Ahmad Ali Kohzad’s visit to China in 1958, as documented in an essay originally published in Persian Dari in the Afghan magazine Āryānā, offers a fresh perspective on the intersection of heritage, development discourse, and international relations during the mid-20th century. Kohzad, a prominent Afghan historian, intellectual, and political activist framed his narrative around the shared historical ties between China and Central Asia. Through a shared historical experience linked by the spread of Buddhism, the exchange of diplomatic missions, and economic exchange along the Silk Road, Kohzad imagines Afghanistan as part of a broad community of Asian states, despite the difference in their recent history, political systems, and ideological convictions. This international solidarity is deployed to reinforce a sense of national consciousness and benefit nation-building projects at home; or, as Berthold Unfried and Claudia Martinez Hernández put it, to create a “patriotic internationalism.” By juxtaposing this shared history with the impact of colonialism and the problem of economic development, his essay brings into focus the links between the various socialist, nationalist, and development discourses that animated the Non-Aligned and Afro-Asian movements. These linkages were a key factor in the appeal of those movements, which helped facilitate ties between nations with significant differences in their approach to politics and economic development. Kohzad’s essay is an important source for understanding how different locales responded to development discourse and the challenges of modernity. His narrative emphasizes solidarity among Asian nations and advocating for state-led development helps highlight the role of Afghanistan and Central Asia in the history of socialism and development discourse. His portrayal of China as a model for economic success underscored Afghanistan’s aspirations for modernization and industrialization. More broadly, it demonstrates how individuals across Asia were actively working to build a common sense of national identity through international solidarity. They found common ground by (re)imagining a shared history and tapping into anti-colonial discourses of national renewal that were circulating globally, especially in the Non-Aligned, Afro-Asian, and international socialist movements. The enduring rhetorical power of the combination of heritage and developmental discourse continues to be a core feature of China’s diplomacy in the Global South. Understanding these relationships can therefore not only help to de-provincialize the history of Central Asian and Afghanistan, but also to better understand a critical set of contemporary political and economic relationships.