China's engagement with Africa has recently become a subject of much policy and academic debate. Most of the studies on this subject have wrongly assumed a continental posture, but this view does not take into cognisance the unique national interests of China towards each individual African state. Such analyses were also heavily subjected to a North[ern] perspective as expressed through either a liberal or realist contextual lens. Despite this, the discourse on the foreign policy of China towards Zambia and Africa as a whole has not been uniformly understood. Based on the alternative Afrocentric perspective, this article seeks to employ Zambia as a test case to critique the foreign policy of China towards Africa. The central argument of this article is that China's foreign policy towards Zambia can best be understood when located within a historical and BRICS context. Methodologically, this article is based on document study