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During a visit to Tanzania in 2023, Paul Nantulya couldn’t help but notice StarTimes television satellite dishes being installed atop homes and businesses throughout the country. He also noted the prevalence of Huawei and ZTE broadband equipment.
An expert on Chinese foreign policy, Nantulya struck up a conversation with someone about the StarTimes platform and the dominance of Chinese digital communications infrastructure in his country.
“I asked if he was aware that this is a Chinese service, and he said he didn’t know that,” Nantulya said during an April 25 interview with the China-Global South Project.
The man explained that StarTimes is popular because it offers free installation and has no subscription fees. The cheapest tier of its television package costs about $1 a month and offers customers 30 channels, but its only international news channels are two 24-hour media outlets owned and operated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“This is just an anecdote to show the kind of penetration, the kind of market research that these media companies have done,” said Nantulya, a researcher at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS).
Most African media consumers don’t know that they are being exposed to Chinese-funded media. Nantulya said that is by design, the product of decades of information warfare strategy that continues to be refined with increasing stealth. In a recent report for ACSS, he branded China’s tactics “media offensives.”
“This combative perspective of media influence is a staple of official Chinese thinking,” he said. “A lot of attention is put into it. The media domain is seen as a battlefield.
“This is not new. This goes all the way back to the 1950s when Chinese media agencies had this framing of combat.”
Research has shown that China spends billions of dollars a year on global disinformation campaigns. It has made enormous investments in Africa and used an array of approaches to spread influence and quash criticism of its policies.
China’s state-owned StarTimes has become the second-largest digital television provider in Africa, boasting more than 13 million digital TV subscribers and 20 million streaming subscribers.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, has 37 bureaus in Africa — far more than any other media agency — a dramatic increase from just a handful of bureaus two decades ago.
Experts say the large presence of Chinese state-run media operations on the continent likely does not have a significant impact on public opinion, but Chinese-owned media represent only the official streams of information that Beijing strategically places in Africa.
“What is most interesting is all the other things that the CCP is doing to try to influence this information space, and it’s in those other spaces that things are becoming a bit more creative and a bit different,” said University of Sheffield global journalism lecturer Dani Madrid-Morales during an October 26, 2023, edition of the China in Africa podcast.
Madrid-Morales, an expert on disinformation in Africa, highlighted several of China’s recent strategies on the continent.
Content-sharing agreements: The free content Xinhua offers to many poorly funded African news operations can appear to be a lifeline. But readers rarely are aware that large amounts of that content originally were produced in Chinese newsrooms.
“There’s some information-laundering going on, where the original source of that article disappears, and then it’s presented to audiences as if it was coming from a local journalist or local news organization,” Madrid-Morales said.
Free infrastructure: Chinese companies have provided free equipment and rebuilt broadcast facilities for digital transmission.
Paid media: China has signed long-term contracts to provide content to multiple African newspapers, creating a revenue stream that in some cases has been wielded to manipulate coverage.
Media junkets: China has paid for thousands of African journalists and content influencers to visit for extended training. In Kenya alone, Chinese media agencies employ hundreds of African journalists.
Nantulya reports that these Kenyan outlets produce about 1,800 news items a month.
“There’s not a single Chinese journalist or a single Chinese face on these stories,” Nantulya said. “These are stories that are being put out by African journalists that are paid by these different entities.”
Joseph Odindo, a Kenyan journalist trained in China, is a former editorial director of East and Central Africa’s largest media conglomerate, Nation Media Group. He said it was difficult to keep track of his workforce.
“[We] had to draw up a chart which would enable us to see who was out on a Chinese training at any given time, who was due to come back, and who was next — otherwise you could find half of your newsroom is in Beijing undergoing training,” he told ACSS.
Nantulya worries that the entire media landscape in Africa has been overwhelmed by China’s systematic offensives.
“For a normal African audience propaganda is a dirty word,” he said. “You’re indoctrinating people. But in the Chinese context, propaganda is actually an instrument of statecraft.”
