China and AI: the obedience machine is getting exported, and Africa should pay attention

Behind the headlines, China’s AI-driven “social credit” approach is less a single score and more a scalable model of behavioural governance that can travel.

Article link: https://open.substack.com/pub/johanosteyn/p/china-and-ai-the-obedience-machine?r=73gqa&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Audio summary: https://youtu.be/PoXQhCum0yY

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When people hear “China’s social credit system”, many still imagine a sci-fi dashboard that assigns every citizen a single number. The reality is more bureaucratic, more mundane, and arguably more powerful: a growing mesh of databases, compliance rules, and algorithmic decision-making that can reward “trustworthy” behaviour and punish non-compliance across many aspects of life. 

My concern is not only what happens inside China, but what happens when elements of this governance model are packaged as “smart city”, “public safety”, or “efficiency” solutions and exported into countries with weaker oversight. Africa should not treat this as a distant story. It is a preview of how AI can quietly become a lever of social control.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

China’s system has evolved through many pilots and local experiments, some highly publicised and others quietly administrative. Over time, the emphasis has shifted towards standardisation, integration, and legal scaffolding: less about a dramatic single score, and more about joining up court enforcement, regulatory records, and sector-specific compliance lists into something that follows individuals and firms across regions and services.

What makes this uniquely modern is not the idea of law enforcement or regulation. Every country has that. It is the digitised, automated layer: identity, transaction trails, surveillance feeds, and risk analytics stitched together, then used to shape access to finance, procurement opportunities, mobility, and services. In its best-case framing, it is “market order” and “good governance”. In its worst-case reality, it can become an obedience architecture that amplifies state power while narrowing the room for dissent.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

The global question is not, “Will other countries copy China exactly?” They won’t. The more realistic question is, “Will parts of this model be adopted, piece by piece, because they look useful?” When governments face fraud, crime, tax leakage, and administrative chaos, the promise of integrated digital systems is incredibly tempting. Add tight budgets and political pressure, and the pitch of “automated compliance” becomes hard to resist.

Here is where AI matters. Once you treat society as a dataset, the next step is prediction: who is high risk, who is likely to default, who should be inspected more often, who should be fast-tracked, and who should be blocked. That “risk-based regulation” language sounds neutral, but the ethics hinge on transparency and appeal. When the model is wrong, who gets harmed, and how do they recover?

We also need to be honest about export dynamics. Surveillance and monitoring capabilities already travel, and they do not always land in healthy democratic contexts. A recent Associated Press investigation describes how surveillance technology was used to monitor and silence Tibetans in Nepal, illustrating how cross-border political interests can ride on top of technical systems.

At the same time, the AI infrastructure layer is consolidating. If the “token factory” era is about building massive compute and cloud capability, then control of data centres, cloud stacks, and AI supply chains becomes geopolitical leverage. This is not abstract. Data centre markets and access to GPUs are now strategic terrain, including in China, where Tom’s Hardware reports that GPU cloud capacity is consolidating around Baidu and Huawei as domestic AI chips scale up.

IMPLICATIONS

For Africa, the risk is not only “digital colonisation” in the dramatic sense. The more practical risk is dependency without accountability: buying complex AI-enabled governance systems without the institutional muscle to audit them, govern them, or provide meaningful redress when they fail. This is where procurement discipline becomes a civil liberties issue, not just a finance issue.

South African readers should view “sovereignty” here as a governance question: where is the data processed, who can access it, and what happens when foreign jurisdictions, vendors, or geopolitical shocks intervene? These debates are already surfacing in discussions about China’s cloud expansion and localisation strategies, including ITWeb’s recent look at how China’s cloud ecosystem is shaped by domestic policy priorities and a distinct approach to data sovereignty.

If we care about the future of our children, we should ask a simple set of questions before any “smart” system touches schools, transport, grants, policing, or healthcare: Can a citizen see what the system says about them? Can they challenge it quickly? Is there an independent appeal path? Are decisions explainable, or are we expected to trust a black box? And are we building capability locally, or outsourcing both the technology and the power that comes with it?

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

China’s AI-enabled compliance machinery is a warning, but it is also a lesson in how fast governance can become automated when the technical rails exist. Africa does not need to mimic China for similar dynamics to emerge. All it takes is fragmented institutions, political incentives, and shiny “efficiency” systems deployed without accountability. The antidote is not panic or simplistic “anti-China” rhetoric. It is democratic competence: disciplined procurement, enforceable safeguards, transparent auditing, and real redress. In the AI era, freedom will increasingly be protected, or lost, in the fine print.

Author Bio: Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net