China's role in Africa: pitting development against media freedom?

Last week, I spoke at the Oxford University China Africa Network on the implications of China's media interventions in Africa.

There is ample discussion of China's role in the overall frame of African development. Opinion is divided on whether these interventions are a reinforcing of previous colonial relationships or an admirable route for Africans to access infrastructure and other key support, without the complications sometimes associated with Western aid?

China's intervention in the world of African media raises a number of other issues. Assistance with media - through technological support, training journalists or the investment in public diplomacy and soft power through expanding media outlets - prompts inevitable questions about Chinese attitudes towards media freedom and robust journalism. Does this kind of intervention best serve African audiences and citizens?

China likes to promote its involvement in Africa as 'ideology free'. But this cannot really apply to media and journalism because China's own media is subject to such restrictions. The BBC website is not freely available in China. Google and other search engines do not operate freely, and YouTube and Facebook are not accessible in the way they are in the West. The Chinese recently even devised a way of controlling social media sites such as Twitter. 

One of the ways in which African countries such as Zimbabwe and Ethiopia have received assistance from China is in the supply of jamming technology that blocks internet sites or radio frequencies. This is hardly ideology free. 

In some areas Chinese journalism has demonstrated an ability to speak out. Stories such as the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008 were fully reported and not covered up. Yet at other times there is an emphasis on the need for 'positive journalism' which values social solidarity more than speaking truth to power.

And it is this qualified idea of journalism which has parallels in some African countries where there is talk of 'developmental journalism' and antagonism by powerful rulers to journalists that they consider 'unhelpful' or 'irresponsible'. In recent months President Museveni of Uganda has called independent media "enemies of Uganda's recovery". The Gambian president has similarly criticised journalists who threaten stability of the state. And in Ethiopia journalists have been labelled terrorists and imprisoned.

I mentioned some of these issues at the conference in Oxford and was sharply criticised by a Chinese speaker who spoke of the need to value social justice over political democracy. He was a senior banker and even said we should consider some developing countries as young children who still need guidance.

But why should countries have to choose between stability and press freedom? Surely one can argue that a robust media will enhance progress - and in particular will act as an antidote to corruption, which is now such a problem in China.

Professor Suzanne Franks was this year appointed to a chair in journalism at City University. She has worked in current affairs television both at the BBC and own independent production company. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Reporting Disasters - Aid and the Media.