‘This Is Our Cuba’

Abstract This chapter interrogates arguments that China contributed to or sponsored Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup. It maintains that arguments that point out possible Chinese involvement in, support for, or foreknowledge of the coup rest on a narrow evidential base. Scholars who pinpoint likely Chinese participation in the coup ignore informative literature on China’s approaches to coups, which tells us that China by and large does not have a history of engineering coups in Africa. The chapter also argues there was a history, going back to the early 2000s, of covert action by Britain in Zimbabwe, which sometimes sought to use military power to bring about an end to Mugabe’s presidency. This history of covert action does not, by itself, substantiate suggestions Britain was involved in Mugabe’s fall from power in 2017, but it does provide a valuable backdrop to debates about the role Britain might have played in the successful 2017 coup.