Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Bulelani Jili is an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is part of the African Studies Program and an affiliate of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program. His research interests include Africa-China relations, cybersecurity, ICT development, African political economy, internet policy, Chinese business law, law and development, and privacy law. Bulelani, welcome to the show. It's a treat to have you, and welcome to Georgetown as you kick off the first academic year.

Bulelani Jili:  Thank you so much for having me.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. Before we dig into the bulk of our conversation, I'm curious about how you came to your research and your topic of focus. How did you land on focusing on Chinese tech and then how also within the African context?

Bulelani Jili: I'd say there are probably two stories. The first one really begins at my time in Beijing. I was a graduate student at Beida, Peking University, principally doing graduate work surrounding ethnic minority experiences, both kind of related to surveillance but also more broadly related to experiences surrounding inclusion in the educational, in higher ed in particular. That work got me quite curious in general about the nature of state surveillance, but as you could imagine, that kind of research was considered politically sensitive, and so there was not actually a lot of academic material that I could leverage while there.

The African connection came about when I did a research trip to initially South Africa and then later Zimbabwe that was on a very different topic, but I found that China's digital footprint and geopolitical footprint extended to the continent in a massive way. I became quite curious about the economic and political nodes that held those relationships between the corporations and Beijing together in Africa.

So I became quite curious about in particular the digital infrastructure that was being imported to African countries under the guise of development, but also around the general capabilities of trying to resolve traditional problems that sat at the intersection of security and development.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. Turning to the core of our conversation, let's turn back the clock to early days of Chinese tech in Africa. How did Chinese tech start entering African markets? Were there experimental phases where there was a particular place or a certain type of technology that paved the way for a more robust relationship?

Bulelani Jili: If one is really thinking about Chinese tech in Africa, one probably has to go back to the mid-'90s, maybe late '80s. And majority of the information communication technology demands that were coming from Africa were simply really contingent on trying to close the connectivity gaps that many African countries experienced.

This is basically that digital inflection point in which there was a shift towards fiber optic-capable connectivity, moving away from satellites. African countries themselves obviously were realizing that the internet could play a critical role in their own economic activity, and so they wanted to improve those means.

And if you look on the China side, this was also a particularly prodigious moment in terms of the development of the technical capabilities of their own respective country companies. You can think about Huawei and ZTE and their general improvement in terms of switch technology, and then eventually, they leap into the international stage.

You could, for example, look into the cases of Kenya, and what you see is that a company like Huawei, for example, would've entered their market in about the mid-to-late '90s. The initial work really was about selling the switch technology as one would expect because a company like Huawei was already selling their switch technology in Hong Kong and was selling it also across Asia, and they enter African markets on a similar note.

Much of the big business around tech, both in the early '90s and then into the 2000s was around governmental contracts. Also, this is kind of a tangential note, but an important note is that at the time, you also are seeing a declining interest by traditional Western firms in African markets in part because of trepidations over risk, trepidations over political instability within the region.

Chinese companies saw this really as an opportunity to double down on those markets, also in part because they thought that they could compete with these American and European companies on a more equal footing if they're operating within emerging markets.

So a company like Huawei began initially switches and then eventually started taking on tender contracts, which are basically state contracts for work. Their big break began when they started also selling fiber optic installation opportunities and became the digital backbone for countries like Kenya but also for other African markets.

Eleanor M. Albert: And when did fiber optics take over as the bulk of Chinese tech?

Bulelani Jili: This is around the mid-2000s—so 2005, 2008, 2012—became the major rollout. They were doing this business in Kenya, but they were also supporting other connectivity initiatives in South Africa and in Zimbabwe and so forth.

This work also then connected the initiatives with data centers and then eventually smart city initiatives, and I'd say the general analytical attention within the policy space but also within academic research has been around the smart city model. But the smart city model echoes an earlier history and their involvement on the African continent, and really, I would argue the broader Global South.

I, in general, don't like the analytical aperture of the Global South because it holds much, but also tries to explain a lot, which at times might not explain anything. But what you can surmise is that principally, it's countries that experienced a form of settler colonization, or countries that themselves were not traditionally thought of as upper-income countries.

Eleanor M. Albert: That helps transition us into the evolution of the tech relationship, and clearly a lot of it was about entering new markets for retail purposes. Some of that was overcapacity in China, new markets to sell some of this technology.

But how does that translate to the current footprint of Chinese technology? You were talking about this a little bit with these initiatives of smart cities. Are there tech standards that China has been developing that have become embedded and traveled with the technology? What's the evolution been like?   

