Between Narrative and Reality: The Belt and Road Initiative in Kenya. Discourse, Power, and the Case of the Standard Gauge Railway.

This thesis examines the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as both a material and a discursive project, analysing how China constructs and disseminates narratives of development, connectivity, and win-win cooperation, and how these narratives compare with empirical outcomes on the ground. After reconstructing the BRI’s geopolitical context and its evolution towards a “Green BRI”, the thesis focuses on the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya, the country’s most significant Chinese-financed railway infrastructure. Through a discourse-analytical approach applied to official sources, media coverage, and academic literature, the thesis identifies three recurring patterns in the relationship between promise and outcome: selective omission, statistical imprecision, and semantic reframing, the latter read as an exercise of discourse power (huàyǔquán 话语权). Building on this evidence, the thesis discusses whether the Chinese model in Kenya constitutes a genuine alternative to Western development models or reproduces patterns of dependency under a different rhetoric, proposing the category of “technocratic developmental paternalism” as a more precise interpretive lens than that of neo-colonialism. The thesis ultimately shows how, in the case of the SGR, infrastructure functions simultaneously as a practical instrument of influence and as a narrative tool of power.