Digital Infrastructure, China, and the Reorganization of Dependency

This conversation examines Huawei’s rise in Kenya as part of a broader transformation in African digital governance. The sections trace how telecommunications liberalization shifted the state from direct infrastructure provision toward regulation, procurement, and partnership with external firms, creating the institutional terrain in which Huawei could expand. They then situate the company’s growth within China’s own pursuit of technological autonomy, state-supported finance, and overseas market development. The broader argument of the book is that digital infrastructure does not simply expand state capacity; it reorganizes the conditions under which that capacity is exercised. Huawei’s projects can extend connectivity, technical capability, and public services while simultaneously embedding governments within external systems of finance, proprietary technology, expertise, and maintenance. The concept of operational dependency captures this tension: sovereignty is not simply lost or surrendered, but performed through infrastructures that states can deploy without fully controlling. Huawei therefore offers a lens for moving beyond binary accounts of China as either development partner or geopolitical threat, toward examining how risk, authority, capacity, and dependency are redistributed through digital infrastructure.