tl;dr - It appears that the PRC pressured Zambian officials due to Taiwanese participation in RightsCon.

  What the [Zambian] government wanted ... in order for RightsCon to continue, we would have to moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk, including our Taiwanese participants, from in-person and online participation.

  We invested months in building government relationships focused precisely on transparency and mutual understanding, including explicit conversations about the diversity of our community ...

  This was our red line. Not because we were unwilling to engage, but because the conditions set before us were unacceptable and counter to what RightsCon is and what Access Now stands for.

Is there any other African country that’s not this beholden to China?

Related:

Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964996

This sounds like a South Park episode

As much as the west has been shooting itself in the foot lately, discovering that they are still much less subject to interference sounds like a lesson that could have been had for way less money

This is why more well known human rights conferences are held in places like Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

This is so performative.

One of the key reasons that college campuses no longer talk about Tibet and certainly don't talk about Taiwan or dare I even mention the Uygers or anything else mainland China related is of course that Chinese influence is a 10,000 pound gorilla. When you look at it more closely you realize Qatar, Turkey, Iran, and Russia influence campaigns all perfectly complement China's objectives to avoid themselves being a focus on human rights related topics

All of this sums up why trust and risk concerns are so important. For example if you put your money into a bank in a country that might not exist tomorrow you might wish you had instead put your money into Chase, depending on what events ensue... those Bankers in that other country might charm you up the Wazoo but at the end of the day trust and risk concerns truly matter

Fun fact: Zambia’s GDP per capita was greater than China’s in 1975. So there’s a parallel universe where a human rights conference in China gets cancelled because of Zambian influence.

Government put their national interest ahead of NGO organisations should not come as a surprise to anyone.

This reads like a failing part on the organisers to manage such risk, and decided to kick up a stink about it instead of implementing a fallback strategy.

> We are disappointed that our international participants won’t get to experience the Zambia we have come to know through our planning for RightsCon

This strikes as a bit naive. Like a bunch of kids who saw a Disney movie about Zambia and then decided to go there have a RightsCon. Have they seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Zambia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Zambia? I could see if they wanted to sponsor an action there or protest or something but it's unrealistic expecting RightsCon to go without issues there. Unless... the whole point was to show that Zambia would never allow this and they just wanted to "expose it".