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Chinese in Africa / Africans in China Research Network Conference Mini-symposium Series

Date
26 Feb 2021-25 Feb 2022

Time
9:30am (GMT-5 New York)
3:30pm (GMT+1 Lagos)
10:30pm (GMT+8 Beijing)

Venue
Zoom

Language
English

This event is hosted by the Chinese in Africa / Africans in China Research Network Conference Organising Committee in collaboration with the Centre for Cultural Research and Development at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Click here to revisit the programme.

  • 2nd online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Contemporary Chinese Mobilities in East/Southern Africa

    Date: 26 Feb 2021 (Fri)

    Moderator: Roberto Castillo, Lingnan University

    Cheryl Mei-ting SCHMITZ
    Make a New Friend, Build a New Road: Opportunity, Mistrust, and Reliability in Chinese-Angolan Collaborations

    In debates about African debt and agency in relation to China, Angola has figured prominently, often cited as China’s largest trading partner on the continent, and recipient of more Chinese loans than any African country. Less attention has been paid, however, to how Angolan individuals may act as gatekeepers to obstruct or facilitate Chinese business in the country, and how Chinese entrepreneurs try to negotiate advantageous positions within such “collaborations.” 

    Drawing from fieldwork conducted in 2013–2014 with a Chinese state-owned construction firm in Luanda, this talk examines how Chinese businesses attempted to expand in the aftermath of a booming period of Angolan post-war reconstruction. Chinese entrepreneurs found that business could only be done with the help of local mediators promising to open otherwise inaccessible portals to political expediency. They shared with their would-be collaborators an image of Angola as a land of vast extractive opportunities, available only to those who could gain access through crucial personal connections. Highly aware of the opacity and potential deceptiveness of their “friends,” in part because they engaged in dissimulative practices themselves, Chinese businesspeople evaluated their Angolan counterparts less in terms of sincerity than efficacy.

    The shared understandings and practices that emerge through the transactions analysed in this paper challenge images of Africans and Chinese as either antagonistic classes or cultural “Others.” Instead, my ethnographic examples would indicate a situation in which Chinese and Angolan actors become entangled in relations of both mutual benefit and reciprocal exploitation.

    Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Chinese migrants and their Angolan partners while working as a Chinese-Portuguese intern translator for a Chinese state-owned construction firm based in Luanda. As a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, she is currently exploring the development of African Studies in China, as part of the Lise Meitner Research Group “China in the Global System of Science.”

    Maggi LEUNG
    Medical diplomacy before and after COVID-19: Chinese engagements in Zambia

    The COVID-19 pandemic has brought Chinese growing presence in the global medical field to the world’s attention. The practice of Chinese ‘mask diplomacy’ can be considered as the latest manifestation of China’s rising (soft) power in the Global South, but also in parts of Europe. Chinese medical aid to African countries is, however, not a new phenomenon. The scale and scope of these ‘medical diplomacy’ engagements have expanded significantly in the last two decades.  There is no shortage of reports on the important role played by the Chinese state as a new alternative for medical development in Africa. China’s medical aid is visualized by abundant figures such as the amount of money donated and invested, hospitals built, numbers of Chinese professionals deployed, African practitioners trained and patients treated etc.. However, little is known about the lived experiences behind these numbers. Drawing on academic debates surrounding knowledge mobility, this paper presents the embodied experiences of Chinese-Zambian medical co-operation. Based on our qualitative research in Zambia, we analyse the factors and processes of knowledge (im)mobilities and (co)creation. We identify a number of important prisms that affect the exchange of knowledge between the Chinese and Zambian teams in the hospital where we conducted our fieldwork. Our paper will also provide some thoughts on the implications of COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese ‘medical diplomacy’ in Zambia [co-authored by Peter Schumacher].

    Maggi W.H. Leung is Associate Professor at the Department of Human Geography and Planning at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the geography and impact of migration and other forms of mobility (esp. academic and professional mobility), internationalisation of education and related outcomes in knowledge mobilty and capacity development. She has published on these topics in a range of geography and social science journals. She is one of the editors of Geoforum and the Handbook of Translocal Development and Global Mobilities (Edward Elgar, 2021).

