As China encourages more enterprises to go abroad, project contractors in Africa find themselves competing not just against their Western counterparts but also their fellow Chinese. Li Jiabao reports from Nairobi, Kenya.

"I can't sit without a project for five years, even though we are a State-owned enterprise," Wang Xiaoming said in his office in Nairobi.

Wang is the chief financial officer of the East African branch of China Overseas Engineering Group Co Ltd, a subsidiary of China Railway Group Ltd, which entered Kenya in 1984. Business originally focused on foreign aid and residential construction. It expanded to large infrastructure construction projects in 2007, with a model of tendering for projects and subcontracting them to construction companies.