Description: China has recently emerged as Africa's top business partner, aggressively pursuing its raw materials and trying mightily to insert itself into the continent's booming construction market. This signals to some a moment of threat and even predation on a global scale. Others, including many African leaders, have on the contrary claimed that China is the continent's best chance at economic renewal. Ching Kwan Lee's The Specter of Global China, based on six years of research in Zambian copper mining and construction, seeks to understand what is unique about Chinese capitalism. Distinguishing carefully between different patterns of investment and forms of capital, she concludes that Chinese investment represents a complex engagement with African development with its own unique limitations and contradictions. The author combines an acute sociological analysis of capitalism with fine-grained ethnography, bringing a compelling micro-social perspective to macro-political and economic problems. This book will be a must-read for anyone interested in the future of China, Africa, and capitalism the world over.
Brief description: Ching Kwan Lee is professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women and Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.
Review Quotes: "Ching Kwan Lee's The Specter of Global China is the first book-length attempt to systematically consider the broadertheoretical implications of China-Africa relations. . . . In centering 'capital', Lee's book provides an important starting point."-- "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute"