There are journeys that alter one’s geography, and there are those that rearrange one’s mind. My recent travels across China belong firmly to the latter. Long before my flight descended over the ordered expanse of Beijing, I had inherited an image of China shaped by half-truths — a monolithic state of stoic people, great walls, and even greater censorship. What I encountered instead was a civilisation alive to paradox: ancient yet futuristic, disciplined yet profoundly human.
Climbing the Great Wall on a crisp October morning, I saw not a relic of defence but a monument to persistence — a line of stone that seems to breathe with history. “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones,” Confucius once wrote. That patient pragmatism defines China’s ascent. Progress here is incremental, deliberate, and coherent — a mosaic built stone by stone rather than a revolution waged overnight.
Later that day, standing atop the wall’s highest rampart, I understood why the myth of China as merely authoritarian misses the essence. What looks like rigidity from afar is, up close, choreography — millions of coordinated movements guided by purpose. It is a rhythm born not of fear but of focus.
At BOE’s innovation campus in Beijing, where engineers turn glass into light and pixels into living colour, I saw how that same philosophy animates the digital age. The laboratories were immaculate, yet not soulless: calligraphy hung beside quantum screens; potted bamboo softened the geometry of machines. Engineers spoke of balance, of designing technologies that coexist with the rhythms of human life. Their pride was quiet, grounded in the Confucian belief that the highest skill lies in harmony rather than dominance.
For Africa — and Zimbabwe especially — this approach offers a revelation. We have been told that progress requires disruption, that only by abandoning our histories can we industrialise. But China’s story suggests another path: that the future can be engineered without erasing memory. Development, I realised, need not mimic the smoke-stack century; it can be re-imagined as a dialogue between innovation and sustainability.
In this spirit, China did not chase the global North’s combustion engines — it leapt straight into electric mobility. It did not lament digital disruption — it built platforms that re-imagined cinema, education, and commerce. The lesson is clear: to compete with credibility, Africa must locate its own comparative advantages — our sunlight, our lithium, our creativity — and build around them rather than against them.
The Village That Taught Me About the Future
Travelling south to Zhejiang Province, I discovered Lizucun — once a sleepy hamlet, now a model of rural revitalisation. In the early 2000s it was scarcely electrified; today it welcomes over 650 000 visitors a year. Paved roads thread through fields of tea; cooperative workshops produce crafts once dismissed as quaint; and the entire settlement hums with quiet prosperity.
The “Two Mountains Theory” — that lucid waters and lush mountains are as precious as gold — is not a rhetorical flourish here but a moral compass. Lizucun shows that prosperity and ecology are not competing destinies. The community’s income has risen six-fold, yet its air and streams remain clear. What transformed Lizucun was not money alone but organisation: government enabling, citizens participating, culture commercialised without being commodified.
It reminded me of home. In Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, the same mixture of natural beauty and artisanal skill exists in abundance, but the connective tissue of governance and innovation is often missing. If Lizucun could turn heritage into livelihood, so too could Mutoko or Domboshava. Modernisation, I realised, is not the abandonment of the rural; it is its reinvention.
A few days later, at Ningbo’s Tianyi Ge Museum — the world’s oldest private library — I confronted another kind of transformation. The ancient books have been moved into climate-controlled vaults, a decision that angered purists. Yet a curator told me gently, “We do not worship the dust; we preserve the breath.” Those words stayed with me.
So much of Africa’s heritage remains vulnerable — both materially and conceptually. We guard relics but neglect relevance. China’s model demonstrates that preservation is an act of evolution: a living culture renews itself by translation into modern forms. In Suzhou’s classical gardens, centuries-old stones sit beside Wi-Fi routers, and somehow the harmony persists. The past here is not a museum piece; it is an ecosystem.
That sense of continuity — of negotiating with time rather than resisting it — is China’s most subtle export. It offers Africa a reminder that genuine progress need not sever its roots.
Media, Meaning and the Digital Silk Road
In Beijing, during the Seminar on Regional Online Media for Belt and Road Countries, I witnessed another frontier of transformation: the forging of a digital Silk Road. The sessions, hosted by the China Broadcasting International Economic and Technical Co-operation Company (CBIC), revealed how storytelling itself has become a form of infrastructure.
China’s audiovisual industry — now valued at over US $7 billion — operates as a vast ecosystem spanning cinema, streaming, e-commerce, and social interaction. Platforms such as Tencent Video, iQIYI, and Bilibili have redefined what a “film release” means, blending art and algorithm. Artificial intelligence now edits news copy; augmented and mixed-reality studios allow anchors to stand “inside” the story; audiences participate rather than consume.
As one lecturer put it, “Technology will not replace journalists, but journalists who use technology will replace those who do not.”
This approach need not alarm Africa’s media landscape; it should inspire it. Imagine The Southern African Times producing an immersive report on the Kariba Dam or letting readers step virtually into a solar plant in Hwange. With thoughtful curation, immersive media could reconnect citizens to their own realities.
Yet China’s example also carries a warning. The same tools that democratise expression can centralise power. African media innovators must therefore pair ambition with ethics — ensuring that digital storytelling serves enlightenment, not manipulation.
Still, I left the seminar convinced that Africa’s creative future lies in this fusion of art, technology, and public purpose. The question is not whether we can build platforms, but whether we can build trust.
Competing with Credibility — Africa’s Turn to Climb
Pragmatism is China’s quiet superpower. Every major reform — from land policy to high-speed rail — aligns state intent with local incentive. Ideology bends before utility. Africa’s leaders could adopt the same temperament: fewer declarations, more delivery.
Indonesia offers an instructive parallel. Facing the twin pressures of decarbonisation and growth, Jakarta has negotiated a US $21.6 billion Just Energy Transition Partnership with foreign partners, including China. Its strategy is not charity but choreography — local content rules, vocational training, and technology-transfer clauses ensure that green investment builds domestic capacity.
Zimbabwe, with its mineral wealth and youthful population, could follow suit. Bilateral projects with China should be structured to guarantee technology transfer and skills development, not merely extraction. Our education reforms must therefore become living frameworks: data-driven, outcome-led, audited annually. We must ask not only how many engineers we graduate, but how many innovators we employ.
Likewise, our energy policy should mirror pragmatism with vision. By unburdening the national grid through decentralised solar systems, we can divert electricity toward manufacturing — creating jobs while greening growth. Such a development-comparable energy transition would anchor industrialisation in sustainability rather than sacrifice competitiveness to virtue signalling.
At the core of these reforms lies culture. China’s rise was powered as much by self-belief as by steel and silicon. Its museums, media, and villages are expressions of a civilisation confident enough to modernise without apology. Africa’s own ascent must likewise merge material progress with cultural coherence.
To compete with credibility is not merely to industrialise faster but to believe more deeply — in our languages, in our creative industries, in our capacity to define modernity on our own terms. Only then can partnership with China evolve from dependency to dialogue.
When I returned to the Great Wall on my final evening, the wind carried the word suiyuan — “to follow fate.” Yet I understood it differently. Fate, in the Chinese sense, is not fatalism but equilibrium: the wisdom of advancing in step with circumstance. Africa’s suiyuan will depend on our ability to harness time rather than chase it.
Rabindranath Tagore, reflecting on his 1924 visit to China, observed that “the world speaks in many tongues, but truth has only one voice — that of sincerity.” Beneath the same clouds that once drifted over Li Bai’s inkstone, Africa and China may yet find that sincerity — not rivalry — as the basis of their shared horizon.
