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The Petroyuan’s Challenge to Dollar Hegemony

The launch of yuan-denominated crude oil futures in 2018 marked a significant step in the renminbi’s internationalisation, offering an alternative to the US dollar in the global energy trade. The historical context of the petrodollar system—established through an agreement between the United Stat…

Voices from the Ground

‘Eat Bitter’: A Conversation with Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy

Touching, absorbing, and, at times, hilarious, the 2023 documentary Eat Bitter reveals the human face of Chinese involvement in Africa. Set in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, the film follows Thomas Boa and Jianmin Luan, two men whose lives are intertwined by sand. Thomas div…

Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China

China experts today increasingly describe the current linguistic landscape of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as one of ‘Mandarin hegemony’. But what does this term mean, how was it created, and how is it reinforced? The purpose of this essay is to define the concept and explore the primary …

Leveraging the Art of Geo-Cultural Calculus in BRI Projects: A Case Study of the Silk Road Samarkand Project

On the outskirts of the Uzbek city of Samarkand—a key site on the historic Silk Road and the capital of the ancient Timurid Empire, which stretched from Iran to the South Caucasus and parts of India—lies ‘Silk Road Samarkand’, the largest, most ambitious tourism complex in Central Asia, and a dev…

Angloscene: A Conversation with Jay Ke-Schutte

Why do African students who attend Chinese universities have to teach English as a means of survival, while Chinese students are frantically acquiring the English skills that enable them to pursue studies in the United States and Britain? Why does the Third-World solidarity that Africans hope to …

Global China’s Dark Side

For decades, scholars have been examining Chinese engagements overseas, exploring for instance China’s involvement with Third World struggles during the Maoist era, the evolution of its foreign aid approaches, cultural diplomacy, diasporic activities, and later, the expansion of foreign investmen…

Enclaves of Exception: A Conversation with Omolade Adunbi

What are the social costs of extraction? And how does extraction reconfigure traditional power structures and cultural practices? In Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2022), Omolade Adunbi compares the extraction of econom…

Transpacific Developments: A Conversation with Monica DeHart

China scholars in Latin America and the Caribbean have long critiqued the monolithic way in which Chinese identity is represented in the dominant literature. In Transpacific Developments: The Politics of Multiple Chinas in Central America (Cornell University Press, 2021), Monica DeHart tackles th…

Arise Africa, Roar China: A Conversation with Yunxiang Gao

The past two decades have witnessed an explosive growth in historical scholarship exploring African American connections with China during the twentieth century. In their Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies web resource Teaching China through Black History, Keisha A. Brown, Ruodi Duan, an…

African Agency in China’s Tea Trade: A Conversation with Ute Röschenthaler

How has Chinese green tea become Mali’s national drink? By retracing the tea supply chain from Bamako’s corner shops and wholesale markets to southern China’s tea plantations and processing plants, in African Agency in China’s Tea Trade (Brill, 2022), Ute Röschenthaler describes in vivid detail h…

The Hong Kong–China Nexus: A Conversation with John Carroll

How do we understand the trajectory of Hong Kong’s relationship with China? In The Hong Kong–China Nexus (Cambridge University Press, 2022), John Carroll—one of the foremost historians working on Hong Kong today—introduces the fateful history of the city, from its establishment as a British colon…

Voices from the Ground

Chinese Legal Expertise in International Environmental Activism: A Conversation with Jingjing Zhang

Jingjing Zhang is the founder and Director of the Center for Transnational Environmental Accountability (CTEA), an organisation based in the United States that, in her words, is still ‘part of Chinese civil society’. A lawyer by training and profession, Jingjing has been involved in China’s envir…

Chinese Capital’s Move into Upstream Oil Palm Plantations: Navigating Competing Sustainability Norms and Regulations in Indonesia

Chinese overseas direct investment in Southeast Asia is often seen as extending the reach of Beijing’s influence. What this overlooks, however, is the diversity of structural power of Chinese economic actors across different sectors, as well as the agency of actors in the host country. Looking at…

Chinese Finance in Venezuela: A Non-Interventionist Lender’s Trap

Focusing on Venezuela, China’s largest borrower, this essay explores how Beijing’s non-interventionist principles create important limitations on its foreign lending practices. In the case of Venezuela, the governance of commodity-backed loans has ingrained mechanisms that allowed mismanagement a…

Voices from the Ground

Piraeus versus COSCO: A Conversation with Anthi Giannoulou and Anastasia Frantzeskaki

