Special Series: "New Directions in Africa-China Studies" | Mingwei Huang, Thinking Sino-African Extractive Zones
For my first project, my fieldwork was sited at a Chinese wholesale mall, one of many sprawling Chinese developments located along Johannesburg’s old mining belt, piquing my interest in the City of Gold and extractive capitalism. In 2024, I returned to South Africa, this time to Cape Town, for the Mining Indaba and Alternative Mining Indaba: the former, the premier annual gathering of the global mining industry on the continent since 1994, and the latter, the annual counter-conference. At the thirtieth Mining Indaba, African heads of state, corporate executives, consultants, investors, and senior managers of the largest institutions in the world – Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Barrick Gold, De Beers, China Molybdenum Company (CMOC), Fair Cobalt Alliance, the World Gold Council, and the World Bank – gathered to discuss the future of African mining in the age of climate change and energy transition. Across town at the fifteenth annual Alternative Mining Indaba, grassroots organizers, scholars, journalists, tax justice advocates, faith leaders, and community members shared strategies to hold mining companies and governments accountable. Both conferences focused on “just transition,” the global initiative of shifting to a low-carbon economy without replicating historical injustices, but with radically different visions of what a just transition in Africa would look like. Nested in discussions of African futures was the question of China’s role in the energy transition.
Grounded in the 2024 Mining Indaba and Alternative Mining Indaba, this essay explores Chinese extractivism and Africa’s Just Transition as imagined by global mining companies and anti-extractive activists. The two Indabas represent two ends of the global carbon economy: “ultra-carbonised” elites who lead carbon-intensive lives and profit from green transition rents, and the “decarbonised” global majority who are the least responsible for climate change but the most adversely impacted by the extraction of “critical minerals” for the green transition (Deberdt and Le Billon 2024). At Mining Indaba, “China”– referring to Chinese communities, companies, and the government – represented a geopolitical force far larger than its actual presence, gesturing to the ambivalent place China occupies in “extractivist futurism” (Amar et. al. 2022). At Alternative Mining Indaba, activists held a daylong event on the question of China, still a relatively unknown actor when compared to Western entities. Taken together, the two Indabas locate Sino-African extractive zones beyond the mine and situate them within global circuits of extractivism and anthropogenic climate change.[1] In this short essay, I aim to chart new avenues for the study of Chinese extractive projects in Africa, perhaps counter-intuitively, by departing from the field’s key prototypes and frameworks.
Chinese Debt Traps, African Resource Curses
Chinese resource extraction has been the cornerstone, if not the focal point, of China-Africa studies and narratives. In the Western media, Chinese state-owned mines have been scenes of wildcat strikes, child labor and human rights abuses, deadly police and military interventions, environmental degradation, and anti-Chinese backlash, most famously in Angola, Ghana, DRC, Sudan, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In China-in-Africa narratives, Chinese state-owned mining companies are singled out as the newest beneficiaries of Africa’s “resource curse,” the paradoxical abundance of minerals and lack of development. Chinese mining and fossil fuel extraction projects are closely intertwined with infrastructure development and debt. In the early 2000s, the PRC introduced the “Angola model” of extending large infrastructural loans to be repaid in crude oil. Since the 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese state investment in roads, railways, dams, and ports have facilitated access to natural resources: infrastructural investment secures access to concessions and markets, and these infrastructures power commodity chains. Resource-for-infrastructure deals have come under scrutiny as African nations become increasingly indebted to the PRC, leading Western observers to accuse China of trapping resource-rich African countries in debt. Through political economic and narrative analysis of the debt trap, China-Africa researchers have debunked the erroneous narrative, which obscures the role of the World Bank, IMF, and Western institutions in producing underdevelopment and indebtedness long before the Chinese arrived (Brautigam 2019; Soulé 2024). The Global North/West has long forced economic liberalization of resource markets, while also making resource-backed loans that benefit authoritarian states and ruling elites.
