Birds of a feather flock together: The Chinese Communist Party meets African political parties

The Chinese Communist Party’s International Department is a key player tasked with the dissemination of favorable information to an external (elite) audience, and in turn, channeling back positive foreign responses into domestic propaganda. This article investigates the Communist Party’s International Department (CCP-ID) relations to parties and other elites in Sub-Saharan African. We analyse the patterns of the CCP’s relations with parties across Sub-Saharan Africa since the early 2000s and explore several potential drivers of party-to-party interaction, as well as the promoted discourses. We find that party-to-party relations support the CCP’s specific interests as a party such as enabling organizational learning, disseminating favourable narratives and signalling to Chinese citizens that the CCP has longstanding international friends. Our findings have implications for our understanding of China’s global rise and of organizational learning in party-based regimes.