By Dr Blessing Vava
Introduction
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
.
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.
Why “geosociotechnopolitics” and not just geopolitics?
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.
The end of unipolarity: technomultipolarity in 2026.
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 zhong and 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.
China–Africa ICT Relations as the Test Case
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 digital realm. According to Xiaoyang Tang (2021) and Kai Zeng (2023), Chinese companies are building Africa’s digital infrastructure, such as the National Telecommunications Broadband Network of Cameroon, the ICT Backbone of Nigeria, and the expansion of telecommunications in Zimbabwe related to the Hwange Power Station.
A new conceptual perspective called geosociotechnopolitics allows one to see the changes through a different lens. Instead of the popular discourse of “debt traps,” one should pay attention to the interactions of geography, society, technology, and politics in this technological context.
There are three major topics to consider:
1. Complementarity Beyond Dependency
As such, in this case, the role of ICT in bringing about transformative change in China can be explained in terms of technological complementarities that are exclusive to the country of Zimbabwe. The rationale behind this argument can be traced back to the point that in the absence of Western firms, Chinese ICT provided an alternative way of meeting technology needs through its ability to be flexible to local conditions and cheap enough to provide viable solutions even during periods of economic and political volatility in an economy dependent on mining and agriculture.
The above discussion must not be viewed as dismissing the potential of any kind of dependence. On the contrary, this discussion suggests that the use of technology depends on the local setting. The question at hand is whether or not Africa will remain a consumer of technology or go further ahead to create new complementary technologies based on the adoption of GPTs. It is important to note that the adoption of GPTs is not sufficient for bringing about transformation but needs to be supplemented by diffusion and application.
2. The Interface Between Domestic Politics and Global Rivalry
China’s ICTs in Zimbabwe provide an insight into larger patterns in China-Africa relationships, as well as into the emerging competition between great powers on technological frontlines. Every telecommunication pole is, at once, a source of wealth, a channel of communications by government officials, and part of an even larger chain of geopolitical battles.
The importance of such issues becomes more pronounced from 2026 onwards, following the CHIPS Act of the US, Europe’s new digital strategy, and China’s own Digital Silk Road, which represent competing paradigms of technological governance. The African leadership finds itself faced with decisions that go far beyond mere technicalities. Decisions about data security, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure will have implications not only for sovereignty but also for democratic values, freedom of the press, and industrial policies for many years to come. Geosociotechnopolitically speaking, decisions of this kind go beyond simple regulations; they become constitutional decisions.
3. From Infrastructure to Platforms to Norms
China-Africa ICT relations have gone through different stages. The first stage involved infrastructure, such as fibre optic network connectivity, telecommunications equipment and affordable mobile phones, according to researchers Yu Hong and Iginio Gagliardone, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. In the second stage, the focus was on platforms, which included mobile money solutions, e-commerce platforms, and smart city technologies. In the third and current stage, the focal area involves norms, which include data governance, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and platform governance.
It is within this third stage of China-Africa ICTs that the sociotechnical aspects of geosociotechnopolitics become clear. As a participant in my doctoral study stated, China's technologies have made more information available than before. Nevertheless, access to information per se is not sovereignty. Technologies have embedded values on governance, security, and how society organises itself, as Langdon Winner contended in 1980 and technology researcher Andrew Feenberg illustrated in 1999. States end up importing political and institutional frameworks when they use surveillance technologies, algorithms, or artificial intelligence technologies created in another country.
However, the African continent faces a situation in which the problem goes beyond merely using technology. It concerns technological sovereignty.
From Analysis to Strategy
My thesis concludes that without Nehanda, the story of Zimbabwe would be incomplete until Nehanda is in it. Here, Nehanda Nyakasikana refers not only to the historical figure herself but also to the idea of self-determination. My main argument is that technology, in the end, must serve the interests of society and the nation, not others. This point holds continent-wide significance.
For geosociotechnopolitics to work both as a theoretical construct and as a guide for action, there are four imperatives Africa must do in the technomultipolar world to come.