    Ding FEI
    Displacement and Socio-Economic (In)Mobility of Chinese Expatriates in Africa

    This article investigates the transnational experiences of Chinese expatriates in Africa, drawing upon survey, semi-structured interviews, and sketch mapping with Chinese expatriates working in different sectors in Ethiopia. I argue their transnational movement are shaped by inter-state diplomatic ties, overseas ventures of Chinese companies, and the individual aspirations for better livelihoods in China. Specifically, expatriation is marketed by official rhetoric of South-South skills transfer at the state level and sustained by management activities and discursive constructions of certain employee characteristics (e.g. suzhi) as strategies for differentiation at the firm level. The emergence of a transnational social order of stratification among expatriates indicates that Chinese in Africa are neither a homogenous group nor free-floating cosmopolitan elites with power and resources at their disposal. Instead, most expatriates are simultaneously domestic and international migrants moving between places within and beyond China. They are subject to varying degrees of empowerment, displacement, estrangement, and socio-economic (in)mobility at migratory nodes, which informs their future migration decisions.

    Ding Fei is a development and economic geographer. Her research focuses on the relationship among state, capital and human agency in the uneven process of China’s globalization, and its implications on industrial transformation and local capacity building in the “Global South”. Fei’s empirical research examines the variegated construction of local work regimes by globalized Chinese state and private capitals in Ethiopia, with case studies of Chinese companies operating in multiple sectors of overseas investment. Fei earned her doctoral degree from the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Arizona State University, and an early career fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies.

  • 3rd online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | On anti-Black and anti-Chinese sentiments

    Date: 26 March 2021 (Fri)

    Moderator: Jamie Monson, Michigan State University

    KUN Huang is PhD Candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her dissertation explores the translation of racial blackness in modern Chinese literature and culture in the long twentieth century. Born and raised in Guangzhou, her project grapples with the global transactions of racial forms and their unaccounted “Chinese” manifestations. Her research has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She also writes public-facing commentaries regarding anti-blackness in China, and translates literary and cultural critiques by Black feminist writers. Her writing has been published on positions politics, South of the South, Wenxue（《文學》）, and Sixiangshichang（《澎湃思想市场》）.

    YAN Hairong teaches in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She authored New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (Duke University Press, 2008). She and Barry Sautman have been collaborating on China–Africa links and have published in Chinese China in Africa: Discourse and Practices (Beijing: shehui kexue chubanshe, 2017). In recent years, she has become concerned with food sovereignty and agrarian change in China.

    Runako CELINA is the co-founder of Black Livity China, a media platform founded in 2018 to document and demystify African and afro-diasporic experiences in China and in relation to China. She holds an MA in International Politics and African Studies from Peking University and has worked in Chinese media spaces for five years. She is currently pursuing her second Masters in Investigative Journalism at City University and is presently based between Beijing and London.

  • 4th online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Relocating Africa: Representations and Memory of Africa in 20th and 21st Century China

    Date: 7 May 2021 (Fri)

    Moderator: Facil TESFAYE, director of the African Studies Programme, the University of Hong Kong

    Supported by: HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

    Ignatius SUGLO
    Visualising Africa in Chinese posters 1950-1980

    This paper examines the depictions and portrayal of Africa and Africans in China during the period when that country moved to establish diplomatic relations across the continent – the foundation of what would become Africa-China relations today. Chinese posters were early forms of mass visual interaction with (the image of) foreign nationals. They reflect how Chinese society viewed itself in relation to others as it developed an awareness of the international through domestic mobilization. This study investigates how Africa and Africans are depicted in Chinese posters and how they shaped and/or reflected discourses of the period. It also examines the motivations behind the inclusion of Africans in Chinese posters, arguing that this had a largely domestic rationale. By historicizing Chinese posters in the meaning-making process of the image of Africa in 20th century China, this paper concludes that posters negotiated public opinion by defining friend and foe, were more about China and her cold war entanglements than about Africa, and simultaneously challenges and reinforces some widely held stereotypes about the continent.

    Ignatius Suglo is a PhD candidate in China Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He is interested in twentieth century Africa-China relations, people-to-people relations, digital diasporic communities, and linguistic landscapes. His PhD project examines the politics of African representations in Chinese popular media since the establishment of the PRC.

