Special Series: "New Directions in Africa-China Studies" | Vivian Chenxue Lu, The Global Majority? Political qualities of capital between the two Afro-Asian demographic giants
Judging by global political discourse in recent years, an emergent non-Western-dominated world order appears more imminent than ever. With the geopolitical expansion of entities like BRICS and the accumulating economic gravity of the People’s Republic of China, the sensibilities of the Global South are politically expansive and taking hold across many sectors and geographic domains. Indeed, the Global South as a political conscience has increasingly solidified in the past decade around planetary questions of climate change and accountability of the Global North in its mitigation and reparation (Táíwò 2022b; Fanning and Hickel 2023; Sylla et. al. 2024); so too, have crises like the intensification of genocide in Palestine since 2023 further thrown into sharp relief geopolitical fautlines and racialized global hierarchies of humanity through unabashed American and Western European material and ideological support for Israeli apartheid (Hindi 2023; Bhungulia 2024). And yet, whether this shift away from the West, or the solidification of a ‘multipolar’ world order will bring revolutionary or substantive material changes for the living conditions of the global majority remains uncertain. Patterns endure and are regenerated anew; nationalism foments and induces recurring xenophobic exclusions and ethnoracial violence; transnational capital predictably accretes towards elite circles, and many ‘southern’ states remain invested in militarism, border-making, ethnonationalism, and capitalist projects (Li 2023; Al-Bulushi 2024). Just as the Global South is solidifying as a strategic geopolitical stance for southern governments at particular moments, so too are its uneven and jagged topographies of dispossession, inequality, and extraction.
Nonetheless, part of the promise of a rising Global South mainly lies in its sheer size and scale, with its population being the “global majority,” a term with populist, if not democratic, political significance. Asia and Africa, for example, constitute over 80% of the world’s total population, and this percentage is expected to steadily grow over the century.[1] Correspondingly, the planet’s urban boom of the past several decades has taken shape across the Global South, now home to the vast majority of the world’s largest megacities, which are increasingly interconnected through flows of capital, commodities, and people.
This commentary examines how these demographic facts influence the geopolitical relations and cultural imaginaries between two regional population giants, China and Nigeria. Historically, Nigeria has faced the West, ideologically and materially, particularly through the oil industry and petrostate economy. Earlier China-Africa scholarship has insightfully traced longer histories of socialist, Third World, and non-aligned solidarities and political connections between the modern Chinese state and various nations on the African continent. Such scholarship provides important historical depth and nuanced social context, countering sensationalist “China-Africa” media narratives in the West. However, unlike many of China’s most significant trading partners in Africa, such as Angola, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Egypt, Nigeria does not have a significant history of Third World, socialist, or non-aligned solidarities that would ideologically align it with China. Nor does political rhetoric influence their bilateral diplomatic relations, in comparison with other nations with similar material entanglements. However, its status as Africa’s most populous country has linked it, sometimes begrudgingly, more tightly with China in recent decades through import and export relations, substantive infrastructural projects, and substantial flows of people and commodities in both directions. Today, Nigeria now constitutes China’s largest export trading partner on the African continent after South Africa.
Thus, this paper joins emergent directions in Africa-China studies that move beyond simply ‘countering’ Western media narratives. Instead, it critically considering how geopolitical and material asymmetries continue to be reproduced in south-south formations (Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Grewal 2023). In this vein, I consider three interconnected scenes, which reveal realms of affectively charged negotiation of economic policy and political ideology between these two regional giants: Nigeria’s recent attempts to enter BRICS, debates about raw versus finished commodity imports and exports, and anti-Black racism in China. Each scene illustrates how the tentacles of global capitalism continue to interlock with the nation-state unit, regenerating it as an ethnoracial, and thus, an ethnonational formation. Collectively, they demonstrate how capital is not just an abstract or deterritorialized or disembodied driving force, but how capital comes to take on qualities, socially envisioned and politically affixed to places, bodies, and objects.
Scene 1: Nigeria’s Global South shift (?)