Bulelani Jili: I will try and at least speak to first, say, what is a smart city and then speak a bit briefly into questions about what were the underlying features that supported the push for both smart cities but also more entrenched engagements with Chinese technology partners.

When we say smart cities, we are just saying computationally-driven urban planning. That means trying to leverage technologies—whether it be facial recognition, data centers—in order to support the general performance and efficiencies of an urban landscape. And so that might mean, for example, using a facial recognition for security purposes or using a surveillance infrastructure to improve, say, the overall traffic and efficiency of traffic within a respective city.

Obviously, the demand for these technical systems is very much in line with developmental goals across the continent and across the Global South in which the technologies are presented as a modality in order to resolve traditional problems that sit at the general intersection of security and development.

You could imagine a country like Kenya is both worried about growing challenges surrounding, say, terrorism, and this is particularly earmarked by the Westgate massacre in Kenya in 2013. And then also challenges surrounding the traditional questions of the digital divide, issues around connectivity, but also issues around broader efficiency within traditional post-colonial state capacity.

So basically, these technologies have been consistently presented as almost a panacea, a means to resolve a lot of these traditional issues that governments face. Simultaneously, improving state capacity by relying on, say, a tech company, whether it be Chinese or not, raises several questions, right?

So state capacity contingent on corporate entanglement in itself raises a variety of questions in part because while you're presuming that you're improving state capacity, you are also relying on a technology partner, i.e., the capacity of the state is outside of the state, and at times, the corporate interests of the company may not be neatly aligned with the interests of the respective government.

So development in many ways is entangled with neoliberal logics of the state, and those issues are some of the current issues that are playing out in terms of Africa-China relations in which state capacity is tied up with debt, state capacity is tied up with outsourcing state applications. And these kinds of issues then also raise questions about the general governance of these technologies. So beyond whether or not they function, how are we choosing to manage them?

Many partners in the context of Africa-China generally don't necessarily offer an immediate governance blueprint in terms of managing, for example, a biometrical dataset, which is the basic ingredient that you'll need in order to run a facial recognition system. In brief, you could think of a facial recognition system as a digital camera that is able to identify a face in front of the lens. The way in which you would do that is by cross-referencing the face in front of the camera with that of a biometrical database that the state has.

Obviously, how the state goes about collecting that data, how the state goes about managing that data, raises another plethora of questions. But in part, Chinese partners, while they've necessarily helped governments in improving their functional capabilities of rolling out these technologies, they've not necessarily always played a role in helping them build out a governance framework.

At times, and particularly in examples in South Africa, and you see also examples in Kenya and also in Uganda, you see moments in which, at times, officials receive training from their Chinese partners in terms of simply learning how to
utilize these systems, and you'll see this also in examples in Kenya where you've procured the basic surveillance system, and now you're trying to figure out where to support the training of some of these officials who will be managing the system, and the officials would at times be coming from the police, but also they'll be coming from other parts of local and regional government.

They, at times, would receive training from similar organizations in Beijing, but the training would come from a diversity of partners. At times, they would've worked with countries in the Middle East to train the officials and officers, and at times, they would've even worked with some British security organizations. So the general influence on governance is quite broad. It's not
just contingent on a Chinese factor.

Outside of the training, in terms of the actual writing of legislation, what you see is at times lobbying coming from companies like Huawei or ZTE and so forth who are trying to influence the government policies that would impact the technology. But you also see on the other end, a European factor, what people have been terming the “Brussels Effect,” i.e., the exploitation of European normative and political commitments around the management, both of, say, technologies like AI but also technologies more broadly.

You see that the legislative and legal class being trained under European frameworks that also have a general impact on how these systems are managed, but none of these general efforts get to what I've been arguing, which is the root cause of some of the challenges, which is simply a lack of state capacity-building efforts—systematically but also at scale—to improve issues surrounding the misuse of these technologies.

If you look into the governments across the continent, their means of managing data, you find that a lot of the data commissioners are understaffed. Some countries, it's at times literally just one or two people within a respective office, and they're responsible for an entire country's data flows and management. But their police have received these new shiny technologies. And it is that incapacity that at times is resulting in the spillover of negative consequences outside of the fact of a Chinese influence over how a security apparatus might be thinking about those technologies.

Eleanor M. Albert: Right. I think a lot of times, there's a simplification in the concerns of Chinese technology being exported, that there's some malevolence by the Chinese in terms of what they might get from it. Not to say that there aren't perhaps concerns, but it's as much of a consequence of once it's been created, how does it survive and operate and get managed, right? The corporate social responsibility that certain firms should have for the environment, right?