    Emily CHOW-QUESADA
    Understanding “Blackness” in Hong Kong: Representations of Africa in Hong Kong Popular Media

    This paper studies the representations of Africans and African cultures in Hong Kong popular media since the 1990’s and its political, social, and cultural significance. Representations of the African continent in Hong Kong popular culture define the local’s understanding of African peoples and cultures. On one hand, some representations continue to reproduce long held stereotypes by constructing African cultures as the city’s inferior binary opposition; on the other hand, some attempt to do away with the sense of “othering” and achieve empathetic cultural exchanges. By analysing the construction of “African-ness” in these representations, this paper shows that African cultures are constantly portrayed in relation to Hong Kong’s under the presupposition of assimilation. It is by studying the absences and presences of “African-ness” in locally produced movies, songs, and variety shows that it could be shown that Africa is often narrated as the subordinate of the local. Significantly, this hierarchy not only predetermines but also crystalizes the local people’s understanding of Africa. This paper thus studies how these representations incur ideologies and define Africa and African cultures in the city.

    Emily Chow-Quesada is assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on the representations of Africa in Hong Kong, and world and postcolonial Anglophone literature. She has published journal articles and book chapters on Anglophone African literature and taught courses on world literature, postcolonial literature, African literature, and representations of “blackness.” She is also the editor of the “Hong Kong and Chinese Literature and Culture” section of Hong Kong Review of Books.

    Clifford PEREIRA
    Friend or Foe? Africans at the Door: Twentieth Century military encounters between the Chinese and various African nationals at the borders of China 1900-1950.

    The first half of the twentieth century was marked by two World Wars, both of which played a role in the decolonization struggles of the Caribbean, Africa and Asia alongside marked “South-South” military encounters within the frame of imperialism. Men from far-flung parts of Africa interacted with Chinese nationals in various capacities on the very borders of China during a period that witnessed the rise and practice of Marxist-Leninist Socialism. A factor that played into the discourse of decolonisation, independence and models of development in Africa. The narratives of these Africa-China encounters have been largely forgotten by most countries of Africa and by the Peoples Republic of China. This paper seeks to identify through historical research the encounters that China had with people from various parts of the African continent between 1900 and 1950 in Asia. Followed by a brief description on how these encounters were perceived in Africa during that fifty-year period. The paper concludes with a discussion on the subject of memorialisation of these encounters in both China and in the independent African countries that were involved.

    Clifford (Cliff) is a history researcher, curator and heritage consultant with a portfolio of projects in Britain, Canada, Qatar, Kenya, China and Hong Kong SAR. Cliff has produced numerous publications, radio and documentary programs across the world. He is best known for his work on Africans in the Indian Ocean World, especially the Bombay Africans narrative which will be featured in the UNESCO General History of Africa Vol. X. Cliff was recently featured on NHK for his work on Yasuke – the African Samurai. He is presently reading an MRes on Africa and the African Diaspora focusing on Africans in Southeast Asia 1900-1960 and is Visiting Research Associate with the University of Hong Kong’s African Studies Programme.

  • 5th online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Africa Looking East: A Global History of Africa-China Engagement

    Date: 28 May 2021 (Fri)

    Moderator: Jamie Monson, Michigan State University

    Shaonan LIU and Jamie MONSON
    Africa Looking East: A Global History of Africa-China Engagement

    In the last decade China has become Africa’s leading trading partner as Africa’s natural resources have been exported and manufactured goods are imported. China has also invested heavily in Africa’s infrastructure, constructing railways, roads and ports that will facilitate the movement of goods and people both within Africa and abroad. China’s expanding role in Africa in the 21st century has caused anxiety for other global powers, as the United States and European countries fear Chinese economic and political competition on the continent. Some have compared 21st century rivalry over Africa’s resources to the nineteenth century European “Scramble for Africa,” while competing East-West political ideologies have led to comparisons with the Cold War.

    Observers are right to look to history for a deeper understanding of Africa’s engagement with China. But these historical comparisons – whether to the nineteenth century “scramble” or to twentieth century East-West rivalries – make it seem like Africa was a passive, isolated and unchanging continent upon which other global actors repeatedly imposed their agendas. Nothing could be further from the truth. And current anxieties about globalization make us forget that the world – including Africa – has been globally interconnected for a very, very long time.

