The Thursday Briefing: From “Zhing Zhong” to Technomultipolarity: Geosociotechnopolitics and the future of China–Africa ICT relations

For two decades, academic discourse around China in Africa has largely been confined to binaries. On the one hand, China is cast as the virtuous South-South partner championing cooperation in Africa. On the other hand, it is portrayed as the new neo-colony in the guise of debt-trap diplomacy. Chinese products are dismissed as zhing zhong or celebrated as affordable alternatives to Western technologies. While such discourses may indeed play an important role in shaping our thinking about China and its presence in Africa, they have also tended to obfuscate what I believe is the much more radical transformation taking place across the continent.

The transformation that I am talking about has little to do with loans, infrastructure projects, or even diplomatic realignments. Rather, it has much more to do with technologies – particularly the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), their social embedding, and subsequent redistribution of power. In my own doctoral research on ICT diffusion in Zimbabwe, I found myself grappling with a theoretical blind spot. While the research itself is grounded in the Zimbabwean context, the question it poses is much broader and concerns the transformation of Africa’s digital terrain. How do you make sense of how the Huawei telecommunications tower, the Transsion smartphone, and the TikTok feed together constitute economic activity, political governance, social interaction, and foreign relations? None of the theories used to explain the former – i.e., the spread of Chinese influence in terms of loans and ports – can help here

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That is why I developed the concept of geosociotechnopolitics. The concept provides an understanding of how geographical, social, technological, and political considerations form the setting within which modern-day development, sovereignty, and power are increasingly contested. Its central thesis is that technological developments cannot be understood in isolation from the social, political, and spatial contexts in which they unfold. At its core, geosociotechnopolitics rests on a simple insight: technology is never merely technical. Digital infrastructures shape who communicates, who governs, who profits, and who exercises control.

This question has become more urgent as the world enters a new technological era shaped by artificial intelligence, digital sovereignty, data governance, and intensifying US–China technological competition. Decisions on telecommunications networks, cloud computing, digital identity and artificial intelligence platforms become questions of sovereignty.

In its attempt to deal with these transformations, the African Union (AU) has come to act more assertively as a continental entity when it comes to defining Africa’s digital governance and its position in a newly emerging global technological landscape. The emergence of a Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa, developed by the AU, indicates the recognition that digital sovereignty cannot be addressed exclusively through nation-state actions; it requires continent-wide coordination, standard-setting, and the ability to bargain in the global digital economy.

Hence, a conceptual approach to studying the relations between China and Africa through ICT should consider factors beyond geopolitical and economic concerns. This involves a theoretical perspective able to provide an adequate description of the concurrent interplay between geography, society, technology, and politics. Geosociotechnopolitics can be one such approach.

The paper is divided into four parts. In the first part, it reconsiders the intellectual roots of geosociotechnopolitics and explains why traditional approaches such as geopolitics, development studies, and techno-nationalism have failed to make sense of the present China-Africa relationship within the realm of ICTs. The second part explores the historical progression of China’s digital outreach to Africa, from “zhing zhong” infrastructural projects to the emergence of more complex digital ecosystems, including platform ecosystems, cloud services, digital standardisations, and data governance. The third section looks at the way African countries, businesses, and citizens are responding to these developments and highlights the continent’s agency in shaping its digital future. Lastly, the article brings up the term technomultipolarity to describe today’s multipolar digital world and discusses its implications for Africa’s digital sovereignty and governance. In sum, these arguments suggest that Africa should be considered not only as the theatre of technology wars between different actors but also as an increasingly important place where future configurations of the global digital order will take place.

Geopolitical studies have focused on territory, resources, and military capacity as the central variables. Geoeconomics incorporates trade and finance, and technopolitics highlights the importance of code and digital platforms. All three frameworks have merit, but none is sufficient when used alone.

According to geosociotechnopolitics, all three frameworks overlap in crucial ways. Chinese ICT investments in Africa go beyond simple infrastructure investments; rather, they serve as General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), which are disruptions to economies and societies through the ubiquitous application, continual improvements, and extensive spill-overs of technologies like steam power, electricity, and the internet. GPTs have five key characteristics: wide applicability, continuous upgrading, spill-overs, lack of close substitutes, and a basic beginning stage that leads to increasingly complicated stages.

Electricity was not just for lighting up homes; it transformed factories, cities, employment practices, and logistics for the military. The internet was not only about connecting people but also about transforming media landscapes, election campaigns, protest movements, and even surveillance mechanisms. Similarly, China’s ICT investments in Zimbabwe progressed from derogatory terms like “zhing zhong” in the 2000s to cautiously accepting the technology in the 2010s to reliance upon it every day of the 2020s.

That trajectory is geosociotechnopolitical. It shows the interface of:

•  Geography: where cables are laid, towers erected and data centres built.

•  Society: how ordinary Zimbabweans moved from dismissing Chinese devices as zhing zhong to incorporating them into everyday life.

•  Technology: the GPT characteristics of ICTs that generate economic, political and social spillovers.

•  Politics: both domestic struggles over access and control and wider US–China geopolitical competition.

Disregarding any particular facet will make the interpretation of the whole phenomenon inadequate. Historian Daniel Headrick warned that technology is often overlooked, underestimated, or seen as secondary when compared to politics. This warning is as relevant today as ever before.