In January 2025, Nigeria officially joined BRICS as a partner nation, a new category of partial membership introduced late last year, alongside Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. They joined BRICS’s original core countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and its new core additions in 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE, and Indonesia. Although not entirely unexpected, this marks a significant departure from Nigeria’s historically strong orientation towards the West, particularly the USA, through its petrocapital and military engagements (vis a vis War on Terror - Boko Haram and ISIS West Africa) entanglements. Nonetheless, in 2023, Vice President Kashim Shettina noted that Nigeria’s interest in joining BRICS “underscores the profound realization that the cornerstone of stability within our intricate multipolar landscape lies in fostering developmental partnerships.” BRICS is estimated to account for 85% of global Gross Domestic Product, over 75% of international trade, and about two-thirds of the world’s population. As one Nigerian economist, Emeka Okengwu, observed, “Look at the members of BRICS and the economies that they bring to the table…Look at Russia, India, China and South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia. These are big populations. If you put them together, they can probably bring 10 times the value of whatever Europe and American can give to you.”
With a dynamic population of around 184 million, Nigeria is known as the Giant of Africa and is the continent's most populous country by nearly 100 million people. In an interview with the Director General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a reporter asked: “Our population is expected to exceed that of the United States of America by 2050, and become the world’s third most populous country behind India and China by 2100. Should this be cheerful news for business or does this press the panic button?” In response, Director General Muda Yusuf replied,
“Population could be an asset or a liability. If you have quality population, a population which has a very high man capital content, that could be an asset because they can contribute more. That is a population that we have actually invested in through the development of capacity, skills, knowledge, etc. But if we have a population that we did not quite invest in, then it could be a liability; a serious burden on the economy. A similar case is what is happening in some regional parts of the country; and there is nothing that can be worse than dealing with somebody who doesn’t value his or her own life.”
Anthropologist Kristin Peterson (2014) has argued that during the 1970s, the Nigerian state shifted its priorities from investing in infrastructure and human capital to managing and disciplining an increasingly “risky population” through military governance and corporate practices. The state’s depiction of Nigeria’s population as being both its most significant economic potential and political risk falls in line with central tensions posed by capitalist-state nexuses, where under contemporary global capitalism, populations are not just political subjects but markets - of labor, consumption, distribution, and extraction.
As a major commercial hub in west Africa, Nigeria was estimated in 2016 to control 40% of trading transactions within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and was the destination for 52% of total imports to the 15 ECOWAS countries. Although Nigeria is popularly characterized as a petro-state, with the majority of government revenue derived from oil profits, recent estimates indicaat that the informal economy consists of the majority of the country’s GDP, which is largely buoyed by Nigeria’s status as a commercial hegemon, both domestically and regionally. The Nigerian consumer market is notable both for its size, as Africa’s most populous nation, and its striking decentralization. Less than 2% of Nigerian retail passes through corporate retailers, with most of the commodity distribution and retail occurring through decentralized networks of markets, controlled by self-organized trader associations. Corporate manufacturers and mega-retailers eager to expand their consumer bases in this “emerging market” regularly bemoan its ‘impenetrability’ due to logistical obstacles, including staggering infrastructural frustrations, bureaucratic opacity, inconsistent import bans, security threats, and political volatility. For example, a McKinsey consulting report from the past decade, emphasized that “Nigeria’s retail market is both capturable and too large to ignore. Companies that act now to build a winning business model will be getting in on the ground floor of Africa’s biggest growth opportunity…For multinational retailers or African companies wanting to capture new potential, there is a unique opportunity to seize an early mover advantage and create brand loyalty while consumers are young and media is relatively inexpensive…. Companies who want to gain a foothold should act quickly and decisively since the market may support only a few winners.”
However, commercial spaces in Nigeria are notoriously and actively resistant to monopolies and explicitly defend themselves against corporate and non-Black foreign actors. Decentralized wholesale markets, run by self-organized associations, in the Nigerian megacity of Lagos make up the core of Nigeria’s commercial distribution. These associations are strikingly organized, occasionally paramilitarized, and create spaces that are notably difficult for corporate mega-retailers to penetrate; since the 1970s, they have regularly expelled non-black foreign actors. Unlike many other countries, for example, in recent years, Chinese businesspeople have been restricted from operating in many Nigerian markets, and those who are often negotiate elaborate conditionalities, such as restricted operating hours, inability to own commercial space, and only operating at larger wholesale scales. These organizations and sensibilities emerge from a long history of anti-colonial and postcolonial political mobilizations in market places, where commerce and profit are seen as inherently political. In response to what historian Bianca Murillo calls the colonial “commercial battlefield,” postcolonial countries have long debated tactics to re-envision economic formations that entrap capital and prevent it from circulating domestically. For example, in the African context, “indigenizing” capitalism was an explicit feature of many postcolonial projects in the 1970s and 1980s.
