Special Series: “New Directions in Africa-China Studies” | Nina Sylvanus, China for exPort: Africa and the Global Maritime
Shenzhen, July 2018.
It was the final week of the C-Blue Summer Training Program, when I joined a group of 25 global “trainees” at the headquarters of China Merchants Port [CM-Port]. Representing Tanzania, Malaysia, Djibouti, Brazil, Russia, and Sri Lanka among other nations, they awaited a lecture on Shipping Economics. They had already spent three weeks in Shanghai and Beijing following a curriculum on port management, logistics, and free trade zones combined with lessons on Chinese history, philosophy, and culture. Launched in 2016 as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Program was sponsored by the China Merchants Charitable Foundation and developed by CM-Port as a Corporate Social Responsibility initiative.
Despite its ambitious framing, the program seemed misaligned with its objectives. The lecture, presented by a professor from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, offered a rudimentary overview of shipping and port operations. Clearly, it was not tailored to a group that had already been immersed in Chinese port operations for weeks. Visibly bored, many trainees turned to their phones. Over a coffee break, two of them described the program as emblematic of “the Chinese style”: its rigid scheduling, staged photo ops, and dry lectures given to silent audiences. Later that evening, at a public screening of a World Cup football match, I asked them to elaborate. They explained that they had learnt little of substance about shipping or ports. True, they had enjoyed seeing the Great Wall of China, visiting museums, and touring shipyards and a logistics center. But they struggled to figure out the program's real purpose. This for good reason: Why would CMPort invest in bringing these international trainees to China for a seminar that could not possibly deliver on its stated goals of expertise-building in port management?
The next day’s keynote by CMPort’s Vice President, Erik Yim Kong, offered some insights. His address was billed as the highlight of the program. He began by acknowledging the group’s diversity: “You come from 13 nations.... It’s like a small United Nations experiencing China.” In launching into the “miracle development” of Shenzhen’s Shekou model[1] – and how it had been exported to Djibouti in the context of China’s Belt and Road Initiative – he repeated a grand modernization narrative that his audience had heard many times during their training program. Kong praised China’s many technological innovations and economic achievements; he also took the opportunity to highlight the long, illustrious past of Chinese culture, represented in the singular. China Merchant’s ‘firstness’ featured critically: Founded in Hong Kong in 1872 as the country’s first commercial shipping line, its first bank, and first insurance company, it was eventually to become a driving force behind Xi Jinping’s 2013 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Turning to a series of slides filled with metrics and charts, he painted a picture of trade between different regions of the globe as spaces to be optimized for logistical efficiency; this while alluding to the counter-productive nature of Trump’s trade-war with China. In this worldview, the BRI featured as a global infrastructural network that connects Asia with Europe and Africa to promote trade and cultural exchange.
The attention of Kong’s audience waned as it was hit with endless examples and statistics showing China’s allegedly miracle development. But it returned when he discussed the company’s effort to replicate its Shekou Model, also known as Port-Park-City, across the world. Established in 1979, Shekou was China's first special economic zone, and it played a pivotal role in transforming Shenzhen into a major commercial and industrial hub (Herlevi 2021). The Shekou Model, pioneered by CMPort and its parent company, China Merchants Group,[2] involves the integrated development of adjacent industrial parks, residential areas, highways, and free trade zones, all centered around a port (hence Port-Park-City). Expecting his audience to see the promise of the model’s success in China, he turned to Djibouti and the company’s plan to transform it into the "Shekou of East Africa."
“We have the experience and the background to implement this successfully,” he stated proudly as he went over a map showcasing the different zones of Djibouti’s Port-Park-City. He explained how, covering an area of 48,2km2, CMPort planned to move manufacturing from South China to Djibouti: “You can save transportation costs for commodities,” he said with palpable excitement. To further emphasize his point about shifting manufacturing from China’s Guangdong region to Djibouti, he referred to the half million African traders currently based in Guangzhou. The implicit message? That China should now go to Africa rather than have Africans come to China. “If this proves successful, it will be a win-win for everyone,” he said with earnest conviction. Turning his gaze to the Tanzanian participants, he seemed to suggest that the Djibouti model could be put in place anywhere on the African continent, if not in the world at large. Conspicuously absent from this triumphalist narrative was any mention of CM-Port’s controversial actions in Djibouti, including legal disputes with Dubai Port World over alleged government coercion to expel rival operators.
