Publications & Research
Peer-reviewed articles, policy briefs, and scholarly contributions spanning Africa-China relations, AI governance, cybersecurity, and digital policy.
Peer Reviewed Articles
A Technological Fix: The Adoption of Chinese Public Security Systems
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (2023)
Bulelani Jili
This paper analyzes how governments across the Global South adopt and implement Chinese surveillance technologies as solutions to public security challenges. Drawing on case studies from Africa and Asia, the research examines the political economy of technology transfer and its implications for digital sovereignty.
Digital Surveillance Trends and Chinese Influence in Light of the COVID-19 Pandemic Asia
Asian Journal of Comparative Law (2023)
Bulelani Jili , Marco André Germanò, Ava Liu, Jacob Skebba
Countries across the world expanded digital surveillance strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic occurred contemporaneously with a global trend toward greater digital repression, commentators advanced the notion that China would use the health crisis to promote a technology-enabled form of authoritarian governance abroad. This article surveys the evidence for these claims by first examining the literature on the increase of digital surveillance associated with China and then presenting three case studies from developing countries with varying responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The selected countries – Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam – used surveillance technology as part of their pandemic response and have either been influenced by Chinese approaches or adopted Chinese technology in recent years. Examining these case studies allows us to better understand claims regarding China's role in the general spread of digital surveillance and the interplay between Chinese state objectives and local political environments. Crucially, we illustrate how China's engagement in digital governance abroad is heavily contingent on domestic environments. Against a backdrop of China's growing influence in global digital governance, the effects observed in these case studies of Chinese surveillance models and technology proliferating through pandemic management are diffuse and contextualised by local factors.
Africa: regulate surveillance technologies and personal data
Nature (2022)
Bulelani Jili
CCTV cameras and spyware are proliferating in Africa without checks and balances. Governments must legislate locally to prevent civil-rights abuses.
Chinese ICT and Smart City Initiatives in Kenya
Asia Policy (2022)
Bulelani Jili
The essay chiefly brings to the fore the local factors that contribute to the growing use of Chinese digital infrastructure in Kenya. There is limited analytical research on the spread of Chinese digital infrastructure and its consequences for African local environments and actors. Accordingly, the essay seeks to examine the growing use of Chinese-produced digital infrastructure in Kenya and its consequences.
China, Africa, and the future of the internet
African Affairs (2021)
Bulelani Jili
Although academic and media discourses are examining both the encouraging and detrimental aspects of Africa–China relations, the way those relations are frequently covered obfuscates the part played by local actors and conditions
The emergence of guiding cases in China
Peking University Law Journal (2019)
Bulelani Jili , Li Guo
Chinese legal reform is dotted with episodes of progress and stagnation. While significant steps have been taken to professionalize, specialize, and autotomize the judicial apparatus, populist forces have also informed the trajectory of reform. Guiding cases have ignited tremendous scholarly discourses about the importance of the tool, and how it can help ameliorate the legal system. Some scholars “cite their potential to fill statutory lacunae, unify legal standards, improve judicial efficiency, and limit judicial discretion.” Others argue that the Chinese political and legal system are ill-prepared (or incompatible) to adopt the guiding cases paradigm. This article investigates the development of guiding cases and attempts to shed light on their function and potential impact on the political and legal landscapes. We maintain that the current role of guiding cases in the overall system is still ambiguous and that the rise of guiding cases has had marked progress, but its development in the political and legal milieus remain to be discerned.
Book Chapters
The Spread of Chinese Surveillance Tools in Africa: A Focus on Ethiopia and Kenya
Routledge (2022)
Bulelani Jili
This chapter examines the introduction of Chinese surveillance technologies in Kenya and Ethiopia. Unlike most studies that focus on supply factors, the chapter explores the quality of local and global features in the spread of Chinese surveillance tools. It analyses surveillance technologies as a dynamic social process. Drawing attention to the often-neglected Chinese operations in Kenya and Ethiopia helps to expand our understanding of how China’s growing geopolitical footprint in Africa is mediated by local conditions and actors. I argue that Beijing’s “no strings attached” strategy is a beguiling posture – systematically presenting China as an affable development partner towards African governments while also deemphasising economic asymmetries and its bias towards state actors. In Ethiopia, China’s tendency to privilege state actors risks undermining citizens’ rights. Even in a more democratic Kenya, the bolstering of state power reinforces the ambitions of the state that can benefit from utilising digital technologies to conduct surveillance for political and commercial ends. The absence of robust and clear regulatory data and privacy measures leaves people vulnerable to the misuse of ostensibly neutral surveillance technologies.
Other Publications
Digital Sovereignty in Postcolonial Africa: The Spread of Chinese Surveillance Tools
Stanford University Press (2028)
Bulelani Jili
Digital Sovereignty, a book that critically examines the expansion of Chinese surveillance technologies in East Africa, with Kenya as the main field site. The project interrogates the “technological fix” as a dominant aspiration aimed at strengthening the postcolonial state’s capacity to enforce social order and drive economic development. It explores how surveillance technologies function as infrastructural nodes in developmental capitalism, where Chinese firms portray themselves as benevolent development partners and digital tools are cast as structural solutions to governance challenges. This framing often obscures the role of the firms and their technologies, attributing failure to African institutions. The book analyzes the impact of these technologies on state sovereignty and governance (especially in the regulation of crime and economic activity), on democracy and civil society (through shifting perceptions of security and freedom), and on social and material inequality. It also considers the growing risks these systems pose to individual privacy and collective safety, particularly in contexts of limited oversight and weak data protection frameworks. Finally, the book reflects on what these dynamics portend for China’s evolving role in Africa and for broader configurations of global power. By foregrounding the political life of surveillance infrastructures, Digital Sovereignty offers an analytical entry point into the convergence of techno-political imaginaries, global capitalism, and Africa–China relations in shaping digital futures in postcolonial Africa.
What is driving the adoption of Chinese surveillance technology in Africa
Atlantic Council (2023)
Bulelani Jili
When examining the proliferation of Chinese surveillance systems and cyber capabilities in Africa, research disproportionately focuses on the motivations and ambitions of the supplier. This perspective, while it highlights Chinese diplomatic ambitions and corporate opportunities, ignores local features that drive the adoption of Chinese surveillance tools. This paper discusses African demand factors through an examination of the primary case study of Kenya and examples from South Africa and Uganda. By drawing attention to local efforts to procure and collaborate with Chinese firms to establish public security systems, this work seeks to address the motivations behind the adoption of Chinese information and communication technology (ICT) systems, which include artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance tools and other biometric identification systems, and illustrates the consequences of the proliferation of digital surveillance tools for local and global communities. The paper emphasizes African volition—recognizing its salience—as a way to go beyond myopic representations of Africa as a passive recipient and partner in Africa-China relations.
China’s surveillance ecosystem & the global spread of its tools
Atlantic Council (2022)
Bulelani Jili
This paper seeks to offer insights into how China’s domestic surveillance market and cyber capability ecosystem operate, especially given the limited number of systematic studies that have analyzed its industry objectives. For the Chinese government, investment in surveillance technologies advances both its ambitions of becoming a global technology leader as well as its means of domestic social control. These developments also foster further collaboration between state security actors and private tech firms. Accordingly, the tech firms that support state cyber capabilities range from small cyber research start-ups to leading global tech enterprises. The state promotes surveillance technology and practices abroad through diplomatic exchanges, law enforcement cooperation, and training programs. These efforts encourage the dissemination of surveillance devices, but also support the government’s goals concerning international norm-making in multilateral and regional institutions.
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