    This paper will present research findings from our co-authored book project that places Africa and Africans at the center of global historical encounters. It traces the deep history of African and Chinese engagement within larger circulations of goods, people and ideas that go back at least as far as the 8th-9th centuries. We frame our inquiry with two critical guiding questions: first, how does our understanding of the world change when take a historical perspective on globalization? And second, how does this history create openings for new kinds of knowledge, by allowing new stories to be told, once we shift our gaze from “Africa and its Invaders” to “Africans Looking East?”

    Andrea KIFYASI
    China’s Role in Global Health: HIV/AIDS Traditional Chinese Medicine Research and Treatment in Tanzania from 1987 to 2014

    The HIV/AIDS pandemic poses one of the greatest challenges to global health. Countries from the North and the South both worked tirelessly to get rid of the disease. However, roles played by countries of the Global South in fighting the disease have been less studied. Such context upheld the impression that countries of the South had little to offer to the global health. Local and joint initiatives made by African, Asian and Latin American countries were lowlily recognised, not only by scholars but also by traditional global health partners. Available research literature dwells on China’s multilateral engagement in global health from the 2000s following its domestic health crisis, leaving bilateral medical projects it funded to the South, such as HIV/AIDS TCM research and treatment unattended. This paper pushes further discussion on the manner and the extent to which countries of the South engaged in the fight against pandemic diseases. The paper examines the history of the Chinese sponsored HIV/AIDS TCM research and treatment project in Tanzania from its inception in 1987 to its decline in 2014. It shows contexts which influenced its establishment, practice and perceptions by patients. The paper argues that Sino-Tanzania’s HIV/AIDS TCM research and treatment contributed to global health. However, modus operandi of the project defeated its broader contribution. Data for this study were drawn from archival materials, oral testimonies, government reports, and other published research literature.

    Jodie Yuzhou SUN
    Transnational Networks of Africans and Chinese: Global South Imaginaries, Decolonisation and the Cold War

    This paper introduces Sun’s postdoc project which explores the exchanges of people and ideas between decolonising African countries and the People’s Republic of China during the Cold War. Following the end of the Second World War, the African continent experienced a growing ‘wind of change’ that called for an end to the global colonial order; the United States and the Soviet Union replaced European empires to become the new superpowers. China, although led by Mao Zedong and his Communist Party, claimed to be a leader of the ‘Third World’.  This research will examine a range of Africans’ experiences including but not limited to politicians of initiating, deepening or negotiating relations with China at the time of global ideological contest. Through a close reading of national archives, English and Chinese newspapers, left-wing political pamphlets, and in-depth interviews, it will illustrate how transnational networks infused with a real and imagined shared colonial past, competing ideologies, and the developmental state contributed to and shaped the distinctive trajectories of China-Africa relations.

    A comprehensive investigation into the history of African decolonisation and the Cold War through the lens of China-Africa social networks is of both historiographical importance and great contemporary significance. Postcolonial African states, societies, ideas and practices need to be understood within what Jeremi Suri described as the ‘historical intersections’ of an on-going decolonisation, global waves of social mobilisation, and Cold War realpolitik. This study will also contribute to the emerging but uneven literature on the social history of Africa’s Cold War. The question of how the ‘global’ is revealed and remade through the ‘local’ is as crucial as that of how global forces shape local experiences. Bringing in China’s ‘alternativeness’ in engaging with African actors, this project will challenge the conventional understanding of the divisions of East and West, North and South in the context of the decolonising Cold War.

    Junle MA
    The Operating Logic of Chinese Capital in Africa from Historical Perspective: A case study of sisal industry in Tanzania

    The discourse and practice of Chinese capital in Africa has become a hot topic in the academic community, but current scholarship has tended to be one-sided and to ignore history. By comparing a western company, a local company and a Chinese company in the Tanzania sisal industry, this paper argues that there are commonalities among all three cases, when these are framed in the context of Tanzania’s international status, political and economic structures, and the history of sisal industry development. Specifically, the three cases all show the importance of the relationship between the state and enterprise investment; cheap land and labor as a primary source of capital accumulation; and chronic labor shortage in analyzing the sisal industry in Tanzania.

