Special Series: “New Directions in Africa-China Studies” | Jason Woerner, Ralph Litzinger, Charlie Piot, “Introduction: New Directions in Africa-China Studies”
The impetus to publish these essays in Critical Asian Studies emerged from a workshop at Duke University (US) in February 2025, entitled “New Directions in China-Africa Studies.” The workshop aimed to explore whether the relationship between Africa and China, and the field of what we now want to call Africa-China studies, had changed since the flurry of scholarship that inaugurated the study of the Africa-China intersection almost two decades ago. Participants at the symposium and contributors to this issue were mostly junior scholars and PhD students conducting research on the continent today.
A common theme that emerged during our daylong seminar—as well as in a reading group that continued throughout the spring semester—was that there has been a shift in Africa-China relations from top-down, state-to-state projects focused on large infrastructure to those that are more bottom-up, less material, and driven by private actors. Many of these entrepreneurs peddle the digital—online retail, cell phone microloans, insurance, and telecom services, among other virtual services.
Our aim in this set of articles is to explore the contours of this new terrain—its labor regimes, forms of extraction, modalities of debt and finance, the imaginaries that accompany them—as well as the implications of this paradigm shift for power, agency, and development on the continent today. In examining these new modes of engagement, we remain mindful of the ongoing salience of key themes that animated the earlier moment of Africa-China inquiry, especially the role of the state and the status of the figure “neocolonial.”
It is clear, for instance, that while the Chinese state’s presence as an instigator and financier of projects on the continent has receded, Chinese state capital continues to play a role in backstopping some initiatives. Infrastructure and resource extraction projects continue as well, albeit in a minor key and now often routed through the digital, as with the growing presence of robots in mines in South Africa and at ports across the continent.
African states also continue to liaise with Chinese businesses (see Zheng, this issue, on the partnership between CloudWalk, a Chinese Facial Recognition Technology company, and the Zimbabwean state), but these are commonly public-private partnerships with hybrid and more privatized funding sources than before. Moreover, they are engaged in “extraction” that is now digital.
The term “neocolonialism” and imperial ambition cycled through much of the earlier scholarship, sometimes glossed as “global capitalism with Chinese characteristics”—a worry that continues to inform and haunt Africa-China scholarship. Indeed, the contributors to our workshop and this collection of essays demonstrate that power asymmetries, although differently configured, may be even greater today.
Africa-China Studies: A Genealogical Sketch
As mentioned, an early wave of Africa-China scholarship focused on infrastructure and resource extraction—and the labor regimes and financial protocols that accompanied them—as well as on the relationship between China and African states. Critical scholarship (Alves 2013; Anthony 2018) also interrogated the implications of resource extraction and imported labor regimes for Africa-China relations more broadly. Brautigam’s (2009) and Lee’s (2017) books were paradigmatic in asking how Chinese infrastructure, mining, and agricultural projects were both similar to and different from those that typified the longue durée of Euro-American colonial/postcolonial investments on the continent. While unrestrained in her critique of Chinese engagement, Lee importantly de-totalized Africa-China as an object of study by suggesting the concept of “varieties” of labor regimes and forms of capital accumulation, thus usefully cautioning that neither Africa nor China can be rendered or reduced to a singular object of analysis.
As the number of Chinese on the African continent increased—to over a million in 2010—a new phase of scholarship (French 2014; Driessen 2015; Xiao 2014) focused on migration and cultural encounters through the study of on-the-ground interactions and trade networks—both among Chinese and between Chinese and Africans. A set of complementary studies (Bodomo 2010, Haugen 2012, Matthews, Lin & Yang 2017, Lu 2017, Liu 2022, 2025) examined the reverse movement of Africans (often Nigerians) to China, where some went to study while many entered the export trade of Chinese commodities (often from Guangzhou) back home. Key themes of this research included the network relations of West Africans in China, the financial and currency exchanges they engaged in, attempts to game papers and visas, and Chinese state surveillance.
Chinese interventions in Africa also have a longstanding medical aid component, with scholarly work (Gong 2022, 2023) documenting shifts in Chinese medicine on the continent, from an earlier (socialist) state-funded “barefoot doctors” era in the 1970s to the current privatized neoliberal moment—and the biopolitical logics that accompany each period. Far from exceptional, this health context re-issues many of the worries of coercive neocolonialism, albeit with a difference.
