Kenya’s ruling United Democratic Alliance is the latest African political party to benefit from China’s soft power push to promote its development model and ideology on the continent.UDA officials visiting China in May clinched a deal with the Communist Party to build a leadership school for the Kenyan party in Nairobi. Chinese officials had previously held talks about setting up the school when they visited Kenya in March.Beijing has also agreed to finance and build Nairobi’s new foreign ministry headquarters “as a visible marker of 60 years of diplomatic relations”, Korir Sing’Oei, Kenya’s principal secretary of foreign affairs, said in May.
Many African political parties have approached the Chinese Communist Party to build their schools and help strengthen party building, according to Paul Nantulya, a China specialist at the National Defence University’s Africa Centre for Strategic Studies in Washington.
He said those parties were from countries including Burundi, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco and Uganda.
UDA officials visiting Beijing in May clinched a deal with the Communist Party to build a leadership school in Nairobi. Photo: HandoutThe Chinese Communist Party has already provided US$40 million to build the Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Leadership School in Kibaha, named after Tanzania’s revered founding father, which opened in 2022. Beijing also supported the refurbishment of the Herbert Chitepo School of Ideology in Zimbabwe – the political training school of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front – that was completed last year.
Source link : https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3273698/how-chinas-communist-party-building-political-schools-and-influence-africa
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Publish date : 2024-08-08 07:00:00
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