Africa's Choice in the Technomultipolar Moment
Imperative 1: Read Technology as Power
Discussions regarding technology policy cannot be limited strictly to technological considerations. Each fibre-optic cable, data server, cloud service, and artificial intelligence system represents a set of power relations that exist between societies, economies, and governments.
Imperative 2: Build on GPTs Rather Than Merely Consume Them
It is no accident that ICTs made in China are prevalent throughout Africa. They have gained popularity due to their relative affordability and availability as a GPT. But their importance lies in their ability to act as platforms for innovations coming from Africa. It is not about US or Chinese dominance in the world. The ultimate aim here is the building of African software industries, African communities of innovators, African infrastructures of information, and African digital companies. Geosociotechnomultipolarity becomes meaningful only insofar as African technologies, platforms, and governance processes enter the global technological landscape.
Imperative 3: Constitutionalise the Digital
It follows, then, that the third imperative flows immediately from this line of argument – digital infrastructures have become increasingly integral to constitutional arrangements. And if this is true, then it is no surprise that the lessons of the Zimbabwean Constitution and the discussions around Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3 (CAB3) are instructive. In particular, Section (328) provides expressly that a referendum must precede any amendment that would involve changes to the Declaration of Rights, the presidential term limit, or national sovereignty. As it recognizes that some powers may be too crucial for Parliament to amend on its own initiative.
Indeed, the controversy around CAB3 reveals why constitutionalism exists – to safeguard the ability to raise fundamental issues of sovereignty and democracy for discussion and decision-making in accordance with proper democratic procedures.
Similarly, issues of digital identity systems, AI in government institutions, cross-border data deals, and smart-city platforms have come to bear on these very issues. Such issues define questions of privacy, citizenship, accountability, and ownership/control of data. They are, however, often approached as procurement or administrative matters. The typical procedure involves Cabinet approval followed by Parliamentary approval, with the public largely left out of the equation. It is this constitutional gap that manifests itself each time questions of sovereignty and participatory democracy are approached from the perspective of an administrative process.
It means, then, that the intersection between society, technology, and geopolitics needs to be governed democratically. The Constitutions drafted in the 1990s did not provide provisions for the regulation of artificial intelligence, biometric identification, algorithmic governance, and cross-border data deals. But at the same time, these technologies determine what makes up citizenship, how our rights are realised, and where power lies.
In the same way as Section (328) appreciates that sovereignty deserves higher democratic standards of safeguarding (such as referenda), so too does the age of digitisation require constitutional oversight over decisions regarding the nation's digital identity system, algorithmic public services, and strategic cross-border data arrangements.
In keeping with the rule according to which improved democratic practices, such as referenda, come into being because of the felt need to improve democracy because of the nature of sovereignty of the state, the current era of digitisation also demands similar thinking. National ID, algorithmic use of technology in public services, and partnerships on data sharing and digital infrastructure are issues that must be democratically negotiated.
What this implies is that none of the above can take place without the democratic approval of the citizens of the country. Just as referenda are required before changing the constitution regarding presidential terms of office, so too any change made to the digital framework of citizenship would require similar considerations.
The debate of the twenty-first century is not about whether we should consider digitising politics, but about how we can constitutionalise the digital era. Geosociotechnopolitics becomes important in this regard not just for explaining phenomena in the digital era, but also for strategy-making for Africa within the digital domain.
Imperative 4: Build Continental Digital Sovereignty
No individual African country can compete the magnitude and significance of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. It therefore means that digital sovereignty requires coordination at the level of the entire continent. In this respect, the African Union ought to lobby for the adoption of compatible digital infrastructures, continental data governance policies, cloud computing and data centres, artificial intelligence research clusters, collaboration in semiconductors and advanced manufacturing technologies, and regulation of the same. This is a sure way for Africa to enhance its bargaining power in an emerging technomultipolar international system.
Conclusion: Africa in the Technomultipolar Age
Geosociotechnopolitics is both a diagnostic and a normative framework. It diagnoses how geography, society, technology, and politics increasingly intersect in shaping China–Africa ICT relations. At the same time, it provides a framework for understanding how African states can engage these transformations strategically rather than passively.
