Just over forty years ago, in 1971, I published my first book about educational aid to Africa (King, 1971). It was a critical account of the two famous educational aid missions to Eastern, Western and Southern Africa undertaken by the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York, and it looked particularly at the Commission's recommendations for Kenya as well as at the institutional developments in that country following Education in Africa and Education in East Africa (Jones, 1922; 1924). The choice of the topic was partly coincidental, derived from stumbling by chance upon the two extraordinary volumes of the Phelps-Stokes Commissions of 1922 and 1924, with their very strong message that the education of Africans should draw inspiration from institutions such as Tuskegee and Hampton for Black Americans in the Southern States. Needless to say, the word China did not appear in the indices of my book or of the two Phelps-Stokes Fund reports.

Twenty years later, I wrote a second book about aid and education (King, 1991). It was about the role of donor agencies in carrying out and promoting research and analysis on education in the developing world. Surprisingly, neither Japan nor China were mentioned in the index as donors, and China only appeared as a place where there had been research carried out by other agencies such as the World Bank on skills development, literacy and non-formal education.