Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta received credentials from six new envoys on Wednesday including China’s Zhou Pingjian. The new Chinese ambassador replaced Wu Peng who recently returned to Beijing to become the Foreign Ministry’s top diplomat for sub-Saharan Africa.
In the Chinese diplomatic hierarchy, Kenya is second only to South Africa as among the top posts in Africa and Zhou comes to the position well-prepared after completing a four-year posting as ambassador to Nigeria.
Zhou gained prominence in April when the first videos went viral of Nigerian and other African residents being forced to sleep on the streets of Guangzhou after they were evicted from their homes and hotels. Femi Gbajabiamila, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, called Zhou into his office and famously showed the envoy social videos of the apparent mistreatment that occurred in the southern Chinese city.
Zhou is widely credited with soothing ties with Nigeria’s leaders after what happened in Guangzhou but he did nothing to address the outrage in the Nigerian press and across large swathes of civil society. He also was either unwilling or unable to manage the mounting criticism over Chinese loans that erupted last May in the House of Representatives, an issue that remains highly contentious.
Kenya will present many of the same challenges that Zhou encountered in Nigeria. While Beijing’s ties with both countries’ political elites remain stable, perceptions of China in the news media and in other segments of civil society appears to be increasingly negative, amid mounting concerns over the country’s debt to China, the viability of Chinese-financed infrastructure, and anti-African discrimination, both in Kenya and in China.
