China’s ambassador to Chad, Li Jinjin, paid a vist on Sunday to a new network operations center that Huawei is building. Judging by the tweet, it seems like a rather mudane diplomatic excursion. But a look at the broader context reveals how “China’s winning the war for global tech dominance,” as put in a new column by Sam Olsen in the Washington, D.C. publication The Hill.
China’s deployment of massive amounts of state-backed capital to fund technology infrastructure development in high-risk, far-flung places like Chad is unrivaled by any of its peer competitors.