One such example is Lagos’ largest wholesale market, a commercial area known as Trade Fair, home to an estimated 60,000 traders and a major destination of Nigerian imports coming from Asia and the Middle East. Over the past few decades, its dozens of commercial plazas have been collectively financed, constructed, co-owned, and operated by a vast decentralized but systematic collective of market associations. Strikingly, state police do not enter Trade Fair, and it is instead fully run by market associations and their security force, and it is architecturally and organizationally structured to actively discourage rapid expansion and monopolization across any sector. In practice, there are some non-Nigerian merchants from other West African nations like Ghana or Mali. Yet, the Trade Fair trader organizations hold their line with non-black foreign nationals, such as historically Lebanese, European, Indian, and recently Chinese businesspeople. Market associations are explicit about such measures being important in protecting Nigerian people’s ability to profit and thrive. Processes of capital circulation in contemporary capitalism are notably marked by the strategic deterritorialization and enclaving of capital by global elites. In striking contrast, postcolonial indigenization and market formations such as Trade Fair delineate a qualitative politics of control designed to emplace capital to circulate it domestically.
Scene 2: “Made in China” in the Pan-African Economic Zone
The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) was ratified in 2021. It now constitutes the largest neoliberal free trade zone in the world. The African Union spearheaded it and requires member nations to remove tariffs on 90% of goods to promote the movement of commodities across borders. Its rollout across the continent has been uneven and incomplete, partly due to COVID but also because of some resistance by big economic actors like Nigeria and South Africa. An interesting debate has emerged around particular provisions in the agreement about commodity origin or the “nationality” of commodities. That is, what does the free movement of commodities mean? Does it only apply to goods manufactured in Africa? Or can they be manufactured in China and then freely exported across the continent? This has implications for regional commercial hubs like Nigeria, which is both a regional manufacturer and the major importer and distributor of commodities from Asia. Already within Nigeria, this has reignited debates from the decolonial era, centered on national anxieties around manufacturing and commerce, and importantly, who in Nigeria – those involved in manufacturing or those involved in commerce – stands to benefit from the lifting of different kinds of commercial restrictions. Specifically, Nigeria’s trade structure with China often involves exporting raw commodities and importing consumer commodities, one that many in Nigeria have critiqued as a neo-colonial economic relation.
Historically in the 1970s and 1980s, “BUY NIGERIA” was a phrase explicitly promoting Nigerian-manufactured consumer goods and was tied to the concept of “practical nationalism,” or as bluntly stated in a 1978 column by Nigerian scholar Amo-Frank Aliu, “The Nigerian who prefers imported food items to his Eba, Tuwo, Amala or Akpu [indigenous foods] is not a practical nationalist. He is a practical neo-colonialist.”[2] In Nigeria, imported Chinese commodities are often called chinko in Nigerian pidgin topejoratively refer to shoddy goods, such as the saying “chinko no dey last,” meaning chinko products are not durable. Whether known as chinko in Nigeria, zhing zhong in Zimbabwe, or fong kong in South Africa, “Made in China” exists within in a global hierarchy of production and valuation, where nation states take on brand-like qualities, with European, American, and Japanese labels at the higher end of the spectrum (Park 2013). Nigeria also resides on this spectrum; as Nigerian writer Abimbola Adelakun (2015) lamented in a recent column, “When confronted with local and foreign-made products, Nigerians are likely to vote foreign with their money most of the time.” While the Nigerian postcolonial government has regularly attempted to promote Nigerian manufacturing, consumers often disparage “Made in Nigeria” or “Aba-made” (a city in southeastern Nigeria) commodities similarly to chinko ones, as suspect and of poor quality.
