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.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.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.I particularly recall a 20-minute conversation with a taxi driver in Beijing. He was curious about Africa, just as we were curious about China. We talked about the weather and how we had arrived at the right time. “You don't want to come to China in January,” he said, explaining that the month, which is often hot in Kenya, is very cold in Beijing. He explained how he spent his free time with friends and family, including playing card games, a pastime we noticed in several places we visited.On Sundays, he said, he could either work or rest with his family. “But I prefer to work,” he said through Google Translate, which had become a crucial partner during the trip. In another encounter, a group of us went shopping and came across a robot serving customers in a retail shop. We ordered water, and the robot moved to the shelves, picked up the bottle, and handed it to us. Had we not needed to pay in cash, the entire transaction could have taken place without human interaction.The experience was a reminder that technology in China is not confined to highways, trains and large infrastructure projects. It has become part of ordinary transactions. In several markets we visited, most shops accepted WeChat Pay, the mobile payment service built into the WeChat app. For a Kenyan, the experience felt familiar, it works in much the same way as M-PESA, allowing customers to pay digitally without exchanging cash.The Great Wall offered perhaps the clearest image of China's relationship with its past. Built and rebuilt over successive dynasties for more than 2,000 years, it remains one of the country's most recognisable symbols. But the attention at the site was drawn not only to the wall itself but also to the people climbing it. Men and women, young and old, pushed themselves up the steep sections. Some struggled with the climb, sweat poured down faces as people pushed towards the next section. The scene brought together much of what the journey had revealed, a country carrying its history while moving rapidly into the future and millions of ordinary people living within that transformation.The experience did not suggest that China was perfect, nor that everything observed during a two-week visit could be applied to Kenya. There were systems that remained unfamiliar and aspects of daily life that required far more time to understand. But it challenged the narrow image of China that can emerge from headlines. The country is a government and an economic power, but it is also commuters, workers, traders, families, consumers and young people building ordinary lives.That raises a broader question about how China is reported from Kenya. If Kenyan journalism is to explain China and its relationship with Kenya more fully, it may need to look beyond the governments and projects and ask a simpler question, who are the people living inside this story?
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