Cover of The Specter of Global China
The Specter of Global China Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa
by Ching Kwan Lee
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-34066-1 | Paper: 978-0-226-34083-8 | Electronic: 978-0-226-34097-5
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

China has recently emerged as one of Africa’s top business partners, aggressively pursuing its raw materials and establishing a mighty presence in the continent’s booming construction market. Among major foreign investors in Africa, China has stirred the most fear, hope, and controversy. For many, the specter of a Chinese neocolonial scramble is looming, while for others China is Africa’s best chance at economic renewal. Yet, global debates about China in Africa have been based more on rhetoric than on empirical evidence. Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China is the first comparative ethnographic study that addresses the critical question: Is Chinese capital a different kind of capital?
 
Offering the clearest look yet at China’s state-driven investment in Africa, this book is rooted in six years of extensive fieldwork in copper mines and construction sites in Zambia, Africa’s copper giant. Lee shadowed Chinese, Indian, and South African managers in underground mines, interviewed Zambian miners and construction workers, and worked with Zambian officials. Distinguishing carefully between Chinese state capital and global private capital in terms of their business objectives, labor practices, managerial ethos, and political engagement with the Zambian state and society, she concludes that Chinese state investment presents unique potential and perils for African development. The Specter of Global China will be a must-read for anyone interested in the future of China, Africa, and capitalism worldwide.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ching Kwan Lee is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women and Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt.

REVIEWS

“Rejecting simplistic depictions of Chinese investment in Africa as inevitably ‘imperialistic’ and ‘exploitative,’ The Specter of Global China paints a richly nuanced portrait based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Zambian copper mines and construction sites. Lee makes a compelling case for the benefits of placing the study of China’s political economy in global perspective.”
— Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University

“The book is brilliant in its portrayals, and impossible to put down: both the ethnographic section of the book and the appendix are superlative in their vividness.”
— Gordon Mathews, author of The World in Guangzhou

“Lee has produced another pioneering treatise on China. With Zambia as her field site, she contrasts Chinese state investment with competing footloose private capital from other countries, thereby refuting mythologies of Chinese colonialism or world hegemony. Her novel political economy based on ‘varieties of capital’ displaces more conventional theories of ‘varieties of capitalism’ to reveal a startling contingency to global capitalism. Sure to be an unforgettable classic, The Specter of Global China represents the very best of historical and comparative ethnography.”
— Michael Burawoy, University of California at Berkeley

“The Specter of Global China engages with substantial theoretical questions at the center of the nature of capitalism as a system. It is not a book exclusively for students of China in Africa; its theoretical and empirical engagement with enduring questions in the social sciences make it an important contribution to all those interested in the theory and practice of development.”
— Edward Webster, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

"Lee deserves praise for her enviable ethnographic research: the myriad interviews and observations that inform her findings make for a richly textured study. Her book is a major contribution to the China-in-Africa literature."
— Current History

"[A] masterful deployment of the global ethnographic method as a tool for rigorous conjunctural analysis. . . .  The Specter of Global China will undoubtedly appeal to geographical political economists, critical resource geographers, Asia and Africa scholars, and economic sociologists who wish to understand the contemporary moment of economic restructuring, particularly as it unfolds in a non-North Atlantic setting."
— Antipode

Ching Kwan Lee is an excellent ethnographer and the access she obtained to mining companies through her friendship with Zambia’s former acting president is exceptional. For academics studying mining or construction in Zambia, with or without a Chinese focus, this will prove an invaluable text purely for its details. Its core depiction of Chinese State capital is an interesting insight that opens productive space for the ongoing study of both China and other forms of capital.
— African Studies Quarterly

"Ching Kwan Lee has written a captivating ethnographic study comparing the behaviour of Chinese state capital and global private capital in Zambia. By looking at the activities of Chinese state capital in both the copper mining and construction sectors, Lee’s field research creates a window at the grassroots level into the China-Zambia relationship. She weaves the worldviews of dozens of Zambians and Chinese into an accessible narrative that helps bridge the divide between different actors’ perspectives. This book is a lesson to all scholars, myself included, on the value of perseverance and chutzpa in academic field research."
— Joshua Eisenman, Pacific Affairs

"Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China is the first book-length attempt to systematically consider the broadertheoretical implications of China-Africa relations. . . . In centering ‘capital’, Lee’s book provides an important starting point."
— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.003.0001
[Chinese state capitalism;China in Africa;Chinese investment;varieties of capitalism;global China;Zambian Copperbelt;resource nationalism;underdeverlopment;copper mining;construction]
This book poses the question “Is Chinese capital a different kind of capital?” and answers it with a comparative ethnography of Chinese state capital and global private capital in Zambia’s copper and construction industries. Specifically, it asks: what are the distinct mechanisms, interests, power, and limits of Chinese state capital in Zambia, a copper giant in Africa? For African states and labor, under what conditions will Chinese state investment become an alternative to global private capital? This introductory chapter discusses the rhetorical debates about Chinese colonialism in Africa, the global media’s disproportionate attention to Chinese among other more dominant national sources of investment, and the lack of grounded and comparative research on China in Africa. Instead of aggregate statistics of investment and trade, or interviews with policy elites, this book uses comparative ethnography to analyze the relational, process and contested nature of capital. It offers an analytical framework which critically appropriates insights from the literatures on Chinese state capitalism, Zambian underdevelopment, classical sociology and comparative ethnography. It explains the three moments of capital – accumulation, production and ethos – for comparing Chinese state and global private investment in Zambia, the fieldwork process, and sums up the arguments of the book.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.003.0002
[encompassing accumulation;2008 financial crisis;windfall profit tax;value addition;profit maximization;concessional loans;infrastructural projects;Forum on China Africa Cooperation]
Chapter 2 looks at the first moment of capital—its accumulation imperative. In both copper and construction, Chinese state capital in Zambia is driven by an encompassing set of imperatives, which include profit making, extending China’s political and diplomatic influence, and gaining source access to strategic minerals. This is in contrast to global private capital’s single-minded pursuit of profit maximization. Exactly because of its more ambitious agenda, which cannot be reduced to profit, Chinese state capital has been more concessionary and negotiable with Zambian state and society than global private capital, whose singular profit-maximization imperative renders it less territorially and politically bounded. Using several market-defying corporate decisions by the Chinese state mine, including the establishment of two Chinese special economic zones, this chapter shows that Zambia was able to leverage the China difference to create an opportunity for copper value addition, a long-standing developmental strategy of Zambia. In construction, however, the lack of state developmental vision and labor capacity turns Chinese state capital, in the form of interest-bearing concessional loans and infrastructural projects, into a predatory and pernicious threat to Zambia’s long-term solvency.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.003.0003
[labor regimes;informalization;production-driven exploitation;finance-driven exclusion;exchange value;use value;subcontracting]
In the global public imagination, Chinese capital (state or private) is notoriously and uniquely exploitative toward African labor. Yet, once comparison with other investors and contextualization in Zambia’s externally imposed neoliberalization are introduced, the picture looks very different. All foreign, not just Chinese, investors today take advantage of a labor law regime already liberalized by international financial institutions and donors prior to their arrival in the late 1990s. They brought with them the global industrial trend of subcontracting and job informalization. Beneath these similarities lie significant differences, as comparative ethnographic data from inside the mines show. Global private capital runs a finance-driven production system with high sensitivity to price fluctuation of copper and a tendency to retrench labor as its first response to market volatility. On the other hand, Chinese state capital’s dual interest in the exchange value and use value of copper drives a production regime predicated on stability of production and stable but low-wage employment. Unions and workers therefore confront two kinds of bargains: finance-driven exclusion or production-driven exploitation. In construction, however, the footloose and project-based nature of construction undermines the collective capacity of construction labor in its struggle with capital, whether state or private.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.003.0004
[managerial ethos;collective asceticism;eating bitterness;individualistic careerism;rumor of convict labor;moral boundary;hundred years of humiliation;expatriates]
Chapter 4 compares the managerial ethos of the two types of capital. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork inside the residential compounds of the mines, I compare the “collective asceticism,” or the culture of eating bitterness, practiced by Chinese state managers and the more “individualistic careerism” among expatriates in global private companies. These distinct ethoses find organizational and behavior manifestations in managers’ living arrangements, everyday life on and off duty, patterns of social interactions with local Zambians, and the discourses they construe and contest in response to local cultural norms. Overall, I find Chinese state capital has at its disposal a more collectively committed, controlled, and disciplined managerial workforce than global private capital does. But the Chinese managerial ethos of collective asceticism has also fueled the rumor that Chinese employees in Africa are convict labor sent by the Chinese state, rendering suspect the moral authority and cultural normalcy of Chinese state capital.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.003.0005
[countermovements;culture of microloans;entrepreneurship;historical memories;civil society;class fragmentation;violence;generational divide;mining township;housing]
Chapter 5 offers a finer-grained view of the collective aspirations and countermovements from below. Miners and their communities have accumulated over almost a century of historical memories and practical knowledge of what can be expected of mining capital, be it colonial, national, or foreign. Fieldwork in mining compounds and among construction workers reveals a set of standards—material, moral, and technical—that Zambians have come to expect as realized and realizable vis-à-vis what is being offered by the current wave of investors. Both Chinese state capital and global private capital are found lacking, but the countermovements against them, taking the forms of wildcat strikes, thefts, and civil society campaigns, are equally precarious and yield limited gains for the working classes and their communities. A new culture of petty entrepreneurship and microloans has arisen, further undermining the basis of working-class solidarity. This sobering observation suggests that, on their own, countermovements from below are not likely to be effective in subordinating either kind of capital to popular aspirations. What is needed is a political synergy between countermovements from both above (state and elite) and below, as happened briefly in the wake of the Patriotic Front’s ascendance to power in 2011.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226340975.003.0006
[eventful sociology;ideal types;formal and informal empire;embeddedness;varities of capital;eventful capitalism;China in Latin America;resource hunt]
The concluding chapter recapitulates the arguments made about the distinctive interests, organizations, ethos, and limits of Chinese state capital vis-a-vis global private capital. Adopting the notion of "eventful capitalism" proposed by William H. Sewell Jr., it argues that China in Africa is an event that illustrates both the structural and the contingent tendencies of capitalism, with uncertain outcomes for Africa and the world. It then broadens the picture from Zambia to other case studies of Chinese state investment in African and Latin American countries, showing its varied and uneven power and developmental impacts. Returning to sociology, the chapter reflects on the intellectual payoff of analyzing varieties of capital (emphatically distinct from varieties of capitalism), which can reveal the range of struggles and potential within global capitalism. The book ends by advancing the idea of “global China” – in the forms of foreign direct investment, migration, global media network, global credit institutions, expansion of Chinese NGOs -- as a necessary empirical, theoretical, and methodological reorientation and agenda for China studies as a field.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2017. Page maintained by BiblioVault.