Ching Kwan Lee University of California-Los Angeles
The study examines "the labor question" of Chinese investments in Zambia. The research addresses the questions of how Chinese firms operate overseas, how the practices and ideologies of Chinese managers interact with the politics and cultures of African workers, and how these Chinese labor regimes differ from those in non-Chinese foreign companies in Zambia. The study will help to elucidate the particularity of "Chinese capitalism" as it expands overseas and becomes a global economic force. NSF funding will be used to continue a study the investigator started two years ago in Zambia, the site for the first of several Chinese-run Special Economic Zones in Africa. Preliminary fieldwork has found that labor--in the forms of strikes, protests, public discourses on Chinese labor practices--is the primary challenge to the Chinese mode of accumulation abroad.
Using ethnographic in-depth interviews, surveys and observation, this research is designed to accomplish a double comparison. First, it plans to identify what is "Chinese" about Chinese companies' labor practices by comparing Chinese companies with non-Chinese counterparts. Second, this project compares two industries central to Zambia's economy: copper mining and construction. Whereas mining involves place-bound, long-term investment employing an organized labor force, construction is a short-term, project-based business engaging mostly casual and non-unionized workers. Comparing these two industries with contrasting conditions of production will illustrate the divergent interests, capacity and constraints of Chinese "capital", too often mistaken as a singular and monolithic force.
Broader Impacts
This research contributes to the global conversation on a "Chinese scramble for Africa" and China's rise as an economic force. Empirical data on the actual practices of Chinese investors and their diverse impacts can inform development policies. Also, the inter-continental nature of this study can serve as a new model for bridging area studies that are traditionally unconnected.
This research analyzes the peculiarity of outbound Chinese state capital by comparing it with global private capital in copper and construction in Zambia. I conducted about a total of six months of ethnographic fieldwork in three foreign owned mines and another six months of on site interviews in twenty construction sites run by foreign contractors. In addition, I interviewed and worked with Zambian officials at various ministries dealing with foreign investors. Refuting the dominant narratives of "Chinese colonialism" and "south-south cooperation", this comparative ethnography chronicles the multi-faceted contestations that embed and differentiate these two varieties of capital entailing uneven potentials for post-colonial African development. In short, the overall findings reject the two dominant narratives of "Chinese colonialism" and "south-south cooperation". Using comparative ethnography as a method, this project chronicles the multi-faceted contestations that embed and differentiate these two varieties of capital entailing uneven potentials for post-colonial African development.Characterized by a logic of encompassing accumulation (vs. profit maximization), a labor regime of production-driven exploitation (vs. finance-driven exclusion) and a managerial ethos of collective asceticism (vs. individual entrepreneurialism), Chinese state capital can be made both more accommodating and more perilous to African development than profit-maximizing multinational corporations. Notwithstanding its peculiarity, Chinese state investors show no interest or capacity to replace or undermine the prevailing neoliberal order that continues to disempower the African working class.
