Author: Peter Kragelund.

Like other bilateral actors China is engaged in the development of higher education in Africa. For the past decade, China has set up 25 Confucius Institutes in Africa. These Institutes are supported by the Chinese government and figures highly on the widely publicised meetings between African and Chinese heads of state, but are carried out by individual universities. Based on insights from the newly established Confucius centre at the University of Zambia, this paper seeks to deepen our understanding of these recent and understudied collaborations between African and Chinese actors. It sets out to explore the extent to which this collaboration resembles a new type of South ‐ South collaboration in higher education or rather resembles soft power initiatives of the Africa’s ‘traditional’ partners. . It argues that this instrument in China’s relations to Africa resembles soft power more than south ‐ south collaboration and although the Confucius Institute indeed adds extra resources to UNZA, it to a large extent mirrors other soft power initiatives from Western donors such as Alliance Française, Göete Institute and the British Council.