| By adopting the personal life of experts as the field of analysis and examining individual’s cognitive process of the expert identity and the interaction between different roles, the author of this research attempts to establish a new path of discussion and explanation for the effectiveness of the agricultural experts program of China’s aid to Africa, which is different from the traditional institutional analysis approach. This research follows the qualitative research approach and the author collects data through field observations and interviews with experts dispatched by China’s aid to Africa, as the object and the historical inheritance and development of China’s foreign relations as the context. This research discusses individual expert’s cognitive process of the aid expert identity from three levels of analysis, including the production of the aid expert identity, expert’s role encountering in the field, and the identity conflict at home and abroad, aiming to investigate the relationship between the state and individual in the field of aid and to explain the national logic of China’s foreign aid.Considering it from the state level, the production of aid expert is not an independent issue, but a subsidiary one. Through organization procedures, the state produces a group of standardized high-level experts whose original skill levels are different, and blurs the technical differences, causing obstacles for state’s estimation of dispatched agricultural technicians’ group identity shift and even policy contradictions which need to be avoided in the process of program implementation.Because of the defect of expert identity produced by the state, during the practice in Africa, individual aid expert’s national identity in ideological level, which was constructed by the state through institution and ceremony before going abroad, has suffered a contradiction of role expectation in the live daily interaction environment of Africa, leading to confusion of one’s role identity. Two reasons have been concluded; First, there is a defect of knowledge reconstruction in the transferring of china’s agricultural technology, and the parallel movement logic of technology makes the local knowledge of Chinese agricultural technology lose its self-explanatory power when it encountering the power structure of global knowledge logic; secondly, the deficiency of the program design compresses individual expert’s subjective initiative institutionally, and the lack of institutional power support cases aid expert’s local experience formed by domestic cognitive framework can’t be brought into fullest play under the circumstance of foreign culture and social value.During the space transferring process of the identity, the expert presents both as an identity and a profession. On the one hand, an individual has to sacrifice the freedom of role rotation in one’s daily life so as to obtain the expert identity; on the other hand, factors such as the lack of career development expectation and the insecurity of the role weaken individual expert’s identity for professional expert and cause one’s professional role identity. Therefore, in the face of such a role shift environment and the condition of no standardized provisions regarding the role of expert, an individual expert can only rely on his/her habitual feelings and determination to capture the role expectation. This means the role shift of an expert is in a relatively weak environment, and his/her identity towards the expert identity shows a weak one.The conclusion of this research can be elaborated as an aid expert is a technology-based spokesman for the state, and as an individual of the country, his/her cognition towards foreign relations is built on the value basis of the country’s foreign relations and is influenced by the country-led social mobilization and the collective identity with the nation-state as the core. The confusion of experts’ identity is originated from the conflict between domestic bureaucracies, institutional organization managements, and the fragmented development practices, which reduces the effectiveness of China’s aid to Africa.
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