On 22 April 2025, Kenyan president William Ruto began a five-day state visit to China, shortly after finance minister John Mbadi had also visited.
But this isn’t just routine diplomacy. It’s happening as China and Donald Trump’s US square off in a heated trade war, and Kenya finds itself caught in the middle.
Back in May 2024, Ruto was on a historic state visit to Washington DC, where Kenya was named a “major non-NATO ally”, opening access to US military tech and security partnerships.
Fast forward to 2025, and the tone has changed. A US funding freeze has created a KSh52-billion (about US$400-million) hole in Kenya’s budget and cost over 40,000 jobs.
As Ruto, suffering minor diplomatic whiplash, seeks to charm China again, we look at some facts that frame Kenya’s relations with the Asian giant.
1. Two Kenyan presidents have visited China at least seven times, but China’s president Xi Jinping has yet to set foot in Kenya
Chinese president Xi Jinping assumed the presidency in March 2013, just as Mwai Kibaki was finishing his term as Kenya’s president and before Uhuru Kenyatta was sworn in.
During his 10 years in office, Kenyatta visited China at least five times, meeting Xi in August 2013, May 2017, September 2018, November 2018 and April 2019. Xi described the frequent meetings as a reflection of the “strategic significance and high level of China-Kenya relations”.
Ruto has been just as active in engaging China. In just two and a half years, he has visited twice – in October 2023 and September 2024 – and is now on his third trip.
While top Chinese officials, including premier Li Keqiang and the foreign minister have visited Nairobi, Xi has never reciprocated the visits. Indeed, the Chinese leader’s first overseas visit as president was to Africa in March 2013, to Tanzania, the Republic of the Congo and South Africa. He has been to South Africa four times in total, most recently in 2023 for a summit of BRICS, an alliance of major emerging market economies named for founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Xi has also been to Egypt, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Rwanda, with a stopover in Mauritius. Nairobi waits. The last Chinese president to visit Kenya was Hu Jintao in April 2006, during Kibaki’s term, a return visit after Kibaki went to China in 2005.
2. Kenya owes more money to China than to any other country in the world
Kenya owes 63% of its bilateral debt to China – that’s six out of every 10 shillings borrowed from other countries.
As of early 2025, Kenya’s debt to China was about KSh691-billion (roughly $5.4-billion). That’s:
- 21 times more than what it owes the US ($248.5-million)
- 13 times more than its debt to Germany ($393.6-million)
- Seven times what it owes France ($697.9-million)
Most of this debt was borrowed in 2014 and 2015, with repayments due between 2021 and 2030. Because it was short-term and high-interest, the cost of repaying it is steep.
Between July and December 2024, Kenya repaid KSh231-billion in foreign debt, according to the national treasury. Of that, KSh65.4-billion (28.3%) went to China. Even more striking was the fact that China took up 81.9% of all bilateral interest payments during that time.
The bulk of the money, about $5.1-billion, was used to build the standard-gauge railway (SGR), the country’s most expensive – and controversial – infrastructure project. The SGR, launched in 2017, is yet to break even. A November 2024 parliamentary report said it had a KSh27.6-billion deficit as of 2023, meaning it had cost KSh100.6-billion to run but only brought in KSh73-billion in revenue.
In 2023, there were also reports, which Kenya denied, that Chinese hackers had targeted government systems to assess Kenya’s ability to repay its debt.
3. China sends nearly everything to Kenya yet buys next to nothing in return
China has been Kenya’s top trading partner for years but the trade heavily favours the Asian country.
In 2023, the latest year for which there is full data, Kenya earned KSh28.96-billion from exports to China out of a total KSh1 trillion in exports. But it spent KSh458.99-billion on goods imported from China. To oversimplify this imbalance, for every container Kenya sent to China, about 15 came from China.
China is also Kenya’s biggest source of imports. In 2024, Kenya imported KSh2.7-trillion worth of goods globally, and KSh577.9-billion (21.4%) came from China.
In January 2025, Kenya paid KSh53.7-billion to Chinese companies out of a total import bill of KSh229.6-billion – that's 23.4%.
In short: one in every five shillings Kenya spends on imports goes to China.
4. Since 2022, Kenyan tea to China, the world’s largest producer and exporter, has surged fourfold
Tea is Kenya’s top export crop, bringing in over $1-billion yearly. The country is also the world’s biggest exporter of black tea.
Tea has deep roots in Chinese culture, used for centuries in ceremonies, daily life and medicine. So it might seem like a perfect fit for Kenyan tea.
But there’s a twist: China is the birthplace of tea, the largest producer, and one of the top exporters globally. Why would it need to import tea at all?
And yet, it does. And increasingly, it’s importing tea from Kenya.
In 2022, Kenya earned just KSh562.3-million from tea exports to China. But in 2023, that number tripled to KSh1.55-billion. By 2024, it had climbed again to KSh2.7-billion – a more than fourfold increase in just two years and ranking China the 10th export destination of Kenyan tea.
To strengthen this momentum, Kenya launched the China-Kenya Tea Trade Centre in Fujian province in 2024, creating a foothold in one of China’s tea heartlands.
While China still doesn’t import tea in the same volumes as markets like Pakistan or the UK, interest in Kenyan tea is clearly growing, driven especially by health-conscious consumers seeking orthodox, or traditionally produced, tea.
5. The number of Chinese tourists to Kenya has grown fourfold since 2022
Tourism, another of Kenya’s top foreign exchange earners, is also seeing a boost from China.
In 2022, Kenya received 20 260 Chinese tourists, making China the 19th largest source market for tourists, accounting for just 1.4% of the 1.48-million tourists who visited the country.
By 2024, that number had grown sharply to 90 462 tourists from China, or 3.8% of the 2.39-million total visitors. This jump pushed China up to seventh place among Kenya’s top tourist source markets.
Bonus fact:
What do China’s official state news agency Xinhua, state-owned international broadcaster China Radio International, China’s largest English-language newspaper China Daily and international TV news service China Global Television Network (think BBC or Al Jazeera) have in common?
They have all in recent years visibly ramped up their presence in Nairobi, part of what analysts call “discourse power” or, more colourfully, a “borrowed boat” approach – China’s strategy to shape global opinion through media.
Xinhua, in Nairobi since 2006, recently built its only major office outside Beijing there. The same building now houses CGTN’s Africa headquarters, which has operated in Kenya since 2012. China Daily runs just two African bureaus – one in Nairobi, the other in Johannesburg.
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This report was written by Africa Check., a non-partisan fact-checking organisation. View the original piece on their website.
