Political Embeddedness and Structures of Power: Re-Politicising Technology Transfer in the Case of Sino-African Telecommunications

Over the past two decades, Chinese telecommunications companies, Huawei and ZTE, have entered and altered the global ICT industry. Their success has been particularly evident on the African continent, where they have displaced previous European equipment vendors in most markets. Their expansion in African markets has paralleled a growth in African mobile penetration, and a rise in new hopes for development opportunities, through technology transfers and in ICT as a supporting industry. Based on data collected through three months of fieldwork in South Africa, I argue that the provision of telecommunications and the success of technology transfer are heavily mediated by the political nature of institutions in which companies are embedded, as well as the structures of power indicated by use and misunderstanding of language. 

Telecommunications is a relevant case in the framework of the moral economy, due to its immense potential for leveraging development in other sectors and subsequently strong claim for universal coverage as a basic right. However, the privatisation and deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the 1980s and 1990s have limited the provision of universal coverage in many developing markets, such as South Africa. Further, the intensification of capital and technological demands on the development of new generations of ICT service have cemented the narratives around telecommunications to be strongly technical, evolutionary, professionalised, and de-politicised.

However, the cases of Huawei and ZTE in South Africa show that despite its heavily technical nature, telecommunications cannot be understood without the deeply political structures of power surrounding both the public provision of coverage as well as its role as a profit-driven business. These are especially prominent in a case of two separate cultural heritages that come together in the same industry of a highly global nature, such as China and South Africa. The success of technology transfer and efficiency of provision for both companies depends heavily on the political institutions and structures of power in which Huawei and ZTE are embedded. Institutions such as Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment, and the African National Congress’  BRICS-based China strategy enormously affect the impacts of Huawei and ZTE on South African ICT. The political nature of institutions as well as public pressure on the South African government suggest the moral economy of telecommunications remains relevant.

Further, I combine Bourdieu’s analysis of language and symbolic power with theories on technology transfer to show that we need to conceptualise transfer in more than technical terms. There is more explanatory power by incorporating transfers into wider analyses of power structures, whereby inefficiencies in language fluency are not static weaknesses in transfer mechanisms, but reflect the clashing of altogether different systems in a global industry. The relevance of this reconceptualisation is high for both our understanding of the moral economy of the telecommunications industry as well as Sino-African relations more broadly.