Will the Internet Save the Elephants?: Public Diplomacy, China-Africa Relations, and Media’s Impact on Policy

China is the world's largest market for ivory. Chinese demand is widely blamed for driving poaching, which threatens the extinction of African elephants. This is not only an ecological problem – It is also diplomatic. In countries like South Africa and Kenya, the internet has become a forum for discourse blaming China for poaching, a discourse shaped by African class difference. This complicates China's own attempts to communicate with African publics. The poaching issue came to a head in 2015, with the Chinese government announcing a ban on ivory imports. But did African protest cause this change in policy? In this talk I unpack the complexities of this issue. I touch on the growing role of the Internet in shaping China-Africa relations, and how the poaching crisis reveals key paradoxes underlying Chinese public diplomacy in Africa. I show that the policy change can't simply be ascribed to African reactions to the poaching crisis. Rather, what seemed like a policy dispute between countries of the Global South was mediated by Western NGOs, and crucially affected by emerging economies of consumerism and celebrity within China itself. That said, the controversy also reveals new potential for the Global South to use media to influence global policy.

Cobus van Staden is a lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research focuses on nation branding and the use of media in diplomacy. He concentrates on Africa-East-Asia relations. He holds a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Nagoya in Japan, and completed postdoctoral work at the Center for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is also a media practitioner. He directed seventeen long-form documentaries for South Africa's award-winning TV show Special Assignment. In 2011, he co-founded the China-Africa Project, a multimedia resource dedicated to expanding the global conversation about China-Africa relations. It has grown to the largest English-language online forum for China-Africa discussion, with a quarter of a million members. He also co-hosts the weekly China in Africa Podcast, which has become a key forum for the dissemination of China-Africa scholarship and journalism. In 2015, the China-Africa Project cooperated with the Open Society Foundation and Wits Journalism to produce www.reporting-FOCAC.com, a set of multimedia resources aimed at training journalists covering the 2015 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit in Johannesburg, a first of its kind in targeted journalism training.