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China’s Soft Power Play in Africa: Rapid Industrial Development

by Eric Olander

The Chinese embassy in Cameroon posted a short, seemingly innocuous video today that commemorated 40 years of development in Shenzhen, a once-sleepy fishing town near Hong Kong that is now one of the world’s leading tech hubs with a population of 13+ million people.

There’s a very important message here that resonates widely in Africa: how a city like Shenzhen in a country like China went from being as poor and underdeveloped as most of Africa is today to become one of the world’s most advanced societies.

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