Early China-Africa scholarship cautioned against a neocolonial scramble for Africa whereby a Chinese and American race for resources, market access, and territorial control reinforce African resource dependency (Carmody 2016). The counterpoint has often taken a comparative shape, highlighting how Chinese mining companies have been singled out when compared to their Western counterparts (Yan and Sautman 2019), or comparatively analyzing what is distinct about Chinese extractive capitalism. In The Specter of Global China (2017), Ching Kwan Lee argues that Chinese state capital aims to maximize political capital and long-term resource security, whereas global private capital’s prioritizes short-term economic profit and shareholder value (2017, 33). Ethnographies have invaluably detailed the modes of extraction, labor regimes, and managerial practices of Chinese mining projects and challenged grand narratives (Haruyama 2024). In a welcome departure from social scientific approaches, Duncan Yoon analyzes Ghanian and Zambian fictional representations of Chinese mining projects to argue that “Chinese investment triggers the colonial trauma of European colonialism” (2023, 12). Specifically, contests over land tenure and displacement activate past experiences with European mining companies. Although Chinese extractivism bears some similarities to Western extractivism, they are not equivalent in scope and scale: “Conflating the two not only effaces the vast historical and cultural differences between Western imperial powers and mainland China but also perpetuates colonial discourse, such as the invading yellow peril and the agentless, passive African, reconfiguring these racist tropes for an emergent Global South” (Yoon 2023, 55). Comparative approaches differentiate Chinese from Western extractivism, but extractivism itself remains undertheorized.
Beyond debt traps and resource curses, critical discourses of extractivism offer new theoretical frames for China’s social and ecological entanglements in Africa. Grounded in Latin American scholarship and social movements, extractivism (extractivismo) names an ideology, mode of accumulation, and economic system. It foregrounds the historical interconnection of mining with settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological loss beginning with the European colonization of the Americas (Acosta 2013; Riofrancos 2020). Extractive economies take oil, minerals, trees, and water from the ground and value from laboring bodies, while turning land into sacrifice zones (Davis 2019). When resources are exhausted, they move on to the next “extractive zone” (Gómez-Barris 2017). In Planetary Mine, Martín Arboleda charts the changing twenty-first century geography of extraction and planetary order characterized by sociospatial fragmentation of ever-increasing global connectivity and militarized borders (Arboleda 2020a, 16). Extraction has been deterritorialized and privatized to extend beyond the extraction of raw materials and the site of the mine to circuits of finance, logistics, and urbanization. The mining industry has entered a fourth machine age of robotics and automated labor (2020a, 4). Surpluses in commodity production are redirected into searching for new resource frontiers, technological standardizing, and building mining towns, while further displacing an expanding global precariat (Arboleda 2020b). China has been a critical actor in these transformations. The BRI has transformed spaces of extraction, infrastructures, transoceanic corridors, networks of financial intermediation, and geographies of labor toward establishing China’s “global supply chain empire” of minerals (Arboleda 2020a, 13, 66).
Amid rising sea levels and a warming planet, “green” extractive zones have proliferated across Southeast and Central Asia, Africa, and South America. Over half of the reserves for copper, cobalt, lithium, aluminum, graphite, zinc, platinum, and other “rare earth deposits” and “critical minerals” are on Indigenous people’s lands (Owen et. al. 2022, 204). “Climate-friendly extraction” is as intensive as the older extract-and-export scheme, no matter how much the global mining industry represents it as compatible with and necessary for mitigating climate change (Bruna 2022, 844). A key ingredient for EV batteries, cobalt has become the conflict mineral of our time. Katanga, a region in the eastern DRC, holds 60 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves. In the early 2000s, the DRC’s mining sector, under pressure from the World Bank, was forced to liberalize and privatized Gécamines, one of two SOEs that formed with the nationalization of colonial mining companies after independence. Following economic liberalization, American, Canadian, South African, Australian, European, and Chinese companies have entered joint projects with Gécamines. The 2002 Mining Code legalized artisanal mining. Alongside the DRC’s mining boom, expulsion, enclosure, genocide, and dollarization have created a “displaced army of diggers” (Smith 2022). Artisanal miners form a flexible wageless labor pool and produce 20 percent of the DRC’s cobalt (Calvão et. al. 2021; Salie 2019).
In the best-selling, award-winning Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, Siddharth Kara rewrites Heart of Darkness for the twenty-first Chinese Century. Reporting from Katanga, Kara tells the story of Congolese artisanal miners and Chinese and Western intermediaries. Kara sensationally depicts the violence at the bottom of the global supply chain, describing “the blood-caked corpse of that child lying in the dirt” (2023, 12). The book recalls Howard French’s 2014 China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa, an early, widely read treatise on Chinese neocolonialism. Echoing French, in Cobalt Red, “the Chinese rule Katanga” (Kara 2023, 65). Chinese are the new Europeans: in the racial hierarchy of Katanga, where once were “Africans at the bottom, Indians and Arabs above them, and Europeans at the top.” Today, “simply swap out the Europeans with the Chinese” (Kara 2023, 71). Africa and Africans remain passively trapped in the resource curse, but the superpowers have changed. Despite two decades of scholarship and journalism on Chinese mining in Africa, the same questions, tropes, and comparisons keep surfacing. To produce new understandings, theories of extractivism can be productively extended to the remaking of land, labor, and ecologies under Chinese extractive regimes in Africa to foreground multiple temporalities, processes, and actors.
