China Africa media interactions: media and popular culture between business and state intervention

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1 Journal of African Cultural Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: China Africa media interactions: media and popular culture between business and state intervention Alessandro Jedlowski & Ute Röschenthaler To cite this article: Alessandro Jedlowski & Ute Röschenthaler (2017) China Africa media interactions: media and popular culture between business and state intervention, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 29:1, 1-10, DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 20 Jan Submit your article to this journal Article views: 397 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at Download by: [ ] Date: 26 November 2017, At: 12:47

2 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017 VOL. 29, NO. 1, EDITORIAL China Africa media interactions: media and popular culture between business and state intervention Alessandro Jedlowski a and Ute Röschenthaler b a University of Liege, Belgium; b Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Introduction Following the exponential growth in China Africa relationships over the past few years, African and Chinese media industries have developed new ties and increased their reciprocal relationships. For instance, Chinese state media corporations such as Xinhua News and China Central Television (CCTV) have significantly invested in developing their African chapters, private companies such as StarTimes acquired a leading role in the continent-wide satellite television market, and Chinese telecommunication firms such as Huawei and ZTE have transformed the African continent into their testing ground for new products and marketing strategies, to be later exported elsewhere around the world. These developments have confirmed emerging trends in the multipolarization of media transnational flows, which scholarship grounded on cultural imperialism theories had often overlooked (but see Larkin 1997; McNeely and Soysal 1989; Shohat and Stam 2003; Sreberny 1991). A growing number of studies addressed the increasing China Africa media interactions over the past few years. Some of these studies made an attempt at interpreting the consequences of these interactions on the African mediascape, often connecting them to the wider debate about the transformations of Chinese soft power strategies (cf. Banda 2009; Gagliardone 2013; Gagliardone, Stremlau, and Nkrumah 2012; Harber 2013; Li and Rønning 2013; Rønning 2014; Wu 2012; Xin 2009; Zhang, Wasserman, and Mano 2016; see also Kurlantzick 2007; Li 2009). Others investigated African audiences reception of Chinese media and popular culture, and analysed African media coverage of Chinarelated news and African visual representations of China (cf. Gorfinkel, Joffe, and van Staden 2014; Joseph 1999; Simbao 2012; Stern 2009; Wasserman 2012, 2013; Wekesa 2013). A relatively smaller number of studies explored also the activity of African media entrepreneurs in China and questioned the representation of Africa and of Africarelated news in Chinese media (cf. Castillo 2016; Ferry 2012; Saavedra 2009; Shen 2009; Strauss 2009; Zheng 2010; Zheng 2014). Within this landscape, scholars have tended to prioritize methodological and theoretical approaches grounded in political economy and international relations, aimed at understanding the macro-implications of growing China Africa media connections. Against the background of this still limited but rapidly expanding literature, this special issue proposes CONTACT Alessandro Jedlowski 2017 Journal of African Cultural Studies ajedlowski@ulg.ac.be

3 2 EDITORIAL to examine existing media connections from a different perspective, that is, by analysing the processes of production, the content, and the trajectories of circulation of both African and Chinese media products related to China Africa interactions, focusing particularly on products such as popular films, postcards, photo journalism, news coverage, and television programmes. In so doing, this special issue aims at interpreting the collective imageries about China Africa engagements that the new phase in political and economic connections have generated. How do these representations interact with wider debates about the perception of Chinese people in Africa and Africans in China? And what do they suggest for the analysis of the collective perceptions of south south cultural, political, and economic entanglements that the increase in China Africa relationships has brought about? The ways in which the Chinese presence in Africa, or the African presence in China, is presented in both state-owned and independently produced media is diverse. Some representations are triumphalist or sycophantic, while others are disapproving or unremittingly negative. Beyond this binary, however, there are many representations that capture more ambiguous positions, and point towards the contested or fluid nature of engagements and perceptions (cf. Geerts, Xinwa, and Rossouw 2014; Mwongeli 2013). Hence, we need further analysis and more explanation of representations of Chinese people in Africa and Africans in China applying multiple methods of research. A closer look at specific examples of