2026年3月27日
上午 9:00 - 上午10:30 EDT
地址: Online Zoom Webinar
Emeka Umejei will present his recently published book, China in African Media: Between Influence Operations and Decolonization (2026), providing unique, on-the-ground insights into the expansion of media engagement and influence-building by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) across the length and breadth of Africa.
Does the PRC’s multimodal engagement with African media promote decolonization or its media propaganda? Drawing on copious interviews with journalists from across the continent and complementing these with detailed analyses of stories reported in ways that serve the narratives and interests of the Chinese Communist Party, Emeka Umejei explores this question through China’s ever-growing expansion of training, content-sharing, and formal media coordination initiatives across Africa. He maps these initiatives in the context of changing media economics in Africa, showing how they make strategic use of material constraints on the African side to expand China’s footprint in the African media market.
This event is co-sponsored by Georgetown University’s Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, the Africa-China Initiative, and the African Studies and Asian Studies Programs at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Featuring
Emeka Umejei is a media scholar whose research focuses on Chinese media and Chinese digital infrastructure in Africa. He has taught at institutions across the African continent, including the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the American University of Nigeria, and the University of Ghana. He currently serves as a senior research associate with the Department of Communication and Media, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Bob Wekesa (discussant) is the director of the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), South Africa. Wekesa coordinates the African Agency Towards Global Powers Project at Wits, and he is a member of the West Asian and Sub-Saharan African Partnerships in Flux research project. He is the coordinator of the Africa-U.S. Universities Network.
Inignio Gagliardone (discussant) is the inaugural SARChI SA-UK Bilateral Chair in the Digital Humanities at Wits University and a fellow of Wits’ Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute. His most recent work examines the international politics of artificial intelligence and the emergence of new imageries of technological evolution in Africa and in the
Global South.