For years, much of Kenya's coverage of China has focused on the country's government, infrastructure projects, trade and growing influence in Africa. We report on presidents and state visits, roads and railways, Chinese companies and disputes involving Chinese nationals.

🇰🇪 Breaking It Down

These are important stories. But a two-week journey through China raised a different question, where are the Chinese people in our China stories? China is home to about 1.4 billion people, yet the country that appears in Kenyan headlines is often the China of the state.

Kenyans.co.ke toured China for two weeks as part of a seminar for Kenyan media managers and editors organised in collaboration with Kenya Editors Guild (KEG), covering Beijing, Ningbo and Jiaxing, with a layover in Guangzhou.

It offered an opportunity to observe a country that is difficult to fully capture from thousands of kilometres away.

📌 What You Need to Know

The first impression was the scale of ordinary life in markets, restaurants, trains and streets, people were working, travelling, shopping, eating and spending time with family and friends.

Their routines were not fundamentally different from those of people in Nairobi's Muthurwa or Gikomba markets. The scale was different, but the basic concerns,  work, family, food, transport, and making a living were familiar.

The relationship between Kenya and China is already a people-to-people relationship as much as it is a government and commercial one. Chinese enterprises employ thousands of Kenyans, while Kenyans live, study and work in China.

Data from the Joshua Project indicates that there are 38,000 Chinese citizens living in Kenya, the third largest in Africa behind Ethiopia and Algeria. Yet people on both sides often become visible in coverage only when there is a dispute, a crime, a business development or another event that makes them newsworthy.

In Guangzhou, and later in Beijing, Ningbo and Jiaxing, we encountered people simply going about their daily lives. They were working, travelling, eating, shopping and trying to make a living, activities that are not particularly different from those of people in Nairobi's Muthurwa or Gikomba markets.

There were also moments of curiosity. They wanted to know about Kenya, while we wanted to understand their lives.

📰 Source: Kenyans.co.ke