I imagine that there are likely similar types of demands or expectations from some civil society groups saying, "We need to have more corporate social responsibility for technology companies and surveillance companies in terms of how these tools are then used and managed when given to countries.”

I was curious if you could give some examples of how different African contexts might create different outcomes based on these different types of incapacities, right? So how might we compare or contrast the South African experience and the Kenyan experience or the Ugandan experience with some of these Chinese technologies?

Bulelani Jili: There are definitely similarities and differences, and the differences are echoed by distinctions at the level of state capacity, but also at the level of the robustness of the civil society. And then finally, about what kind of legislation do those respective countries have in their books? To offer some lucidity here, let me speak to, say, South Africa and Kenya.

When you look at those two countries, at one level, they both have clearly very robust civil society organizations that have been consistently calling for the curbing of the misuse of surveillance technologies, but obviously the motivations for the procurement of these systems are going to be distinct in relation to why those technologies are in demand.

In the South Africa context, the big push for surveillance technologies is marked by trepidations over crime, which in itself is a historical phenomena that extends itself from the long shadow of apartheid. Whereas in the context of Kenya, it is a regional issue surrounding terror. The motivations are quite distinct, and when the technologies land, they are being mobilized for at times overlapping issues, like both countries would be dealing with questions of crime, but both countries are not dealing with similar levels of questions around terror.

Then, how the civil societies have responded are quite similar in the sense that both have spoken to the challenges and misuses of the technologies, largely so in the context of Kenya where the police have had a history of misusing the technologies against traditional communities like Somali Kenyans, but also around protest. The most recent cases of protests in Kenya have illustrated to the people that, at times, the police might be using technologies in supporting the suppression of protest. The civil societies noted that as an issue and then have put pressure on demands on being more transparent, not only in terms of the history of the procurement of these systems—which in most countries across the continent, the transparency about when and how they were procured is not particularly clear—but the fact of also how they've been used has not been particularly clear. The only time people find out how they're being used is precisely when they're being abused. In both countries, that's been a major push.

What's clear is that both countries have, at least in place, a form of data protection-related legislation. Both legislations are not particularly old. In the Kenya context, the legislation is definitely not older than four or so years, and building capacity to ensure that the legislation is realized is a key issue, and that also mirrors the South African experience.

But when you take a step back and you look across the continent, you become aware that about almost half of the countries on the continent actually don't have any form of data legislation put in place, and the distribution now is becoming ever more widely. So the likelihood of the abuse of the systems is becoming quite evident simply on the fact that people don't have the requisite legislation in order to support the overall management of the system.

This is not necessarily even speaking to whether or not the political contingencies of that country are more, say, authoritarian or democratic, and it's also not necessarily even speaking to exactly how Chinese partners would engage. What is clear about how we shouldn't be interpreting China is that it is able to try and meet the political horizon in which it lands, i.e., that they are quite politically promiscuous in terms of how they choose to engage with their partners.

They are equally willing to work with democracies on the continent and with authoritarian governments, and how they choose to promote policies would be contingent on the interests of their firms and their partners there, rather so than any kind of broad normative commitments. In part, because the discourse of human rights has been almost marked with a supposition that it is uniquely Western, and to push back against human rights in many ways is also to push back against Western influence. Much of the challenge is to try and almost dislodge the connection of human rights with the West and to simply think of it in terms of a broad human interest.

Much of, I would argue, the work is to try and explicate and speak to a rights-based commitment to the application of these technologies if they're here to stay, away from simply thinking that it is a U.S. interest or a Canadian interest or a German interest. It can be a local interest, and that pushing back against its misuse shouldn't be construed with a normative influence from foreign partners. In fact, I've argued that partners, whether it be the U.S. or elsewhere, should be trying to engage with local stakeholders, particularly within the civil society in terms of where they are.

And backdoor access, it's a long conversation. But one thing that I think is particularly important to think about when we're thinking about backdoor threats, is not that it's not there. It's more so about where is the solution for it? I've consistently argued that in the African context, improving cybersecurity supply chains is a paramount for them, and that improving cyber stability domestically is a paramount regardless of who the supplier is.

Attention to that issue shouldn't be interpreted simply as a critique of the quality of goods coming out of China, in part because it then is read almost as a way to say that importing commodities from Japan or elsewhere is illustrative of the quality against Chinese goods. The threat might be coming from China today, but tomorrow, the threat might be coming from Russia. So domestic stakeholders and their allies should really be thinking about how do they support improving cyber stability and security across supply chains? That's where they can ensure that local stakeholders can resist these threats.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's fascinating. I was actually curious about this process, which you already said is not necessarily super transparent. But in the ways in which these technologies migrate to their contexts, are we talking about a majority of capital stakeholders negotiating with Chinese firms? Are we talking about smaller provincial stakeholders negotiating with these firms? At what level is this technology being integrated into the African context?