Kong concluded his presentation by mingling with trainees, followed by cameras and CCTV crews. Participants, initially perplexed by the relentless filming, had come to see it as “the Chinese way.” As one remarked, “It’s all about representation.” Interviews with some of them were broadcast on Chinese television, carefully arranged to evoke a "United Nations-like" impression, feeding into domestic narratives of China's ascendant global leadership to create national pride and even legitimacy amidst the country’s own economic woes, population decline, and shrinking trade opportunities. This dissemination of the event to mass domestic audiences reveals how "Mythic China" -- a fantasy of China’s place in the world, carried and curated by the private sector—serves to reinforce the narrative of the "China Dream" among both its citizens and those beyond its borders.
This carefully curated narrative reveals the deeper purpose of the C-Blue Program. More than a site of technical training or routine trade facilitation, it exemplifies the evolving dynamics of China-Africa engagement—marked by the hybrid and nuanced ways Chinese corporate actors and entrepreneurs extend their influence across global maritime spheres. Departing from conventional, state-led models that characterized an earlier phase of Sino-African relations, the program illustrates how these actors shape narratives and exercise soft power within a shifting institutional terrain. As Kellee Tsai (2015) suggests in her notion of “party-state capitalism,” this engagement operates within a hybrid field where state authorities, private firms, and other entities intersect with varying degrees of autonomy and coordination. Ports—where much of this activity converges—emerge as both strategic infrastructures and symbolic sites. They facilitate operations while producing the imagery of “Mythic China.” The C-Blue Program becomes a vehicle for projecting a vision of Global China, one that exceeds economic or infrastructural ambition. It asserts a nationist narrative: a history-in-the-making that is neither strictly top-down nor confined to formal state-to-state relations. Borrowing from Mingwei Huang’s (2024: 9) idea of the “Chinese Century,” the program enacts a Sinocentric model of global influence, blending diffuse capital operations with soft power and a distinctive form of imperial ambition. Its trainees are not merely learners, they are emissaries of a desired and desirable future, in which China’s connectivity-driven, entrepreneurially oriented development reshapes the global order. In sum, the C-Blue Program repositions ports as more than logistical hubs. They become ideological frontiers where China’s broader aspirations are staged—not by the state alone, but by corporate actors like CM-Port, which positions itself as a central, quasi-autonomous force in constructing the narrative of Global China.
Togo Harbor
9,500 nautical miles west of Shenzhen lies Lomé Container Terminal. In 2012, the Chinese port operator acquired a 49% stake in what would soon become West Africa’s largest transshipment harbor, a move that has proved particularly lucrative. Situated in Togo, Lomé Container Terminal provides a strategic location along a major transportation corridor that serves both coastal and inland routes. CM-Port, also benefits from Lomé being the West African base for Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), the world’s largest shipping business. This joint-venture created the ideal conditions for CM-Port to pursue its ambition of transforming Lomé into the “Shekou of West Africa.”