Images of the Greek Port of Piraeus on Google Search depict the hardware of logistical capitalism in action, with freighters docked at piers and cranes piling containers and moving cargo. These images often omit, or place far in the background, the densely populated urban districts of the Piraeus…

Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush: A Conversation with Michael Dwyer

Over the past two decades, Laos has been on the front lines of a global rise in transnational corporate land investments. This has been driven by China’s supposedly growing appetite for foreign land and resources, which has featured centrally in coverage of this so-called new global land rush. Mi…

Gendered Space and Labour Control in a Chinese State-Sponsored Hydroelectric Project in Ecuador

Building on a critical analysis of spatial politics, this essay uses ethnographic evidence from the Chinese state-sponsored Coca Codo Sinclair (CCS) Hydroelectric Project in Ecuador to explore how the transnational Sinohydro organises boundaries between spaces, bodies, and symbolic differences to…

Global China’s Knowledge Infrastructure: The Rise of International Development Studies in China

This essay examines the creation of international development studies in China over the past decade as an intellectual project. It traces the genealogy of the nascent state disciplinary apparatus, making visible the evolving landscape of individuals, institutions, and ideologies at a complicated …

Caught in the Crossfire: The Inter-American Development Bank and US–China Rivalry

China has engaged with Latin America at both bilateral and multilateral levels. This essay focuses on China’s entrance into the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and its impact on regional multilateral governance. It shows that the United States sought to hinder China’s entry, against the wil…

Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China: A Conversation with Annah Lake Zhu

China and the environment often sit in tension—for example, China is a primary polluter while also the key to our global environmental security, and China is both the largest deforester and the largest planter of trees. How might we reconcile demand for resources within China and the country’s ef…

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Paris Alignment, and the Role of China

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was launched by China as a new multilateral development bank in early 2016, just over a month after governments adopted the Paris Agreement. Despite the AIIB’s president commitments to make the bank ‘green’, these promises so far have not been put i…

Project Spotlight

Boten: From Dawn till Dusk

Travellers crossing the Boten–Mohan border from China into Laos pass through the ‘Belt and Road Lane’ before descending concrete steps to a paved road lined with Chinese flags, palm trees, and flowering shrubs. Walking towards Boten, Laos, the road turns to dirt and a golden stupa that marks the …

Clash of Empires: A Conversation with Ho-fung Hung

The rise of ‘Global China’ is the result of sustained economic globalisation in the past decades, undergirded by a generally positive relationship between China and the United States. Since the watershed moment of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the Chinese and US e…

What is Global China?

In the past two decades, China’s ascendance in the world has given rise to ‘Global China’ as a subject of public debate and scholarly inquiry. If ‘Global China Studies’ is an emerging field of knowledge, it may be helpful to reflect on what our central concept is. We can discern at least three me…

Pragmatic Living in Motion: Two Chinese ‘Migrants’ and their Meanderings in the ‘City of Gold’

This essay unpacks the personal stories and experiences of two Chinese individuals who have lived in Johannesburg for a considerable time. It offers contextualised glimpses about ageing and living in a city in which inequality, excess, violence, and the mundane coexist in a complicated tension. B…

High-Profile Infrastructure and China’s Global Influence Gamble

Policymakers, pundits, and scholars often assert that China’s state-led global infrastructure drive is an important avenue for enhancing its international influence. However, the first decade of the Belt and Road Initiative has demonstrated that links between infrastructure projects and influence…

Civil Society’s Multifaceted Response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Chinese companies and investors have faced increasing pushback from communities and civil society organisations (CSOs) against their businesses in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partner countries. This essay examines some of the common themes related to Chinese overseas investment that emerge fro…

Translating China’s Special Economic Zone ‘Model’ into Rural Southern India: Impacts on Urban Development

This essay explores the impacts of trying to import a Chinese ‘model’ of special economic zones (SEZs) into southern India. Inspired by China’s SEZ success, from 2005, India set up large, city-style zones. Based on in-depth examination of one such zone, we argue the Chinese SEZ ‘model’ is not a c…

Overlapping Agendas on the Belt and Road: The Case of the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone

Initiated in 2006, the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone (SSEZ) has become a flagship Belt and Road project in Cambodia. This essay examines the development of the project since its inception, considering the various drivers that have moved it forward and the numerous agendas and interests that…