This, of course, then has ripple-down effects in terms of how it's applied, and these questions of state capacity might be missed, because if you have a country level negotiating with a firm for a contract, then you might not be aware of the ways in which in different provincial contexts or city level, prefecture level even, that's going to be applied. That creates, of course, power imbalances when you have a large Chinese corporation who might have more influence.

Bulelani Jili: Much of the negotiation and engagement about the procurement of these technologies takes place at multiple levels. At the first level, it's at the local level or the city level, where basically a city official, whether it be in Nairobi or in Johannesburg, is interested in procuring some level of surveillance capacity within specific designated areas within a city. Again, it's not like they're in every single corner. They're generally strategically placed within what is considered either hot spots for crime or simply major transit nodes that is also believed to have greater risk.

A city official might then want to put out a tender contract or a contract to then invite competition—disproportionately so Chinese companies get these contracts in part because of the financial reachability of their products vis-à-vis traditional Western competitors. That is partly connected to both the R&D capacity of a company like Huawei, but is also deeply connected to access to state credit that they have, which supports the production at lower cost of these technologies.

Then, of course, a general consequence of development is that, the reality is that the cost of labor for a Chinese company is just simply lower than compared to the American counterparts, which is again connected to where China is in terms of its developmental experience. These general formative factors influence the price of these technologies when you're comparing it to a Western partner, and that means that countries and cities that are financially strapped generally then procure from Chinese partners.

While the city is engaging in these conversations, the national government in a lot of African countries is also in negotiations with China, and you'll generally see empirical evidence for these things, particularly at the level of FOCAC [Forum of China Africa Cooperation], which is the multilateral stakeholder platform for China and respective African countries.

And there, there are several meetings around ICT technology and in particular smart city technology and AI technologies. You'll see levels of negotiation about what level of support can China offer the rollout of smart city technologies. You'll then see support specifically for the use of surveillance technologies.

At times, you will find that the national government has then been able to get access to an EX-IM [export-import] bank loan, and that that loan will specifically only support the rollout of smart city technology that includes surveillance but can only be used for Chinese companies.

So the state machinery is then being leveraged precisely to support their own companies when they're operating locally, and that local operation can then basically lockout Western competition when you are working on, say, a data center, but you also are working on installing a facial recognition system and other things in other assortments that then will privilege Chinese companies when they're working in Global South contexts.

Eleanor M. Albert: With that imbalance that's created from the loan and the financing, what might it mean for the ways in which the U.S. and Europe engage on the continent?

Bulelani Jili: I've definitely thought quite a bit about this in terms of these clear imbalances. How should U.S. stakeholders be thinking or potentially engaging? One of the things that I've consistently said is that what is particularly striking about, say the U.S. and its allies—in Africa but really across the Global South—is that many of them have multiple initiatives in operation.

You know, the GIZ, a German equivalent of USAID, has a plethora of programs that are supporting AI governance or supporting local civil servants and improving their ICT skills. Similarly, Britain has a program, and Canada’s got a program, and the U.S.’s got a program, and so there's just a stupendous amount of overlap. In fact, I've conducted tons of interviews with African civil servants about their interactions with Western civil servants and agencies, and they've consistently told me that “I've received three different kinds of training programs from Western partners, and they were like, ‘Can't they just simply offer us one that is comprehensive?’"

Similarly, they have a lot of financing initiatives for fiber optic installation or other programs that are development-orientated. Again, to me, that screams out for opportunities for collaboration in terms of financing some of these initiatives, in part because many of them see themselves financially constrained when they're comparing how much China can offer. But collectively, they could offer something as equally competitive.

I've consistently argued that the U.S. should be leveraging its alliances across the Global North to offer equal and comparable initiatives that are co-funded between the U.S., Canada, Germany, Australia, and Britain, and so forth, as an example. Similarly, that kind of initiative can deal with some of the more functional, material aspects of issues surrounding surveillance and AI, but it also can deal with the more soft or governance-related issues. Where again, this issue can be brought and financed better, but also can be inclusive of other countries and partners who are like-minded. This is an opportunity to invite Singapore to the table, invite South Africa to the table, and other Global South stakeholders that have articulated similar values in terms of trying to truncate the worst aspects of the misuse of these technologies.

