Unpaywalled (Web archive)
The strange number lighting up Tawanda Majoni’s phone again and again felt like a warning.
Majoni, one of the Zimbabwe’s most respected journalists, soon learned where the calls were coming from: a federal police unit called Law and Order, notorious for abductions, torture and killings.
When unmarked cars rolled through his neighborhood after a relative was pressed for his location, Majoni packed a bag, tossed his cell phone’s SIM card so he couldn’t be tracked and fled the city, haunted by memories of slain colleagues. One was hurled from a moving vehicle in broad daylight. Another was beaten to death.
He knew he couldn’t run forever. After two weeks, he returned and answered one of the calls. An officer told him to come in: We have a case related to you.
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A few days later, Majoni sat in a small, airless room at Law and Order offices, his lawyer ordered to wait outside. For three hours, officers grilled Majoni about his work, at one point sliding a printout across the desk—a tweet about a speech he’d given on World Press Freedom Day. They accused him of “inciting rebellion,” a treasonous offense.
The questioning made no sense until Majoni noticed a file on the desk: his photograph on top, and beneath it, text written in Mandarin Chinese.
He didn’t need to ask. His newsroom, the Information for Development Trust, had recently published exposes on Chinese mining projects that left open waste pits, poisoned rivers and displaced communities. “I know what this is about,” Majoni said.
The lead officer smiled, then pressed on about the tweet. Majoni walked free that day but stopped writing his weekly column. Later, he said, trusted police contacts confirmed what he already suspected: Chinese investors had been behind the interrogation.
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The Chinese government’s repression of journalists at home is well known. Less visible is how that machinery now reaches far beyond its borders—and what that means for the environment.
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An Inside Climate News investigation has identified more than a dozen journalists who have faced retaliation for reporting on environmental destruction and human rights abuses tied to China’s ventures in African countries, likely a stark undercount. Many of those cases involve projects under Beijing’s $1.3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, a massive investment effort into mines, ports, railways, pipelines and other infrastructure in mostly poor countries.
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When a project carries political weight for both the Chinese government and local authorities, that’s often when repression happens, according to Sarah Cook, author of the UnderReported China newsletter who has studied the country’s media influence operations for more than 15 years.
“If there are muckraking journalists or whistleblowers who might expose environmental issues, it could potentially be in the interest of both the local actors and the Chinese-linked ones to put a stop to that,” Cook said.
That suppression hides or sanitizes environmental and human rights abuses, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes the Belt and Road Initiative as a model of “green” development and positions China as a global climate leader.
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China’s media influence campaign targets a continent crucial to the planet’s climate and ecological balance. Africa is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, vast carbon-rich peatlands and a quarter of all mammal species, including endangered mountain gorillas, pangolins and chimpanzees. Its degradation threatens not only 1.5 billion Africans, but also Earth itself.
Polluting companies from other nations have been linked to attacks on journalists, too. But China’s role is distinct.
“We’re talking about a nation that is not only highly repressive but also the second-largest economy globally,” said Cook, who worked for years for Freedom House, which defends civil liberties around the globe. “This creates an unprecedented situation.”
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Censorship is only half the story. Journalists across the Global South are regularly flown to China on all-expense-paid trips that function like indoctrination, according to some participants. Chinese officials have also showered underfunded news organizations in other countries with investments and gifts—from computers to cell phones—and later exerted influence to spike stories and promote flattering coverage, journalists and government officials interviewed for this article said.
“The Chinese are very good with disseminating their agenda,” said Leo Mutisya, manager of press freedom and advocacy at the Media Council of Kenya, an independent government institution tasked with protecting media independence.
Mutisya pointed to the reach of Chinese state media in Kenya, their sprawling Nairobi offices and their cozy ties with the Kenya Broadcasting Corp., which gives a regular slot to one Chinese network and a radio frequency to another. (The Kenya Broadcasting Corp. did not respond to requests for comment.) Chinese officials also organize private lunches and parties with Kenyan journalists and editors, Mutisya added, and sponsor the country’s annual journalism awards—handing out Huawei smartphones to winners.
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China has cast its overseas mining and other ventures not as a new form of imperialism but as “win-win” partnerships among nations of the Global South—countries, it says, long oppressed by Western exploitation. The message resonates in places like Zimbabwe, where resentment of Western interference runs deep and memories of colonial horrors remain vivid.
After winning independence from Britain in 1980, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe as a symbol of unity and liberation. But by the late 1990s, his rule had hardened into autocracy—marked by election rigging, repression and state violence. Western nations responded with sweeping sanctions, in part over human rights abuses but also over Zimbabwe’s efforts to redress deep land inequities left by racist colonial rule.
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Beijing’s lending to Zimbabwe has come free from Western pressure to improve democracy and human rights—a hallmark of what Beijing calls its “noninterference” policy.
But that principle, said Richardson, who is also co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, is “nothing more than words on paper.”
“The Chinese government interferes left, right and center,” Richardson said, adding that Beijing spends “massive amounts of time and money and effort on putting forward and protecting a very particular image of what it is.”
Environmental reporters and researchers across Africa described how that influence plays out in the media.
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