media products, such as those that the articles included in this issue propose, will help in subverting binaries that may still exist, and will offer original insights for the understanding of relationships and perceptions that are often equivocal and complex. Beyond soft power Much of the existing scholarship on China Africa media interactions examines these phenomena through the prism of soft power theory. Taking Nye s (1990) seminal text as a starting point, these works focus mainly on the expansion of Chinese media corporations in Africa and consider it as a direct expression of the Chinese charm offensive (Kurlantzick 2007). As Li and Rønning (2013) underlined, these approaches reflect a true interest by Chinese authorities in the soft power concept and in its possible application to Chinese foreign policy. In fact, the discussion on soft power in China can be dated back to 1992, the year Joseph Nye s [book] was translated into Chinese (Li and Rønning 2013, 102), and since then it has been a clearly relevant conceptual framework for the elaboration of political strategies to counter negative perceptions of China s rising economic and political power beyond its borders. However, if this theoretical perspective can at times be analytically insightful, it tends to privilege a top-down approach to the study of China Africa media interactions, which leaves aside the perspective of local actors or absorbs it in the generalizing label of civil society initiatives and undermines the specificity of the media texts that are produced and circulated on the ground. This situation reflects a wider limit in China Africa studies, which Chris Alden clearly underlined in a recent contribution to the debate: The absence of a centre of gravity for China-Africa studies underscores the domination of an international relations-esque approach as a starting point for the initial swath of research and publications on this topic. Studies in international relations give preference to the features of a

4 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 3 state-led system and read intentions through the prism of various grand theories, leaving domestic and transnational elements as secondary or even unrecognized. (2013, 1) Indeed, throughout its first decade of existence, this field of studies has been mainly influenced by policy-oriented researches, grounded on macro-economic data, and more interested in producing a large, encompassing picture of the changing relationships between China and Africa in the new millennium than to analysing closely the expectations, motivations, and experiences of specific actors. This situation created a widespread sense of frustration with the quality of the research produced in this field of studies, well expressed by Julia Strauss in her contribution to one of the most recent special issues of a journal dedicated to China Africa studies: Whether critical or celebratory, most analyses of China s involvement with Africa are subject to an entrenched problem of what can be called incommensurate simplifications. Each sphere and subfield that engages questions of China and Africa produces simplifications, but in ways that recall Tolstoy s remarks on unhappy families: each does so in quite different ways. (2013, 158) According to this perspective, the first generation of China Africa studies ended up producing often a distorted image of the complex web of relationships on the ground (see also Monson and Rupp 2013; Park and Huynh 2010; Strauss and Saavedra 2009). By focussing mainly on macro quantitative data, which Jerven (2013) has shown to be of little analytical utility for the understanding of the everyday realities of people in Africa as in other parts of the world, this earlier scholarship produced a static picture, based on a series of binary oppositions: good versus bad consequences of China s engagements in Africa; optimistic versus pessimistic analysis of them; a focus on China Africa friendship versus a focus on China Africa mistrust and conflict, and so on. Furthermore, most of these early studies offered limited insight into the historical depth of the political, cultural, and economic relationships between China and Africa, and focussed particularly on Chinese political actors. This implicitly reproduced a dependency paradigm, which scholars demonstrated to be analytically inappropriate for understanding African agency, and for appreciating the complexity of the role of African people in the construction of Africa s multiple engagements with the rest of the world (cf. Bayart 2010). From the early 2010s a substantial number of ethnographic studies of China Africa interactions has begun to emerge. These studies focused on the lived experiences of historical actors in transnational and transregional engagement and brought about a larger analytical claim about the complexity of these experiences [and] about the necessity of locating them in their larger theoretical forests (Monson and Rupp 2013, 24). This trend has been paralleled by another important development aimed at studying China Africa interactions in relation to the wider landscape of globalization processes, and thus through the lens of globalization theory (cf. Mathews, Ribeiro, and Alba Vega 2012; Röschenthaler and Jedlowski 2017). Jean-François Bayart s call for a scientific de-dramatization (2010, 31) of African encounters with the world resonates here with the need to recognize that contemporary China Africa engagement takes place within a larger context of global capitalist transformation from which it cannot be detached (Monson and Rupp 2013, 24; see also Sautman and Hairong 2008). This does not mean, however, that we should lose sight of the historical specificities of China Africa interactions, and particularly of the key difference existing between these