    At the same time, these three sisal enterprises show differences in concrete implementation.  Western capital by virtue of its first-mover advantage is good at making political investments, shaping and dominating the global value chain, and setting the rules. Local capital relies on its local advantages and has the ability to influence policy making but is still dependent upon western capital due to its weakness.  Chinese capital, on the basis of localized operations, has a culture of self-reliance and bearing hardships, and has focused on productivity improvement based on technology input. The most important finding of the study is that Chinese capital has broken the western capital monopoly in the world sisal trade and provides a new development solution for the Tanzania sisal industry.

  • 6th online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Ethnographies of Mobility: Circular Migration and Uneven Geographies

    Date: 2 July 2021 (Fri)

    Moderator: Cheryl Schmitz, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

    Supported by: HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

    Vivian Chenxue Lu
    Emplacing capital: Import anxieties and profit politics in Nigerian south-south commerce

    This talk examines how south-south circular migrations are transforming Nigerian markets. Based on ethnographic research amongst transnational Nigerian businessmen between Asia and Africa, this talk focuses on the politicization of Nigerian transnational commercial space and its relation to ongoing postcolonial political anxieties surrounding Igbo ethno-regional identity and national economic sovereignty.

    Vivian Chenxue Lu is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on capitalism and diasporic mobilizations amongst the Global South. Her first book project focuses on the extensive migratory circulations of Nigerian businessmen amongst contemporary trade sites across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Drawing from academic genealogies in the anthropology of capitalism, critical race studies, and postcolonial African studies, her work examines how transnational south-south diasporic formations have transformed Nigerian social imaginaries and discourses of postcolonial political and economic sovereignty.

    Derek Sheridan
    Developing in Africa: Chinese Migrants to Africa and the Imagined Geography of Uneven Development

    Based on the life histories of several Chinese migrants and their families to Tanzania and neighbouring countries, Sheridan examines how “Africa” became both an imagined and desired destination at specific moments when China’s changing domestic development made existing livelihoods and strategies of social mobility no longer possible. This talk examines how “Going to Africa to develop” has been premised on the historically contingent (and also continuously changing) uneven geography of development between Africa and China after reform; and how these conditions have afforded the different ways Chinese migrants have thought about their own potentialities and those of their African interlocutors.

    Derek Sheridan is a socio-cultural anthropologist based at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. His first book, currently in preparation, is an ethnography of Chinese entrepreneurial migrants in Tanzania. Based on fieldwork in Dar es Salaam, a key trading node with a long history of Afro-Asian connections, the book examines how Chinese migrants and ordinary Tanzanians have come to depend on each other for their livelihoods within an uneven and hierarchical global political economy.

    Mingwei Huang
    The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: On Race and Labor

    This paper examines how the history of racialized migrant labour across the region makes possible capital accumulation among Chinese migrants to South Africa. Decades after the end of mine migrancy, the system of racialized migrant labour on which mining depended, Chinese migrant traders rely on the casual labour of an African precariat, migrants from the main sending countries to the mines who continue generations of journeying to the City of Gold and are racialized anew. Engaging ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, Huang illustrates how circular migration and the devaluation of African migrant labour born on the goldfields persist, perhaps unexpectedly, at Chinese wholesale malls located along Johannesburg’s old mining belt. The paper proposes a palimpsestic approach to thinking about Chinese and African futures. The unfolding “Chinese Century” does not begin and end with the arrival of Chinese migrants but is layered with longer histories of racial capitalism, colonialism, migrancy, and extraction in the Golden City, including the debris of European imperial centuries.

    Mingwei Huang is an assistant professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and fellow in the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality at Dartmouth College. Her work has been published in Scholar & Feminist Online, Radical History Review, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Public Culture (forthcoming), and Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (Wits UP, 2020). Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and supported by the Centre for Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand.

