By delving into China–South Africa and China–Italy relations in the ICTs, this chapter compares two of Huawei’s smart city projects – the Open Lab launched in 2017 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the Joint Innovation Center (JIC) launched in 2019 in Cagliari, Italy. The study assesses the extent to which these Huawei-led initiatives and their digital governance models do empower indigenous actors – that is, South African and Italian – in terms of production, access to and (re)use of data, or rather take the form of a new data-driven colonization. Findings show that while Huawei’s Open Lab tends to exclude African actors, either public or private, by favoring collaboration among foreign ICT partners, the JIC sees the collaboration between Huawei and Italian public and private actors. Huawei’s approach is modulated and adaptive to extend its corporate digital sovereignty and arrange the local communities’ digital infrastructures. Further field research should be conducted to: (1) obtain a more transparent picture of how data stemming from these initiatives is handled, by whom, and for which purposes and (2) assess the impact of the deployed smart city solutions on local citizens by foreign tech firms, including those from China.

This chapter introduces the concept of data colonialism. Nick Couldry argues that capitalism has developed a new mode of colonialism, in which the appropriated resources are not land, land resources or bodies, but life itself, which is appropriated for value through the extraction of data traces, often via social media platforms. This new data colonialism, Couldry argues, paves the way for changes in capitalism whose full shape we cannot know yet, but which will be built around not just labor relations data relations that appear in and through media and public life. Such data relations produce value by imposing categorizations, that is, alternative modes of knowledge about the social world. Beyond introducing this concept, Couldry also hypothesizes a worrisome result: A hollowing out of previous ways of knowing the social world, with potential profound implications for the politics of social justice.