This volume is the result of a conference titled “China’s Soft Power in Africa: Emerging Media and Cultural Relations between China and Africa,” held in the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo Campus in China (UNNC) in September, 2014. China has dramatically increased its economic engagement with Africa. At the same time, it has been promoting its soft power on the continent. As important platforms for the promotion of soft power, large investments are being poured into the official media organizations to improve their reporting and broadcasting, including greatly increased and increasing media presence, exchange programs, and training for African journalists, and provision of infrastructural and technical support to the media sector in Africa. However, the involvement of China in Africa has been controversial. It is seen by some to have negative consequences for the deepening of democracy on the continent should China’s attitude toward press freedom be adopted by their new African partners. This conference examined and analyzed the competing views in order to promote a better understanding of China’s involvement in Africa using its media engagement as an entry point.
China’s active, multidimensional engagement in Africa in the past decade has given rise to competing, sometimes conflicting, views regarding its real motivations. China is keen to have its own platforms to air its own views, because it believes the international media discourse environment is dominated by the West, which has been demonizing China, including its activities in Africa. Big investments have therefore been poured into the official media organizations to improve their reporting and broadcasting on the one hand and to increase their presence around the world on the other, especially in the case of China’s broadcasting giant China Central Television (CCTV), the state news agency Xinhua, China Radio International (CRI), and the state press in English China Daily. Private media and communications companies operating outside China also work closely with the state. African media’s representations of this “new other” and the situating of these entities in relation to established foreign actors and experiences, such as those of the West, are no less crucial to the overall success of China’s “thrust” into Africa. Therefore, China has been rolling out training packages for African journalists in China as well as cultural exchange programs, inviting heads of press authorities and media groups, and individual African correspondents, to visit China. In addition, it has been providing infrastructural and technical support to the media sector in Africa, which has been mainly aimed toward stateowned media.
Many analysts have written on what China’s real economic intentions in Africa are and how they differ from those of the West. While some have shown appreciation of China’s effectiveness in delivering aid and improving infrastructure, the distinctive Chinese approach in large parts of the African continent has come under intense scrutiny. Critics have also begun to examine China’s use of soft power, offering insights into the way in which soft power is playing an increasingly important role in China’s relations with the world in general and with Africa in particular. A small but growing number of scholars are also starting to explain how Chinese media efforts are caught up in their incursion into Africa and the implications for the global mediascape.
In order to ascertain the effectiveness of China’s approach by building soft power through its communications strategies in Africa, the three of us, coming from different academic backgrounds and geographical locations, put our efforts together on a three-year project funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (CCKF) and each of our institutions. We adopted a cultural and critical media studies perspective to examine China’s media intervention in the African media sphere by examining issues of production, representation, regulation, identity, and consumption within the context of China’s promotion of soft power in Africa. This analytical framework, known as “circuit of culture” postulated by du Gay et al. (1997),1 not only allowed us to examine all the different dynamics of, but also overcome the divide between production-based studies, representation-based studies, and lived experiences–based studies. It enabled us to address critical questions not yet addressed by existing literature and to advance existing literature on soft power, contribute to the construction of theoretical frameworks in understanding Chinese influence on the African media and cultural sphere, offer insights into the changing global media world order which has been thus far dominated by the West, and provide a critical “entry point” to understanding the broader sociopolitical, economic, and cultural implications of the China–Africa relationship. To explicate the different moments of the whole process and to critically evaluate China’s new place in the reconfiguration of the global media world order, we combined qualitative and quantitative analyses including (a) content analysis; (b) document analysis; (c) and in-depth interviews and focus group studies in China, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
As Africa consists of 55 internationally recognized states, with many diverse peoples, any single study of African media and audiences should be seen as ambitious. The conference held, as part of our project, in Nottingham University’s Ningbo Campus in China with scholars from the world over focused on the findings on China’s engagement in Africa and perceptions of Chinese involvement in the different countries of the continent. We believe that the chapters in the volume add a fresh perspective and new evidence on a key contemporary topic.
The whole project would not have been possible without the generous financial support from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, UNNC’s Research Committee, the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies, the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, and the Faculty of Social Sciences. The administrative team, particularly Tina Zhang, Yolanda Sheng, and Vicky Zhu, provided invaluable support to make the conference a success. Special thanks go to Prof. Stephen Morgan, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at UNNC, for his enthusiastic and encouraging support; Nathan Stone, for his flexibility with working hours and efficient support for the organization of the conference and the edited volume; and Herman Van Bellingen, for design and maintenance of the project website.
We are indebted to Adam Knee who offered great comments and suggestions for the volume, colleagues and friends who have kindly shared their views with us, and other contributors of the book: Ivy Shixin Zhang, Ulf Henning Richter, Jiang Fei, Wenping He, Cobus Van Staden, Shubo Li, Kuo Huang, Goretti Nassanga, Sabiti Makara, Tokunbo Ojo, Yuqing Li, Elisabet Helander, Thembi Mutch, Vivien Marsh, Yuzhou Sun, Rosiji Soluade, Yu-Shan Wu, Sérgio Chichava, Elling N. Tjønneland, Anton Paul Harber, and Tony Hong. We are also grateful to the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan for their patient guidance and the high standards of professionalism they have exhibited at all stages of the publication process involving this volume. We take responsibility for any flaws in the book.
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