Taking anxieties about commodity quality as a point of departure, chinko commodities have come to represent global geopolitics in material form, evoking a larger racialized imaginary of Chinese expansion and a shifting global order that is increasingly facing Asia, the Middle East, and other African countries, rather than towards the West. Yet through this economic transformation, commentary around chinko and “Made in Nigeria” commodities are also engagements with Western economic dominance, both referencing Western branding and quality as a reference point while also contesting its symbolic hegemony. It this context the material qualities of such commodities quickly become political metaphors; the cheap, mass-produced, shoddy goods are symptomatic of something else: dynamics of disrespect, neglect, abjection by “the Chinese,” “the government,” or even African designers and distributors themselves. If commodity fetishism in capitalism masks relations of production, I argue that in postcolonial contexts like Nigeria, the capitalist commodity has never been fully fetishized. People are constantly aware of not only the relations of production, but the relations of exchange and distribution. The flooding of cheap Chinese goods into an African market is not simply about global price points and comparative advantage; it is produced by geopolitical conditions and enduring structural hierarchies of infrastructural accumulation. The anxiety surrounding “made-in-China” and “Aba-made” commodities is, in other words, precisely emblematic of the problematic conditions of their production, distribution, and consumption. Nigeria’s joining BRICS does not come as a complete surprise, although critics are already wary that it exemplifies what theorist Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020) has called a failure to question the rules of the game, or to reimagine what a system of neocolonial material and cognitive extraversions could be otherwise. Indeed, “Made-in-China” commodities are symbolically infused (intertwined?) with the geopolitical context of their recent emergence in African markets: the collapse of African manufacturing following neoliberal structural adjustment, the Chinese state-driven boom of mass-manufacturing, the global proliferation of both large and small-scale Chinese businesses, and the growing prominence of China in African geopolitics.
Scene 3: COVID-19 as ethnoracial event
Soon after the pandemic lockdowns in mainland China in 2020, the international media reported on anti-Black racial profiling in southern China. These articles specifically focused on African residents in Guangzhou, a major commercial hub, with Nigerians being the most prominent African population living in southern China. Such incidents are part of a longer history of anti-Black profiling in south China, including earlier cases during various immigration raids over the past decade and a half and the 2014 Ebola epidemic, when Black Africans across the world were profiled and detained (Adebayo 2023). On Nigerian social media, many users linked these events to other anti-Black African xenophobic incidents in places such as South Africa, Malaysia, India, Turkey, other parts of China, and Dubai – events that often do not make international headlines. Strikingly, these moments of crisis illuminate (highlight?) the global reach of Nigerian communities across the Global South, and spark sharp critical public conversations about their vulnerable positions in these sites. These conversations are characterized by an acute awareness of race as a transnational formation that is interlinked with, but also exceeds, the West.
How do enduring patterns and logics of blame and exclusion reemerge in times of crises? Interconnected events across the world of anti-black racial profiling starkly reveal the workings of racecraft (Fields and Fields 2022), or race as a process of identification within global racialized communities. Furthermore, by considering racialization and national stereotype together (Hall 2017), we can see historical patterns of events that “engage apprehensions of a wider social milieu beyond that of the ‘moment’”[3] and continue to inform (influence?) the movement of diasporic Nigerians. I want to quickly highlight two key lines of analysis that emerged from various Nigerian critiques of the incidents. The first critiques the treatment of black people in Guangzhou while immediately contrasting it with the vastly different treatment of Chinese nationals residing across the African continent. Many pointed out that Chinese nationals are rarely treated the way Africans have been treated in China, with some calling for retaliation against Chinese nationals living in Africa. This point highlights China as a global actor on the geopolitical stage, but also how the bodies of Chinese nationals become symbolic sites where geopolitical critique of the Chinese state can be expressed.
Secondly, the other line of analysis I want to highlight is that this incident in Guangzhou is not an isolated one. Indeed, the incident sparked widespread outrage across a broader African diaspora precisely because it follows a pattern, both across time and geographic context, demonstrating the vulnerability and volatility of black African migrant and diasporic life across Asia and the Middle East, and in the West. The spectacle of black eviction during Covid-19 in China, and the 2014 Ebola scare, are not exceptional moments. Rather, rather they are unusally stark or clarifying moments, exemplifing ongoing processes of racialization. As news stories punctuate social media and daily conversations, globalized mediascapes proliferate and enable the linking of dispersed incidents, or what Nancy Munn (1990) calls “events,” moments that people articulate as being part of a larger world, in terms of causality, meaning, and implication. These formative events that are infused with the “ambience of potentialities or ‘futurity’, as well as pasts,” serve as key sites of translocal consciousness. Instead of conceptualizing social worlds as tethered to cohesive shared cultural essences or historical narratives, Munn argues that translocal consciousness and interconnected social entities emerge through everyday practices that infuse “the experience of a given event with pasts (or possible pasts) and futures” (1990, 5). Therefore, by considering Ebola as an event in Nigerian diasporic life across the Global South, it highlights a range of ongoing and difficult circumstances regularly experienced, where processes of racialization are deeply intertwined with national stereotypes.