Lomé is both a port and a city. Adjacent to the harbor lies a Special Economic Zone where several Chinese and Indian manufacturing concerns operate. The area also includes warehouses and car parks filled with second-hand vehicles that arrive through the port. Together, these areas offer the kind of spaces that could be conveniently expropriated for Port-Park-City value production à la Shekou. During summer of 2017, there was lots of talk amongst Togolese about what “the Chinese” were planning. And what kind of a deal the government of President Faure Gnassingbé hoped to make with their businesses. The Togolese head of state had met with Xi Jinping in China in 2016 to promote China-Togo relations; these talks had allegedly included discussion of China Merchants and the Port-Park-City project. In 2018, the president of China Merchants Group visited Togo to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and to meet with various stakeholders, including Lomé Port Authority. One of its directors confirmed that “les Chinois” had indeed visited the port to pitch their project. “Port harmonization,” he said, appeared to be a central component of how CMPort hoped to reorganize the harbor’s operation, namely by fusing the two container terminals. He did not seem pleased with its privatization; it had hollowed out the port authority, leaving the operation of its terminals to foreign entities. “They invited us to Djibouti to visit their port and free-trade zone so that we [could] see what they propose[d] to do here.” The promotional materials they had seen from Djibouti were striking in their visual rhetoric. Glossy brochures presented the Shekou Model through before-and-after imagery that transformed barren landscapes into gleaming metropolises. Digital renderings showed future Lomé with containerized efficiency and bustling commercial zones, all coordinated through Shekou expertise.
The redevelopment of Togo’s maritime frontier has been at the center of Faure Gnassingbé’s political ambitions. Emboldened by the “Africa Rising” narrative, the continent’s ports have been cast as the final frontier of global capital, with predictions of unprecedented container volumes—volumes that only ports with state-of-the-art infrastructure could manage (Sylvanus 2023). Turning Lomé into the Shekou of West Africa was central to the vision of the Chinese, and the port was undoubtedly a necessary condition. But did its presence guarantee the model’s successful replication?
In the many conversations I had with Togolese stakeholders there was a general sense that the Chinese business operators were quick to sign memoranda. One mocked the MoU, “It’s like signing toilet paper,” he said, suggesting that these agreements were merely symbolic and easily disposable in practice. This skepticism points to a paradox: while Chinese operatives work to construct an image of certainty, security, and imminent development, local stakeholders have developed their own counter-myths about Chinese intentions and capabilities. These counter-myths point to the gap between Chinese promises and local realities. They also suggest that, contrary to the dominant narrative on BRI and China-Africa relations, a top-down perspective that emphasizes the long-term goals of the Chinese state, Chinese firms are seen to be more focused on short-term gains and/or immediate strategic positioning rather than committing to the long-term objectives outlined in the agreements.
The temporality of the MoU warrants closer examination, as it occupies a unique position within transnational capitalism. As a temporary document or promise, it is neither a binding contract nor a Letter of Intent, but an instrument that promises a pathway to the making of futures in both China and Africa. It is also a rhetorical device that hypes the value to be produced in those futures. However, the MoU also carries within it inherent asymmetries. Although it promises shared benefits, shared “progress,” it typically privileges Chinese interests at the expense of African stakeholders. This asymmetry invites further reflection on the ways in which such instruments, apparently neutral and mutually beneficial, sustain uneven geographies of capitalist exchange. As Hannah Appel (2019) reminds us in her discussion of production sharing contracts, the fiction of equivalence between state and corporation is precisely what enables such contracts to operate, constituting the state as a legal person while at the same time embedding it within global legal architectures that sustain extractive capitalism.
Mythic China
Achille Mbembe (2021:34) argues that China has become the most prominent actor in the future-making of the African continent, “to the point where Africa is not only a planetary question, but also and more specifically a Chinese Question.” This reifies “China” as a presence in the world, one that ignores the diffuse and fragmented elements that compose the country’s global presence. Instead of attributing to China a coherent or unified grand strategy, it is critical to embrace the complexity and contradictions of Chinese actions in and on the world, thus to reveal the mosaic of practices, narratives, and strategies that together construct its image and influence. By piecing together these disparate elements, we might better grasp the fluid, adaptive, and multifaceted nature of the Sino presence, both domestically and abroad.
