In 1960, Martin Wight published a learned essay provocatively entitled ‘Why is there no international theory’? 1960 was also the year I began my studies of international relations and took adolescent delight in Hans Morgenthau's realist theory of international politics. Wight was spared the need to indicate what assumptions international theory might be predicated upon, what it would or could be about, what form (or forms) it might take, what value it might have. One might suspect, as I did when I read Wight's essay a few years later, that he was rejecting the onslaught of realist theory from across the Atlantic and, even more, claims on behalf of a science of international politics, but that he was doing so indirectly, with characteristic English circumspection and perhaps a whiff of snobbery.

What Wight did say about international theory bears recalling: political theory, international law, and diplomatic history leave no space for ‘speculation about the society of states, or the family or nations, or the international community’ and, by implication, obviate any need for it. I would say instead:

• • As informed speculation, international theory long flourished at the margins of political theory, international law and diplomatic history.

• • Elevated to paradigms, liberalism and realism persist on the margins of law and history.

• • A loose confederation of critical, feminist, constructivist, poststructuralist and postcolonial scholars has migrated from the margins of liberalism and realism to the margins of social and political theory, which already occupy the margins of philosophy.

• • The prestige of science and the demands of the scientific method position quite a few students of international relations in the margins of economics and the so-called natural sciences.

• • A great many people discuss policy issues, global developments, regional concerns, and preferred futures with little concern for fields of study and their theories.

In short, there is no theory to orient the study of international relations; ‘the international’ is a sentimental allusion to an undisciplined subject matter. There is, however, an abundance of theorizing at the margins. Theories are linked propositions about the world and its workings; theorizing is linguistically mediated activity falling somewhere, anywhere, between informed speculation and formal stipulation.

The laws of hospitality

Hospitality is a fashionable topic in political and international thought. The most obvious reason for this development is the movement of people across national frontiers to escape persecution or privation in their own countries. The unplanned-for arrival of needy or enterprising strangers is hardly a new phenomenon. Nor is their disposition to make themselves at home. Yet in recent years immigration and its restriction have come to be seen as a social problem on a global scale— one that raises troubling questions about the duties we, as individuals or societies, have when faced with strangers.

Scholars have discovered that their predecessors have had little to say about the treatment of strangers. Thus they have seized on Immanuel Kant's brief and ambiguous remarks on ‘universal hospitality’ in Perpetual Peace. This should be no surprise. With the recent resuscitation of liberalism in a cosmopolitan guise, Kantian ethics have been much in fashion and Kant and Perpetual Peace much discussed. Yet recent efforts to reach more deeply into early modern thought have, in my opinion, confirmed the paucity of relevant conceptual and ethical resources for help in thinking about hospitality in today's world of strictly bounded, presumptively sovereign nation-states.

Among contemporary thinkers, Jacques Derrida is not just fashionable. His extensive work on hospitality is at the centre of the discussion of a cosmopolitan ethics not predicated on liberal premises. As Gideon Baker has remarked, Derrida's ethical stance is ‘a significant departure from Kantian hospitality and from Kantian ethics generally’. Derrida based his stance on a distinction that I believe most people would find entirely plausible. Hospitality is, or should be, utterly unconditional; it is to be extended to the stranger at the door, no questions asked. At the same time, hospitality is, in practice, always conditional; it is subject to rules in practice.

Derrida formulated this apparent contradiction in striking terms, with Kant very much on his mind.

Han Beiping’s comment captures the paradox of dominant Chinese perceptions towards Africa and its people. A journalist and member of China Writers Association, he had visited Africa twice in the early 1960s, which made him a rare first-hand Chinese observer ofnewlyindependent African countries. Han vividly recalled the moment he stepped down from the aeroplane in Cairo: ‘a cold gust of wind hit my face and I started to shiver … Did you presume everywhere in Africa was hot?’ Another kind of warmth he went on to be impressed by was that with which he was received by the locals, who had made him feel at home and at ease. He portrays the bond between Chinese and Africans as forged through a shared struggle against imperialism and colonialism along with courageous nation-building efforts. Such claims, which tend to be dismissed as mere propagandist slogans by today’s media, in fact reflect the historical baggage that contemporary actors in China-Africa relations must shoulder in their engagements with each other.

Few topics on China’s remarkable ascension to the status of global superpower have captured the interest and imagination of both popular and academic audiences more than China’s renewed levels of engagement with the African continent. Africa has become a major platform from which to analyse and understand China’s growing influence in the global South. Since the mid-2000s, research on ‘China in Africa’ has generated a wide body of scholarship ranging across a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including political science, international relations, economics, anthropology, and sociology. Even so, the history of Chinese relations with Africa remains largely under-represented. Considered either too recent to constitute ‘factual history’ or insignificant to the formation of contemporary metanarratives, historical relations between China and Africa during the Cold War are often discussed briefly and in reductionist ways before paying lip service to the presence of ongoing changing dynamics.

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.

