China Power | Diplomacy | East Asia

China and African Sovereignty: Beyond the Digital Silk Road Narrative

African states have considerable agency to shape their own digital governance and are not simply accepting models imposed on them by China or other external actors.

Critics of China’s digital engagement with African countries argue that Beijing, through Huawei and ZTE, is systematically exporting its model of digital governance to the continent, locking African governments into Chinese hardware, cloud infrastructure, and crowding out Western alternatives. This concern has driven considerable policy commentary and shaped how analysts measure Chinese influence in the region. However, this perspective rests on a flawed zero-sum assumption and falls short in three important regards, each of which reflects a broader analytical failure to account for the agency of African states as deliberate actors.

The empirical foundation of this concern is not without basis: Huawei has signed more than 70 cloud and e-government deals across 41 countries with foreign governments or state-owned enterprises, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for the largest single regional share at 36 percent. In essence, the scope and scale of Chinese telecoms infrastructure on the continent is significant and cannot be dismissed. The problem is not the data, but the analytical framework applied to it. Assessing Chinese influence solely through contract volumes and hardware deployments obscures the political and regulatory dynamics that determine whether that infrastructure translates into durable geopolitical leverage.

The first shortcoming is that the dominant framework disregards the agency of African states in shaping the terms of their digital engagement. The African Union (AU) Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030) articulates a continental vision of internet connectivity driving economic growth. Representatives from across the continent contributed to the AU Data Policy Framework, which outlines clear guiding principles for AU members in digital governance, drawing upon best practices from across the globe. 

For individual African states, the formulation and implementation of digital governance architecture has been, and continues to be, driven by domestic stakeholders pursuing their own political and economic objectives. The characterization of African governments as passive recipients of Chinese norm diffusion fails to account for this dynamic. 

Nigeria’s legislature, for instance, has advanced sweeping digital economy legislation that would require foreign AI systems to be registered and approved prior to domestic deployment and grant regulators expansive new authority over data, algorithms, and digital platforms. This is not the adoption of a Chinese governance model, nor an American one, but an autonomous regulatory initiative driven by domestic imperatives.

The second shortcoming is the assumption that Chinese infrastructure presence translates into Chinese norm-setting. In practice, African regulatory frameworks have emerged as constraints on all foreign technology actors, not just Western competitors. Kenya’s data localization requirements apply uniformly to American cloud providers and Chinese telecoms firms alike. Nairobi modeled its framework substantially on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, drawing on established continental legal precedent rather than Chinese instruction. Rwanda has gone further, mandating domestic data storage unless companies obtain explicit regulatory authorization. Kenya, Rwanda, and Zambia all now impose formal data localization mandates that complicate the operational models of Chinese and Western vendors in equal measure. 

Western experts have provided continued funding and technical support for African Union guidance documents on data policy. Furthermore, these regulatory developments reflect a deliberate effort by African governments to assert digital sovereignty as an extension of broader economic development strategy rather than as a reaction to external pressure from any single great power.

The third shortcoming is that the dominant analytical lens centers great power intent at the expense of recipient state outcomes. This results in a framing that conflates the presence of Chinese infrastructure with the exercise of Beijing’s influence or control, an assumption that a growing body of political economy scholarship has set out to systematically dismantle. 

Washington’s concern about the Belt and Road Initiative and its digital extensions has consistently reproduced this error: by focusing on what Beijing is attempting to achieve, it regularly underestimates the degree to which African governments are actively bargaining over the terms of engagement, leveraging competing vendor interests, and building regulatory institutions that constrain all external actors. The African Union and AU member state digital infrastructure ambitions are larger than can be provided by one foreign partner or corporations from one nation, providing significant leverage. 

This is not to suggest that Chinese infrastructure engagement is necessarily benign, but that the zero-sum framing generates a fundamentally incomplete picture of how digital governance in Africa is being constructed.

This analysis does not suggest that African agency is uniformly distributed across the continent. It is most pronounced in economies with functioning regulatory institutions, such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda. For countries experiencing non-democratic transitions of power, civil war, and violent insurgencies, the capacity to impose meaningful conditions on Chinese vendors or build independent digital governance frameworks is more limited. These asymmetries should be taken seriously; they do not, however, validate a framework that treats African states as a monolithic passive recipient of Chinese digital power.

Although Chinese corporate and development aid digital infrastructure projects have expanded access to high-speed internet in Africa, China has been unable to edge out all other competitors, nor has it won exclusive rights to the digital economy of the continent. Critics who view China’s Digital Silk Road Initiative in Africa purely as a great power tool to manipulate developing states miss the point that digital infrastructure growth is a priority for the African Union and African governments. China is one of many countries with digital infrastructure initiatives in Africa, and the emerging digital governance landscape on the continent draws upon models and norms from across the globe. 

African states have considerable agency to shape their own digital governance and are not simply accepting models imposed on them by China or other external actors. The African Union and AU member states seek to adopt digital governance norms that align with their own values and interests, oftentimes choosing alignment with the West over China. African recipients of foreign digital infrastructure have sizable leverage, able to play competing offers off one another and ultimately set their own regulations to protect their own sovereignty. With a fast-growing population projected to nearly double by 2050, the African digital infrastructure market is simply too large to be a zero-sum game that can be cornered by one player. 