The Specter of Chinese Extractivism
Over the course of a week, over 8,000 corporate executives, managers, and consultants representing multinational corporations with mines all over the world converged at the Cape Town Convention Center for Mining Indaba. Bringing together governments and industry, the Indaba is a critical node of developing the productive, technological, logistical, and monetary nodes of global extractive circuits. An investment-oriented network dedicated to the “Future of African Mining,” Mining Indaba is about building the “economy of tomorrow.” In 2025, the theme was “Future-Proofing African Mining, Today!” On stage, mining executives and government leaders extolled platitudes about community empowerment, dialogue, stewardship, responsibility, sustainability, and biodiversity alongside markets, value, and risk. In the exhibit hall, companies showcased advances in automation to optimize productivity, efficiency, and safety, promising the impossible of mining “with care” and “zero harm.” Speakers repeatedly returned to the African Mining Vision, the African Union’s 2009 vision for a developmental approach to the mineral sector that represented a departure from the past “pit to port” export of raw material. The new task was to “extract and beneficiate.” The Just Energy Transition would bring downstream value addition, jobs, schools, power stations, roads, and infrastructure to communities. Through repetition of platitudes, the mining industry could manifest a future that overcame the past.
Outside the convention center, crowds of attendees, cobalt-powered smartphones in hand, scanned the sea of Uber and Uber Black vehicles. Over the course of several days of shuttling back and forth between the two Indabas, I listened to Congolese and Zimbabwean Uber drivers share observations of the industry. From their cars, they tuned into coverage of the convention on the radio, marveled at the sight of heads of state, and exchanged stories about entitled passengers with each other. Where they encountered haul trucks back home, they were driving executives to meetings at faraway destinations where the real business of the Indaba happened. I met Congolese men who left South Kivu, Goma, and Kinsasha during the second war, coming to Cape Town by way of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. Perhaps because I am Chinese American, comparisons between the US and China came easily. China was favorably viewed, a superpower that brought “good deals” for Africa, unlike the West. A driver from Lubumbashi, a mining city along the DRC’s copper-cobalt belt, commented that American and European companies, but not Chinese, “just come and steal” and “build cities out of blood.” Among Uber drivers, histories of plunder had never ended.
At Mining Indaba, the industry trafficked in future-oriented abstractions to produce an optimal “investment climate” and its self-image, which meant disavowing the past and minimizing China’s prominence. While Chinese SOEs are prominent in imaginaries of mining in Africa, few were in attendance. Perhaps the February event conflicted with the Chinese New Year, or because Chinese companies did not need to be at the largest mining event on the continent. Or this is proportional. Western companies continue to dominate African mining, despite how China is imagined as the new behemoth (Sautman and Yan 2019). A Nairobi-based consultant for the Fair Cobalt Alliance joked that the conference on “Investing in African Mining” was “Investing in What’s Left in African Mining.” Suggestively, Western companies that once monopolized the extractive industry on the continent were now scrambling to maintain their foothold. China had a spectral presence, alluded to as “geopolitics” in the race for critical minerals between the PRC, North American, and European countries. At the Cobalt Institute-led panel “Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste,” a senior specialist for the World Bank repurposed the PRC’s phrasing to announce new “win-win synergies.” Rallying the North American and European conglomerates in the room, partnerships were imperative for “mineral potential growth.” “No country can do it on their own. No private company can do it on their own. No development institution can do it on their own.” As mining, finance, and logistics are integrated in circuits of extraction, “improving the investment climate” went together with “improving the infrastructure of energy and transport.” It seemed as if the Global North/West was trying to catch up with the PRC’s BRI and FOCAC. An hour into the discussion, a panelist representing the Dubai-based Green Africa Minerals cautioned that “the rush to diversify away from China will lead to some unintended consequences,” naming the PRC as the target of partnership efforts. Despite its modest presence, “China” loomed large in how the industry imagined its globality and future of endless growth. The idealized denationalized world of financial, logistic, and technological connectivity conflicted with the geopolitical realities of two decades of China-Africa relationship building.
