This two-day conference on China-Africa relations focusing on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is convened by the China-Africa Working Group, Center for African Studies. It assembles scholars from Africa, China and Europe, to examine the BRI as it relates to African countries.

Launched in 2013 by China’s President Xi, the BRI is an ambitious attempt by China to create massive infrastructure development and extensive political influence stretching from Beijing to Western Europe and through the Horn of Africa to the rest of the continent, linking them to China with land and maritime corridors (the “new silk roads”) and intensifying economic, political, and cultural interactions. Initially 66 countries in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and East Africa were included in the initiative, which has now grown to some 120 participating countries, including most African nations.

This conference captures this changing relationship through the prism of media reporting, infrastructure development and foreign direct investments. The conference is organized in three sessions. The first session, focusing on the media, features papers and presentations by six journalists and media scholars, examining how the BRI in Africa is covered by the press from different nations with varying geopolitical, cultural and economic interests. Together, they unveil the ideological frames deployed in both promoting and reporting the BRI, and speculate on their implications for the success of the BRI project.

The papers in the second session focus on China’s human and capital investment, in both formal and informal institutions in Africa. One paper provides a comparative overview of the major receiving sectors of Chinese FDI in Africa while the other underlines the role of informal institutions in helping Chinese investors to successfully navigate the African environment.
Session three, the concluding session, focuses on foreign direct investment in transportation corridors and infrastructure. One paper compares the performance of state-owned and private-owned Chinese companies, while the other provides a case study on Chinese infrastructure projects in Ethiopia.

The featured keynote speaker, Cobus van Staden, wraps up the conference by interrogating the dominant narrative, which says the unequal economic relationship between China and Africa is undermining Africa’s quest for self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Cobus proposes a counter-narrative of African agency, asserting that African governments are not powerless in relation to China, while acknowledging that the power differential between China and individual African countries does fundamentally structure their relations.

This is the third conference organized by the China Africa Working group examining the Africa-China linkage. The first conference, China-Africa Relations: Political and Economic Engagement and Media Strategies, resulted in a peer-reviewed special edition of African Studies Quarterly, with Agnes Ngoma Leslie as guest editor.

The proceedings of the second conference, China-Africa Relations: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives on African “Migrants” in China were published as a second peer-reviewed edition of African Studies Quarterly, with Agnes Ngoma Leslie as guest editor.

CONFERENCE CONVENERS:
Agnes Ngoma Leslie, Ph.D.
Anita Spring, Ph.D.
Michael Leslie, Ph.D

Conveners

Agnes Ngoma Leslie, co-convener and organizer of the conference, is Master Lecturer and Outreach Director at the Center for African Studies, University of Florida.  Her publications include: Social Movements and Democracy in Africa: The Impact of Women’s Rights in Botswana published by Routledge in New York and London in 2006. She has served as editor for the African Studies Quarterly special issues, focusing on the China and Africa’s relationship: “China-Africa Relations: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives on African “Migrants” in China.”  Volume 17, Issue 4 (February 2018); and “China-Africa Relations: Political and Economic Engagement and Media Strategies.” Volume 16, Issue 3-4 (December 2016).

Anita Spring, co-convener and organizer of the conference, is Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Florida. She worked in Africa for decades (Zambia-3 years, Malawi-2 years, Ethiopia-~2 years, plus 17 other countries), and since 2008, on China and Chinese SOEs and private-sector entrepreneurs in Africa (Ghana and Mozambique). She also served as Chief of Women in Agriculture and Rural Production at the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization; Chief of Party for USAID (Malawi); Fulbright and Project Director (Ethiopia) for GTZ. She has combined research and scholarship with implementing projects for multilateral and bilateral organizations. She is the author of 11 books and 65 articles.

Paper title: “BRI in Africa: China’s SOE Infrastructure Development and Chinese Private-sector Firms”

Michael Leslie, co-convener and organizer of the conference, is associate professor of telecommunication in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida.  He speaks English Spanish, French and Portuguese and has lectured, lived and conducted research in multiple countries in both Africa and Asia. He is the author of “The Dragon Shapes Its Image: A Study of Chinese Media Influence Strategies in Africa” (African Studies Quarterly, Volume 16, Issue 3-4, December 2016, pp. 161-174); and co-editor (with Goran Hyden and Folu Ogundimu) of “Communication and Democracy in Africa” (Transaction Publishers, New Jersey, 2002.

