Ideological Sinicization of China Central Television in Africa A Reception Analysis of African Audiences

China’s booming investment in and trade with many African countries since the early 2000s marks the beginning of a new wave of industrial escalation on a global scale and at the same time a revived campaign for a new world information and communication order. The launch of CCTV-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2012 was a significant milestone in the ‘China media going global’ project initiated by the Chinese government in 2009.

This research is aimed at conducting a reception analysis of the African audiences of CCTV-Africa from the perspective of critical political and economic media studies. The focus of this research is not limited to the audience reception of the media content produced by CCTV-Africa but also focuses on the wider context of China-Africa political and economic interactions within the global structure of capitalism. The thesis will explore how the Chinese media is paving its way in the African news market and the process of manufacturing ideological consent among its target audience of the elite classthrough the medium of CCTV-Africa news programmes by analyzing how African students in China perceive the ideology of Sinicism delivered by CCTV-Africa.

Therefore, this thesis has two main aims: first, to provide a definition of ideological Sinicization through a comprehensive illustration of China’s political-economic reality as a semi-peripheral country and its political and economic interaction with the peripheral countries in Africa, deploying the revised theoretical frame of structural imperialism developed by Johan Galtung. The second goal is to look into the mechanism of the process by which CCTV-Africa news programmes represent ideological Sinicization. The
term Sinicization is deployed in this research to summarize the ideological homogenization of the China-African elite class through the establishment of ‘harmony of interests’.

One the one hand, as a semi-peripheral country conditioned by the contemporary global system of economy, China attempts to boost its economic interaction with peripheral countries from Africa in order to complete its domestic economic transition from semiperiphery to core. On the other hand, countries from Africa see the economic cooperation with China as an alternative opportunity to transfer their peripheral statues
to semi-periphery by developing their labour-intensive industries. Therefore, there exists a consensus amongst transnational elite class underpinned by the “harmony of interest” to pursue economic growth.

Such consensus is reinforced by the news of CCTV in Africa which is the state-controlled international media of Chinese government. Target audiences of CCTV in Africa, as the
opinion leaders of their local societies, are more or less influenced by either the reality of China-Africa cooperation or the ideological agenda of CCTV in Africa to support such
consensus. And the findings of this research achieved through content analysis and individual interviews show that the majority of the African audiences of CCTV-Africa do agree with the ideological agenda of the news channel to promote the economic development in local societies.

The audience reception research of the thesis is situated within an analysis of the political and economic context, which conditions the agenda and production of the media. The extensive review of the literature of international communication studies, imperialism studies and ideology studies, contributes to establishing a theoretical framework for the empirical research. Together with the data collected from field research, it is intended that this analysis should contribute to the understanding of the development of China-Africa communication and media studies and also to the enrichment of the research topics in this field.