China’s Overseas Energy Investments after the ‘No Coal’ Pledge: An Assessment

In September 2021, President Xi Jinping announced that China would no longer build new overseas coal power plants. Companies and banks have begun to adapt to the pledge and impacts have already been seen, with several projects halted or in jeopardy. However, this essay highlights several importan…

Understanding the China Development Bank in Latin America

In terms of lending power, the China Development Bank (CDB) is the largest development bank in the world, one of the most important financiers of infrastructure and extractive projects globally, and a key instrument to support Chinese international economic policies such as the Going Out strategy…

Voices from the Ground

Engaging with China in Latin America: A Conversation with Paulina Garzón

Paulina Garzón is the Director of Latinoamérica Sustentable (LAS), a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) based in Ecuador that focuses on Latin America. Paulina is an Ecuadorian with 25 years of experience working on issues related to the environment, human rights, and international finance. Until…

Chinese Soft Power: A Conversation with Maria Repnikova

Maria Repnikova’s new book, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines China’s visions and practices of soft power. Repnikova starts by analysing Chinese academic writing and official speeches about soft power to grasp whether and how this concept has been transformed in the …

What’s Behind the Diplomatic Spat between China and Lithuania?

In late 2021, Lithuania, a small country in Eastern Europe, managed to infuriate Beijing by welcoming a Taiwanese Representative Office in its capital, Vilnius. In Lithuania—a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that gained independence from the Soviet U…

How Global Capitalism Became Humanity’s ‘Fate’ in Xi Jinping’s New Era

Western media regularly and casually suggest that China is pursuing ‘world domination’ (The Economist 2021). US national security officials evangelise the view that the country has a ‘grand strategy to displace American [global] order’ and perhaps even reduce their country to a ‘deindustrialized,…

China’s Overseas Coal Pledge: What Next for Cambodia’s Energy Development?

In September 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in a speech to the UN General Assembly that China aimed to hit peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 (Xi 2020). The statement focused on China’s domestic emissions, but in the months that followed, there w…

Is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank a Responsible Investor?

When the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was first announced by China in 2013, a flurry of speculation erupted around which countries would join and how closely the new institution would follow the path trodden by traditional multilateral development banks such as the World Bank. Huma…

Going Global: The International Endeavours of Chinese NGOs

On 4 August 2020, a large amount of improperly stored ammonium nitrate exploded at the Port of Beirut, killing at least 178 people, injuring more than 6,500, and leaving 300,000 homeless (WHO 2020). In response, the Beirut office of the Peaceland Foundation (平澜公益), a Chinese organisation founded …

Project Spotlight

Ruptured Worlds

So, if ‘the numbers’ are insufficient, how can we understand Cambodia’s Lower Sesan 2 Dam and the magnitude of its impacts? As Emily Raboteau suggests (2021), in discussing the climate crisis, perhaps art can provide a soft pathway into this dark subject.  Art does provide a powerful medium for i…

Project Spotlight

Under the Water

Cambodian Artist Sreymao Sao on the Lived Experience of Hydropower Dams  Sreymao’s inspiration for this exhibition came from her previous work with communities along the Mekong River. After graduating in 2006 from Phare, a school for the creative arts in Battambang, Sreymao worked with various no…

Going Out Responsibly: Time to Take Human Rights Seriously in Chinese Overseas Business Operations

In the late 1990s, the growing exposure of corporate misconduct—such as the use of sweatshop factories by global clothing and footwear brands, as well as environmental destruction and gross human rights violations linked to extractive companies—prompted global debates about and efforts to regulat…

Is China’s Belt and Road Initiative Slowing Down?

More than seven years since China launched its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a widely held view from the outside is that this endeavour has now slowed down. Such an assessment is typically supported by evidence that China’s overseas financing was in decline even before the COVID-19 pa…

A Disappointing Harvest: China’s Opium Replacement Investments in Northern Myanmar Since 2009

The launch of the ‘Going Out’ strategy in 1999 precipitated more than a decade of rapid growth in Chinese outbound investment activity. From trivial levels in the late 1990s, Chinese outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) reached US$20 billion in 2006 before surging up to US$196 billion in 2016…

Chinese Energy Investment in Cambodia: Fuelling Industrialisation or Undermining Development Goals?

In early 2020, Cambodian authorities fast-tracked approval of two new coal plants. Soon after, they also signed a memorandum of understanding with the Lao Government committing to purchase energy imports from two proposed coal plants in southern Laos. This marked a significant shift in the evolut…