Participants

Abdoulkadre Ado is assistant professor of international business at Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. He completed his higher education in Africa, China, and Canada. His research focuses on corporate partnerships, Chinese FDI through joint ventures, and the implications for knowledge transfer in Africa. Dr. Ado stayed at UN Headquarters (Office of Special Adviser on Africa), providing inputs on China-Africa cooperation. He visited more than forty countries and advises executives on internationalizing toward Africa. He received the Vanier CGS from federal government, a world-class scholar recognition from Canadian Senate, and competitive scholarships from governments in Africa and China.

Paper Title: “Chinese Investments and Informal Institutions in Africa.”

Lina Benabdallah is Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University. She is also a CARI-affiliate research associate. Her research interests are centered on China’s foreign policy in Africa with a specific interest in security and military relations. Her current book manuscript examines China’s multilateral foreign policy in continental Africa and seeks to theorize the power dynamics within these relations. Other publications include a co-authored book chapter with Dan Large in New Directions in the Study of Africa and China (Routledge, 2018) and a recent article titled “Contesting the international order by integrating it: the case of China’s Belt and Road initiative” which appeared in the Third World Quarterly.

Paper title: “Human Capital Investments in China-Africa Relations: Impacts and Perceptions.”

Lianxing Li is a PhD student in International Relations at Tsinghua University, also the secretary-general of China-Africa Report Project of Tsinghua. He and his team initiated the first academic award for Africa reports in China, and have organized three training programs for Chinese journalists on Africa and China-African relations during the past three years, with a goal to advocate and encourage a more comprehensive and in-depth reports in this field. He was the Chief Africa Correspondent of China Daily and an international news reporter of the China Global Television Network. He holds an MPhil in international relations from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford.

Paper Title: “Mutual Understanding or a New Confusion? A Media Perspective on China’s Promotion of the BRI in Africa.” 

Larry Madowo is the BBC Africa Business Editor and a Contributing Columnist for the Washington Post’s Global Opinions page. He was named one of the 100 Most Influential Africans 2018 by NewAfrican magazine; the continent’s most prestigious ranking. He has reported from more than 40 countries and interviewed some of the world’s most prominent business, political and cultural leaders. Larry has covered the growing economic and political influence of the Chinese in Africa over the last decade from both continents as well as the Belt and Road Initiative. He’s a multi-lingual journalist, speaker and global citizen with over 3 million followers on social media.

Paper Title: “How the Belt and Road Initiative is covered in the Western media, compared to the African and Chinese media outlets.”

Dani Madrid-Morales is Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Houston’s Jack J. Valenti School of Communication. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Media and Communication (City University of Hong Kong), and M.A. degrees in International Relations (Freie Universität Berlin) and Contemporary East Asian Studies (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). His research falls at the nexus of global media studies, international politics and popular culture, and is geographically focused in East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. His academic work on Sino-African mediated relations has been published in top peer-reviewed journals such as Journalism Studies and International Journal of Communication.

Paper Title: “The Belt and Road Initiative in the media: A comparison of news coverage in 30 nations.”

Istvan Tarrosy is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Pécs in Hungary. He is also the director of the Africa Research Center. He was a Fulbright Visiting Research Professor at the Center for African Studies of the University of Florida in 2013-14. His research interests include Afro-Asian relations, the international relations of Sub-Saharan Africa and global African migrations. He has published widely in journals including the African Studies Quarterly, Twentieth Century Communism, Society and Economy; and written book chapters published with LIT Verlag, Palgrave Macmillan, Zed Books and L’Harmattan. As a Janos Bolyai Research Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences his most recent work and book project focuses on the ‘neglected African diaspora’ of Central and Eastern Europe.

Paper title: “Chinese Infrastructure Projects, Debt Risk and a New Dependency Scenario: The Case of Ethiopia”
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Ian Taylor is Professor in International Relations and African Political Economy at the University of St Andrews and Chair Professor in the School of International Studies, Renmin University of China. He is also Professor Extraordinary in Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and Visiting Professor, Institute for Peace and Security Studies, University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is the co-editor of the Journal of Modern African Studies and has authored 12 academic books, edited another 12 and has published numerous articles and book chapters on the political economy of Africa and on Sino-African relations.

Paper Title: “Africa’s Place in the BRI: A New Route to Dependency?”

