Chinese Media in South Africa: An Overview

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Published: Jul 7, 2023
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Chinese media South Africa news agencies portals websites newspapers local media immigrants

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Barry van Wyk
Africa-China Reporting Project (ACRP), University of the Witwatersrand

Abstract




This article explores Chinese media in South Africa, both in terms of the media content of Chinese state media and the media content of South African Chinese media operations, which is privately produced locally by Chinese residents. Chinese state media has a relatively small footprint in South Africa, comprising a couple of channels on satellite television, a small number of mainland Chinese journalists working mainly in Johannesburg, and content produced by the Chinese embassy and consular staff and usually published in English on Independent Media outlets (a South African news agency partly owned by Chinese state media). South Africa currently has one active homegrown Chinese media agency, African Times, which produces content in Chinese for and about the local Chinese community. The content in African Times is subject to the kind of content constraints prevalent in Chinese state media, but African Times provides an invaluable perspective on the local Chinese community. This article concludes with a comparative analysis of the content produced by Chinese state and local Chinese media in South Africa and an assessment of the unique contribution of South African Chinese media.




Article Details

How to Cite
Barry, V. W. (2023). Chinese Media in South Africa: An Overview. The Africa Governance Papers, 1(3). Retrieved from https://tagp.gga.org/index.php/system/article/view/37
Issue
Vol. 1 No. 3 (2023): Sovereignty in a multipolar world
Section
Research Articles
Author Biography

Barry van Wyk, Africa-China Reporting Project (ACRP), University of the Witwatersrand

Barry van Wyk is research associate at the Africa-China Reporting Project (ACRP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and business editor at The China Project, where he writes about China’s economy. He was project coordinator of the ACRP from 2015 to 2022, where he supported activities providing facilitation and capacity-building for journalists. He spent eight years in China, from 2006 to 2014, studying Chinese in Tianjin and then working as a business analyst and media industry project manager in Beijing. His academic research interests include the networking and media of overseas Chinese communities in Africa, and South African media of the 1950s. His recent publications include The Chinese community and the search for security in South Africa-China: A Partnership of Paradoxes (Palgrave, 2021), and Networking a quiet community: South African Chinese news reporting and networking, in Journal of African Media Studies (2020). Van Wyk holds a Master of Arts in Economic History from the London School of Economics and a Master of Arts in African History from the University of Pretoria.

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© The Africa Governance Papers, 2023, Vol 1 Issue 3