Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers, and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves

Abstract

China’s return to Africa beginning in the late 1990s flows from decades of political, ideological, and economic ties cemented since the Bandung Conference in 1955. Although the Bandung rhetoric of anticolonial, third world-ist development still finds faint echo among elite and ordinary people alike in Africa, the more prevalent public discourse these days is the one the United States and former colonial powers in Western Europe promote. It focuses on China’s capitalist, even “imperialist” impulses—its hunger for raw materials, its financial prowess, and its wide-ranging investment portfolio throughout Africa.² A frenzy of alarmist media reports, as well as a rapidly growing academic literature on China in Africa, have recycled many aggregate statistics on the volume of Chinese investments, casting China as a formidable competitor for global energy resources and diplomatic influence. Yet without comparative and grounded analysis on how these investment projects operate—the diverse agents and local conditions that enable and embed their interplay with workers, unions, and communities—analysts remain trapped in sweeping and unproductive generalizations. Neither Chinese capital nor Africa is singular, and the dynamic of their encounters, raw in many ways as this chapter will show, can be grasped only from within and across these Chinese enclaves.

The author wishes to thank Ron Aminzade, Michael Burawoy, Peter Evans, Alastair Fraser, Amy Hanser, Gary Herrigel, Miles Larmer, Jamie Monson, and Mark Selden for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.