Shannon Tiezzi is Editor-in-Chief at The Diplomat, an online magazine focusing on Asia-Pacific affairs. Her main focus is on China, and she writes on China’s foreign relations, domestic politics, and economy. Shannon previously served as a research associate at the U.S.-China Policy Foundation, where she hosted the weekly television show China Forum. She received her M.A. in Regional Studies-East Asia from Harvard University and her B.A. in Chinese and English from The College of William and Mary. Shannon also studied Chinese language and history at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Paper Title:  “Different Storyteller, Different Story: Contrasting Chinese and US Media Narratives on China-Africa Engagement.”

Cobus van Staden is a senior researcher at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). He specializes in China-Africa relations as part of SAIIA’s African Governance and Diplomacy Program. His research specialties include the use of media in public diplomacy, focusing on Asia-Africa relations, and tracing flows of media between East Asia and Africa. He graduated with a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Nagoya, Japan, in 2008. After his graduation he conducted post-doctoral research at Stellenbosch University and the University of Johannesburg. He is the co-host of the China-in-Africa Podcast, which has become a prominent platform for the dissemination of new research on China-Africa relations.

Paper Title: “Locating African Agency in the BRI.”

Bob Wekesa is senior lecturer and coordinator of the mid-career program in the department of journalism and media studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He also teaches and supervises projects in international communication at masters and doctoral levels. He is affiliated with the Wits Africa China Reporting Project and the African Center for the Study of the United States. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Nairobi and masters and doctoral degrees from the Communication University of China. His interests lie at the intersection media and international relations with a focus on media and public diplomacy.

Paper Title: “Framing the BRI in Africa.”

Chinese Investments and Informal Institutions in Africa

Abdoulkadre Ado

China has become one of Africa’s top financiers through significant FDI. Chinese investments in Africa vary across sectors and span many countries. The paper particularly focuses on Chinese FDI in the top ten African destinations. It explores why some of those African countries labelled risky by major institutional rankings still receive significant and increasing investments from China. The paper particularly underlines the importance of informal institutions for Chinese investors in successfully navigating the African environment. The paper uses secondary data from various international institutions and government agencies to categorize receiving countries and to analyse, from an informal institutional lens, the characteristics of Chinese investments in Africa. The preliminary findings indicate substantial Chinese investments in risky African countries based on international ranking standards. Hence, Chinese businesses appear prosperous in Africa, not only by gaining more contracts but also by successfully navigating the African environment. To understand such Chinese risk-taking approach and success in Africa, I offer alternative explanations, based on informal institutional mechanisms and China’s long-term agenda. Finally, I also suggest avenues whereby African countries can take advantage of the current momentum to redefine and reorient their engagement toward China.

Human Capital Investments in China-Africa Relations: Impacts and Perceptions

Lina Benabdallah

An important part of China’s Africa policy revolves around Chinese investments in human capital development and professionalization trainings for African journalists, elites, public servants, and security personnel. Although, often under-explored, human capital investments are increasingly central to China-Africa relations and FOCAC agenda. This presentation unpacks Chinese-sponsored professionalization training programs and examines their impacts and perceptions among African recipients. An important impact that will be explored is the networking opportunities and people-to-people relations that are fostered through these trainings.

Mutual understanding or further confusion? China’s promotion of the BRI in Africa

LI Lianxing

Demystifying and legitimizing China’s Belt and Road Initiative has become a mandate for the country’s state owned media outlets since the launch of the plan, especially for those who are operating internationally. For Africa, China’s policy towards the continent came to life much earlier than the BRI and has become more mature with a comprehensive consistent engagement between two sides. Thus it remains difficult for China to clearly differentiate the BRI from its general Africa policies under the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, as both indeed have overlapped in numerous areas. Against this background, my prospective paper will firstly introduce the relationship between the BRI and China’s traditional Africa policies, and then examine the logics of China’s international media on reporting China’s presence in Africa, especially in Africa. CGTN will be selected as a case study to see how the BRI promotion is perceived with the FOCAC policies and how it deals with it to Africa in Africa. This will be followed by an analysis of African audience feedback or concern about the confusion of notions initiated by China to Africa, which will be exemplified by the case in Nigeria.

