Docking tech between China and Kenya

Drawing on fieldwork in Kenya and Shenzhen in 2023 and 2024, June Wang and Sami Moisio examine Chinese battery and mobile phone businesses operating across competing standards regimes. Three findings connect everyday technical work to geopolitical ordering.

Docking makes partial compatibility possible

The paper develops docking to explain how different technical systems are made to work together without adopting a single standards regime. Golden Lion secured changes to battery testing that accounted for product age and shipping time. Transsion adapted phones to local priorities and sustained their use through repair and service networks. These are distinct routes to compatibility through regulatory procedures and material objects.

Technical work becomes everyday diplomacy

Docking depends on three overlapping forms of work: establishing technical authority through standards knowledge and testing; building positional networks that connect manufacturers, regulators and users; and sustaining affective infrastructure through trust, care and recognition. Entrepreneurs perform diplomatic functions through these practices, mediating differences that formal agreements leave unresolved.

The territorial outcome is dispersed authority

The authors call this outcome atomised territory: authority and technical control are distributed across laboratories, inspection routines, committees, devices and service centres. Chinese technologies can become embedded in Kenyan everyday life without a wholesale change in formal geopolitical alignment. Docking manages rivalry through provisional connections, while placing the work and risks of maintaining them on the actors who bridge competing systems.