5 4 EDITORIAL specificities and the history of Europe Africa engagements: the fact that China Africa reciprocal relationships do not include the experience of colonialism and slavery. The comment of a Nigerian diplomat reported by Deborah Brautigam speaks for itself: The Chinese have an advantage of not having a colonial hangover. Whatever the Chinese do for Africa is very credible in our eyes. You have to understand this. We think maybe we can learn something from the Chinese (2009, 10). In this sense, China Africa studies (and the study of China Africa media interactions in particular) are an interesting site for the production of a globalization theory able to go beyond Eurocentric perspectives implicitly biased by the colonial legacy. Most existing theories of globalization that made an attempt at analysing south south interactions ended up labelling them with attributes such as minor, from below, and alternative (cf. Gaonkar 2001; Lionnet and Shih 2005; Mathews, Ribeiro, and Alba Vega 2012). However, the use of these attributes inevitably maintains the West at the centre of the picture, as the key referent for comparison. This has often caused a theoretical blindness toward the existence of other geometries of encounter, which cannot easily be labelled as minor or hegemonic. Within China Africa studies, the absence of past reciprocal colonial confrontations frees the field from preconceived conceptual frameworks within which to inscribe contemporary interactions. This challenges scholars to come up with approaches able to openly face the multipolar complexity of today s world. For this reason, in our view, this field of studies requires scholars to adopt an open approach, avoiding ideological assumptions, and based on inductive rather than deductive methodologies of research. The essays in this special issue all make an attempt at achieving this research agenda. In doing so, they propose an original perspective on China Africa engagements whose main strength are its interdisciplinarity, its wide geographical scope, and its thematic focus, which includes research on both popular and official media. Studying China Africa media interactions through an interdisciplinary perspective Most existing research on media interactions between China and Africa comes from the field of communication and journalism studies and focus mainly on the eastern and southern regions of the continent with a particularly significant corpus of studies on countries such as South Africa and Kenya. Most of them are based on quantitative analysis and focus on the comparative analysis of news content from different media outlets. In so doing, they tend to miss the link existing between the textual and the visual dimensions of media content, and often fail to analyse the dialogue existing between the representations that emerge from official media (such as television, newspaper, and radio reporting) and those resulting from the circulation of popular media (such as films, photographs, songs, and TV shows). Our special issue intends to overcome these limitations by combining essays which look at both textual and visual dimensions, and which analyse both official and popular media. For instance, Philip Harrison, Yan Yang, and Khangelani Moyo ground their analysis of the representation of Chinese people in South Africa on images coming from both official and unofficial media, including newspapers, postcards, magazines, and satirical vignettes. Shubo Li, Giovanna Puppin, and Birama Diakon and Ute Röschenthaler analyse, from different perspectives, the discourses and practices connected to official media such as CCTV, Xinhua, or the Malian ORTM. Conversely, Cobus

6 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 5 van Staden, Terrence Musanga, and Alessandro Jedlowski and Michael Thomas look at popular media such as Hong Kong kung fu films, Zimbabwean novels, music songs and video clips, and Ethiopian video movies. The analysis of such heterogeneous materials allow us to bring to the forth the full complexity and ambiguity of existing discourses and practices, and to emphasize the unpredictable uses that discourses on otherness might serve in specific local contexts. Early scholarship on China Africa interactions has often been criticized for taking China and Africa as monolithic entities, thus overlooking the diversities existing between different African countries and different regions within China. In order to avoid this risk, our special issue adopted a wide geographical scope (encompassing research on Ethiopia, Mali, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and China including also references to Hong Kong and Taiwan in relation to specific political conjunctures and historical periods), and approaches from a variety