Recent scholarship has increasingly challenged monolithic framings of Chinese engagement abroad. Maria Repnikova’s (2017; 2022) work on Chinese communication strategies highlights their improvisational, adaptive qualities: outreach initiatives often address multiple audiences at once, layering messages so that the same program can be received as technical training, as cultural diplomacy, and as domestic spectacle. Ching Kwan Lee (2017) similarly challenges the notion of centralized control from Beijing in her influential study of Chinese capital in Africa. She writes: “The impression that outbound Chinese state investment is masterminded and calibrated by Beijing to execute a coherent and well-thought-out national grand strategy echoes the emphasis on state control in the scholarly literature on Chinese state capitalism” (5). Through comparative case studies in Zambia, Lee demonstrates how different forms of Chinese capital—state-owned enterprises, private firms, and hybrid entities—operate according to distinct logics that often contradict one another. This fragmentation, she argues, undermines attempts to ascribe a singular intention or strategy to “China” in Africa. Huang (2024) likewise cautions against conceiving Chinese capital as “a totalizing force with a singular logic” (5).
It is precisely here that Mythic China —recall, a fantasy of China’s place in the world, carried and curated by the private sector—comes into play. Mythic China is the image, the trope, that allows these heterogeneous species of action to appear coherent: a means of reconciling and disguising widely disparate practices (ranging from state-led diplomacy to corporate expansion to private enterprise) under a benevolent image of China as a responsible, non-imperial “partner.” In this sense, Mythic China is the means to the end of sustaining a coherent and palatable vision of a Chinese global presence. It allows contradictory engagements—among them, extractive mining concessions, concessional loans, cultural programs, and technical training programs—to be understood, by both external audiences and domestic publics, as different expressions of a larger, benevolent Chinese role in the world.
This explains how Chinese port expansion and the heterogeneous encounters that Lee and others have observed may be subsumed in a single narrative. The corporate, state, private, and hybrid initiatives that compose various Chinese projects do not cohere at the level of strategy or activity; they cohere at the level of myth. Through media representations, Confucius Institutes, training programs like C-Blue, and the promotion of China’s own economic success story, Mythic China projects an image of benign modernity and solidarity. It resonates with African aspirations for alternative development models and the shared memory of anti-colonial struggle, recalling the Bandung spirit.
Seen this way, Mythic China does not contradict the exercise of soft power—it subsumes and enacts it. Soft power emphasizes the deliberate projection of noncoercive means, cultural values among them, to attract foreign publics; Mythic China captures the emergent and often improvised ways in which diverse Chinese engagements are sutured into a non-imperial narrative of beneficence. In this sense, it aligns with Huang’s (2024) notion of “world-making,” in which China seeks not only to exercise influence but to shape global imaginaries.
Ports
Ports occupy a uniquely strategic position within the global supply chain, serving as critical nodes of capital accumulation and control over the planetary martime. At the same time, they are places where the flow of goods can be most effectively disrupted by labor action. As Beverly Silver (2003) argues, ports, despite their profitability, have historically been sites of acute insecurity for capital precisely because they concentrate logistical operations in ways that amplify the collective power of workers. Charmaine Chua’s (2018) work on port logistics and chokepoints draws further attention to how harbor infrastructures represent critical vulnerabilities in global capital flows, making them focal points for social struggle and collective disruption.
A recent New York Times article cautions against China’s influence in international harbors, especially from a cyber-surveillance security perspective: Chinese made port equipment and software, it suggests, could create vulnerabilities in transportation networks, including ship-to-shore cranes that can be controlled remotely. Seventy-five percent of these cranes are manufactured in Shanghai by the engineering steel-giant ZPMC. Not surprisingly, they are also used at Lomé Container Terminal. When integrated with global shipping and logistic networks, these cranes can allegedly gather sensitive information, including details about U.S. military shipments and critical supply chains (also see Volz 2024).
Those working in, around, and with the Togo port have diverse views on the expansion of China in the global maritime and in digital surveillance. Togolese crane operators I spoke with were less concerned about digital surveillance than they were, as are most port workers around the world, about their jobs being replaced by robots. I was frequently told that mistrust in global powers, especially China, was not about their capacity for surveillance and algorithmic knowledge production, but about their increasing control over Togo’s national economy. For example, the Togolese owner of a medium-sized logistics company, whose trucks operate the transportation corridor to Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, complained that, “If things progress as they have since the opening of the new container terminal [LCT] and MSC buying out the Bolloré [the other container terminal], …Togolese can close their businesses.”
