Ching Kwan (CK) Lee is one of the most influential thinkers on Africa-China relations working today. While she’s mostly known in academic circles, her analysis has reshaped thinking about the nature of China’s global influence, especially in Africa.
A professor of sociology at UCLA, Lee became famous for The Specter of Global China, her account of seven years of fieldwork among Chinese mining companies in Zambia.
In the book, Lee unpacks the dynamics of Chinese influence-building in Africa with a level of sophistication far above most other accounts. She recently sat down for a rare interview with the academic journal Dissent, to reflect on events since its publication in 2017, particularly Zambia’s ongoing debt crisis.
Highlights from Dissent’s Interview with CK Lee:
- RETHINKING ‘CHINESE’ LENDING: “We have to ask what interests and which players have been driving China’s lending spree. In most debates, people write about “China” as if there is a willful mastermind located in Beijing, pulling levers and making sinister decisions. In reality, there are many bureaucratic, ministerial, corporate, and private interests behind the “Going Out” policy, or the Belt and Road Initiative. These interests compete as much as they collude, and often they end up defying, derailing, or defeating Beijing’s grand strategy.”
- HOW ZAMBIAN DEBT GOT SO MESSED UP: “The clout and connections of these state-owned enterprises allowed them to secure financing from the Export-Import Bank of China or the China Development Bank, and they then peddled these already approved, shovel-ready projects to government officials in Zambia. To maximize corporate profit, these powerful contractors exploited the clause of non-competitive single sourcing from China to set inflated price tags. Not only are these projects lucrative (with 30 to 40 percent higher costs due to the lack of bidding, according to Zambian technocrats); they are also secured as Chinese government loans to African governments.
“African technocrats knew full well the problem of inflated loans would come back to haunt their countries. But election-minded politicians were more concerned about getting roads and bridges built fast enough to keep them in power than repayment in twenty years, at which point they would be long gone.”
- RETHINKING ‘NEOCOLONIALISM’: “Against the grain of popular discourse, I think the term colonization is more apt in Hong Kong than in Africa in relation to Chinese aggression. Colonization, to me, refers to an external power’s transplant and imposition of institutions to a local society, and not just a catch-all moral critique of economic domination.”