The specter of China also appeared in evocations of ESG or Environment, Social, and Governance, a set of frameworks and indicators born from Corporate Social Responsibility in the early 1990s (Deberdt et. al. 2024, 4). At Mining Indaba, ESG referred to issues of land displacement, environmental sustainability, government relations, and human rights. Like the African Mining Vision, ESG could overcome past exploitation and mitigate climate change through technological fixes and standardization, while minimizing “risk,” protecting corporate reputation, maximizing profit for investors. As the PRC has become one of the largest producers of critical minerals, it has embraced ESG to satisfy Chinese and Western clients (Deberdt et al. 2024, 2). The strongest Chinese presence at Mining Indaba was CMOC, which owns 80 percent of Tenke Fugurume Mine (TFM) in DRC with Gécamines, in addition to mines in China and Brazil and the commodity trading house IXM Metals. TFM is the world’s second largest cobalt mine, and IXM oversees ethical compliance along the supply chain with “cobalt trading desks” in Geneva, Shanghai, and Johannesburg. CMOC underscores its “world-class ESG performance” to cultivate its global brand (Deberdt et al. 2024, 9). It has followed the digitization of the mining industry that employs AI-powered, remote-controlled trucks in underground and surface mining, drones to survey resource frontiers, and Blockchain technologies to trace sourcing along the supply chain. AI promises “continuous, efficient operations without the limitations of human labor” (Kebal and Cherednychenko 2024; Smith 2022). It is unsurprising that TFM promotes its fleet of automated drill rigs and never the artisanal miners, including children, digging on their concessions. Such human labor is accounted for under the ESG rubric of “human rights.”
At Mining Indaba, Julie Liang, CMOC’s Vice President of ESG, carried the representational burden for Chinese mining companies. Liang’s position entails liaising with the 400,000 residents who live near and dig on the 1,500 km2 industrial mine (The Copper Mark 2024). Liang spoke of CMOC’s partnership with the Fair Cobalt Alliance and programs to keep children from working in open pit mines. Demonstrating allegiance to ESG, Liang touted disposing of ore potentially collected by children, which could “contaminate supply chains.” At one point, Liang said “illegal” instead of “informal” miners. She quickly corrected herself but was promptly chastised by her co-panelists representing an NGO and the DRC Ministry of Mines. Her mistake was a reminder of the several confrontations between the mine and artisanal miners at TFM, puncturing the illusion of ESG. Over the years, when threatened to leave, miners have carried off ore from the mine, set fire to mine vehicles, and attacked cargo trucks. The mine has called in police and military to evict miners, leading to violent confrontations (Business and Human Rights Resource Center 2019; Khan 2023; 121-24). Such episodes give credence to scramble narratives and retrigger traumas of Western extractivism.
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The TFM is a prototypical joint venture state-owned mine of China-Africa studies and a prototypical planetary mine, an open pit mine where an “army of displaced diggers” extracts high-grade ore by hand alongside AI-powered drills. Financialization and automation have changed mining. We need other ways to understand extractivism beyond scrambles, resource curses, and debt traps. As Arboleda insists, we need new analytics to grasp the “new territoriality of extraction whose immanent content cannot be fully elucidated by…state-centric concepts of political economy, such as resource curse, dependency, imperialism, and so forth” (2020a, 5). How might we locate Chinese extractivism within geographies and circuits of extraction? To what extent are national or regional scales and state/non-state distinctions of China-Africa studies useful for making sense of planetary phenomena? With the emergence of green extractivism, what has changed about Chinese mining projects? It remains necessary to compare and contextualize Chinese green extractive projects and regimes of labor, debt relations, and/or infrastructural developments vis-a-vis Western/global regimes. At the same time, we might break from these rubrics to examine dynamic modes of exploitation and extraction across the divisions of national/denationalized, state/private, industrial/artisanal, high/low-tech, and material/immaterial.