The Belt and Road Initiative: African, Chinese and Western Media Perspectives

Larry Madowo

Larry Madowo is the BBC Africa Business Editor and a Contributing Columnist for the Washington Post’s Global Opinions page. He was named one of the 100 Most Influential Africans in 2018 by NewAfrican magazine, the continent’s most prestigious ranking. Since joining the BBC in 2018, he has hired nearly 30 employees across Africa and the UK and launched 6 syndicated business programs for African audiences in English, French and Swahili. Larry is a well-known multimedia journalist in Africa who previously worked with NTV Kenya, CNBC Africa, and KTN Kenya. His work has appeared in a variety of global outlets including CNN International, BBC World Service, Al Jazeera English, France24, ABC News Australia, CNN.com, and the World Economic Forum. He has covered the rise and of the Chinese in Africa over the past decade, from both continents, with recent trips to Shenzhen, Beijing and Guangzhou, focusing on the global supply chains that exploit African resources but leave host communities impoverished, despite providing the building blocks for some of the most profitable industries. He is critical of African governments that have allegedly put up state resources as collateral for Chinese loans, such as Zambia, Kenya and Djibouti.

The Belt and Road Initiative in global media: A comparison of news coverage in 30 countries

Dani Madrid-Morales

China’s growing engagement with the outside world that started forty years, commonly referred to as the reform and opening up (gaige kaifang) period, has been matched with an equally growing interest from news media across the globe in Beijing’s policies at home and abroad. This increased media attention, however, has not always been welcome. Chinese leaders, and increasingly ordinary citizens, often lament that, in their view, foreign media tend to narrowly focus on stories that portray China negatively, and rarely highlight the country’s successes and achievements. While this view is widely promoted by China’s State-owned media and can be read regularly in Chinese social media discussions, it is not unequivocally supported by existing research on foreign media’s reporting of China. In fact, most studies seem to agree on two things: negative news stories are not predominant; and, news tone, as well as other attributes of news coverage, are dependent on several factors such as topic, national and international political context, and relevance to domestic politics. Other comparisons between studies tend to be difficult because variables are rarely operationalized in the exact same terms by different researchers. This paper addresses shortcomings in previous research by comparing, in a single study, the news coverage in 27 nations/territories of China’s most ambitious project overseas, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

BRI in Africa: China’s SOE Infrastructure Development and Chinese Private-sector Firms

Anita Spring

BRI’s five Pillars in Africa include large-scale corridor and transportation projects executed by State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), as well as the expansion of private-sector Chinese firms under China’s Ministry of Commerce. Large SOE infrastructure projects may be gifts or collateralized as loans or deals for resources (minerals, natural/agricultural products), or ownership of transportation routes (ports and storage facilities, aviation routes, and industrial parks). Current BRI plans include four railways; six highways; and civil aircraft for China-Africa external and African internal routes. Also considered are data from eight African countries documenting over ten thousand Chinese market-driven and profit-motivated firms (manufacturing, services, trade, construction, real estate) that counter-balance the large SOEs. Both engagements are under BRI and have intense monetary and policy effects on African economies. China’s comprehensive policies and programs are being assuaged from criticism by large infrastructure for connectivity, millions of lower-level jobs for Africans in Chinese private-sector companies, and synchronism of African governments’ development strategies with those of China’s. The BRI policy is also linked with the African Union 2063 Agenda, NEPAD 2, and United Nations 2030 Agenda. The paper also comments on consequences for African contractors.

Locating African Agency in the BRI

Cobus van Staden

It is perhaps not surprising that the BRI is frequently seen as an expansion of Chinese power and influence world-wide. While understandable, this characterization tends to put BRI partner countries into a receptive role, either accepting or not accepting China’s overtures. However, as the experience of the BRI has shown so far, local political developments far away from Beijing can have significant impacts on the BRI as a whole. The issue of the agency of BRI member countries vis-à-vis China deserves more attention.

Drawing on recent research into the impact of multilateralism on Africa-China relations, and theoretical interrogations of the concept of African agency, this paper uses the BRI as a case study to argue that conceptions of African agency should be revised both upwards and downwards in scale.

The paper shows that the BRI presents significant challenges to, and new opportunities for, the exercise of African agency. In addition, it argues that emerging African agency represents a key test case for the BRI itself, in the sense that its move towards greater multilateralism in the form of proposed African Union reforms and its recent African Continental Free Trade Agreement challenges China’s current strategy of structuring the BRI around bilateral agreements.

