A heated discussion about the merits and dangers of Chinese loans to Africa is now taking place in the aftermath of last weekend’s landmark debt default in Zambia. Analysts, finance professionals, journalists, activists, and various other stakeholders across Africa, the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere are all working through what this means and where we go from here.
But in all of the commentary, podcasts, news reports, tweets, and webinars examining the burgeoning debt crisis over the past few days, Chinese voices have been largely silent.
News about the Zambian debt default is censored, with no mention of it on any major Chinese news sites, social media channels, or on Baidu, the country’s largest search engine. Xinhua, CGTN, and China Radio International have hundreds of staff members in Africa but still, they haven’t produced a single story on the subject.
One reason for the media’s silence is that the government has yet to publish its official position on the matter, which will provide news outlets, think tank analysts, diplomats, and scholars with talking points to disseminate. We’ll probably see that process start sometime later this week or early next week if past experience is any guide.
But the bigger problem here is that we need the Chinese to be a part of this discussion. It’s tragic for everyone involved, namely investors, policymakers, diplomats, and most importantly taxpayers, that everyone is more or less guessing about how the Chinese think about these issues. Instead, we’re resigned to collecting tiny clues. It’s kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle which always feels like it’s missing a bunch of pieces.
When you do get the chance to talk with someone on the other side of the firewall, the discussions often tend to be quite bland, given the enormous information discrepancy. Those of us outside of China who follow these issues closely are blessed with so much diverse information that allows us to build a complex, nuanced understanding of stories like the current Zambian debt crisis.
But in China, the discourse is often reduced to bland generalities that conform to rigid censorship guidelines. The storylines on African debt issues, especially on the largest state-run media outlets, necessarily default to simple binary narratives: China is good, Africa loves us and the West seeks to divide us.
The information gap between China and the outside world is a lot like the divide we’re seeing in the United States, where a Fox News viewer and an NPR listener live in totally disconnected parallel universes. We just can’t understand each other because our worldviews are shaped by two different data sets.
And just as this is an unfolding tragedy in the United States, the same can also be said of the growing information divide between Chinese and Africans.
