Chinese and African leaders met in Beijing this week to strengthen economic ties, as the middle kingdom mines the continent for natural resources and markets. Western observers cry foul, pointing to China's apathy in funding notorious human rights abusers (read: Sudan/Zimbabwe). Yet for some Chinese (and Africans, supposedly), this new financial lovefest is a reunion long in the making...
Six hundred years in the making, suggests an op-ed in China Daily. After exchanging "passionate hugs" and eulogies of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Jomo Kenyatta ("Mao and Zhou were great persons!""Kenyatta was also a great man!") with every Kenyan in sight, the article's author arrives at the ancient port city of Mombasa.
There, he is not only greeted with warmth and hospitality, but a history lesson. "Zheng He! Zheng He! Ok! Ok!" the locals chant, referring to the 15th century Chinese admiral who allegedly sailed as far as the east coast of Africa (some, including a contemporary Portuguese cartographer, suggest he went 2,000 miles deep into the Atlantic).
The author then goes on to describe how, in the 16th century, the Portuguese built a fort near Mombasa that eventually became a centre for the east African slave-trade. The implication is clear: a future of Zheng Hes was far better than a past of da Gamas.
One doubts that the mythical Chinese mariner was in fact embedded in the collective memory of the locals. Innocently fabricated, the Zheng He episode speaks to China's new vision of itself: an empire that could have been, now redeemed as the empire of tomorrow.
Predictably, the article's not-so-subtle posturing remained couched in the solidarity of anti-imperialist rhetoric. China Daily: new home of satire and irony.
History, writes the regressive historian Niall Ferguson, is the history of successive empires.
The Chinese, it seems, hope to write another chapter.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)