Chinese Infrastructure Projects, Debt Risk and a New Dependency Scenario: The Case of Ethiopia

István Tarrósy

Based on field research in 2018 and 2019, the paper looks beyond some of the recent large-scale infrastructure projects in Ethiopia all built by Chinese companies, in particular the Light Railway in Addis Ababa and the Ethiopia–Djibouti Railway, using Chinese soft loans, operated by either Chinese companies, or Ethio-Chinese joint ventures. These will be analyzed in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of China. Although the expansion of a badly needed modern infrastructure, thus, enhanced connectivity is welcomed by society at large, questions are raised about: 1. How difficult the repayment of loans is/will be for Ethiopia?; 2. How much it will enable an accelerated extraction of resources?; and 3. After all, what are the costs and benefits for both sides? In the process of measurable growing indebtedness – this time to China – the paper will shed light on some new dependencies in the making. It will also discuss the issue of the appearance and possible rise of anti-China sentiments in certain localities connected with the infrastructure projects and the accelerated presence of individual Chinese migrants.

U.S. Media See It Differently:  from China’s Win-Win-stories to ‘Neocolonialism.’

Shannon Tiezzi

According to Chinese state media outlets, China’s engagements with Africa are dominated by “(win-win) cooperation,” “mutual trust,” and “equality.” In U.S. newspapers, however, readers will see a vastly different story, one centered around “(resource) exploitation,” “debt trap,” and “neocolonialism.” What is driving these contrasting narratives – and is there any overlap between the seemingly divergent themes?  The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the dominant narratives regarding China’s engagement with Africa in Chinese and U.S. media. From China, I will analyze articles published by state news agency Xinhua, official CCP newspaper People’s Daily, and China’s top global-facing newspaper, China Daily. From the United States, I will analyze articles from the three majors newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal as representative national media outlets.  I will perform keyword analysis (ie “Belt and Road,” “cooperation,” “equality,” “debt,” “(neo)colonialism,”) to detect general trends among these publications over the past 10 years. I will also select a small number of representative articles for more in-depth textual analysis.

The key questions to be answered are: How does China seek to portray its engagement with Africa through state-owned media? How does the U.S. media, as a whole, portray China’s engagement with Africa? And to what extent have these narratives influenced each other?

Africa’s Place in the BRI: A New Route to Dependency?

Ian Taylor

The BRI aims to integrate Africa into an ambitious Chinese-constructed infrastructure network that seeks to link the economies of participating countries to that of China’s. The terms of this integration, whether it be the reliance on Chinese construction corporations, increasing levels of debt owed to Beijing or the very nature of the economic relationships being generated however threaten to deepen Africa’s dependent position in the global economy and increase the continent’s reliance on China. Indeed, processes associated with the BRI potentially deepens and intensify Africa’s chronic and damaging terms of (mal)integration within the global political economy. These terms, which are characterised by external domination and socially-injurious and extraverted modes of accumulation, primarily based on primary commodity extraction, are likely to be exacerbated by the BRI’s focus on facilitating extraction from the African hinterland to the coast and then onto China. Whilst the BRI aims to resolve contradictions within China’s own economy, the latent dynamics within the BRI vision can but only entrench African dependency.

Framing the BRI in Africa

Bob Wekesa

The Belt and Road Initiative started off as somewhat of a rhetorical slogan by President Xi Jinping in 2013, one year into his presidency. In its short five years of its being, the global plan has rapidly shifted in name, intent and fortune. Initiated to stimulate trade and economic growth along the ancient Silk Road and beyond, it was initially interchangeably known as the “Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, “21st Century Maritime Silk Road and the Silk Road Economic Belt”, “One Belt, One Road”, eventually assuming the label of “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). The proposed presentation will begin a discourse analysis of the changes in the labels.

More importantly, the presentation will use the media framing theory and concepts therefore to test the claim that the BRI is directed towards Africa only transiently. This will be undertaken by content-analysing some of the key official Chinese documents, events and Chinese party-state media – principally CGTN and Xinhua News Agency.

 

Sponsors

UF African-American Studies Program

UF Center for African Studies

UF College of Journalism and Communications

UF Department of Political Science

Hugh Cunningham Fund for Excellence in Journalism

UF International Center

UF Warrington College of Business

Hugh Cunningham Fund for Excellence in Journalism