This analysis enables us to historicize the event within a longer history of anti-black violence and to understand how crises like Covid-19 illuminate transnational geographies of race and nationalism. The 2020 pandemic had clear precedents during the 2015 Ebola epidemic and its scares, where Nigerians in particular were subjected to extremely publicized, racialized, and nationalized experiences of suspicion, scrutiny, and pathologization. Moreover, as Nigerians encountered racism during the Ebola epidemic and the Covid-19 pandemic, they explicitly linked this to xenophobic violence inflicted by states and citizens in places like China, South Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. For the Nigerian diaspora, race and national stereotype are co-constitutive. While anthropological instinct often emphasizes the intricacies of ‘local’ repertoires of distinction – for example, race in relation to particular discourses of ethnicity, colorism, caste, class, and localized histories of colonialism – these incidents highlight the need to link such analyses to transnational economies of migration, geopolitical formations, national stereotypes, and globalized media circulations.
Concluding thoughts
Much is new in the recent tectonic economic shifts that have drawn two regional demographic hegemons into closer, sometimes contentiously. And yet, it is important that we do not render the new ahistorically. While China has become the main trade destination and the subject of recent “China-Africa” (or “Africa-China”) academic and popular media inquiry, it is crucial not to overlook the historical context and the afterlives of past events. Historical perspectives situate China as one of many Global South trade sites, particularly in relation to Nigeria’s political economy. Since the 2020 pandemic, and due to the severe devaluation of the Nigerian currency, many Nigerians have stopped travelling to China altogether. Those who still travel are frequenting other places, such as Istanbul, where there has been a notable uptick in Nigerians seeking new trading hubs.
Furthermore, consistent with the theme of the workshop drawing from new directions in much of the China-Africa scholarship, we must think relationally - not just bilaterally between China and a specific African country. We need to think in a triangulated and multi-factorial way, where geopolitical shifts, volatile and restrictive legal regimes, and devastating economic crises all reconfigure particular arrangements. These layer onto longer histories, colonial and postcolonial, which help us see the patterns that inform the present. These are not simply sterile calculative processes. They reveal how capital and its political structuring take on particular stories and qualities and are shaped by histories of social organization and political tension. In these contexts, rather than simply being an attempt at market ‘disentaglement’ (Callon 1998) by abstract global elites, capitalism’s current political form is expressed through the nation-state unit, which underpins the basis of the larger, structured, and hierarchical order of states. As Stuart Hall (2017) argued, “Capitalist modernity has worked as much through the proliferation of difference as it has through the homogenization of the world into sameness,” and that “such flows have been powerfully organized around, and thereby sustained within, the particularly boundaried formations of the nation-state, which gave rise to our commonplace notion of the “national economy” and “national culture” (135-136).
In particular, during this inflection period of shifting geopolitics, these narratives of capital become clearer and more prominent as Global South states deliberately attempt to reconfigure existing international orders marked by centuries of Euro-American colonial and imperial hegemonies. What emerges is less a coherent ideological vision, and more a southern political and economic contested terrain, in which decolonial histories figure as a common reference point. These histories are marshalled and mobilized in a variety of directions, signalling different target audiences and prioritized citizens, that are not always easily mapped onto contours of leftist or rightist politics.[4] This Global South terrain is marked by a materialist sensibility, which explicitly foregrounds developmentalist pragmatism and transactionalism that is susceptible to state cooptation and elite capture (Táíwò 2022a).
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Notes
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/continents
[2] Amo-Frank Aliu, “BUY NIGERIAN: We need practical nationalism,” The Punch, February 5, 1978, 5.
[3] Munn, Constructing Regional Worlds, 2.
[4] Taking up Gramsci’s long-relevant insight around the dialectical and dynamic, but not overdetermined, relationship between material conditions and cultural political ideologies: “It may be ruled out that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions involving the entire subsequent development of national life” (emphasis added, 184).
Vivian Chenxue Lu is a cultural anthropologist of capitalism, ethnonationalism, and social mobilization. She is an assistant professor of Anthropology and faculty affiliate of African & African American Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas, USA.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Vivian Chenxue Lu, “The Global Majority? Political qualities of capital between the two Afro-Asian demographic giants,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 22, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/FJQE8461.