China has once again positioned itself as the supposed guardian of cyberspace, this time by unveiling a sweeping “Plan of Actions on Jointly Building a China-Africa Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace (2025–2026)” at the Sino-Africa Internet Development and Cooperation Forum in Xiamen. The irony is impossible to miss: the very state that leads the world in digital censorship, surveillance, and cyber-espionage now offers to teach Africa how to manage its digital future. It’s the arsonist walking into the firehouse and insisting he be put in charge of the hoses.
The initiative, rolled out with great fanfare before some 400 delegates from 32 African nations, carries the familiar hallmarks of Beijing’s global influence campaigns. Officially, the plan promises cooperation in cybersecurity, AI governance, and bridging the digital divide. In practice, it risks embedding Chinese standards of surveillance, data control, and authoritarian internet governance deep into Africa’s emerging digital infrastructure. China pledged training programs on cybersecurity and the digital economy, which on the surface sounds like capacity-building, but in reality these programs often serve as vehicles for exporting China’s “cyber sovereignty” model — where governments control online speech, monitor citizens, and neutralize dissent in the name of “security.”
African delegates, many of them eager to accelerate digital transformation, welcomed the initiative as aligned with their needs. Yet this enthusiasm reveals a vulnerability: while Africa’s digital leap is real, its lack of indigenous cybersecurity frameworks makes it susceptible to external models. If those models are authored in Beijing, the continent risks importing not just fiber optics and 5G, but the architecture of surveillance states. Sub-forums at the event covering AI, data governance, and media cooperation may sound progressive, but each offers China a chance to define norms in areas where the West is either absent or internally divided.
The forum’s co-host, the Cyberspace Administration of China, embodies Beijing’s dual role as both regulator and enforcer of the Great Firewall. This signals that the plan is less about protecting Africa’s digital sovereignty and more about extending China’s own. Africa, caught between Western rhetoric about “open digital societies” and China’s hands-on, infrastructure-heavy offers, now faces a choice: build with Beijing and risk inheriting its authoritarian DNA, or struggle to secure more balanced partnerships elsewhere.
The danger here is subtle but real. By positioning itself as Africa’s cyber mentor, China can gradually normalize its methods of digital control on a continental scale. What begins as training in “cybersecurity” can morph into the legitimization of mass surveillance, AI-driven censorship, and data pipelines that ultimately benefit Beijing more than African citizens. For China, it’s a soft-power victory dressed in technical jargon. For Africa, it risks being the quiet surrender of digital freedom under the banner of “cooperation.”
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