  • 8th online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Can Hong Kong Be Home? Sub-Saharan Africans’ Experiences of Belonging/Not Belonging

    Date: 29 Oct 2021 (Fri)

    Moderator: Roberto Castillo, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University

    Supported by: HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

    Fekadu Malede
    Foreign Catering Firm-Owners and “Home”: Reflections on African Catering Services in Hong Kong

    Hong Kong has attracted Africans as permanent residents, asylum seekers or traders who use the city as a conduit in their travel between China and Africa. While the lives and livelihoods of asylum seekers and traders have attracted scholarly attention, small business owners, and particularly catering firm owners, have been less focused upon. In this paper, I investigate the livelihoods, lives, and senses of home of African catering firm owners in Hong Kong. I explore questions such as, what kinds of assets do they have access to and control over, including financial, human, social, and physical capitals? What kinds of structures and processes (policies, laws, institutions) influence their lives and livelihoods? What sorts of vulnerability contexts (trends, shocks, and seasonality) do they face? What strategies do they implement to cope with these vulnerabilities? On the basis of these strategies, are they able to feel that Hong Kong is their home, or does it remain a place of foreignness for them? I investigate these questions through in-depth interviews and long-term and frequent contact with African catering firm owner in Hong Kong, and thereby put in perspective the larger question of whether, practically and emotionally for these African restaurant owners, Hong Kong can indeed serve as home.

    Fekadu Malede is a PhD student in anthropology from Ethiopia at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is researching low-end globalization among Ethiopian traders in China, Dubai, and Turkey. He holds a Hong Kong PhD Fellowship.

    Phillip Thebe
    Homing Aspirations of African Students in Hong Kong

    Hong Kong has an academic system quite different from that of mainland China, and has only recently begun to accept promising Ph.D students from sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions around the world. What remains unclear, however, is what these students will do after they are educated in Hong Kong. In this paper, I seek to unravel the homing aspirations of African PhD students in Hong Kong. Do they want to establish a ‘home’ in Hong Kong after graduation? Is this legally possible for them? Is this economically possible? Is this culturally possible? What factors are involved in shaping whether or not Hong Kong can seem home for them? This ethnography, written by an African student, uses his own experience and the experience of several other African Ph.D students in Hong Kong to explore their experiences in Hong Kong in terms of their education, everyday life in the city, and their hopes, dreams and fears for the future.

    Phillip Thebe is a PhD student in anthropology from Zimbabwe at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is researching the aspirations of Africans in Hong Kong and mainland China. He holds a Hong Kong PhD Fellowship.

    Gordon Mathews
    Can Hong Kong be home for sub-Saharan African asylum seekers?

    This paper, based on a weekly class that I have taught for the past 15 years, explores whether African asylum seekers can ever consider Hong Kong as “home.” Sub-Saharan Africans in general in Hong Kong have long reported incidents of racial discrimination. Asylum seekers have experienced this all the more because they are forbidden to work, and are seen as beggars (“without money in Hong Kong, you’re nothing,” I’m often told). Some work anyway, but run the risk of two years in jail if they are caught. The only way that an African asylum seeker can legally remain in Hong Kong is to marry a Hongkonger, which a significant number have successfully done. The attitude towards asylum seekers in Hong Kong has been changing in recent years, particularly among younger Hongkongers, who used to spurn African asylum seekers but over the past few years have come to welcome them as evidence that Hong Kong remains an international city. However, with the passage of the National Security Law in 2020, as well as a tightening of restrictions on asylum seekers, Hong Kong may be turning away from being an international city to becoming more Chinese. Given this uncertainty, it is unclear the extent to which Africans can consider Hong Kong as home in the future.

    Gordon Mathews is a professor in anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is one of the authors of The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace (2017).

  • 9th online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Distances and Intimacies: African and Chinese Entanglements in Art, Heritage and Material Culture

    Date: 21 Jan 2022 (Fri)

    Supported by: HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

    Ruth Simbao
     Re-burying the Remains of Chinese Martyrs: The Rumours, Controversies and Revised Solidarities of the New TAZARA Memorial Park in Zambia

