This could mean that China will have immense influence over politics and public life in Africa, potentially influencing election outcomes and swaying public opinion in favor of Beijing and its allies, according to the studies.

Some academics say it's happening already.

One investigation by a nonprofit studying the use of social media and other technology to target dissident groups worldwide concluded that a "largely invisible pattern" is transforming conflicts across Africa.

The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) stated that using technology such as spyware to hunt political activists and employing facial recognition to track protesters represents "a new kind of mercenary force" in Africa, one that's largely shaped by companies controlled from Beijing.

Adio-Adet Dinika, researcher and affiliate fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Science in Germany, headed DAIR's Data Workers Inquiry project. It investigated incidents in countries including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.

Dinika's research revealed the existence of "digital sweatshops" in African cities and towns, including in Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; and Gulu, Uganda, where workers are paid as little as $1.50 per hour to teach AI systems to recognize faces, moderate content, and analyze behavior patterns.

The Chinese regime is perpetrating what Dinika called "digital colonialism at its most insidious."

"I call this surveillance colonialism, the process by which foreign powers extract data and labor from African populations to build AI systems that ultimately police, repress, and destabilise those very populations," he wrote.

Among the new additions was CloudWalk, with which "the Zimbabwean government agreed to the installment of a mass surveillance network in Zimbabwe," the Treasury stated at the time.

"The agreement included a requirement that the Zimbabwean government send images it acquires from the surveillance network back to Cloudwalk's offices in China, so that Cloudwalk could improve the ability of its facial recognition software to recognize individuals based on skin pigmentation," the Treasury stated.