Writing in the 1970s, Alan Hutchison proclaimed his conclusion with confidence: China’s foreign policy goals in Kenya had failed. However, many contemporary observers would be surprised by this verdict. The standard account of Sino-Kenyan relations begins in December 1963 when China became the fourth country to open an embassy in Nairobi, then leaps abruptly to September 1980 when President Daniel arap Moi paid his country’s first state visit to Beijing. This leaves the period of time between 1963 and 1980 almost entirely out of the picture. Terence Ranger has discussed how the ‘the usable past’ can be effective in legitimising nationhood, but it could be said that most of what took place in the 1960s and the 1970s did not conform to the preferred nationalist histories of either Kenya or China. This chapter tackles this omission through an attempt to answer the following questions. Did African countries such as Kenya always submit to powerful Cold War actors? What role did ideology play in Kenyan foreign policy and its relations with Communist China? To what extent did domestic and local politics play into the dynamics of Sino-Kenyan relations? And, driven by Mao’s radical outlook, did China attempt to orchestrate a regime change in Kenya?

This chapter will provide a comprehensive study of the relationship between Kenya and China from 1964 to 1975. Shortly after independence, Kenyan elites continued to develop and deepen relations with China. Nairobi dispatched two delegations, the first to the US in late December 1963, and the second to the USSR and PRC in April-May 1964. Both Communist giants signed economic and technical cooperation agreements with Kenya in the wake of these visits, the Sino-Soviet competition for global influence enabling a relatively small country like Kenya to negotiate a better overall aid package for its own development.

The second part of this chapter will analyse the tri-dimensional nature of post-independence Kenyan politics through the lens of party factions and their respective foreign backers. China’s preference for the most ‘advanced/progressive’ forces in the ‘Third World’ influenced its decision to finance the faction within KANU led by Oginga Odinga.

Mamadou Gologo, a Malian minister and novelist, recounted his 1963 travels in China in La Chine, un peuple geant au grand destin (China: A Great People, A Great Destiny), which expresses a deep appreciation for the country. The above remark invokes British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960 speech in Cape Town, in which he famously used the phrase ‘wind of change’ to describe the rapid growth in national consciousness. With seventeen African nations achieving independence, the year 1960 was dubbed the ‘Year of Africa’. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, few had predicted that a country located in the Far East would contribute significantly to that wind throughout the coming decades. Despite the prevalent perception that Communist China was a natural supporter of Africa’s anticolonial struggles, the early years of China-Africa relations were characterised by indifference, ambivalence, and estrangement, as much as by solidarity and friendship. ‘Brotherly strangers’ is my term for this intrinsic paradox. To write the history of Kenya’s and Zambia’s relations with China is to do more than simply amalgamate their respective nationalist historical trajectories. Indeed, there are three major dynamics to be observed in this transnational history. One of these is naturally the Chinese view of global events, which was translated into practical foreign policy. There is also a history of how China engaged with African actors on the ground. But what tends to be overlooked, and what is key to this study, were perceptions of ideas and values about Chinese engagement with Africa, especially when these concerned and were influenced by the anti-Communist fears of the late-colonial period.

This chapter analyses the development of ‘Red’ China’s foreign policy in the historical context of African decolonisation, which set the stage for increasing Afro-Asian engagement during the Cold War. It first discusses the Maoist dialectics which shaped China’s foreign policy and the changes they underwent over the course of practical experience with Africa and the wider world. It then traces the origins of AfroAsian solidarity and unpacks China’s activities in Africa in the wake of the Bandung Conference of 1955.

Kenyan Trade with China, 1962–1980 (KSh)

The state of Kenyan politics as the 1960s drew to a close was a great disappointment to Chinese leaders: Oginga Odinga, the left-wing figure they had chosen to back, had been excluded from the ruling party KANU and subsequently marginalised on account of his position as the leader of a Communist-backed opposition. Economically, Kenya traded largely with Britain, while political and sociocultural exchange with China was minimal in comparison to that with the West. International organisations, however, provided meaningful platforms through which the Chinese government could engage with Kenyan leaders. Jomo Kenyatta’s distaste for Communism did not, for instance, deter him from supporting China on the issue of its UN membership. The normalisation of China-US relations in the 1970s also convinced the Kenyan leadership to reassess its policy towards China. The early 1980s witnessed simultaneous leadership transitions in Kenya and China: in 1980, President Daniel arap Moi met Deng Xiaoping in Beijing to discuss the future of Sino-Kenyan relations, which would be driven by economic interests and trade opportunities.

Zambia, by comparison, was a more unpredictable and surprising partner for the Chinese. President Kenneth Kaunda, whom the West had initially considered as a moderate, eventually developed his Humanism philosophy into an all-encompassing national ideology. Throughout the 1970s, his ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP) became increasingly authoritarian in character. The declaration of a one-party state in 1972 can be seen as the culmination of Kaunda’s supreme leadership over both party and state. Meanwhile in China, the new leadership was grappling with Mao’s revolutionary legacy and rehabilitation efforts in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. The result was, as this chapter will demonstrate, that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the increasingly left-wing UNIP came to believe that post-Mao China had been co-opted by US-led neo-imperialism. Even more problematic were the Sino-Zambian divisions with regard to southern African liberation movements.

African Trade with China, 1960–1974 (US $million)