Polishing mirrors

China and South Africa can strengthen their collaboration for the responsible development and governance of AI

As artificial intelligence has become a transformative technology, the question of who gets to shape this technology and the rules governing it is becoming increasingly important for countries in the Global South. For South Africa, closer engagement with China is emerging as an avenue to strengthen its technological capabilities while asserting a more active role in the international AI landscape.

The University of Johannesburg's Confucius Institute, partnered with Nanjing Tech University, marked its 10th anniversary in November 2025, with its programming increasingly turning to how AI is reshaping language education and research exchange between the two countries. On the skills side, Huawei ICT Academy has established a presence at the University of Johannesburg itself, certifying local instructors to train students in AI-adjacent fields such as networking and cybersecurity, part of a national network spanning 25 universities and 47 technical vocational education and training colleges, as South Africa's website TechFinancials reported. These are the kinds of tangible, if uneven, achievements that should anchor any assessment of what South Africa-China AI cooperation has produced so far, even as the headline diplomatic moments draw more attention.

It is against this backdrop that South Africa and China reaffirmed their commitment to expanding cooperation in science, technology and AI following a high-level bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. South Africa and China can chart a broader course for collaboration spanning joint research centers and laboratories, quantum computing, cybersecurity, space science, and youth exchange programs. As one of the founding members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, South Africa has welcomed the initiative as a platform for promoting international cooperation for the responsible development and governance of AI.

This moment invites a closer look at what such cooperation should actually deliver. The Shanghai meeting builds on a web of engagements between the two countries over the past several years. In May, a framework for cooperation on AI in education and digital transformation, and the creation of a joint technical working group to oversee the rollout of the China-South Africa Vocational and Technical Centers across all nine South African provinces, were agreed upon, following bilateral talks held on the sidelines of the World Digital Education Conference in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. Before this, in September 2025, the Chinese embassy in Pretoria supported the launch of a book, hosted at the University of Johannesburg, on deploying AI to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This signaled academic and diplomatic cooperation converging around AI's developmental potential.

AI cooperation between countries such as South Africa and China is more meaningful if it addresses the structural realities of developing economies rather than simply transplanting frameworks built for advanced economies. Framed this way, the commitments on joint laboratories and researcher exchanges demonstrate what productive AI cooperation should look like.

AI models function as mirrors, reflecting whatever data they are fed. If that data is overwhelmingly drawn from external sources, some African experts are rightly concerned that Africa may risk having its realities defined through someone else's reflection. The conclusion is not to distrust a particular partner, but to insist that African data, languages and priorities are genuinely embedded in the systems being built, rather than added as an afterthought.

Another challenge is regulatory divergence. Deepening cooperation requires sustained dialogue on interoperable standards, data governance and accountability mechanisms that each relevant country, and eventually multilateral bodies such as WAICO, can credibly stand behind.

A closely related issue is scale and asymmetry. China's AI industry has global reach, and extensive compute infrastructure, with some enterprise partners playing their roles in the South African market. This enables South Africa to pay deliberate attention to joint intellectual property arrangements and local capacity-building. Data-sharing arrangements and infrastructure investment are areas where the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area could establish common positions with China. It also means making local investment a driver to deepen bilateral cooperation, with an emphasis on infrastructure built on African soil.

Looking ahead, there are several directions South Africa-China cooperation could take next.

First, joint research should prioritize applications with direct developmental relevance, such as AI for social security administration, informal-economy inclusion, agriculture and public health. This can build on the applied, locally grounded work already visible in South Africa. Funding instruments attached to joint laboratories can specify priority areas up front, so development outcomes are not an afterthought to computing and hardware deals.

Second, education and skills partnerships, such as the vocational and technical centers, deserve sustained investment, as education is the primary safeguard against AI-driven inequality. This can extend beyond enrollment numbers to tracking whether graduates move into meaningful AI-related employment locally, and whether curricula are co-designed.

Third, both governments can use platforms such as WAICO as venues for negotiating governance standards that reflect Global South priorities, including linguistic diversity and the protection of indigenous knowledge systems in AI training data. Concretely, this could take the form of a standing South Africa-China technical working group on AI, tasked specifically with African-language datasets and locally relevant use cases. WAICO itself could consider hosting such a working group, giving South Africa's founding membership practical substance.

Finally, South Africa's engagement with China on AI should be read within a broader strategic context as one important relationship among several others. The measure of success should be whether South African institutions emerge from these partnerships with capabilities, data and intellectual property. South Africa and China AI cooperation under the framework of WAICO can set a good example for South-South cooperation in this regard.

The author is a professor of law, the vice-chancellor and the principal at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

The author contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

Contact the editor at editor@chinawatch.cn.