BY GIKUNDIRO PRISCA
News Anchor and Reporter of AE News English, Rwanda
When the invitation to the Belt and Road Journalists Forum arrived, I thought about my own kitchen, my own street, my own phone, and my last visit to a Chinese restaurant.
It is a strange thing how the smallest details make the most influence in our lives. These details can make a significant part of our memory. The first time I noticed a “Made in China” label, | was in my primary school, we had a weighing scale in the living room that my mother had bought from a trade exposition and it is what she used when helping us with math homework sometimes. From many devices I had seen labeled made in China, | always imagined China as a country leading in technology without even having much information about it. That is the strange thing about China, from where I stand. Long before I ever thought I would set foot there, China had already arrived in my life. Countries that have a hand in day to day solutions that simplify our lives, from complex technologies to human necessities such as food and water have a leading stand in global governance.
In Rwanda, and across much of Africa, China is rarely an abstract idea on the news. It is a physical, everyday presence: in the electronics we buy, the shoes and clothes on our backs, the online shopping platforms increasingly replacing the old marketplace, the roads and stadiums built by Chinese companies. My first impression of China, then, was never really a first impression at all. It was a cumulative build: one product, one construction site, one partnership announcement at a time, long before Jiangsu Province was ever a place I expected to visit.
A Power Measured in Objects, Not Just Headlines
We are used to hearing about global powers in the language of armies, treaties, and summits. But my understanding of Chinese influence has always come from something more tangible: objects. The phone charger that outlives three different phones. The motorcycle that never seems to break down. The market stall selling clothes and electronics at prices that make them accessible to families who could never afford the European or American equivalent.
This is, I think, a distinctly African journalist’s vantage point on China’s rise, and it’s one I want to bring to this forum. When commentators in other parts of the world debate ChinaⅠs global governance ambitions in abstract terms _ spheres of influence, multipolarity, or soft power, I find myself thinking instead about the charity organizations and development partnerships that have become part of the fabric of life here. Hospitals built with Chinese support. Agricultural technology transferred to rural cooperatives. Scholarships that have sent Rwandan students to Chinese universities. These are not abstractions to me; for instance the Alibaba Business School Program. Through Rwanda’s cooperation agreement with Alibaba, I witnessed some of my colleagues with interest in e-commerce benefit from it in terms of financial aid, making their dreams come true, culture exchange and contributing the knowledge learnt when they come back home.
What is still an open question, and one I hope this forum will help me answer, is what lies underneath the objects and the infrastructure: the people, the values, the everyday life of the society producing all of this.
The Gap Between the Products and the People
Here is my honest confession as a journalist walking into this forum: I know China’s exports far better than I know China’s people. I know the brands. I do not know the neighbourhoods. My mental image of Chinese daily life has been assembled largely from films – a skyline of impossibly tall buildings, high-speed trains, a sense of scale and speed that feels almost cinematic rather than real.
So the question I am carrying with me to Jiangsu is a simple, almost naive one: what does community actually look like there? In Rwanda, community is something you can point to – it is umuganda, the shared work we do together once a month; it is the neighbour who checks on you without being asked; it is a social fabric built on proximity and mutual obligation even amid rapid change and urbanization. Does something similar exist in a Chinese city or village? Do people know their neighbours the way we do? Is there an equivalent of umuganda ‑ a habit of collective responsibility, or does a society of 1.4 billion people organize solidarity differently, at a different scale, through different institutions?
Why This Matters for Global Governance
I raise all of this not as a digression from “global governance” but because I think it is the real story. Discussions of global governance too often stay at the level of institutions – the G20, the UN Security Council, multilateral development banks. But for a journalist from Rwanda, global governance is felt first at the level of the household: whose technology reaches your village first, whose companies build your roads, whose scholarships educate your children, whose partnerships show up when Western attention moves on to something else.
China’s growing footprint in Africa is, in a very real sense, global governance made visible in daily life before it is ever debated in a conference room. That is the story I want to tell from this forum: not simply “China is powerful,” which everyone already knows, but what that power looks like and feels like from the receiving end, and what kind of society is producing it.
*The views and opinions expressed in the articles are solely those of the individual authors and do not reflect the position of the Secretariat of the Belt and Road Journalist Network.