Africa Initiative
New Directions in China-Africa Studies
Friday, January 31, 2025
9:00 am – 5:30 pm
Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4, C105
This all-day workshop will explore post-pandemic shifts in China-Africa relations. These shifts are evident in the changing configThis all-day workshop will explore post-pandemic shifts in China-Africa relations. These shifts are evident in the changing configurations of labor regimes, extractive industries, debt and finance, and in the mobility of peoples, commodities, capital, and imaginaries across the African continent.
Organizers: Ralph Litzinger (Duke) and Charles Piot (Duke)
Speakers: Mingwei Huang (Dartmouth), Vivian Lu (Rice), Fidèle Ebia (Duke), Elisa Gambino (Manchester), Nina Sylvanus (Northeastern)Discussants: Anne-Maria Makhulu (Duke), Engseng Ho (Duke)
Film screening: Xinyan Yu’s award-winning “Made in Ethiopia” (2024) about a Chinese industrial park in Ethiopia; discussion with the filmmaker after the screening. https://www.madeinethiopiafilm.com/team
Sponsors: Duke Africa Initiative, APSI, Trinity College Deans, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Department of African & African American Studies (AAAS), Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES)urations of labor regimes, extractive industries, debt and finance, and in the mobility of peoples, commodities, capital, and imaginaries across the African continent.
Schedule
9:00 AM – 9:15 AM
Welcome and Opening Remarks – Charlie Piot and Ralph Litzinger
Panel 1: 9:15 AM – 10:30 AM
Mingwei Huang, Vivian Lu
10:30 AM – 10:45 AM
Coffee Break
Panel 2: 10:45 AM – 12:15 PM
Fidèle Ebia, Elisa Gambino, Nina Sylvanus
12:15 PM – 1:15 PM
Lunch
1:15 PM – 2:45 PM
Discussion Remarks – Anne-Maria Makhulu and Engseng Ho
- Introduced and moderated by Charlie Piot
- 10-15 minutes for each discussant
- Audience Q&A (focus: China-Africa shifts and global order reconfiguration)
2:45 PM – 3:00 PM
Coffee Break
3:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Screening of Made in Ethiopia and Q&A with co-director Xinyan Yu
Moderated by Ralph Litzinger
Abstract and Bios
Mingwei Huang
Conjuring Sino-African Futures
In the twenty-first Chinese Century, African cities are undergoing a re-worldling. New epistemological, theoretical, and methodological reorientations are required to make sense of the novel racial, capitalist, and colonial formations unfolding in China-Africa contexts. In this talk, I examine visions of Sino-African futures—a failed future-oriented Chinese mega-project and the aspirations of ordinary African and Chinese people—that are enmeshed with Johannesburg’s colonial pasts. In so doing, I illustrate a palimpsestic approach for reconceptualizing race, racial capitalism, and empire in the emerging Chinese Century.
Mingwei Huang is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024), an ethnography of contemporary Chinese world-making in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Vivian Lu
Benefit of the Doubt: Qualities of Capital between Two Afro-Asian Demographic Giants
Asia and Africa constitute approximately 77% of the world’s total population, and this percentage is expected to continue to grow over the century. The global emergence of megacities has also strikingly been a largely “Global South” phenomenon, with the vast majority of the world’s largest megacities located outside of the West, including many in China and Africa’s largest megacity, Lagos in Nigeria. This paper explores how these demographic facts figure in the geopolitical relations and cultural imaginaries between two regional population giants, China and Nigeria. Historically, Nigeria has faced West, ideologically and materially. However, its status as Africa’s largest population has entwined it with China more tightly in recent decades through import/export relations, infrastructural deals, and significant movements of people and commodities in both directions. The paper considers disjointed but interlinked realms of affectively charged negotiation between these two regional giants: anti-Black racism in China; raw/finished commodity import and export; and Nigeria’s recent attempts to enter BRICS.
Vivian Chenxue Lu is assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University, working on the cultural politics of profit in commercial worlds of the Global South.
Fidèle Ebia
When Chinese Manufacturers Become Traders
Since the early 2000s, Togolese traders have served as major distributors of Chinese-manufactured commodities in West Africa. This system of distribution enabled West Africans—large traders, wholesalers, petty sellers—to capture significant value from global value chains. Today, however, Chinese traders affiliated with Chinese manufacturers have begun inserting themselves into the downstream end of value chains, thus cutting Togolese traders out of their distribution networks, with large implications for local economies.
Based on interviews with new Chinese entrepreneurs in Togo in 2024, this paper examines the recent evolution of two China-Togo value chains: textiles and sheet aluminum. Both deliver semi-finished commodities to West African markets, where they have long been distributed by Togolese traders before being finished by local artisans. The livelihood of many Togolese, where 90% of employment is trade-based, have long relied on their participation in these value chains. Today, Chinese entrepreneurs are bypassing wholesalers to sell directly to small street vendors. They are able to do so because their affiliation with Chinese manufacturers enables them to sell at reduced prices.
The paper explores the policy and developmental implications of this restructuring, among them economic stagnation and the destruction of local economies. It also asks why this intervention is occurring now and suggests that recent changes in Chinese state policy that prioritize IT over manufacturing (pushing Chinese entrepreneurs to search for new avenues of value capture) coupled with the effects of blockages in these value chains during COVID-19 are responsible.
Fidèle Ebia received her PhD from the University of Manchester in 2023, with a dissertation on African Print Textile value chains, of which the dominant one today is between China and Togo. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Duke’s Africa Initiative.
Elisa Gambino
Beyond trade? Chinese Private Capital Localisation in Ghana under the AfCFTA
This paper explores the evolving role of Chinese private capital in Ghana, focusing on the potentialities associated with localisation of production in the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The longstanding and rapidly growing presence of Chinese private companies in Ghana is increasingly shaping local market dynamics, as well as intersecting with regional integration and industrialisation efforts. As Chinese private businesses increasingly embed themselves in African economies – moving from a focus on importing finished goods to assembling and partially-producing in loco – their impact goes well beyond the trade sector. This paper examines the opportunities and challenges associated with Chinese private capital localisation, highlighting firms’ market expansion and sectoral diversification strategies. In doing so, the paper outlines key emerging investment patterns and explores the potentialities thereby associated, with a particular focus on the AfCFTA. Drawing from the cases of Ghana, it addresses Chinese companies’ role in employment creation and the fostering local entrepreneurship, as well as the tensions that arise in the context of industrialisation and regional integration efforts.
Elisa Gambino is Hallsworth Research Fellow in Political Economy at the Global Development Institute of the University of Manchester, UK. Her postdoctoral project, titled “Chinese trade, African hubs and global circulation in West Africa” explores the internationalisation of Chinese private capital in West Africa to understand its impacts on regional integration. Specifically, the project focuses on Chinese participation to African trade and the localisation of Chinese capital in Ghana and Togo.
Nina Sylvanus
China for exPort: Africa and the Global Maritime
Recent scholarship has begun to frame China-Africa as a provisional, evolving, under-determined, and deeply contested relationship; this by contrast to the received reification long captured in the label “China-Africa,” a moniker that treats both China and Africa as singular, coherent entities. At the same time, Chinese actors in the global maritime and port industry seek, by various means, some of which are discussed here, to sustain an image of China – I refer to it as “Mythic China” – as a benign actor in the global economy. This image is intended to counter allegations of nefarious neocolonial intentions, or worse, of Sino-imperialism. Moving from the port-city of Shenzhen, home of the Chinese model of harbor operations, to Lomé in Togo, this paper explores the ways in which a Chinese mega port operator is endeavoring to export its model amidst China’s expanding control of the global maritime. It looks at Togolese reactions to the Chinese corporation’s efforts to disseminate a benign image of Global China – to wit, of Mythic China – that normalizes the planetary extension of Chinese capital/ism, not least by rendering opaque its means of maritime-techno domination.
Nina Sylvanus is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. Her research centers on capital and labor, value and aesthetics, infrastructure and technology, and, more broadly, critical transformations in the neoliberal global economy.
Xinyan Yu is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC. Born and raised in China, Xinyan started her journalism career in 2012 working as a producer covering the Asia Pacific region for BBC News based in Beijing. In 2018, she launched the North America video team for Hong Kong’s flagship newspaper South China Morning Post in New York, and later joined the BBC’s Washington DC bureau as a Senior Video Journalist in 2020. Now working as an independent filmmaker, Xinyan has directed and produced for international broadcasters and programs including BBC News, NHK, PBS NOVA and PBS Frontline. She is the co-director, with Max Duncan of the 2023 film, “Made in Ethiopia.”