China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet

Iginio Gagliardone

• Editore: Zed Books
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781783605255
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoria: Géopolitique

China is transforming Africa's information space. It is assisting African broadcasters with extensive loans, training and exchange programmes and has set up its own media operations on the continent in the form of CCTV Africa. In the telecommunications sector, China is helping African governments to expand access to the internet and mobile phones, with rapid and large-scale success. While Western countries have ambiguously linked the need to fight security threats with restrictions of the information space, China has been vocal in asserting the need to control communication to ensure stability and development. Featuring a wealth of interviews with a variety of actors – from Chinese and African journalists in Chinese media to Chinese workers for major telecommunication companies – this highly original book demonstrates how China is both contributing to the 'Africa rising' narrative while exploiting the weaknesses of Western approaches to Africa, which remain trapped between an emphasis on stability and service delivery, on the one hand, and the desire to advocate human rights and freedom of expression on the other. Arguing no state can be understood without attention to its information structure, the book provides the first assessment of China's new model for the media strategies of developing states, and the consequences of policing Africa's information space for geopolitics, security and citizenship.

1 CHINA AND THE SHAPING OF AFRICA’S INFORMATION SOCIETIES

At the turn of the millennium, a deep-rooted sense of optimism was associated with the power of the Internet to transform politics and society, opening up closed regimes and loosening the authoritarian grip over their citizens. US President Bill Clinton’s speech at Johns Hopkins University in March 2000 was one of the clearest embodiments of this spirit. As he argued:

In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem. […] We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China. Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet – good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.¹

“Nailing Jello to the wall” became a common reference in the following years to indicate how, contrary to Clinton and many others’ expectations, the Chinese government managed to achieve exactly what was once thought to be impossible. While China’s online population has grown to become the largest in the world, the government has continued to maintain a tight control over the Internet, preventing it from being used in ways that could lead to dramatic and unpredictable shifts in power. The government’s strategy has proved so effective that only a decade later, expectations that the Internet would have changed China have turned into fears that China could transform the global Internet, exporting its model abroad. Ironically, it was Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State during Barack Obama’s first administration, who spelled out the new fears.

Some countries have erected electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in non-violent political speech. […] With the spread of these restrictive practices, a new information curtain is descending across much of the world.²

This shift is significant both from a conceptual and from a political point of view. While in an initial phase, technology was expected, unaided, to bring change to a closed society, the same technology was later reframed as a tool of foreign policy, something that had to be embedded into a broader strategy to produce the expected results. It was as if faith in the Internet – per se – had faded.

As Hillary Clinton continued, “On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” For some, this marked the beginning of a new Cold War over the Internet, where discourses on the good society have begun to be publicly and visibly asserted as part of a battle to define a new global order.³ While the United States has framed its struggle as an extension of the First Amendment of the American Constitution, promoting the idea of one Internet as a way to extend fundamental freedoms globally, China has been accused of working to fragment the Internet and project a more authoritarian version of it.

But are these two camps so neatly distinct? Is the fight for Internet hegemony really a fight between the free and the unfree world? Or is this narrative, which has forced individuals and groups to take sides, obscuring other forces that are reshaping the global Internet? And is it preventing other ideas of the Internet from taking root?

It has become increasingly common for the two Internet superpowers to trade accusations, citing hypocrisy and a willingness to support the Internet simply to extend its sphere of influence, or denouncing the other’s evisceration of the very principles that guided the evolution of the Internet, including the erosion of freedom of expression and privacy. Some non-state actors – think thanks, research centers, international NGOs – have joined the debate, often letting preconceived ideas about how the United States or China would be likely to behave guide their conclusions and recommendations, contributing to a further polarization.

This book seeks to play a different game. It brings evidence from a continent where China has dramatically increased its presence and influence, and where the Internet is still taking shape, both at the level of infrastructure and regulation, to empirically examine the extent to which China is actually (re)shaping information societies in Africa, and what this may mean for the global Internet. It does not assume that China will seek to charm other countries into following its footsteps. Rather, it lets the analysis of a number of cases where China has sponsored or has become involved in large-scale projects illustrate what strategies China is deploying and what the consequences are. Neither does it assume that projects sponsored by countries boasting a free and open Internet will necessarily strengthen open and inclusive information societies as their outcome. Rather, it allows for the contradictions and inconsistencies of the agendas promoted by Western donors, especially as they become embroiled in local networks of technologies, discourses, and actors. By doing so, it becomes possible to appreciate how strategies and forces emanating from the East and from the West, rather than necessarily competing or canceling each other out, may actually overlap in concrete settings.

