Red Dawn: The Power and Peril of Chinese Capitalism in Africa

The Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College presents a discussion with Ching Kwan Lee on how Chinese investment affects African development.

How does Chinese investment affect African devlopment? Rejecting the Western rhetoric of "Chinese colonialism" and the Chinese self-justification of "south-south cooperation," Professor Lee draws on five years of ethnographic fieldwork in Zambia and examines the mechanisms, imperatives, and limits of Chinese power.

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. A native of Hong Kong, she obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and has previously taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research focuses on labor, gender, political sociology, comparative and global ethnography, Global South and China. Among her many publications are two award-winning books:  Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, and Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women.

Sponsored by the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College and R. Stanton Avery Lectureship Fund.