of disciplines (such as history, geography, media and cultural anthropology, film studies, cultural studies, and communication studies); it also adopted a variety of different methodologies (including ethnography, film analysis, content analysis, discourse analysis, and archival research). We consider this interdisciplinarity as a fundamental tool to gain a better understanding of a constantly transforming field of interactions, in which attention is equally due to both media contents, and production and reception processes, seen in their contemporary manifestations as well as in light of their historical developments. The essays in this issue This special issue is composed of seven essays, introduced by a review of the existing literature on China Africa media engagements. In this introductory review, Bob Wekesa underlines the limits of existing studies, suggesting a series of research questions for future work on this topic. As he emphasizes, although the study of China Africa media interactions is still in its infancy, there are a number of valuable lessons to be learnt from the discussion in existing studies, as well as from the assessment of their limits, particularly, the prevalence of macro-economic and political-economy based studies, and the lack of solid theory-building approaches. This review paves the way for the following seven essays, which all make an attempt at going beyond these limits in order to explore the complexity of the existing media interactions between China and a number of African countries. Philip Harrison, Yan Yang, and Khangelani Moyo s essay engages in a historical analysis of the visual representation of Chinese people in South Africa, in order to explore the ways in which changing (both local and global) historical conditions have influenced public discourses about the Chinese presence in this part of the continent. By drawing on the visual analysis of a wide range of existing images of China and the Chinese, including Hollywood films, postcards depictions and photographs of Chinese people, magazine covers, and political cartoons, they show the multiple, at times contradictory, ways in which China and the Chinese people have been framed in the South African public sphere. Among these framings are the decadent, inscrutable Chinaman; the yellow peril; the wise sage bringing the authority of an ancient civilization; the Chinese as victim; the model minority; and many more. Harrison, Yang, and Moyo analyse how these different framings have come together in complex ways and in unpredictable combinations in different places and times. While

7 6 EDITORIAL doing this, they make an attempt at extricating the visualizations of China Africa interactions which remained for a long time absent from the South African public space, and particularly, those of black South Africans which are generally not present in the media, historically dominated by large white-owned corporates and white journalists. In the following essay, Cobus van Staden pursues a similar objective by focusing on the impact of a specific popular culture product, Hong Kong kung fu films, on Black South African audiences during apartheid. While it is generally accepted that the international stardom of Bruce Lee was an epoch-making strike against the white dominance of Hollywood, it is less well known that his influence was particularly felt in Africa, where kung fu films remain popular to this day. In his paper, van Staden unpacks the political and economic factors that led to this popularity, by looking at the disruptive influence of kung fu films in South Africa during the 1970s and 1980s and at the specific itineraries through which, despite the South African government s apparatuses of censorship control, these films managed to become accessible to popular audiences via the new networks of distribution generated by the introduction of VHS technology. Drawing on interviews with film distributors, video store owners and TV executives, as well as archival research, van Staden shows that kung fu film created an early and extremely rare site of shared (although separate, according to apartheid legislation that made it illegal for mixed audiences to view films) enjoyment between working-class Black African and Afrikaner audiences. Furthermore, locating this case study at the interception between film studies and China Africa scholarship, van Staden argues that the African popularity of kung fu films opens the door to thinking about how cinema, originally deeply complicit in Africa with colonial and apartheid regimes of control, could also become a site of non-western meaning. While these two essays focus on South Africa and adopt a historical perspective, the following two contributions look at contemporary African popular culture production in an attempt to understand the role that China and Chinese people have come to occupy in contemporary African imageries. In the following essay of the issue, Alessandro Jedlowski and Michael W. Thomas discuss the ambiguous representation of otherness that emerges from recent Ethiopian video films starring Asian actors as Chinese characters. The essay focuses particularly on two recent releases in order to highlight the existence of two different, at times contradictory, layers of meaning within