    The TAZARA Memorial Park for Chinese martyrs who died in Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s is currently being built in Lusaka Province in Zambia, and is scheduled to open in 2022. In 2021, the remains of Chinese TAZARA workers and other laborers were retrieved from a dedicated graveyard in Mpika (Northern Province) and the Leopards Hill Cemetery in Lusaka, and have been re-buried in the new memorial park along Great East Road. Residents in nearby villages and in the town of Chongwe have heard rumours about the construction of a “large Chinese graveyard”, resulting in various concerns about the use of the land and processes of memorialisation. Controversies in the area, however, are not just about the construction of the Chinese memorial site, but are complicated by recent tensions between local residents and the former ruling party, the Patriotic Front, which was recently voted out of power. While the traditional ruler of the area, Chieftainess Nkomeshya Mukamambo II, granted permission for the park to be built in her area when a delegation from the Chinese Embassy paid her a visit, the PF failed to consult her, adding to entangled suspicions about the park. In this presentation, I examine this new heritage site, which consists of an eco-park, a museum, a small cemetery and a series of public sculptures and memorials. I argue that the new park registers shifting solidarities, both in terms of local concerns that are linked to political fractures, and in terms of a contemporary re-interpretation of the revolutionary friendship or comradeship (zhanyou, 战友) historically associated with the TAZARA.

    Ruth Simbao is a Professor in Art History & Visual Culture and the National Research Foundation Research Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. She received a PhD from Harvard University, and runs the Arts of Africa and Global Souths postgraduate programme. Her research interests are the arts of Africa, art and activism, and artists’ responses to Chinese presence in Africa with a particular focus on South Africa and Zambia.

    Lifang Zhang
     Between “马丁” and “MAP”: Zambian artist Martin Abasi Phiri’s artistic practices and his experiences in China
    Martin Abasi Phiri (1957-1977), also known as MAP and 马丁, is a late Zambian artist who studied at Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing from 1983 to 1988. Between his return from China in 1988 and his mournful decease in 1997, Martin made monumental contribution to the Zambian art scene with his art work and his effort to promote visual art. In spite of his significant artistic legacy, very little has been documented and written about the artist. Through Martin’s personal archives, relevant institutions’ documents and interviews with his former classmates, students and colleagues, this research explores Martin Phiri’s life and artistic experience in relation to his engagement with China. More specifically, this research explores Martin’s three roles as an artist, an art lecturer at Evelyn Hone College in Lusaka and the founder of the Zambian National Visual Arts Council (ZNVAC), and examines the way in which his practices were informed by his experiences in China. By doing so, this research fills the gap of documenting Martin Phiri’s work and brings out the hidden artistic network in the global south.

    Lifang Zhang received her Master’s degree in 2017 at the Department of Asian and African Languages & Literatures at Peking University, and her Master’s degree in Art History at the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University in 2019. She is currently a PhD student in Art History at Rhodes University and a member of the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research programme.

    Binjun Hu
    Carving Out the Lines of Visual Intimacy in the Story of a Chinese Artist and Collector

    This paper explores the ways visual intimacy is performed and enabled by the agency of knives in art making and art appreciation by a Chinese artist and collector who lives between South Africa and China. Based on a biographical study of Li Shudi, it demonstrates the use of the knife physically and metaphorically in facilitating multiple accesses of proximity that pulls together traces of informal, obscured interconnections of ordinary individuals in the South (Baasch, Folárànmí, Koide, Kakande and Simbao 2020). The use of a knife, on the one hand, provides “restorable reach” (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973) to Li’s memory of carving Mao’s profile during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and it also provides a link to his vulnerable experience of working as a graphic designer in a Taiwanese owned carpet factory in South Africa, where he carved patterns on the handle of a knife and used it as a means of protection. On the other hand, it also provides a reflective reach to the learning experience with his lecturer Liu Tiehua (1917- 1997), who was one of the primary artists in the Modern Woodcut Movement in China (1930-40s), and to his print collecting practices in South Africa. A sense of visual intimacy is activated by Li as he carries the bold and often crude lines of Liu’s style in woodcarving and the spirit of an emotional rawness and humility with him in art making and collecting practices in South Africa. The paper substantiates the visual intimacy by interweaving visual analysis of Li’s collection of Japanese prints, and artworks of a South African community artist Edith Bukani as well as Li’s artworks. It proposes the visual intimacy maintained by individuals like Li Shudi as a new way of seeing the obscured and complex co-presence of informality, proximity, and mobility within the broad discourse of China-Africa contacts.

    Binjun Hu is a PhD candidate in the National Research Foundation SARChI Chair Programme in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Fine Art Department, Rhodes University, South Africa. She received her MA in Heritage Studies at Wits University. Her current research focuses on de-centering the history of collecting by reflecting on the agency of Chinese collectors in South Africa.

