From protest to silence: China’s long game in Zambia

Zambia’s abrupt decision to postpone RightsCon, an annual summit on human rights in the digital age, shocked organisers and those who planned to attend. The summit’s organiser, New York-based advocacy group Access Now, says the Chinese government pressured Zambian officials, objecting to the inclusion of Taiwanese participants and demanding censorship of some topics planned for discussion. Access Now cancelled the summit rather than complying. China had provided a US$30 million (A$43 million) grant supporting the expansion of the Mulungushi International Conference Centre, where RightsCon was scheduled to take place, helping to build the hall it later forced empty. Zambia has become a case study for how economic investment from China can progress to suppression of dissent, silencing a population that once protested in the streets against such influence. Public opinion in Zambia also has global import for international security. Zambia sits on the central African copperbelt, one of the world’s richest sources of copper and cobalt – minerals now central to power grids, data centres and defence. Democracies which continue to support free speech, from the United States to its allies in Europe and Asia, including Australia, should not view this as a distant African problem. I filmed a documentary in Zambia for US television in 2009, interviewing people who had demonstrated against labour conditions in Chinese-owned mines; those who, while protesting, were shot and wounded by their Chinese managers; and victims of an explosion at a Chinese-owned plant. I also spent time with perennial presidential candidate Michael Sata, who ran his populist campaigns on a platform opposing investment from China. In 2006, he pledged to recognise Taiwan. Sata’s political career corresponded with an increase in Chinese immigration to Zambia, and his slogans were sometimes xenophobic. ‘The Chinese are infesters, not investors,’ Sata told me. He won the presidency just two years later. Zambian civil society was openly, and often passionately, challenging Beijing. During my reporting I also met with Chinese investors and immigrants to Africa and was surprised by their ready openness and sometimes direct criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. When I asked one interviewee why the Chinese I met had felt so comfortable sharing their perspectives with me, he responded that far from Beijing, they felt safer and freer. ‘The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away,’ he said, sharing a Chinese proverb. In the years since, that distance from Beijing collapsed. I watched as my former colleagues from CCTV, China’s state-run television network, prepared their moves to Nairobi, Kenya, to try and counter those narratives. I worked as a documentary host and producer at CCTV in Beijing from 2006 to 2008. My former boss Pang Xinhua’s next assignment was as managing editor of CCTV Africa. Pang told me, ‘In America, you depict Africa as a continent of poverty, conflict and disease. We will tell a different story. We will highlight the economic promise and potential of African communities, and positive aspects of their lives.’ CCTV Africa launched in 2012. Gregory Gondwe, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media technologies at California State University, San Bernardino, and faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, says that alongside growing Chinese investment, there has been a paradoxical decline in critical coverage by the Zambian media. ‘Part of the research I’m doing is actually looking at how China just becomes so absent. So, if let’s say you read the Zambian media, you barely find anything about China ... and I think they chose to do that,’ Gondwe told me. Beijing has continued to expand its media presence in Africa, particularly in Zambia, by owning new outlets, acquiring control over distribution, and shaping content and education. In 2009, Nan Gengxu launched the Oriental Post in Botswana. Nan has been head of the Botswana–China Friendship Association, chair of the Botswana Council for the Promotion of the Peaceful Reunification of China and a director of the Guangdong Provincial Overseas Exchange Association. These organisations are affiliated with or sit under China’s United Front system, used to control and mobilise individuals on the party’s behalf. Nan has said that the Oriental Post’s mission is to ‘work hand in hand with the People’s Daily to tell China’s story and spread China’s voice.’ Four years later, the Oriental Post opened a branch in Zambia. In 2016, Chinese media company StarTimes took a controlling 60 percent stake in a joint venture it formed with Zambia’s state broadcaster ZNBC to run the country’s transition from analogue to digital television. The venture is responsible for erecting digital transmission towers, distributing set-top boxes that households need to receive digital signals on existing televisions and operating the network that carries the broadcaster’s signals to viewers. Zambia’s national television broadcast signals now reach citizens through infrastructure a Beijing-backed company controls. China’s state news agencies are also training and equipping local journalists. In 2023, Xinhua signed news cooperation and journalist-training agreements with Zambia News and Information Services (ZANIS); state broadcaster ZNBC; and Zambezi FM, a commercial radio station. It also provided laptops and hard drives for Zambian journalists to use, which Xinhua’s president said would strengthen cooperation ‘to better tell the stories of China–Zambia friendship.’ In November 2025, further media agreements were signed between ZANIS and both Xinhua and China Media Group, and between the University of Zambia and China Media Group, China’s state-run media conglomerate. The China Media Group sits under the Central Propaganda Department in Beijing. Across these investments, a pattern emerges. By funding the expansion of the conference hall where RightsCon was to take place, operating Zambia’s broadcast transmission network and equipping reporters with the technology they need to do their jobs, Beijing has taken control of some of the infrastructure and platforms through which information in Zambia flows. Eric Mwalo, a journalist in Lusaka and co-producer of the documentary I made in Zambia in 2009, says Beijing’s influence is now also visible through cultural exchanges and the expansion of Mandarin-language programs. Zambia’s first Confucius Institute opened at the University of Zambia in 2010. That number has grown to 19 teaching sites across the country. Gondwe says that because of these investments, ‘The narrative in Zambia has completely changed. Now it is, “China is a necessary evil, you know, it’s better than the US.”’ China’s soft power expansion into Zambia has recently hardened into coercive, sharp power moves to suppress local dissent. In 2025, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Zambia (CCCZ) sued the producers of a documentary, Chinese Investment in Zambia: The Good, The Bad and The Dangerous. The film included reporting of alleged labour abuses, which the CCCZ said was aimed at ‘disparaging, demeaning and tainting’ Chinese investment in the country. The CCCZ launched in 2022 and is led by Li Tie, who also heads the Zambia Council for Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification of China, which is affiliated with the China’s United Front system. Lusaka’s High Court issued an ex parte gag order for the film. This was later revoked, and the documentary aired last July. But that victory for freedom of expression remains fragile. Michael Sata won Zambia’s presidency after campaigning on people’s fears and criticism of Chinese investment. Fifteen years later, the Zambian government forced the cancellation of an international conference on digital rights at Beijing’s behest. What happened to the voices of protest I filmed in 2009? The cancelling of RightsCon sets a global precedent where Beijing can pressure any smaller or middle power for hosting a convening it dislikes and succeed in having it shut down. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US House Select Committee on China decried China’s pressure over the summit. Zambia’s de-facto cancellation drew statements of rebuke from the British High Commissioner to Zambia; the UN Special Rapporteur on Peaceful Assembly; and the Media Freedom Coalition, a partnership of countries chaired by Britain and Finland. But the lesson for middle and great powers around the world is not to respond only after the fact. Beijing’s long-range plan to cultivate relationships and influence the media in places such as Zambia needs to be countered in advance with investments of our own that reflect and bolster democratic values of freedom of expression and speech. This could include empowering local journalists with training programs, funding and formal collaboration with reporters in democracies, as well as providing platforms for their work free from authoritarian influence. Such partnerships should centre African editorial independence while providing resources that local outlets cannot yet generate alone. These measures are vital to countering and competing with China. Beijing didn’t defeat opposition in Zambia so much as it succeeded in having it structurally foreclosed.