Eleanor M. Albert: What's so interesting is that you've talked about the overlap between certain types of offerings for trainings, especially for the civil society side and financing for that. There's also budgetary restrictions and considerations that stakeholders take when they are going through the tendering process.

Beyond these strict business and financial dimensions, let's talk a little bit about the questions surrounding this intersection of digital development and security, which I think we're very much learning on the fly, right?

But there are some very real considerations here, especially given the regional context of Africa. It's got diversity in terms of how it thinks about itself as this Global South entity, but it also has different experiences with colonization, and so it has other feelings about ideas and normative values that might come out of the Global North.

So, in this space where it's trying to fill that digital gap in its developmental experience, but it's also trying to figure out the right pathways it wants to choose, what are the intersections for development and security in the digital space that you think are underappreciated or are where we should be looking next?

Bulelani Jili: Well, I've consistently thought that development and security co-author each other in the sense that producing a secure and safe environment enables for more stable and secure development in the long term, and simultaneously meeting your developmental prerogatives, whether it be improving education, improving health, and improving your broader economic situation, also supports your security outcomes.

And so, in many ways, the general intersection is evident in terms of how they can support each other. Across the continent, experiences around that intersection of being quite distinct. Using South Africa as an example, much of the discussions about, say, the digital divide have been about how do we, for example, ameliorate challenges that were borne from the experiences with apartheid?

So much of the conversation there is about improving connectivity, specifically for the most rural communities, communities who are incredibly disenfranchised, and then at times seek out, say, crime, for example, in order to garner basic materials in order to get themselves from today 'til tomorrow. For the South African experience, a lot of these conversations about the digital divide are simply about ameliorating historical issues.

Now, of course, how one goes about doing that is an incredibly complicated matter, and it's further complicated when your strategy is simply contingent on leveraging technical artifacts, in part because technologies are always viewed as not having a specific kind of politics, but they can imprint a specific kind of politics. For example, if your strategy is contingent on improving connectivity, that's where you can increase the amount of digital entrepreneurs you might have.

It's well and good, for example, to try and promote digital entrepreneurs so they can create more jobs and resolve this traditional problem of unemployment, specifically youth unemployment in a country like Kenya and South Africa. Currently in Kenya, it's standing at about 70% unemployment for young people. It's a huge developmental goal, and similarly, in the context of South Africa where I think unemployment generally is now standing at about 30-so-odd percent.

Getting digital entrepreneurs and improving connectivity is a good goal, but you have to also raise a basic question like how accessible are our digital jobs? What is its general composition within your broader economy? You're keenly aware that participating within the digital economy space requires a requisite level of technical skills and education, which in many country contexts is simply not easily or equally available, because it'll be contingent on your already very unequal and inaccessible educational systems. So, as you're targeting the tech sector as your principal modality of transformation, you are potentially also further calcifying and entrenching other kind of inequalities.

I've consistently advocated for both a push for digital development-orientated strategies, but then also trying to encompass and take the rest of the economy with it, specifically thinking about underutilized areas like manufacturing and agriculture, which are two important access nodes because you can try and generate jobs that are at the level of semi-skilled and at times unskilled labor, which would pull as many of those people along with you.

Also thinking—this is the last point of this—more creatively about the kinds of technologies that you are trying to support in the terms of development, right? What is particularly interesting about this digital inflection point with AI is that a lot of the kinds of technologies that are coming out of that space at times might just not be accessible or easily usable in the African context. You could easily imagine that a lot of the AI technologies don't represent the linguistical diversity of the African continent, in part because a lot of it is just trained on languages that are not representative of the continent.

Another level, is a basic accessibility level. Many people simply don't have sufficient connectivity in order to be able to even access that kind of technology, let alone whether or not you have an adequate electricity supply, which is another issue that a lot of the globe deals with. So pinning your hopes on leveraging this technology might obfuscate the broader challenges that you're dealing with.

For example, producing technical commodities that are supportive of local stakeholders where they are, to me, is the most important thing. Developing an AI that doesn't require connectivity but can also speak in your local language, but can also specifically try and support, say, agricultural workers in terms of questions about the quality of soil is probably where your technologies should be going, especially if you're trying to resolve these issues that will then scale those economies and then actually bring up more unskilled labor.

Eleanor M. Albert: Right. Cutting-edge technologies need to be leveraged and applied in the context in which they exist, and not just the big, new shiny thing because it might not be useful.

Bulelani Jili: It just simply might not be useful for the majority of the planet, even if it can improve the margins of efficiency of an already privileged class of people who are participating in the service industry, which is representative of, say, at times, Global North economies, but actually not really, you know? And so it's that that I've been consistently trying to speak to in my work.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.