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Critics of China’s digital engagement with African countries argue that Beijing, through Huawei and ZTE, is systematically exporting its model of digital governance to the continent, locking African governments into Chinese hardware, cloud infrastructure, and crowding out Western alternatives. This concern has driven considerable policy commentary and shaped how analysts measure Chinese influence in the region. However, this perspective rests on a flawed zero-sum assumption and falls short in three important regards, each of which reflects a broader analytical failure to account for the agency of African states as deliberate actors.

The empirical foundation of this concern is not without basis: Huawei has signed more than 70 cloud and e-government deals across 41 countries with foreign governments or state-owned enterprises, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for the largest single regional share at 36 percent. In essence, the scope and scale of Chinese telecoms infrastructure on the continent is significant and cannot be dismissed. The problem is not the data, but the analytical framework applied to it. Assessing Chinese influence solely through contract volumes and hardware deployments obscures the political and regulatory dynamics that determine whether that infrastructure translates into durable geopolitical leverage.

The first shortcoming is that the dominant framework disregards the agency of African states in shaping the terms of their digital engagement. The African Union (AU) Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030) articulates a continental vision of internet connectivity driving economic growth. Representatives from across the continent contributed to the AU Data Policy Framework, which outlines clear guiding principles for AU members in digital governance, drawing upon best practices from across the globe. 

For individual African states, the formulation and implementation of digital governance architecture has been, and continues to be, driven by domestic stakeholders pursuing their own political and economic objectives. The characterization of African governments as passive recipients of Chinese norm diffusion fails to account for this dynamic. 

Nigeria’s legislature, for instance, has advanced sweeping digital economy legislation that would require foreign AI systems to be registered and approved prior to domestic deployment and grant regulators expansive new authority over data, algorithms, and digital platforms. This is not the adoption of a Chinese governance model, nor an American one, but an autonomous regulatory initiative driven by domestic imperatives.

The second shortcoming is the assumption that Chinese infrastructure presence translates into Chinese norm-setting. In practice, African regulatory frameworks have emerged as constraints on all foreign technology actors, not just Western competitors. Kenya’s data localization requirements apply uniformly to American cloud providers and Chinese telecoms firms alike. Nairobi modeled its framework substantially on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, drawing on established continental legal precedent rather than Chinese instruction. Rwanda has gone further, mandating domestic data storage unless companies obtain explicit regulatory authorization. Kenya, Rwanda, and Zambia all now impose formal data localization mandates that complicate the operational models of Chinese and Western vendors in equal measure. 

Western experts have provided continued funding and technical support for African Union guidance documents on data policy. Furthermore, these regulatory developments reflect a deliberate effort by African governments to assert digital sovereignty as an extension of broader economic development strategy rather than as a reaction to external pressure from any single great power.

The third shortcoming is that the dominant analytical lens centers great power intent at the expense of recipient state outcomes. This results in a framing that conflates the presence of Chinese infrastructure with the exercise of Beijing’s influence or control, an assumption that a growing body of political economy scholarship has set out to systematically dismantle. 

Washington’s concern about the Belt and Road Initiative and its digital extensions has consistently reproduced this error: by focusing on what Beijing is attempting to achieve, it regularly underestimates the degree to which African governments are actively bargaining over the terms of engagement, leveraging competing vendor interests, and building regulatory institutions that constrain all external actors. The African Union and AU member state digital infrastructure ambitions are larger than can be provided by one foreign partner or corporations from one nation, providing significant leverage. 

This is not to suggest that Chinese infrastructure engagement is necessarily benign, but that the zero-sum framing generates a fundamentally incomplete picture of how digital governance in Africa is being constructed.

This analysis does not suggest that African agency is uniformly distributed across the continent. It is most pronounced in economies with functioning regulatory institutions, such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda. For countries experiencing non-democratic transitions of power, civil war, and violent insurgencies, the capacity to impose meaningful conditions on Chinese vendors or build independent digital governance frameworks is more limited. These asymmetries should be taken seriously; they do not, however, validate a framework that treats African states as a monolithic passive recipient of Chinese digital power.

Although Chinese corporate and development aid digital infrastructure projects have expanded access to high-speed internet in Africa, China has been unable to edge out all other competitors, nor has it won exclusive rights to the digital economy of the continent. Critics who view China’s Digital Silk Road Initiative in Africa purely as a great power tool to manipulate developing states miss the point that digital infrastructure growth is a priority for the African Union and African governments. China is one of many countries with digital infrastructure initiatives in Africa, and the emerging digital governance landscape on the continent draws upon models and norms from across the globe. 

African states have considerable agency to shape their own digital governance and are not simply accepting models imposed on them by China or other external actors. The African Union and AU member states seek to adopt digital governance norms that align with their own values and interests, oftentimes choosing alignment with the West over China. African recipients of foreign digital infrastructure have sizable leverage, able to play competing offers off one another and ultimately set their own regulations to protect their own sovereignty. With a fast-growing population projected to nearly double by 2050, the African digital infrastructure market is simply too large to be a zero-sum game that can be cornered by one player. 

Zenel Garcia is associate dean and associate professor at the U.S. Army War College, where he holds the Henry L. Stimson Chair of International and Military Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of international relations theory, security, and geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia. 

Alex Marino is assistant professor of African Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College. His research focuses on comparative civil-military relations and the role of technology in U.S.-Africa relations.

China digital infrastructure

Chinese investment in Kenya

Digital Silk Road in Africa

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