The focus of this book will be on information societies, as they evolve at the national level, responding to global influences as well as to unique local configurations of technology and politics, but also as they connect, chaotically contributing to the creation of a global system of communication. The term information society is by no means self-explanatory. It has been at the center of numerous debates and has been used to refer to different transformations brought by information and communication technologies (ICTs). ICTs is the term and concept I will be using throughout the book, as the network of technical artifacts – including mobile handsets, routers, software protocols, personal computers – that together facilitate the digital production and communication of information. Often the focus will be on one central technology – the Internet – that has emerged as a central node in this network.

As Frank Webster noted, to many scholars focusing on the transformations brought by ICTs, “it seems so obvious that we live in an information society that they blithely presume it is not necessary to clarify precisely what they mean by the concept.”⁴ And yet, despite numerous claims of the revolutionary power of the Internet, an increasing number of robust, empirically grounded studies have shown how the real impact of the information revolution is more modest than usually thought, even in the country, the United States, where the Internet first appeared.⁵ In this book, I won’t refer to the information society through the lenses of the impact of the Internet on the economy or on political life. It would be presumptuous to think of Ethiopia, a country whose economy still heavily relies on agriculture and whose politics is carried out through complex physical networks connecting the center with the peripheries of power, as an information society. My focus will instead be on the building blocks that are being laid down in each country to give life to emergent networks expanding the ways in which individuals and groups communicate – horizontally (among one another), vertically upwards (towards more powerful actors and institutions), and vertically downwards (towards audiences). What are the visions that circulate in a society when debates on the Internet emerge? Which visions are magnified, and which are marginalized? What actors have the upper hand when these visions are turned into reality? And which allies do these actors seek to realize their plans?

China and the African Internet: a simplified narrative

The strategies the Chinese government has developed to discipline domestic media, together with the tendency of Western donors to advance their own models when providing assistance, have created the expectation China will be a net exporter of authoritarianism.⁶ Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, and US State Department advisor Jared Cohen have accused China of causing the Internet to fracture into smaller pieces, some controlled by an alliance of democratic states and others by sophisticated autocracies.⁷ In 2018, Schmidt doubled down his prediction, suggesting that in 10 or 15 years, users may have to operate on a bifurcated Internet.⁸ Early assessments of China’s expansion into African media and telecommunications have warned about China’s “emphasis […] on forming alliances that are anti-Western and on promoting an anti-Western media model to combat what the Chinese regularly portray as part of an imperialist plan to distort the truth,”⁹ or have stressed how China’s “charm offensive” in Africa can undermine Western interests on the continent.¹⁰

The narrative framing China as active promoter of its own alternative model of the Internet is powerful and seemingly convincing. It rests, however, on assumptions that have not been empirically tested and on a lack of engagement with what China has actually done in countries where it has begun contributing to the development of national information infrastructures.

The first supposition is that China would behave as Western countries have done when engaging with and seeking to influence other media systems. To be sure, referring to a unified Western strategy towards media development would be both confusing and inaccurate. In my experience teaching in Chinese and African universities, I learned how often the term “Western media” is invoked, as if anything like that actually existed. As if the Italian media under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, where both public and private TV broadcasters were under the influence of one man, and the United Kingdom’s many layers of checks and balances to shield public service broadcasting from government interference, responded to a similar logic.¹¹ Also, when providing assistance to the shaping of media systems in foreign countries, different Western donors have promoted substantially different strategies. These differences have been the most apparent in those cases when Western powers sought to ambitiously – and arrogantly – overhaul entire national media systems, as in post-Soviet Europe, Iraq, or Afghanistan.

There is an element, however, that has characterized the vast majority of media interventions promoted by Western countries on foreign soil. Each country, when elaborating a strategy to influence other media systems, has sought to build on and advocate their own media model, the one that historically emerged to shape the relationship between their citizens, journalists, public authorities, innovators, and private companies. This is how, for example, the United States and the United Kingdom clashed in Iraq, the former seeking to “create an environment in which multiple voices [could] be heard as an antidote to the Baathist regime’s propaganda, [and] be an indicator of democratic governance or respect for ‘human rights”¹² and the latter trying to “develop a viable media based upon its own experience with a state funded public broadcaster.”¹³ It is therefore hardly unthinkable that an emerging power with a rapidly increasing international exposure would follow a similar strategy, seeking to impose or at least advocate its own model. And y...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 China and the shaping of Africa’s information societies
• 2 China as partner: financing Africa’s information societies
• 3 Innovative democrats and developmental states
• 4 China as a model? The multiple faces of the Chinese Internet
• 5 Is it really about China? The securitization of development and its influence on Africa’s information societies
• 6 The future of the global Internet
• Bibliography
• Index