I argue in my thesis that geosociotechnopolitics was developed to explain a world moving beyond American unipolarity. Its central premise is that the long-standing assumption that global communications, innovation, and technological modernity would be organised around Western—particularly Silicon Valley—models is beginning to fracture, as scholars such as Manuel Castells, Nick Couldry, and Ulises Mejias have suggested. Chinese ICTs were dismissed as zhing zhongand fong kong not only because of concerns about quality, but also because a US-centred global order struggled to imagine technological leadership emerging from the East. Unipolarity was never solely military or economic; it was also socialised into assumptions about innovation, quality, and modernity itself.

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2025 and the revival of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda have intensified this competition. Through export controls on advanced semiconductors, restrictions on AI cooperation, supply-chain decoupling, and efforts to preserve a US-led digital architecture, Washington continues to view technological leadership as a strategic imperative. The contest between the United States and China is therefore no longer primarily about military power. It is increasingly about who sets standards for 5G and 6G networks, whose AI systems shape public services, whose cloud infrastructure stores data, and whose digital platforms influence public opinion.

Events in 2026 demonstrate how difficult a return to unipolarity has become. Trump’s visit to Beijing in May 2026 was significant less because of any specific agreement than because of what it symbolised. The question was no longer how China might integrate into a US-led order, but how two technological orders would coexist. The presence of executives from Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, and Qualcomm underscored the reality that supply chains, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and digital governance have become central issues of global politics.

The visit did not resolve the rivalry; it formalised it. Complete technological decoupling remains politically attractive to some policymakers, but increasingly difficult in practice. Global production networks, digital infrastructures, and innovation systems are already deeply interconnected. What is emerging is not a return to unipolarity but a technomultipolar order in which multiple technological ecosystems coexist, compete, and interact.

Understanding Africa’s place in this emerging order requires a geosociotechnopolitical perspective. The infrastructure of technomultipolarity is already visible across the continent: Huawei towers on African hills, Transsion smartphones in African pockets, TikTok within African attention economies, and Chinese digital-financial technologies increasingly linked to BRICS+ experiments.

At the centre of this transformation stands Shenzhen—not as a replica of Silicon Valley, but as an alternative model of technological development. Whereas Silicon Valley emerged through venture capital, software innovation, platform dominance, and global network effects, Shenzhen developed through state-industry coordination, manufacturing scale, rapid prototyping, and technology-led industrial policy. Long dismissed as a copycat ecosystem, Shenzhen has become a global leader in telecommunications infrastructure, drones, batteries, electric vehicles, and increasingly artificial intelligence. Its significance lies not in replicating Silicon Valley but in demonstrating that technological modernity can emerge through a different developmental pathway.

The emerging rivalry is therefore not simply between the United States and China, nor between Trump and Xi. It is a competition between two geosociotechnopolitical architectures. The US–Silicon Valley model combines liberal-democratic institutions, venture capital, platform capitalism, and global financial power. The China–Shenzhen model combines developmental-state institutions, industrial policy, manufacturing capacity, and integrated hardware-platform ecosystems. Neither possesses a monopoly on technological modernity. The United States remains dominant in frontier AI, software, and finance; China leads in affordable hardware, rapid deployment, and state-led digital infrastructure.

Three developments in 2026 illustrate how the socialisation of unipolarity is breaking down.

First, artificial intelligence is reshaping the relationship between society, technology, and geopolitics at unprecedented speed. Chinese firms such as DeepSeek, ByteDance, and Huawei increasingly compete with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. For Africa, the question is not simply who develops the most powerful models, but whose languages, values, and datasets become embedded within them.

Second, the expansion of BRICS+ and experimentation with alternative payment systems demonstrate how technological infrastructures are becoming central to the future of global finance. Digital currencies, cloud infrastructures, and payment networks are increasingly intertwined with broader geopolitical realignments.

Third, platform preferences among African youth are shifting. In the early 2000s, Facebook dominated digital engagement. By 2026, many African Gen Z users increasingly gravitating towards TikTok, Temu, and other Chinese platforms. Social preferences, technological design, geopolitics, and local affordability are converging in ways that would have been difficult to imagine two decades earlier.

What began with the dismissal of Chinese technologies as zhing zhong increasingly points toward a geosociotechnomultipolar order characterised by multiple centres of technological innovation and influence. For Africa, the challenge is not to choose between competing technological systems, but to develop the capabilities necessary to navigate and shape this emerging order. The decisive question is whether African states will remain consumers of external technologies or leverage technomultipolarity to build African data centres, African AI trained on African languages, African payment systems, and African digital platforms.

That is the world geosociotechnopolitics was designed to explain: a world in which technology has become a central terrain of sovereignty and where Africa’s agency depends not on choosing sides, but on understanding and shaping the interaction of geography, society, technology, and politics.

The rise of China as a development partner has reshaped the technological landscape of Africa. As pointed out by Deborah Brautigam (Johns Hopkins University) in 2020, China became the largest provider of loans to the developing world, surpassing the World Bank in 2011. Moreover, Africa–China cooperation in terms of trade and investments has flourished. Perhaps the most striking change that took place is in the di