in Chapter 2, especially in regard to the great care to be shown them, the respect due to their cultures and customs whilst in China, and to their prospects on their return: