Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. xvi, 209 pp. (Tables, map, coloured photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-226-34083-8.
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.
One of the book’s contributions is that it opens a door into the world of Chinese workers and managers in Africa. Lee describes in detail not only Chinese expats’ lives and living conditions, but also how they perceive and are perceived by locals. These voices, particularly Chinese ones, are almost never heard in the African media or Western scholarship. This approach is enhanced when Lee adds Indian and other expatriate perspectives that highlight the austere conditions that the Chinese workers and managers endure relative to other expats in Zambia. The local dynamics of the relationship she describes underscore the pervasive distrust on both sides and how it contributes directly to Chinese workers’ feelings of “insecurity, vulnerability, and anxiety.”
A recurrent theme of the book is the contradictions between the local people’s demands and burdens and the objectives of Zambian elites in Lusaka. Ndola Stadium, for instance, was a “win-win” for Chinese and Zambian elites, but less so for the workers who built it. Similarly, the Zambian government’s decision to raise mining taxes did not, for the most part, improve miners’ lives; rather, it eroded their negotiating position vis-à-vis the Chinese mining company. Lee documents countless forms of pushback from miners and the local community against the Chinese state firms, including rumours of Chinese prison labour, exaggerated press reports, petty theft as well as more coordinated theft by workers or other locals, and police delays of convoys and harassment for petty violations, and spot fines for Chinese not carrying work permits.
It is fascinating that the Chinese managers and workers often perceived these local forms of pushback as confirmation of the innate laziness and ingratitude of their Zambian hosts and the potency of anti-Chinese narratives promulgated by the West. “Chinese nationalism is the main legitimating ideology,” Lee observes, and the flames of its adherents’ passions are regularly stoked with reminders of China’s “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of Westerners. The result is a prideful Chinese worldview with systematic blind spots that inhibit Chinese workers’ ability to comprehend how they are perceived by Zambians.
One view shared by both sides is that the Chinese are hardworking, and prepared to “eat bitterness.” Indeed, it is their austere lifestyles, collective routines and uniforms, and long work hours that seem to substantiate the false claims that Chinese workers were prisoners. This notion of workers “eating bitterness” for the greater good actually harkens back to Mao’s People’s Communes. The similarities between Lee’s description of the “China houses” and the commune are too striking to ignore. Notions shared by both institutions include “communal spirit,” “frugal managerial lifestyle,” “forced savings,” “nationalism,” and, most importantly, “eating bitterness,” which was the clarion call of the Maoist commune. But the similarities go beyond the broad themes of self-sacrifice for the collective and a shared communal life. Both institutions preached the “primacy of politics” and fear of the outside world, particularly the West and its intentions toward China. It is a reminder of the potency of path dependence that four decades after they were dismantled, the lessons and values of rural life under the commune still permeate the consciousness of the tens of thousands of farm-raised Chinese workers and managers who now fill the ranks of China’s state-owned firms in Zambia and across the developing world.
Finally, it is worth pointing out that Lee’s research for this book took place on several extended field visits to Zambia between 2007 and 2014—that is, amid a rapid rise in China’s economic growth, the implementation of China’s “Going Out Policy,” and the 2009 financial crisis which precipitated a massive Chinese government economic stimulus program. This means that the book reflects a very particular set of geo-economic conditions: China’s rapid development created a burst of observable economic and political activity with Zambia and other raw material suppliers. As such, researchers seeking to apply this book’s findings to China’s economic relations with other developing countries, particularly non-resource suppliers, should recall that the interactions and perceptions Lee observed between Zambians and Chinese were largely a response to the unique macroeconomic structural pressures they were experiencing at the time.
Joshua Eisenman
Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, USA