them, connected to opposed discursive strategies of representation of the Chinese otherness : on the one hand, a more superficially orientalist discourse which represents Chinese people through recurrent stereotypes; and on the other hand, a deeper layer which uses Chinese otherness as an instrument to address delicate issues related to Ethiopian social and political realities, which can hardly be expressed openly within a context characterized by tight control of media contents. The analysis of these simultaneous as much as contradictory discourses allow Jedlowski and Thomas to highlight the ambiguity of the position that the Chinese Other occupies in contemporary Ethiopian imageries presented in popular culture products. In a similar vein, in the following essay of this collection, Terrence Musanga analyses two recent Zimbabwean cultural products, Wallace Chirumiko s song Made in China and NoViolet Bulawayo s novel We Need New Names, to unpack popular perceptions of the Chinese presence in the country. As Musanga emphasizes by closely analysing the contents of the two texts, popular perceptions of a Chinese presence in Zimbabwe are profoundly different from the rhetoric of the regime s Look East policy, propagated

8 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 7 through official media, and which represents China as an alternative economic, political, and diplomatic partner which recognizes Zimbabwe as equal. The song and the novel discussed in the essay, which Musanga defines as instances of the less visible ways in which Zimbabweans have responded to their regime in their everyday lives, mock the regime s official perspective by highlighting its elitist nature and its distance from the perception of ordinary Zimbabweans who, in their everyday life, struggle with the consequences of Chinese businesses influence on the country s economy. The complex intertwining between discourses and practices of China Africa engagements and their contradictory reflection in African media coverage of the Chinese presence in Africa is discussed in Birama Diakon and Ute Röschenthaler s contribution. Their essay focuses particularly on the behind-the-scene dimension of China Africa media engagements by focusing on aspects related to the training and recruitment of journalists. As the essay shows through a historical discussion of the progressive penetration of Chinese media companies in Mali, over the past few years, Malian journalists have been invited to participate in training sessions in China with the key objective of providing African journalists with a positive experience of China, thus instigating a more positive representation of the country in African news coverage. However, Diakon and Röschenthaler show that, while these activities result in a widespread rhetoric of brotherly cooperation and in the circulation of a generally positive image of China in official Malian media, such rhetoric is often challenged by other Malian journalists who depict in their work more nuanced experiences of the Chinese presence in their country. The authors thus argue for a combined study of the spectrum of media representations and lived experiences in a specific national context, in order to understand their mutually constitutive relation as well as their often contradictory stance on the nature of China Africa engagements. If this first group of essays is focused mainly on African perceptions of the Chinese presence in Africa, the last two contributions analyse the discourse about Africa produced by Chinese media, and propose new approaches for the study of China Africa media engagements, namely south south comparisons between Chinese and other non-western countries media engagements with Africa (in Li s paper), and inward-looking directions of enquiry into the impact of Chinese representations of Africa on Chinese audiences (in Puppin s contribution). Shubo Li proposes a comparative analysis of the news media coverage of the Ebola outbreak by two Africa-centred programmes that have emerged over the past few years: CCTV Africa s Talk Africa and Al Jazeera English s Inside Story. By conducting a precise content analysis of the episodes of both programmes dedicated to the outbreak of the Ebola epidemic in sub-saharan Africa in , Li questions both channels aspiration to produce African news able to present truly African perspectives on African matters. In particular, through comparison, Li shows that, despite China s strategic investments in the production of African news through the creation of the Nairobi-based CCTV Africa Channel, three years after its creation, this channel s contents are yet to be in a position to compete with Al Jazeera English in terms of rendering immediacy and professionalism, thus making China-produced news about Africa still barely relevant for African audiences a finding that can contribute to further complicating existing discourses about the impact of Chinese soft power strategies in Africa. The final essay by Giovanna Puppin moves the focus to mainland China in order to propose a different perspective on China Africa media engagements that importantly