China-Africa and the Decarbonized Class
Returning to Cape Town, at Alterative Mining Indaba, activists from across South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Angola critiqued the vapidity of platitudes of ESG, African Mining Vision, and Just Transition at the “main” Indaba. The schools that mining companies built were empty because children were working in the mines. New roads were full of potholes resulting from heavy traffic from haul trucks. Crucially, what did “just” mean? One participant asked: “Just to those exploiting our minerals, but not just to us. Just for who? Just at what price?” Toward a people-centered just energy transition, activists located themselves in a “context of intersecting poly-crises” of climate catastrophe, conflicts, and wars threatening food security. Ultimately, “Our shared goal is to envision a decolonised extractive industry rooted in justice, inclusivity, and feminism, paving the way for a brighter and more equitable future for Africa” (AMI 2024). On the prominence of Chinese mining of critical minerals, Alternative Mining Indaba’s chair remarked, “we need to know if we need to counter that.” Following the event, the NGO Global Witness organized a daylong workshop with environmental justice organizations, academics, and legal advocates. At the workshop, a participant pointed out, “we never know what to do about China…we know white monopoly capital but they’re not all white. Where do we put China?” In his talk, University of Johannesburg Professor David Monyae similarly raised: “On our roads, we see names of cars we’ve never seen before. We’re not familiar.” “China” remained unknown. Would Chinese extractivism unfold in the same exploitative ways as Euro-American extractivism? Above all, “We need to prevent Africa from being exploited again.”
The questions in this activist space were like the China/West comparisons of China-Africa studies. Monyae pointed out China’s singling out as “The Western world confronts an emerging China; silent actors like Gulf states that are silently entering the continent.” With companies such as De Beers and Anglo America headquartered in South Africa, “Why are we making so much noise about China? How are we approaching investors, all investors, not only Chinese?” All mining companies needed to be held accountable for social and environmental impacts. As Monyae pointed out, most companies fail to follow regulations but insist that Chinese companies follow. These selective enforcers of ESG standards, or “born again human rights activists,” wielded ESG to delegitimize Chinese companies and maintain Western dominance over the mining sector. Chinese companies were not special insofar they were more exploitative than other foreign actors, only less known, prompting activists to study Chinese companies, laws, and language for their communities.
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In sitting with these two Indabas, when is “China-Africa” useful? When are distinctions between China and the West important, and from whose perspective? If thinking from the position of mine management and the ultra-carbonized class, a China-Africa analysis compares Chinese and global/Western modes of extraction and their culturally inflected practices of management and labor regimes. But as scholars parse the difference, from the vantage point of the decarbonized class and anti-extractive activists, the distinction is moot. In the US-China rivalry to secure cobalt reserves, “The road to electrification of Sino-Western livelihoods fuels a high-intensity extraction, with strongly racialised and gendered outcomes in the DRC” (Deberdt and Le Billon 2024, 8). As long as resources are being taken out of the ground and communities displaced, it matters less who is doing the taking. The aim of Just Transition is not to extract better but less. As Thea Riofrancos states, “Keeping a maximum amount of fossil fuels and mineral reserves in the ground is a prerequisite for any kind of a just transition” (2019, 61). At the same time, Chinese and Western differences in ESG standards and corporate practices can be useful. Mineworkers and frontline communities can leverage them for their benefit (Lee 2017, 74).
As Cajetan Iheka (2022) and Gabrielle Hecht (2018) have argued, Africa is important to shaping the future of the planet. Just as there is no singular African Anthropocene (Hecht 2018), Chinese extractive projects on the continent are varied. This tale of two Indabas is only one entry point into a larger collective project of studying Sino-African extractive zones, of which there are many stories about social and ecological change and struggle to tell. As the just transition unfolds, we need more ethnographies of extractive capitalism from the varied perspectives of investors, managers, workers, NGOs, activists, and displaced communities throughout the extractive circuit. We need to study not only the mine but also anti-extractive movements, life-worlds, and struggles at the mine’s periphery (Gómez-Barris 2017). New work might explore how race, gender, sexuality, and indigeneity shape Sino-African extractive zones and the struggles within them (Amar et al. 2022), or examine forms of slow violence, toxicity, and ecological impacts of Chinese mining, fossil fuel extraction, and infrastructure development. We need scholarship that does more than call out Sinophobic tropes and distinguish between Chinese and Western modes of accumulation and extraction to foreground anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critique in the spirit of the planetary politics of the decarbonized class. By engaging with the critical intellectual traditions of extractivism, I hope to connect conversations about resource extraction and infrastructure China, Africa, and Latin America. Modes of inquiry need not be coupled to the areas that originated them.
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Notes
[1] I thank Nicholas Loubre for the invitation to attend the 2025 Global China Summer School at Lund University, “China in Circuits of Global Extractivism,” from which I borrow the phrase.
Mingwei Huang is an interdisciplinary scholar and assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024). Her new research projects examine extractivism and anti-extraction activism in South Africa, and reads mine archives for relational histories of global race-making, indenture, and migrant labor.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Mingwei Huang, “Thinking Sino-African Extractive Zones,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 22, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/UTEX3534.