As relations on the ground in Africa continue to shift and diversify, a new phase of research is emerging that focuses on the digital economy (Chen & Pang 2022), e-commerce (Tang 2024), security and citizen protection, debt/financing/contractual relations (Hwang 2022; Ma 2024), data colonialism (Hwang 2022; Tse, Zhang & van Nord 2025), and the privatized nature of Chinese digital and retail enterprise today. Also prominent are works on counterfeiting/intellectual property, as well as fashion (Sylvanus 2016; Ebia 2023, 2025; van Pezold 2024), and on race and racial capitalism (Huang 2024).
This recent shift to the digital and the privatized is the focus of the commentaries that follow.
Article Summaries
Through case studies, the essays assembled here offer insight into a continent that is going digital and is increasingly engaged in privatized development initiatives, some for better, some potentially for the worse.
We begin with Yuanwei Zong’s study of Chinese digital lenders in Ghana. Zong argues that credit decisions now rely on “data trails…and browsing histories,” and on software engineers more than loan officers. Digital micro-lending in Ghana is part of an expanding platform economy ecosystem in which online shopping, ride-hailing, food delivery, and mobile bill payment are now available on a single platform. Today, the catchphrase “financial inclusion” has become not only a tool for local empowerment but also a market opportunity, mainly for Chinese investors and entrepreneurs.
Yidi Zheng’s contribution is also interested in a new politics of AI-driven inclusion and exclusion. She tracks the introduction of Afro-inclusive facial recognition technologies (FRTs) by Chinese companies Transsion Holdings and CloudWalk Technology in African markets in 2018. While these technologies aimed to make Black faces more legible to machine vision systems, she shows how they perpetuate racial biases by categorizing Blackness only when it fits algorithmically coded conditions. The shift from traditional infrastructure to digital projects in Africa marks a new phase in Chinese investment, with companies like Transsion capturing market share through AI-enhanced cameras optimized for darker skin tones, which have been deployed in new smart cities, border regions, and almost every corner of Zimbabwe. Her analysis of CloudWalk’s biometric FTR experiments with the Zimbabwe government – hugely controversial and contested - provides a counterexample to Transsion’s modes of data capture. Its agreement with the Zimbabwean government to build a national database of all Zimbabweans not only led to mass data collection, profiling, and the violation of privacy laws, but also to the collection of data that was used against opposition party members, civil society organizations, and dissidents critical of the regime. Zheng’s essay critiques the techno-optimistic rhetoric of inclusivity, arguing that it obscures larger political agendas and reproduces logics of racialized exclusion.
Fidèle Ebia examines the recent intervention of Chinese traders into African print textile distribution chains in Togo, chains that have been the monopoly of local traders for almost a century—a development which poses a dire challenge to long-standing wealth-generating West African trade networks. Ebia concludes her essay by suggesting that offshoring Chinese African cloth manufacturing to West Africa might provide a solution to this potential takeover and a win-win for both sides.
Zixi Zhao’s essay complements Ebia’s by connecting Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa to recent changes in Chinese state policy. Zhao argues that Chinese manufacturers offshoring to Africa are responding, in part, to a new emphasis placed on high-end manufacturing and innovation, popularly glossed as a shift from “Made in China” to “Created in China”. In practice, the Chinese state’s goals are enforced through a series of policies meant to incentivize new industries that meet the state’s vision of the future, while making it harder for older industries to survive. He traces the Chinese state’s industrial goals and policies from the start of China’s transition to a market economy, when the state incentivized basic, low-end manufacturing, to the present day, when many manufacturers in those same industries are moving abroad. The history Zhao traces provides an important, if implicit, reminder: throughout China’s rise up the global value chain, the Chinese state sets policy to ensure knowledge-transfer and local capacity building.