The central argument of this paper has been that Chinese ICT engagement in Zimbabwe cannot be understood solely in terms of connectivity or developmental infrastructure. Rather, its significance lies in the transformative potential of technologies that can reconstitute state power, social relations, economic possibilities, and political dynamics. Through the strategic management of ICTs, African states can cultivate what may be termed geosociomultipolarity: the capacity to leverage technological systems to enhance national autonomy, economic productivity, and international influence. In Zimbabwe's case, this could contribute to the emergence of a new Great Zimbabwe—technologically enabled, economically productive, and globally connected. Similar possibilities exist for other African states, Great Senegal, Great Kenya, Great South Africa, seeking to strengthen their position within an evolving multipolar order.
As of 2026, multipolarity is no longer merely a theoretical proposition. It is being constructed through digital infrastructures, data systems, communication platforms, artificial intelligence, and other technological innovations that increasingly shape the global distribution of power. Africa's position within this emerging order will depend not on decisions made exclusively by external actors, but on its capacity to innovate, negotiate, and strategically govern technological change. Understanding the interconnections between geography, society, technology, and politics is therefore essential if African states are to move beyond dependency and become active participants in shaping the future global order.
Yet this transformation is not guaranteed. Africa may evolve from being primarily a consumer of foreign technologies to becoming a co-producer of the future digital and communications order. However, history demonstrates that technological adoption has often been accompanied by new forms of dependency. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to acquire advanced technologies but to develop the institutional, regulatory, and industrial capabilities necessary to govern them in ways that advance African interests.
This places a corresponding responsibility on the African Union. If technomultipolarity is becoming the defining condition of the digital age, Africa requires not only national digital strategies but also a coherent continental vision. The AU's Digital Transformation Strategy, emerging AI governance initiatives, and efforts to harmonise digital markets provide an important foundation. The next step is to move beyond connectivity and access toward data sovereignty, digital industrialisation, platform governance, technological innovation, and African technological autonomy.
Technology is never neutral. It is geography made material, society made scalable, economics made productive, and power made durable. Africa's challenge is not to choose between Washington and Beijing, Silicon Valley and Shenzhen. It is to build the institutional and technological capacity necessary to shape its own future within an emerging technomultipolar order. The infrastructure is being built. The platforms are expanding. The algorithms are learning. The code is being written. The question is whether Africa will merely consume the future or help design it.
In geosociotechnopolitical terms, the challenge is not simply to build digital infrastructure, but to build digitally sovereign societies—and continental institutions capable of governing them. That is the pathway toward a new Great Zimbabwe, a digitally sovereign Africa, and a continent that participates not merely as a recipient of technological change, but as a co-architect of the emerging technomultipolar order.
END
About the Author
Dr Blessing Vava is a Zimbabwean scholar and researcher of tech and power. His PhD research on Chinese ICTs in Zimbabwe produced the concept of geosociotechnopolitics — the idea that geography, society, technology and politics now shape development together. He writes on the political economy of technology, digital sovereignty, constitutionalism, and Africa’s right to design its own digital future. Email: blessingvava@gmail.com
Author's Note: This article draws on the author's doctoral research on the diffusion of Chinese Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Zimbabwe and extends its theoretical arguments to contemporary debates on digital sovereignty, artificial intelligence, and Africa's place in an emerging technomultipolar world. Any views expressed are those of the author. No generative artificial intelligence system was used to write this article. Any digital tools used during the research, editing, or publication process did not generate the article's original arguments, concepts, analysis, or conclusions.
Selected References
• Allison, G. & Segal, A. (2021). The Great Tech Rivalry: China vs the U.S.
• Brautigam, D. (2020). A Critical Look at Chinese Development Finance.
• Breznitz, D. & Murphree, M. (2011). Run of the Red Queen.
• Castells, M. (2010). The Rise of the Network Society.
• Couldry, N. & Mejias, U. (2019). The Costs of Connection.
• Feenberg, A. (1999). Questioning Technology.
• Headrick, D. (1988). The Tentacles of Progress.
• Lee, K.-F. (2018). AI Superpowers.
• Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform Capitalism.
• Winner, L. (1980). "Do Artifacts Have Politics?"
No comments:
Post a Comment