Evolving Media Interactions between China and Africa

Abstract

Media relations between China and Africa have garnered much attention from both Chinese and international scholars. Two analytical frameworks have emerged in delineating the evolution of this relationship. The first is media intervention (Banda, 2009; Gagliardone, 2013; Wu, 2012), which sheds much light on the imbalanced nature of this relationship but fails to capture the changing dynamics therein. The second is media exchanges (Wang and Li, 2010), favored by Chinese intellectuals, which emphasize the equal cooperation between the two sides in the media sector but neglect the historical legacy of the overall political and economic interrelations dating back to 1949. At that time, the Communist Party of China (CPC) displaced the Kuomintang regime and resumed ties with the African continent. In this chapter, media interaction is proposed to better capture the efforts undertaken by both China and Africa to enhance bilateral media alignment. The purpose is to explore a journalistic paradigm more or less akin to developmental journalism, a media philosophy aimed at shifting “journalistic focus to news of economic and social development,” while “working constructively with the government” (Richstad, 2000) in nation building.