JOHANNESBURG—The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has annexed media spaces across Africa, severely restricting citizens’ access to fair, balanced, and accurate news and allowing Beijing to spread anti-U.S. messaging at will, according to separate research completed by two of the world’s foremost authorities on China’s actions on the continent.
The experts’ research shows that the Biden administration has done little to counter China’s dominance of African media landscapes.
To the contrary, budget cuts have forced the U.S. government’s international broadcaster, Voice of America (VOA), to shut African bureaus and severely limit reporting from staff and freelancers on the continent.
In his report, Mr. Nantulya said media controlled by the CCP are now “embedded” in news and information ecosystems across Africa, “distorting” the truth and limiting access to “independent information shaping citizen debates on a host of issues ranging from governance, society, and the economy.”
The studies reveal that Chinese organizations recruit high-profile African media personalities to give propaganda “credibility” by offering them high salaries.
Mr. Eisenman concluded that “all four receive vast state resources that allow them to cover a wealth of stories using various types of media [print, television, radio, and online] in all six United Nations languages”—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
He said each agency has “numerous multilingual, outward-facing social media accounts with millions of followers on platforms that are blocked in China, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.”
Through Xinhua, CGTN, CRI, and China Daily, the CCP funds many struggling African media houses, demanding “favorable” reporting in return, Mr. Eisenman said.
“To consolidate China’s voice, the CCP Propaganda Department provides free content, negotiates content-sharing agreements with government and private broadcasters, pays handsomely for supplements, offers state-of-the-art equipment, buys stakes in leading media companies” and offers training, he added.
“These [trainings] entail a seemingly endless conveyor belt of African journalists going to China on fully paid trips, where they receive first-class treatment and guided tours to instill positive images and experiences.”
Many of Africa’s young journalists are trained in China and paid by Chinese media organizations.
Mr. Eisenman said China’s media presence began “expanding markedly” immediately after the 2008 global financial crisis.
“While budget cuts forced many Western news outlets to reduce their overseas coverage, China launched a worldwide $7.25 billion campaign known as ‘Big Foreign Propaganda,’” he wrote.
Mr. Nantulya said the campaign has been sustained worldwide, but especially in Africa, as it’s become clear how important the continent is set to be in the near future.
Many African countries contain vast deposits of the rare earth and precious metals and minerals needed to manufacture clean energy products, such as wind turbines, solar batteries, computers, cell phones, and weapons systems.
Xinhua is China’s top state media organ, answering directly to the CCP’s Propaganda Department.
“Xinhua’s Africa coverage reflects the agency’s brief to only carry positive stories about China, the Communist Party, and ... Xi [Jinping],” professor Herman Wasserman, head of the University of Cape Town’s media studies department, told The Epoch Times.
“A big part of Xinhua’s work is to cast the United States in a negative light, like it did with a recent piece focusing on the Biden administration’s raising of taxes on Chinese energy products, basically saying the decision would backfire on the United States.”
Xinhua is present in all but 14 of Africa’s 54 countries. It has 40 African bureaus, more than any other media agency on the continent, staffed by almost 1,000 people, mostly Africans.
VOA has one bureau left on the continent.
“Five years ago, we had five bureaus, with each one covering a different region of Africa,” a senior VOA staff member told The Epoch Times. “We had a bureau in Johannesburg for Southern Africa and a bureau in Dakar [Senegal] for West Africa.
“On top of that, we had satellite offices in many of Africa’s main cities, and we always had funds to pay stringers [freelancers].
“All this is gone; the only African bureau left is Nairobi and we have very little funding to pay stringers, so we miss a lot of what’s happening in Africa.”
Professor Glenda Daniels, of Wits University’s media studies department in Johannesburg, told The Epoch Times that “messaging” from CCP-controlled media and their “African proxies” is reaching at least a quarter of the continent’s 1.5 billion people on a regular basis.
Xinhua, for example, has a content-sharing agreement with Kenya’s Nation Media Group.
VOA’s various African services claim a weekly audience of 78 million people.
CRI broadcasts in at least nine African languages from its regional bureaus in Harare (Southern Africa), Lagos (West Africa), and Cairo (North Africa). In 2018, the CCP’s Propaganda Department combined CRI with China National Radio to create Voice of China.
Mr. Nantulya said Voice of China’s 14,000 employees are tasked with “propagating the [CCP’s] theories, directions, principles, and policies” and “telling good Chinese stories.”
CGTN Africa has about 200, mostly African, employees spread across the continent, “briefed to say only good things about China,” Mr. Wasserman said.
He highlighted CGTN’s coverage of the BRICS bloc, consisting of some of the world’s leading developing economies, including China and Russia.
“CGTN has really pushed the narrative that BRICS is a feasible rival to the G7 and is taking economic power away from the West,” Mr. Wasserman said.
“In the past, though, their reports were generally of a poor quality. These days the quality of their material, in terms of high-quality graphics and video, delivered by very eloquent presenters, rivals the material being put out by the BBC and CNN.
“That makes CGTN reports seem extremely credible.”
But that “veneer easily slips,” he said, when one takes a closer look at the ways in which Chinese media in Africa are reporting Russia’s war in Ukraine, which is “unashamedly” pushing the line that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion is legitimate and designed to prevent “Western expansionism.”
He said CCP disinformation is having “serious consequences across Africa,” pointing to CCP assistance to Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF regime in late 2022.
The report also suggested the United States and MDC paid journalists from independent media $1,000 for every “false” story that criticized China for “violating community and human rights.”