Here the stakes of port control become starkly national: when foreign entities and corporations determine what enters and leaves the port, they effectively set the terms of trade for the entire economy, sidelining domestic firms and circumscribing state sovereignty. Port infrastructure, while formally part of the nation’s territory, occupies a liminal position because it is often governed through special concessions, extraterritorial agreements, or regulatory regimes distinct from national law. This makes harbors paradoxical spaces, simultaneously within and apart from the state, where foreign corporate and state actors can exercise disproportionate influence over national economies under the guise of logistical efficiency. It is precisely this paradox—being national yet not fully under national control—that shapes local perceptions of Chinese expansion. The logistics company owner mentioned a few lines back, like others, had learnt in the press about the MoU Togo had signed with China Merchants. And yet he was not fazed by the Port-Park-City project, largely because he did not think China Merchants had the capacity to realize it. But the more general anxiety about Togolese self-determination in the face of global China remained implicit. It is an anxiety evident, also, on the part of the state.
A Togolese shipping agent, who, for many years, had been working for Maersk, the second-largest shipping company in the world, believed that China posed a direct risk, reflecting US-fears about Chinese capital dominating the global maritime – and about the vulnerabilities Chinese-made port technologies could create in global transportation networks. How legitimate that fear is, however, is tricky to assess. In the United States, anxieties about Chinese-made port cranes, particularly in the Fall of 2024 during the run-up to the presidential election, led to federal moves to replace or remove ZPMC equipment (House Homeland Security Committee 2024; CBS News 2025). Yet several observers noted that these actions were driven as much by concerns about theft and the influence of powerful dockworker unions resisting automation as by any substantiated espionage risk (Baertlein 2025). The timing of these measures also suggests that electoral considerations may have played a role, with union support in port states carrying particular political weight. Still, the specter of fully automated, dehumanized “smart ports”—robotic, digitized, and potentially foreign-controlled—remains a powerful source of anxiety.[3] It is this fear, rather than its empirical accuracy, that I focus on here.
As the shipping agent put it: “Look,” he said, “if they [China Merchants] recreate the Djibouti model here […] they will use their own Terminal Operating System to control the operation of their Port-Park-City, as well [determining] which ships would get serviced first… and they will have access to all kinds of data.” Such fears, whether of espionage, automation, or foreign control over trade flows, circulate precisely because they touch on sovereignty and economic survival. In this context, the discursive work of Mythic China becomes most crucial, offering a benign and legitimizing narrative that seeks to reframe these vulnerabilities as opportunities for development. Not surprisingly, in light of all this, China has been ramping up its charm offensive to divert suspicion on a global scale, thus to combat any, and all, suspicions of its imperialist intentions; intentions, that is, of establishing a new Sino-World Empire by dominating the planet through a mix of digital and economic power.
Mythic China was precisely the image the Shenzhen training program sought to conjure: a benign and legitimizing narrative that normalizes the global expansion of Chinese capitalism while obscuring the maritime and technological mechanisms that enable its reach. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) extends beyond material infrastructure; its ambition lies in crafting an aspirational vision of Global China, one that exercises power while masking its rise. This narrative frames Chinese investment as universally beneficial, casting memoranda of understanding as commitments to development and cooperation.
Precisely because “China-Africa” is a construct with little, if any analytical or pragmatic valence, scholars continue to ask what, then, is China-Africa? The prevailing answers continue to reduce the relation condensed in that hyphen to familiar frameworks: global capitalism with Chinese characteristics, neo-colonialism, imperial ambition. However, recent critical scholarship, as I have pointed out, has begun to frame China-Africa as a provisional, evolving, and under-determined relationship. "China-Africa," the chimera, reifies both "China" and "Africa," positing each---and creating each other---as a singular, coherent entity. In reality, both are fragmented, aspirational, works-in-progress, and deeply contested.
