Description
In the past two decades, a particular focus by China (PRC) has been the financing and building of new parliaments for African countries. The involvement of the PRC and Chinese construction firms in these parliament buildings include design, construction, furnishing and maintenance. In other words, China is engaged in an enterprise of donating complete parliament buildings to African countries. Upon completion, the PRC sends a senior official to symbolically handover the building to the beneficiary government. This marked interest by China in African Parliaments read together with recipient states’ acquiescence to receiving as gifts such symbolic buildings that are ultimately tied to national identity raises new questions critical in understanding contemporary China-Africa relations. In this paper, I leverage the phenomenon of China funded parliament buildings in Africa as a site of politics to explore the manifestation and the extent of African agency in China-Africa relations. Concurrently, I also discuss the motivations for China’s unusual interest in Africa’s legislative political institutions and how this is shaping elite and popular perceptions on China’s long-range foreign policy strategy in Africa. I do so through an ethnographic study of Chinese funded parliamentary buildings in Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe. I use data collected through elite interviews, focus groups, document review, non-participant observation and photography.
