Abstract :
China’s official rhetoric on its relations with Africa is important;
it frames, legitimates and renders comprehensible its foreign policy in
this ever-important area of the world. This article explores the following
puzzle: why China’s rhetoric on its involvement with Africa has retained
substantial continuities with the Maoist past, when virtually every other
aspect of Maoism has been officially repudiated. Despite the burgeoning
layers of complexity in China’s increasing involvement in Africa, a set of
surprisingly long-lived principles of non-interference, mutuality, friendship,
non-conditional aid and analogous suffering at the hands of imperialism
from the early 1960s to the present continue to be propagated. Newer
notions of complementarity and international division of labour are beginning
to come in, but the older rhetoric still dominates official discourse, at
least in part because it continues to appeal to domestic Chinese audiences
