Chinese media and telecommunication companies in Africa who are there as part of Beijing’s “going out policy”, have increased and diversified their operations. Once exclusively focused on propaganda work through the likes of Radio Peking, Chinese corporations and State agencies nowadays are involved in five key activities: content production, as in the case of Xinhua, China’s State news agency that provides content to many local media houses; content distribution, like the Chinese television soap operas that have been popping up on Africa’s public broadcasters since 2012; infrastructure development, led by telecom giants Huawei and ZTE; professional training at Chinese universities and Party institutes; and, direct investment, such as the 20% acquisition of South Africa’s Independent Media by a group of Chinese investors.

StarTimes’ operations span across all these activities, covering all aspects of the digital television sector. The company builds and updates broadcasting networks; it sells the set-top-boxes needed to watch digital TV; it acts as a signal distributor, often through public-private partnerships with national broadcasters; it provides pay-TV services through satellite and DTT; it creates, buys and/or dubs content that it then distributes through its multilingual television channels; and, it trains personnel hired locally in the thousands. In some countries, StarTimes has a quasi-monopoly in all these activities; in others, its presence only involves one or two. While CGTN Africa and China Daily are under direct supervision of the State and/or the Party, StarTimes is a privately-owned company, which benefits from a particularly close relationship with the Chinese built by its founder, Pang Xinxing, when he was working at State-owned media companies in the 1970s and 1980s. Pang is often seen travelling alongside high-ranking Chinese delegations in the continent and he openly met with two dozen African heads of state and government.