9 8 EDITORIAL widens the discussion proposed by this special issue and provides a glimpse into the media discourse about Africa circulating within China itself. Puppin takes as a case study the Chinese language documentary series African Chronicles (Feizhou jishi), screened for the first time in 2011 by CCTV9, the documentary channel of CCTV. This series consists of nine episodes which present a variety of stories on China s engagement with the continent, by giving voice to Chinese protagonists and featuring their stories of mobility throughout the continent, and between China and Africa. In her contribution, Puppin focuses mainly on the first episode of the series to analyse what she defines as the Chinese strategies of inward-looking soft power, that is, Chinese media apparatuses attempts at crafting and promoting a positive image of China s engagement with Africa within China. The close socio-semiotic analysis of the first episode of the series conducted in the essay gives Puppin the chance to unveil how the image of China in Africa is constructed for Chinese audiences, and reveals that, as Puppin argues in her essay, what characterizes and distinguishes China s relations with Africa over time and despite changes in policy comes from the sphere of emotions [ ]. Emotions have the power to hold together the old rhetoric and the new rhetoric [ ] without allowing it to collapse and, consequently, they also safeguard China s own identity at home. (This issue, pp ) The contributions to this special issue and the processes of production and interpretation of media content they depict bring to light the wide range of opinions and images on China and Africa, and of Chinese and Africans in the media studied. They also point to the complex trajectories of African- and Chinese-mediated cultural products, their increasing circulation among different audiences, and the multiple meanings and perceptions that are created as a result of this circulation. The contributions to this special issue address this multitude of representations and lived experiences, their complexity and multi-facetedness, the dialogue that emerges from the interplay of official and popular media, and of textual and visual framings. The contributions also confirm the elusiveness of meanings and the impossibility of controlling their movement and reception by audiences on the ground. Through its interdisciplinarity and wide geographical scope, this issue ultimately wishes to encourage more research on the long-term outcomes of these media encounters on the ground, and their impact on the daily lives and the everyday interactions between African and Chinese people. Acknowledgements Most of the contributions included in this special issue were originally presented during two different initiatives: the AEGIS thematic conference Africa in the Global South: biographies of mobility and aspirations of success organized by Ute Röschenthaler and Alessandro Jedlowski in the framework of the AFRASO project at the Goethe University Frankfurt, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Africa of the University of Naples L Orientale (15 17 May 2014); and the panel Visual imagining of the Chinese presence in African cities and Africans in Chinese cities organized by Philip Harrison during the Africans in China/Chinese in Africa Research Network conference at the Jinan University in Guangzhou (12 14 December 2014). We thank all the participants who contributed to these initiatives for their useful comments and their feedback on the initial drafts of the papers presented in this special issue. We also extend our gratitude to the institutions and research projects that participated in funding these initiatives, namely the AFRASO project, the Goethe University Frankfurt, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Jinan University of Guangzhou, and the Africans in China/ Chinese in Africa Research Network. We thank Philip Harrison for his inputs to the preliminary

10 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN CULTURAL STUDIES 9 draft of this special issue s project. Finally, we are deeply grateful to Carli Coetzee, the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, for her invaluable support and for her tireless work on the essays included in this issue. References Alden, Chris In Search of Gravity s Rainbow: Theoretical Approaches and China-Africa Scholarship. Paper presented at the conference Making Sense of the China-Africa Relationship: Theoretical Approaches and the Politics of Knowledge, Yale University, November 18 and 19. Banda, Fackson China in the African Mediascape: A Critical Injection. Journal of African Media Studies 1 (3): Bayart, Jean-François The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity. Brautigam, Deborah The Dragon s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castillo, Roberto Landscapes of Aspiration in Guangzhou s African Music Scene: Beyond the Trading Narrative. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 44 (4): Ferry, Megan M A New Narrative of Development in Chinese Television Media Representations of Africa. In China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions, edited by Ban Wang and Jie Lu, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gagliardone, Iginio China as a Persuader: CCTV Africa s First Steps in the African Mediasphere. