Beyond authoritarianism and liberal democracy: understanding China’s artificial intelligence impact in Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT China is the largest foreign information and communications technology (ICT) investor in Africa, and Chinese telecommunication companies including Huawei, CloudWalk, and Transsion have brought a range of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to Africa, from face recognition to smart cities. Existing analysis of China’s AI impact in Africa, however, habitually falls into a Cold War-style narrative of ‘authoritarianism’ against the backdrop of ‘liberal democracy.’ This article calls for going beyond the oversimplified paradigm and proposes to examine the new phenomenon through a more sophisticated and critical lens. First, I show how (English language) media’s investigations and academia’s analysis of China’s AI policy and its global impact (particularly in Africa) usually concentrate on a deep concern about the exportation of authoritarianism from Beijing. The article then demonstrates that the ‘authoritarianism vs liberal democracy’ model is problematic, if not outdated, and particularly insufficient to capture the multi-layered and overlapping realities of authoritarian and democratic moves by states around the world and the distinguishing properties of AI technologies. Based on a critical appraisal of the notions of surveillance capitalism and data colonialism and the recent empirical evidence from Africa in the third and fourth sections, I propose that these two concepts are more productive analytical frameworks for understanding what is going on in Africa related to the presence of China’s AI, as well as for updating and moving forward the debates about whether China is colonizing Africa.