Nina Sylvanus provides a nuanced analysis of a trope she calls “Mythic China” that cycled through presentations at a week-long training program she attended at China Merchants Port headquarters in Shenzhen. She sees ports as both “strategic infrastructures and symbolic sites…ideological frontiers where China’s broader aspirations are staged—not by the state alone, but by corporate actors who position themselves as central, quasi-autonomous forces in constructing the narrative of Global China.” For Sylvanus, the figure Mythic China—which characterizes Lomé’s largest state-of-the-art port in West Africa, where she conducted research—is provisional, fragmented, contradictory, and evolving, and thus challenges monolithic framings of China’s relationship to Africa. In her rendering, China appears at once benign—a benevolent non-imperial South-South partner—while simultaneously concealing the fact that robots are replacing port labor and that surveillance and foreign ownership lurk. Like Ebia, Sylvanus worries about the long-term effects of emerging Chinese control—namely, the potential for an entirely Chinese-run port in Togo—to have a negative impact on the local economy.
Like Sylvanus, Mingwei Huang critically examines how the Chinese presence in Africa is imagined, asking both what is concealed and what is revealed in the process. Huang’s essay tracks two global conferences in Cape Town, organized around the “Future of African Mining”, the Mining Indaba, attended by politicians, corporate executives, investors, and consultants, and the Alternative Mining Indaba, a shadow conference organized by and for grassroots organizers, activists and other stakeholders under- or un- represented at the Mining Indaba. In both, the figure of China loomed disproportionately large – at the Mining Indaba, around questions of environmental and labor practices through the corporate lens of ESG, and at the Alternative Mining Indaba around debates over whether Chinese-owned companies were uniquely bad actors or merely less known.
We conclude this collection of Notes from the Field with Vivian Lu’s reflection on the evolving, and in some instances, contested geopolitical and economic relations between China and Nigeria. Lu’s paper reminds us that any invocation of the “new” – as suggested in the original title of our workshop - is always haunted by and contains traces of the past. She shows that while a non-Western-dominated world order seems imminent, she reminds us that beneath the grandiose pronouncements of an emergent “multi-polar world,” geopolitical and material asymmetries continue to be reproduced in South-South formations. Lu takes us on a trip through what she calls three interrelated scenes: the hopes, promises, and disappointments of Nigeria joining BRICS; the complicated space of the Fair Trade building in which non-African others are excluded so as to increase indigenous capture of capital and commodity flows; and the continuing legacy of anti-Black racism in the PRC during the Covid lockdowns, which is leading Nigerian traders to seek alternative market spaces, such as in Istanbul. Through her close readings of these scenes, Lu reveals the entanglement of transnational capital with ethnonational identities and colonial and post-colonial geopolitical asymmetries. She calls on us to move beyond the figure of the bilateral and attend instead to the messiness of lived and contested relationalities. In doing so, she warns us to be wary of any rhetoric, political project, or scholarly agenda that claims a cohesive Global South identity is in the making.
Contested Futures
Taken together, these interventions and reflections from the field, built on deep ethnography, analyses from government proclamations and corporate reports, from web archives, scholarly debates, investigative journalism, civil society reports and user-generated data, suggest to us that any attempt to make sense of the present terrain of Africa-China relationalities, to use Lu’s term, must attend to the radical plurality of engagements and contestations unfolding across the continent. Each of these contributions reveals that whereas China’s engagement in Africa earlier focused on state-led infrastructure—roads, railways, and mines—today it also extends into the digital realm, through digital capture, automation, surveillance, and new regimes of capital accumulation. Smartphones and cloud platforms have become new tools of influence, allowing capital to move faster, scale wider, and evade regulation more easily. Can a relationship that is at once inclusive/empowering and extractive/coercive, and whose benefits often skew in one direction only, partner a future that is beneficial to the many and not the few?
Ralph Litzinger teaches in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and is the former director of Duke University’s Asia/Pacific Studies Institute. His research spans questions of migrant labor, eco-media studies, and platform capitalisms in multiple contexts.
Charlie Piot is a professor in the departments of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Duke University, and co-director of Duke’s Africa Initiative. His current research in Togo focuses on the digitalization of the informal economy.
Jason Woerner is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. His research examines the relationship between market and moral economies and forms of value in Southeast Asia.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Jason Woerner, Ralph Litzinger, Charlie Piot, “Introduction: New Directions in Africa-China Studies,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 22, 2025; https://doi.org/10.52698/UBFS4168.