    JIN Xi
    “Fake Masks”: A Reflection on the Reception of African Arts in China

    Chinese collectors, scholars and museum curators are showing growing interest in African artistic works in an era of a closer Sino-Africa relationship. This essay is initially sparked by Taiwanese artist Chihying’s exhibit “I’ll be back” (UCCA Beijing, 2018), in which the artist inquires the circulation and reception of African arts in China under a changing geopolitical landscape. Through an analysis of Chihying’s project and a historical examination of the long-debated issue of “authenticity” in twentieth century African art history, this presentation suggests some cautionary notes for African arts exhibitions in China, most of which remain unconscious of the problematic history and unequal power relationships behind descriptive terms such as “traditional”, “tribal”, “mysterious” and “primitive” when introducing African arts and cultures, and thus might fail to challenge the long existing culture hegemony around African arts.

    Xi JIN     (she/her/hers) received a master’s degree in African Literature and Cultures at Peking University in China in 2021. She is currently a graduate student at the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in U.S. Her research interests include African literature, African popular culture, literary and cultural interactions between China and African nations.

  • 10th online mini-symposium CAAC2021 | Between the Cold War and the Third World: Toward a Transnational Archive of Literary Africa-China

    Date: 25 Feb 2022 (Fri)

    Discussant: Ying Cheng, Department of Asian and African Languages and Cultures, Peking University

    Supported by: HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies

    Kun HUANG
    Translated Solidarity: Lumumba’s Textual Afterlives and the Poetics of African Decolonization in Maoist China

    This paper traces the translation, reception, and adaptation of African anti-colonial poetics that emerged from the Congo Crisis in the People’s Republic of China in the early 1960s. It examines the Cold War discourse translated African poetry was coded in, the socialist literary network that facilitated and constrained textual circulation, and the Maoist script underlying Chinese writers’ responses to Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and African decolonization. It argues that the Cold War served as a powerful geopolitical and discursive structure for keeping specific anti-colonial African authors, texts, tropes, and aesthetics alive and legible across national and ideological borders, while also rendering them susceptible to mistranslations and appropriations. The material, intellectual, and affective configurations of the Cold War thus profoundly mediated imaginations and articulations of Sino-African solidarity.

    Kun Huang is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Comparative Literature and a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She is writing a dissertation on the discourse on racial blackness in modern Chinese culture in the long twentieth century. Her research interests include comparative race studies, China-Africa cultural connections, and theories of translation and comparison.

    Mingqing YUAN
    Kofi Awoonor in China: Revisiting the Afro-Asian Writers’ Interactions in the early 1960s

    Interactions and exchanges among Asian and African writers are often shadowed by the focus on the Cold War two-camp narratives. Starting from the Ghanian poet Kofi Awoonor’s visit to China in 1963, this paper focuses on the textual and personal interactions between Africa and China in the early 1960s, especially the exchanges under the frame of the Afro-Asian solidarity promoted by the Bandung conference. It examines the roles of writers and poetry in facilitating and forming an alternative sentimental structure and literary aesthetics within the “Third World”. Different from the China-dominant perspective, this paper emphasizes the agency and active involvement of African writers in these movements and their personal life track under the influence of international and national geopolitics. Meanwhile, it calls for more attention to multi-sited, cross-genre, and multilingual materials beyond the English archives. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of the Third World from an individual perspective as a dynamic and fluid space of interactions both within and beyond ideologies.

    Mingqing Yuan is currently a doctoral student at Bayreuth International School of African Studies and a fellow at the project Recalibrating Afrikanistik, Germany. She just submitted her dissertation titled “Literalizing Kenya*China: From the Third World to the Global South”. Her research interests include literatures from Africa, cultural studies about Africa-China interactions, Africa and the cultural Cold War, and African popular culture. 

    Ying CHENG is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and African Languages and Cultures, Peking University. Her research interests include youth and popular culture in Africa, African visual and performance arts, cultural interactions between China and Africa, and so on. Dr Ying Cheng has also been a research associate (Arts of Africa and the Souths) of Rhodes University, South Africa since 2017. In recent years, she has published articles in African Arts, Journal of African Culture Studies, Routeledge Handbook of African Literature, African Theatre, and so on.