We Thought We Were Going to Learn About Journalism
African journalists flock to Chinese training programs expecting to learn their craft. What they get instead is sightseeing, subtle pressure — and a debt of gratitude, says author Emeka Umejei.
Over the past two decades — and especially since the launch of Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 — Beijing’s footprint in the African media space has expanded dramatically. Xinhua now operates 37 bureaus across the continent, dwarfing any other news agency, African or foreign. Chinese digital television giant StarTimes has become the second-largest pay-TV operator in Africa. As Western news organizations have lost staff correspondents across Africa, China has moved to fill the media gap, not only through its own outlets and ventures but also through a sophisticated web of partnerships with local media and governments and training programs for journalists.
Yet for all the outside analysis, one perspective has been consistently missing from this debate: that of African journalists themselves. How do the reporters at the center of this story actually experience China’s media push? And what do they make of it?
This is exactly what Emeka Umejei, a Nigerian-born media scholar who spent over a decade as a journalist himself, set out to understand. In his new book, China in African Media: Between Influence Operations and Decolonization, published by Bloomsbury, he draws on interviews with journalists across 14 African countries to offer what has been lacking: an account of China’s media strategy told from the journalist’s point of view.
Last month, Dalia Parete sat down with Umejei, who is currently on fellowship in Taiwan, to talk about his book. The following is an edited excerpt. The full interview is available at the Lingua Sinica website.
Dalia Parete: You’ve just published China in African Media: Between Influence Operations and Decolonization. What drew you to this topic, and why did you feel this book needed to be written now?
Emeka Umejei: If you are from Africa or from the Global South, you would have noticed that anything people from the Global North do with African countries is framed as a continuation of colonial ideology. The PRC has been smart. They know that. So they say: Our engagement in Africa is win-win. We were also colonized. So every one of our engagements is part of decolonization. They play on that delicate balance to win many battles in Africa.
At the Third Plenum of the 20th CCP Central Committee in July 2024, the CCP proposed to establish a more effective international communication system. And when they say that, the PRC is talking about decolonization. Then, in September 2025, the Xinhua Institute published a policy paper titled Colonization of the Mind: The Means, Roots and Global Policies of US Cognitive Warfare. So what the PRC is trying to say is that the US system is colonial, but its own system is decolonial — fed from the ground by what local people want, not imposed.
So I decided to investigate the PRC’s multimodal engagements in African media, whether it advances decolonization or Chinese propaganda. Does it actually advance decolonization in African journalism, or Chinese propaganda in African media? The answer is obviously no. China is not doing anything different from the US or the UK.
The problem is that African political actors have yet to realize this. And if China gains the kind of hegemony in Africa that the US had, it’s going to be much, much worse. Nobody is thinking about the next twenty, thirty or fifty years. When China achieves that level of hegemony economically, in the media, in every part of the African continent — how will that affect democracy in Africa? Nobody is talking about this. These are the critical issues nobody is paying attention to. That’s what motivated my research.
Dalia Parete: Your book argues that the PRC’s most effective work in African media is done through partnerships with local outlets. How did that strategy come about, and why is it effective?
Emeka Umejei: I think what happened was that the Party realized that there’s no trust for Chinese media in Africa. People are just skeptical of Chinese media organizations, saying: Okay, if the Chinese media organizations cannot critically engage with the political leaders in China, how do we trust them to engage critically with us in Africa? So, having realized that, they said: Okay, the best thing we should do is to have a partnership. So instead of just coming to Africa to engage directly, they now have engagement with local media.
There are these media exchanges where they take journalists to China; those journalists come back to Africa and become advocates for the PRC in newsrooms across Africa. Then you have the media partnership and content-sharing agreements, which let them disseminate their own messaging through content they share with African media organizations without it being censored. Most of this content is free of charge. It is not paid for. You also have the Belt and Road News Network, which incorporates African media organizations and journalists, and the Belt and Road Journalist Network, a network comprising African journalists.
In the long run, it gives them a multifaceted influence across African media and Africa generally. Because you have the Chinese media, which is not doing well in Africa even though it’s there, but these other engagements are more profound than Chinese media operations. That’s the essence.
Dalia Parete: It’s always important to consider the agency of local journalists, and not assume they simply accept what China and other powers offer. Your research is based on interviews with journalists across 14 African countries. In their own words, how do African journalists describe the experience of Chinese training programs — from how they were selected to what they actually took away from it?
Emeka Umejei: I want you to understand something about Africa. I was a journalist for more than a decade. In Nigeria, there were times when I didn’t receive a salary for more than 15 months. So I wasn’t getting my monthly salary. Now, China comes to train you. You have the opportunity to go to China. They’ll pay for your ticket and everything. You come back and you’re able to save maybe two million or three million [in local currency]. With the money you save, you can build a house or buy a car. Everyone is happy. So journalists are happy that they can go to China. It’s mostly about the economic benefits. If I go there then I come back, I can build my house in the village. I can buy a new car, or I can repair my car. If I don’t go, how can I do that? So I should be grateful to them. That comes before anything.
That indebtedness is what the Chinese also play on. Most African journalists become indebted and advocates for the PRC. These are critical issues. Nobody is talking about the economic aspects of it. Because of the economic aspect, they don’t really bother about what happens, whether the training is good or bad. It doesn’t concern them. But among them, there are some people who say: Okay, even though we went there, when we were going, we thought we were going to learn about journalism. But we didn’t learn much about journalism. We went there, it was just hospitality.
DP: You also document cases of self-censorship among African journalists who engage with Chinese media partnerships. How widespread is that and is it self-imposed, or are there more explicit pressures?
Emeka Umejei: When journalists return from training in China, they’re added to a WhatsApp group. Most of the people who have gone for training in China are part of it, and the Chinese embassy uses that group to disseminate information and talking points.
If you’re in that group, it works like a leash. You won’t write anything negative about China, because you’re always thinking about the next training trip. They keep a pool of journalists. Once you’ve gone, someone else gets added to the pool and sent next. That rotation keeps everyone in line. You don’t want to write something critical and risk being excluded from the group, because exclusion means no more training opportunities and no more money from them. Nobody wants to end up in that bad group.
A few people do come back and say, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” But only a few.
To learn more about China’s media engagements in Africa — selected below — check out the Lingua Sinica database. Note that the LS database now allows search by date, with a full calendar function. We encourage readers to explore the database of PRC engagements by selecting for countries, engagement types and dates under the map (don’t forget to click “Filter”). We have also implemented a full-site search function in the banner of the site. Enjoy!
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