Recently, I caught up by phone with a long-time Chinese friend. The conversation started off friendly enough but soon veered into a heated debate after he accused me of turning from pro-China to anti-China. I met my Chinese friend while I was working at the Chinese embassy’s press section, where my job included literally speaking for China and driving Chinese media campaigns in Kenya for 6 years. Another four years spent living in China as a doctoral student of China’s public diplomacy exposed me to how China talks about itself and what the pro/anti-China divide looks like from the inside.
In the conversation with my friend, I found myself in a predicament facing a lot of scholars, analysts, and journalists who comment on China. The contemporary China discourse is dominated by an uncompromising binary view, frequently driven by vested interests on both sides, unafraid to mix real concerns with disinformation. This makes it very difficult to get unbiased views on China. This only serves to widen the perception gap and contribute to the hardening of attitudes on both sides. It is critical for countries in the Global South, particularly Africa, to move beyond this zero-sum discourse and chart their own course based on their personal experiences, to get what they want from both sides. However, the ambivalent reaction of many Africans on the issue reflects both their relative lack of power and the ways power has acted on them in the past.
Meanwhile, many critics in the Global North fear that China’s rise will erode norms, political cultures, ideas of justice, and so forth that they hold dear and were born into. For them, China’s insistence on playing a larger global role, and its positioning of itself as a Global South state, frequently feel like democracy, transparency and other ideals are being weakened or edged off the global stage. However, the current dominance of these norms can’t easily be separated from Western hegemony itself. These complicated concerns frequently translate into rigid China-threat narratives.
China’s response to the situation, characterized by censorship of critical views locally and deployment of state apparatuses internationally to attack and counter critics has similarly served to widen the perception gap. Chinese diplomatic messaging, both in its traditional and Wolf Warrior incarnations tend to be equally one-sided and purely focused on portraying China in a positive light to foreign audiences who have no first-hand experience outside what they see in the media.
In the run-up to the FOCAC summit, it’s important to point out (again) that African discourse on China is both surprisingly rare, and weakened by both a lack of local expertise and the impact of the streams of messaging mentioned above. The few rare independent voices on the scene are muted due to a lack of resources and power to influence the discourse in strategic ways. The overreliance on foreign funding by African research institutions and the dominance of foreign media sources in the coverage of China in Africa lead to coverage too often framed by partisan global interests, while specifically African talking points about China go unheeded.
China watchers in the Global South must understand that the reality is much more than we have been fed by the opposing camps and that perceptions have to be unpacked and debated to acknowledge their full complexity. It’s OK to have different opinions based on differing influences, experiences, and personal choices. Africa and the wider Global South’s experiences with China differ from those of the Global North. These perspectives should get more attention. At the very least they will liberate us from our respective echo chambers.