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 34 (3): Gagliardone, Iginio, Nicole Stremlau, and Daniel Nkrumah Partner, Prototype or Persuader? China s Renewed Media Engagement with Ghana. Communication, Politics & Culture 45 (2): Gaonkar, Dilip Prameshwar, ed Alternative Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. Geerts, Sofie, Namhla Xinwa, and Deon Rossouw Africans Perceptions of Chinese Business in Africa. Geneva: Globethics.net/Hatfield (Ethics Institute of South Africa). Gorfinkel, Lauren, Sandy Joffe, Cobus van Staden, and Yu-Shan Wu CCTV s Global Outreach: Examining the Audiences of China s New Voice on Africa. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 151: Harber, Anton China s Soft Diplomacy in Africa. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 34 (3): Jerven, Morten Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Joseph, May Kung Fu Cinema, Frugality, and Tanzanian Asian Youth Culture: Ujamaa and Tanzanian Youth in the Seventies. In SportCult, edited by Randy Martin and Toby Miller, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kurlantzick, Joshua Charm Offensive: How China s Soft Power Is Transforming the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Larkin, Brian Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities. Africa 67 (3): Li, Mingjiang, ed Soft Power: China s Emerging Strategy in International Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Li, Shubo, and Helge Rønning Half-Orchestrated, Half Freestyle: Soft Power and Reporting Africa in China. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 34 (3): Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-Mei Shih, eds Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mathews, Gordon, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, and Carlos Alba Vega, eds Globalization from Below: The Worlds Other Economy. London: Routledge. McNeely, Connie, and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal International Flows of Television Programming: A Revisionist Research Orientation. Public Culture 2 (1): Monson, Jamie, and Stephanie Rupp Introduction: Africa and China: New Engagements, New Research. African Studies Review 56 (1):

11 10 EDITORIAL Mwongeli, Susan China-Africa Cultural Exchange: A Chord in Our Hearts. CCTV.com ENGLISH, September 4. Nye, Joseph Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books. Park, Yoon Jung, and Tu T. Huynh Introduction: Chinese in Africa. African and Asian Studies 9 (3): Rønning, Helge How Much Soft Power Does China Have in Africa? Paper presented at the international conference China and Africa Media, Communications and Public Diplomacy, Beijing, September 10/11. Röschenthaler, Ute, and Alessandro Jedlowski, eds Mobility Between Africa, Asia and Latin America: Economic Networks and Cultural Interactions. London: Zed Books. Saavedra, Martha Representations of Africa in a Hong Kong Soap Opera: The Limits of Enlightened Humanitarianism in The Last Breakthrough. The China Quarterly 199: Sautman, Barry, and Yan Hairong Forests for the Trees: Trade, Investment and the China-in- Africa Discourse. Pacific Affairs 81 (1): Shen, Simon A Constructed (Un)reality on China s Re-entry into Africa: The Chinese Online Community Perception of Africa ( ). The Journal of Modern African Studies 47 (3): Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam, eds Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Simbao, Ruth China-Africa Relations: Research Approaches. African Arts 45 (2): 1 7. Sreberny, Annabelle The Global and the Local in International Communications. In Mass Media and Society, edited by James Curran and Michael Gerevitch, London: Edward Arnold. Stern, Lesley How Movies Move (Between Hong Kong and Bulawayo, Between Screen and Stage ). In World Cinemas: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman, London: Routledge. Strauss, Julia The Past in the Present: Historical and Rhetorical Lineages in China s Relations with Africa. The China Quarterly 199: Strauss, Julia China and Africa Rebooted: Globalization(s), Simplification(s), and Cross-Cutting Dynamics in South South Relations. African Studies Review 56 (1): Strauss, Julia, and Martha Saavedra Introduction: China, Africa and Internationalization. The China Quarterly 199: Wasserman, Herman China in South Africa: Media Responses to a Developing Relationship. Chinese Journal of Communication 5 (3): Wasserman, Herman China in Africa: The Implications for Journalism. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 34 (3): 1 5. Wekesa, Bob Emerging Trends and Patterns in China Africa Media Dynamics: A Discussion from an East African Perspective. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies 34 (3): Wu, Yu-Shan The Rise of China s State-led Media Dynasty in Africa. South African Institute of International Affairs Occasional paper 117: Xin, Xin Xinhua News Agency in Africa. Journal of African Media Studies 1 (3): Zhang, Xiaoling, Herman Wasserman, and Winston Mano, eds China s Media and Soft Power in Africa: Promotion and Perceptions. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Zheng, Liang Neo-Colonialism, Ideology or Just Business?: China s Perception of Africa. Global Media and Communication 6 (3): Zheng, Su Through Erotized Lens: Blackness Encountering Chineseness in the 21st Century, Paper presented at the 2014 CA/AC conference, Jinan University, Guangzhou, December