Race in Sino-African Relations

The long history of Sino-African relations would not be complete without a reference to Zheng He. Zheng He was a fourteenth-century admiral who completed several voyages to the historic kingdoms of Mogadishu, Brava (Barawa), Juba (present-day Somalia) and Malindi (present-day Kenya) along the East African coast. Relics of these voyages have been discovered through the expeditions of scientists, such as the 600-year-old Chinese coin unearthed on the Kenyan island of Manda in 2013. According to legend, a group of shipwrecked Chinese sailors settled in one of the Kenyan islands, eventually intermarrying with Kenyan women and leaving descendants who can still be found in Kenya today. DNA analysis has also proven the Chinese heredity of a number of descendants, who were offered university scholarships to study in China. These accounts are frequently used as counterarguments to the ‘China Threat’, to suggest that China has always had peaceful relations with Africa and still does. Although the story of the first Chinese people in Africa has been well publicized by Beijing, very few people know about the first Africans in China. Their story highlights an aspect of Sino-African relations which no politician, African or Chinese, wants to engage with: race.