Why China is pushing back so hard against spying accusations in Africa
China is pushing back hard against accusations that it spied on the African Union headquarters for the past five years. According to a January report in the French newspaper Le Monde, China hacked the AU’s computer networks and installed listening devices in the building that was financed and constructed by Chinese companies back in 2012.
Predictably, Chinese officials have roundly denied the charges, dismissing them as “absurd.” While it’s not surprising that they would reject the allegations, what is interesting is how they are going about it. Rather than issuing the customary press release and issue a statement to the media, China’s ambassador to South Africa, Lin Songtian, instead commanded almost an hour of live TV on SABC to passionately denounce the spying allegations.
Similarly, other PRC officials in both China and Africa have amped up the rhetoric, not just denouncing the Le Monde report but going further to suggest a broader anti-Chinese agenda.
This new Chinese communications strategy may actually be working. Since the initial report was filed by Le Monde on January 26, 2018 there’s been no follow-up story nor have other media outlets done any of their reporting on the issue. Given that all of the sources in Le Monde’s report were anonymous, the charges do lack a certain credibility that comes with on-the-record attribution. In response, Chinese officials have flooded the internet with a competing narrative: Spying on the AU? HA! We don’t need to spy on the AU, we already know everything we need to know.
Search for the story on Google and that Chinese narrative now dominates the results and has effectively buried the original Le Monde report.
It is likely that officials in Beijing immediately recognized that the stakes were incredibly high and that they had to get ahead of a story like this or else risk a rapid erosion of their credibility in Africa. As Chinese companies build out critical infrastructure, including data networks, communications systems and government buildings in a number of African capitals, billions of dollars in contracts could be in jeopardy if Chinese companies became associated with state-backed espionage. There’s no doubt that the Chinese want to avoid in Africa the difficult situation they face in the United States where spying-related fears have scuttled billions of dollars in deals for companies like Huawei and Alibaba, effectively blocking them from significant expansion in the U.S. market.
For now, it seems, the Chinese response has worked. They’ve buried the story, changed the narrative and used the opportunity to denounce its international rivals. That doesn’t mean Africans and others actually believe the Chinese, instead, it seems they’d just rather put the whole affair behind them and move on.
Join the discussion? Do you think these kinds of allegations hurt the Chinese in Africa or, as Beijing suggests, is it just sour grapes from the West who are increasingly concerned about China’s surging engagement across Africa? Let us know what you think.
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Twitter: @eolander | @stadenesque
Email: eric@chinaafricaproject.com
