Paper short abstract:

How do Chinese firms and the Chinese state in infrastructure construction adapt to African politics? To answer this question, I process-trace the involvement of Chinese firms with the Chinese state’s coordination in a specific case, the construction of Konza Technopolis in Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

How do Chinese firms and the Chinese state in infrastructure construction adapt to African politics? To answer this question, I process-trace the involvement of Chinese firms with the Chinese state’s coordination in a specific case, the construction of Konza Technopolis in Kenya, a flagship project in Kenya Vision 2030 to establish a futuristic technology city. This investigation dialogues with burgeoning studies on African agency demonstrating Chinese infrastructure construction being caught up in the politics of African states. However, it transfers the perspective from how Chinese activities being conditioned to the adaptations of the Chinese state and firms to Kenyan politics. Data were collected from in-depth interviews with five key informants from 64 interviewees during a three-month field trip to Kenya in 2022 and secondary news on the Konza construction and operations of Chinese companies. In this paper, I disaggregate how the participations and operations of Chinese firms in the Konza construction and the Chinese state’s coordination to direct or support these firms are contingent on the politics constituted by the president and bureaucratic officials of the Kenyan government.