The Herald also regularly uses Xinhua copy claiming that “NATO expansionism” caused the war in Ukraine; that laboratories in Ukraine caused the COVID-19 pandemic; and that news of human rights abuses in China is “fake” and designed to “smear” China.
Mr. Wasserman said CCP disinformation claiming there was a conspiracy to depose the ZANU-PF government “created an excuse for the regime to jail journalists and activists.”
Meanwhile, he said the United States has “hardly fired a shot back in anger” at Chinese propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation in Zimbabwe, and in Africa as a whole.
Some of this money, he said, would be used to support “democratic” African media to counter “false information.”
Ms. Daniels and Mr. Wasserman said they aren’t aware of any major U.S. government-funded media projects in Africa.
“Bill Gates funds a few media groups in Africa, as do American donors like the Open Society Foundation. But I don’t know of any media focused on specifically tackling China’s propaganda in Africa,” Ms. Daniels said.
In March 2023, in a statement to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) CEO Amanda Bennett said its networks had “made significant gains in ... bolstering media partners in regions targeted by China despite independent global media operating with only a fraction of the budget of China’s state-controlled media.”
The USAGM oversees operations at seven international broadcasting networks: VOA, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund.
Its website, she said, produces “videos and articles in Mandarin to confront China’s disinformation efforts and present evidence to debunk falsehoods.”
Ms. Bennett said in a statement that the budget was formulated to counter “information manipulation and media suppression tactics emanating from authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran, and others, who strive to undermine American values and incite political, economic, and humanitarian crises around the world.”
She pledged that VOA and the agency’s other entities would continue providing “fact-based information and gaining trust in markets increasingly being targeted by the Chinese [regime] and Russian [government’s] malign influence, including Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the broader Pacific.”
The budget request, she said, allowed for an increase in investigative journalism and “fact-checking labs.”
Several VOA staffers told The Epoch Times that very little of this is happening with regard to Africa.
“I don’t know of any money allocated to investigative journalism in Africa,“ one said. ”Polygraph touches on the continent now and again, but its people are based in D.C., not in Africa.
“We have few Africa-based staff left, just the odd contractor.”
Another commented: “We’re not even out of the starting blocks yet, despite the Biden administration’s promises to counter China in Africa.
“We need the U.S. government to fund us to roll out more programs in Africa and increase budgets to recruit credible on-the-ground correspondents.
“It’s tragic to watch our African budgets being cut to the point where we can’t even pay stringers anymore and to hear from African journalists that they’re being offered big salaries from the Chinese.
“We can’t blame them when they accept; they have families to feed.”
In the USAGM’s 2025 budget request, sent to Congress on March 11, the agency requested $950 million.
In 2021, VOA spent $32 million—less than 13 percent of its $253 million budget—on developing content for Africa, Mr. Eisenman’s report said. In 2023, VOA’s budget was $267.5 million, with the broadcaster spending only 10 percent of its budget in Africa, less than $27 million.
In 2014, according to the Australia Center on China in the World, the CCP was spending $6 billion annually on Voice of China alone.
Mr. Eisenman, Mr. Nantulya and The Epoch Times couldn’t find official figures relating to China’s propaganda spending in Africa.
Mr. Wasserman said that given the “scale and depth” of Chinese media investments in Africa in recent years, “it certainly runs into hundreds of millions of dollars, and dwarfs what the U.S. government is giving VOA’s Africa program.”
“It’s probably close to being a billion dollars a year, given China’s increased focus on Africa the past five years or so,” he said.
In his report, Mr. Eisenman concluded: “The U.S. government has yet to overtly contest China’s anti-U.S. media propaganda in Africa.
“The primary reason for this appears to be Washington’s long-standing, bipartisan neglect of Africa.”
The researcher’s sentiments appear to be shared by the chief of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley.
Some governments, including Chad and Niger, have embraced Russian forces and paramilitaries and are pushing for U.S. forces to leave the Sahel region.
“There was negative sentiment across the last couple of years against one of our most valued allies—France—as you looked at all social media and looked all across media writ large,” AP quoted Gen. Langley as saying.
“A lot of that negative sentiment was fueled by the misinformation and disinformation of the Russian Federation.
“We need to get our narrative out there.”
Johannesburg-based technology and information analyst George Bota agrees.
“The United States is far behind China, and even Russia, in all respects in Africa,” he said.
“It must wake up. It’s asleep at the wheel. It’s not funding its own media agencies on the continent, let alone other media.
“It just doesn’t seem at this stage to grasp the importance of information in this day and age. It’s actually amazing to me since the whole world knows how important messaging and image has become in the modern world.
“You win hearts and minds through messaging. If you have no means to get the right messages to people, you can’t tell your story. If you don’t win hearts and minds, it doesn’t matter how much good you do, no one knows about it.”
The United States is building a 340-mile rail line and 160 miles of roads in Zambia to provide a route for metals and minerals produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo to be shipped to the United States and Europe through a harbor at Lobito on the Atlantic in Angola.
Mr. Bota said: “This is America’s biggest-ever infrastructure project, and it’s going to provide livelihoods to many in Africa.
“But Africans don’t know anything about it. It’s not ‘alive’ to them. It may as well not exist.
“The Chinese fund journalists to cover their infrastructure projects. The United States must do the same.
“Playing war games with African militaries every now and again doesn’t win public hearts and minds.
“America has to start fighting fire with fire in African information spaces, otherwise it’s dead here.”