For their part, Togolese perspectives on the Sino presence in Africa also resist simplistic narratives. They, too, emphasize the diversity of Chinese actors and their varied, labile situation/s within Togo. Contrary to any monolithic, long-term view of Chinese engagement, many Togolese perceive these actors as pursuing short-term ambitions, often formalized through the signing of those MoUs that, like “toilet paper,” disappear without a trace.In short, Lomé has not been transformed into the Shekou of West Africa, nor into a version of Djibouti, the poster child about which Vice-President Kong boasted in Shenzhen. What this ultimately points to are the limits of Global China and its capacity to fix Chinese overcapacity in places like Togo. “China,” that mythic presence in the new global economy, remains an enigma, as does its hyphenated presence in (China-) Africa. “Mythic China” is an imaginary whose implicit purpose is to facilitate a vast, under-articulated assemblage of initiatives across the world, while allaying fears of the implications of those initiatives. China for export, as it turns out, reveals both the excesses and the deficits in the effort to control the global maritime – and the incompleteness of Global China as both reality and analytic category.
References:
Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: U.S. Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Baertlein, Lisa. 2025. “U.S. Port Operators Seek to Mitigate Hefty Expected Tariffs on China‑Built Port Cranes.” Reuters, July 11, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-port-operators-seek-mitigate-hefty-expected-tariffs-china-built-port-cranes-2025-07-11/
CBS News. 2025. “Chinese Cranes at U.S. Ports Raise Homeland Security Concerns.” CBS News, February 11, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-cranes-at-u-s-ports-raise-homeland-security-concerns/.
Chua, Charmaine. 2018. "Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain." In Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain, edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, Pluto Press.
Herlevi, April. A. 2021. “Competing or Colluding Commercial Interests? Ports and Free Zones along China’s Maritime Silk Road in Africa.” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs 4 (8): 1–23.
House Committee on Homeland Security and Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. 2024. “NEW: Investigation by House Homeland, Select Committee on the CCP Finds Potential Chinese Threats to U.S. Port Infrastructure Security.” Press release, September 12, 2024. U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security. https://homeland.house.gov/2024/09/12/new-investigation-by-house-homeland-select-committee-on-the-ccp-finds-potential-chinese-threats-to-u-s-port-infrastructure-security/
Huang, Mingwei. 2024. Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lee, Ching Kwan. 2019. The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
O’Donnell, Mary Ann, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach, eds. 2017. Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Repnikova, Maria. 2017. Media Politics in China: Improvising Power under Authoritarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Repnikova, Maria. 2022. “Rethinking China’s Soft Power: “Pragmatic Enticement” of Confucius Institutes in Ethiopia.” The China Quarterly, 250: 440–463
Silver, Beverly. 2003. Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2022. “Privatizing the Port: Harboring Neoliberalism in Lomé.” In New African Transport Corridors, edited by Paul Nugent and Hugh Lamarque. James Curry, pp. 155-179
Volz, Dustin. 2024. “Espionage Probe Finds Communications Device on Chinese Cranes at U.S. Ports.” The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/espionage-probe-finds-communications-device-on-chinese-cargo-cranes-867d32c0
Notes:
[1] On the production of policy through models in socialist governance see Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
[2] China Merchants Group (CMG) is composed of five separate entities: CMPort, which includes shipping and logistics; CM Real Estate; CM Properties; CM Roads; and CM Bank.
[3] Elsewhere, I discuss smart ports and port automation, and suggest that, for political and economic reasons (above all the cheap cost of labor in Togo), a fully automated smart port is unlikely to come to Lomé in the near future. See “Harboring the Future” Harvard African Studies Workshop, November 2018; “From Togo to the World: Labor, Infrastruture and New Technologies in the Global Maritime Economy” Lecture at the University of Basel, September 2021.
Nina Sylvanus is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on capital and labor, value and aesthetics, infrastructure and technology, and, more broadly, on critical transformations within the neoliberal global economy. With a regional specialism in West Africa and China-in-Africa, her research examines how these dynamics reshape global economic landscapes.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Nina Sylvanus, “China for exPort: Africa and the Global Maritime,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 22, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/RPLQ9235.