China's growing media presence in Southern Africa is reshaping the region's information market through media content-sharing agreements, investments in communications infrastructure and journalist training programmes. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) warns that these partnerships with Chinese state-controlled media can undermine editorial independence and give Beijing greater leverage over the flow of information.
On many roads out of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, the orange shopfronts selling satellite dishes and decoders belong to StarTimes, a Chinese company that has become one of the largest pay-television operators on the continent. In Zimbabwe, state-controlled papers such as The Herald and The Chronicle regularly publish stories written by Xinhua, China's state news agency. Readers usually cannot tell as Xinhua is not named as a source. In Cape Town, South Africa, in 2018, a columnist who wrote about the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang found his column cancelled within days.
Today, Chinese state media organisations operate in Africa along several tracks at once. Chinese businesses like Huawei and ZTE are building the continent's telecommunications backbone while StarTimes is creating and often operating digital terrestrial television networks. Chinese government agencies fly African journalists to Beijing for fellowships lasting anywhere from a fortnight to several months, all expenses covered.
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Meanwhile, Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio International and China Daily produce news about Africa for both African and global audiences. Content by Chinese state media is pushed into local media through exchange agreements with state broadcasters, national news agencies and private media. At the same time, embassies buy sponsored content, place opinion pieces and run social media campaigns.
These tracks are not centrally coordinated. State media, diplomats, provincial agencies and commercial firms pursue them with different motives, which is why a country can be touched by one and barely by another. Countries in Southern Africa show the different impact that these activities can have.
In Zimbabwe, all of these tracks run at once. The Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), the state-owned broadcaster, signed a content-sharing memorandum with China Central Television (CCTV) in 2012 and another with Xinhua in 2023. In September 2024, China Media Group (CMG) signed a further agreement with the Ministry of Information, ZBC and The Herald during President Mnangagwa's visit to the FOCAC summit in Beijing, with Xi Jinping and Mnangagwa both present at the signing.
The agreements have been described by both sides in the "language of friendship" rather than influence. In China Media Group's words, the content exchange and joint production are undertaken to consolidate the "traditional friendship" between the two countries. When a Xinhua delegation visited The Herald's newsroom in 2024, the paper's editor presented the relationship as a joint defence against "fake news." Zimbabwe's state press routinely calls China an "all-weather friend."
Beyond the agreements, Chinese companies advertise in the state press and on state television, and journalists from state outlets travel regularly to Beijing on exchange programmes. Direct pressure on journalists is also well documented. In July 2022, after The Standard, a privately owned weekly, reported violations by Chinese mining companies, the Chinese embassy in Harare threatened unspecified "strong counter measures" against the paper and alleged that its journalists were being paid by NGOs with foreign links. According to Doublethink Lab's China Index, a global index of China's influence in a range of sectors, Zimbabwe ranks third on Chinese influence in the media sector, at the same level as Taiwan.
South Africa is the only country in the region where Chinese capital sits on a newspaper group's share register. In 2013, two Chinese state-linked investors, the China International Television Corporation, the commercial arm of state broadcaster CCTV, and the China-Africa Development Fund, a state policy fund housed in the China Development Bank, took a 20% stake in Independent News and Media, one of the country's largest publishers. In 2018, the group abruptly cancelled editorialist Azad Essa's column after he wrote about the persecution of Uyghurs in China, raising concerns that the group's investors had exerted pressure on the editorial team.
In 2019, Iqbal Survé, Independent News and Media's executive chairman, joined the First Council of the Belt and Road News Network, a grouping of 40 outlets from 25 countries chaired by the People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) official newspaper, and inaugurated by the head of the party's publicity department. In August 2024, he gave a speech to the network's third council meeting in Chengdu, which issued a declaration calling on member media to co-produce content and share information
The same group launched the African News Agency (ANA) in 2015, using the assets of the liquidated South African Press Association, which was once the country's only independent national newswire. ANA signed a content-sharing agreement with Xinhua in its first year, and a report by the NGO Freedom House found it regularly republished Xinhua copy between 2019 and 2021. That copy now travels to other newsrooms in the region, where its Chinese origins are not visible. This is often described as a form of "information laundering," when content loses attribution to its origin as it passes through intermediaries.
Chinese state media have less reach in Lusophone Africa. While they publish in Portuguese, the output is thinner than their English and French services, and less of it reaches local audiences. That said, Lusophone Africa is still targeted by the same media and infrastructure projects present elsewhere on the continent. Xinhua has exchange agreements with state media in Angola and Mozambique, ZTE and Huawei built Mozambique's government network and national data centre, StarTimes has run much of Mozambique's digital television migration and China Radio International dubs Chinese television series for Portuguese-speaking audiences.
Exploiting one-way partnerships and the absence of foreign support for independent journalism
In much of China's media engagement in the region, support tends to flow to governments, state-aligned media and journalists rather than to independent outlets. Content moves one way: Chinese state media distribute their news material across multiple channels in Southern Africa, but rarely does content from African news media travel back to China. Beijing-backed training sessions for African journalists promote what Chinese scholars call "constructive journalism," a term used since at least 2014 to describe the practice of Chinese media in Africa: reporting oriented towards "solutions" rather than scrutiny of those in power, and defined explicitly against a watchdog model of the press. China's media infrastructure development in Africa creates dependencies that outlast any news cycle. Beijing calls all of "this win-win cooperation." The gains to African partners are real and short-term, but this comes with a structural asymmetry.
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China is not the only country trying to exert influence in Southern Africa. Russia has expanded state outlets RT and Sputnik distribution across the continent, and Türkiye has built a broadcasting and training presence of its own. The actors that funded independent journalism, meanwhile, are leaving. The dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2025 and the gutting of US international broadcasting removed one of the largest sources of support for independent media in the region, closing outlets and programmes within weeks. That withdrawal is itself a form of influence, as every donor exit enlarges the space available to actors that see little value in independent, investigative reporting.
This article was written by Dr. Dani Madrid-Morales from the University of Sheffield, and it's an extract from the RSF's China edition of the Propaganda Monitor report.
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