Mingwei Huang, "Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century" (Duke UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Welcome to the New Books Network. I am one of your hosts, Nome Anthony Kanayo. Today, I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Ming-Wei Kwan. Dr. Kwan is an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Dartmouth College.

an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in race and migration. She earned her PhD in American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her work has been published in several reputable scholarly outlets, including Scholar and Feminist Online,

Radical History Review, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Public Culture, VEG, and Safondi. Today we'll be discussing her new book, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, South Africa in the Chinese Century, published by Duke University Press. Good afternoon, Prof.

Hello, Kanayo. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. So before we dive into the book itself, let's take a minute to talk about you and what motivated you to write this book. Well, I started my research project in 2013, and this was a time when the field of China-African studies was still very new.

There was a lot of journalistic writing, most famously Howard French's China's Second Continent. I believe the subtitle is how a million migrants are, you know, basically the thesis is a million migrants are starting an empire on the continent, right? There was a lot of social scientific writing work kind of informal.

by international relations and political economy on the question of Chinese neocolonialism in Africa. And I wanted to complicate these grand narratives of the Chinese scramble in Africa or South-South cooperation and to understand how ordinary African and Chinese actors understand and negotiate power relations and difference. So that was kind of my entry point into this project. Yeah.

And that is very interesting because most times these narratives, you know, just remain at those top levels and, you know, kind of occlude ordinary people. And, you know, while these people are really the people that make

you know, the, the, the realities of what constitutes China African engagement. Right. Yeah. So, um, I mean, reading the book, the book is about the Chinese century and I know this fam probably has been coined earlier, uh, before the, the, the writing of this book, uh,

But in your own terms, what do you, what constitutes the Chinese century in your own definition?

Right. So it was actually, it's actually an American neologism, which gets coined in the early 2000s as the People's Republic of China overtook the U.S. as the premier economic power. And what I'm interested in is what this term conjures. It's a term kind of like the rise of China, right? Which is a term that

You know, it's another kind of master narrative that can never capture, you know, the actual contested geographies and histories and visions bracketed within this term. But I think the Chinese century is interesting to think about as kind of a horizon, as kind of a world making kind of

order shifting kind of moment, like an epoch. So I'm really thinking with like historical conjunctures and thinking about, you know, the 21st century is a moment where China is, you

you know, has been ascending for quite some time and what that does for the world order after say, you know, the British century and the American century. And, and specifically what this means for theory, right. For how we,

capitalism and race and racial capitalism and colonialism and empire when we're talking about China, right? And not the West, right? And how we need to reorient our thinking for this historical conjuncture. Yeah.

That is interesting. Okay, so I will leave that for now. But the book, going to the book, the book is also about race capital. You call it racial capitalism. But usually when these terms are invoked, it is usually in relation with white and other bodies.

But here you are talking about race and capitalism with regards to Chinese, presumably non-white and South Africans. So how can we understand that?

these terms in the absence of whiteness. So how can we understand racial capitalism in light of Chinese and African engagements in South Africa? Right. So racial capitalism is a theory of capitalism, right, that understands the production of racial differences

Right.

How about de-exceptionalizing China here? Right. Why should why should China and Chinese capitalism be an exception? Right. To to how we understand capitalism and biracial capitalism. Right. It's certainly not a term that I coined. Right. It comes from capitalism.

right, these, a lot of scholarship based in U.S. and South African traditions, right, of thinking about racial capitalism, right? And so the framework, I think, is important as another way of understanding how race and capital and power come together in this, you know, African context, right? And

you know, when I started the project, I was really thinking through neocolonialism and I didn't think that neocolonialism could really capture all of the kinds of dynamics. It, it, I, I think it's useful. I think, you know, thinking about colonial afterlives is useful. Um, but I, I needed a different analytic to, to think about this. And so racial capitalism, um, became that kind of primary analytic. Um, and,

And so, although, right, much of the scholarship has been based in either South African scholarship that was thinking about colonialism and the gold mines and apartheid, right? Often through a black-white dynamic, right? And then in...

In the kind of U.S. and North American tradition, a lot of the work has been based in histories of slavery and capitalism, right? And again, that often is centered around a black-white axis. Although there's been a lot of scholarship, right, that goes beyond that. But in the Sino-African context, right, we're talking about Chinese and black people.

South Africans and Southern African migrants, right? And so I'm trying to think about how some of the...

dynamics and logics of anti-Blackness, of a racialized kind of exploitation of labor, how certain figures of domination are kind of being reconfigured, right, which is the title, right, in the Chinese century. So it's not, it's

there are no white bodies here, right? But it doesn't mean that dynamics of racial capital are not there or legacies of kind of a white driven racial capitalism are not there, right? And it's really useful to think with, you know, some of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's writing, right? Who

you know, who insists that all capitalism is racial capitalism. And a few years ago, she did this interview with Michael Dawson that, you know, she says, if we, you know, we, if we want to, you know, keep racial capitalism useful as a concept, we have to stop thinking that it's only white people capitalism, right? We have to think about a world movement of racial capitalization. And I would say in the 21st century,

Chinese century, which is already, you know, about 25 years, right? We're a quarter way through. That I think scholars of racial capitalism need to grapple with, right, with China and the difference of China, right, in thinking about how global racial capitalism works today, right? We can't ignore China.

and also like the kind of emergent economies of the global South where often there are people of color and elites, right? In formerly colonized countries who are capitalists now, right? And how there are really complex colonial legacies and racial entanglements happening now. And I hope that my book and my arguments can be

for thinking about other sites, right? Yeah. I know something interesting about this book is the introduction of this sort of new analytical lens. Often there's been this pattern of forcing narratives or current realities to suit existing realities

methods and sort of conceptual and concepts and frameworks in the social sciences. So, but this is actually what is interesting. Now, the thesis of this book is that, I mean, just like you also said, if all capitalism are racial, why would the Chinese capitalism not, you know, be seen as such?

So the thesis is that Chinese racial and imperial forms overlay European ones, not burying or displacing them. But I'm actually kind of curious about any kind of distinctions in the characteristics of Euro-American imperialism and racial capitalism in contrast with that of the Chinese, which is current and ongoing. Right. So...

So in the book, I argue that Chinese racial capitalist ideologies

they overlay, right, kind of the, particularly the Euro-American or the Western or particularly like you could say like the British and Afrikaner kind of led forms of, right, kind of racial accumulation and exploitation that these new Chinese migrant entrepreneurs, they kind of build on the legacies, right, that

that the British and Afrikaner left, right? Particularly like with British and gold mining. And these new actors, they are not aware of these legacies, right? They came, you know, in the early 2000s, but they certainly, they're beneficiaries of them. And this was a way of,

getting around this question of our Chinese neocolonial or not, and I'm trying to answer it through, well, they benefit from colonial legacies, right. That they didn't make right. But, but that doesn't let them off the hook either. So, so there, I would say there are some continuities, right. In how, how,

these new Chinese migrant traders can take advantage of Southern African migrations, right? People who've been going to Johannesburg for generations from the colonial migrant labor system through the present, right? There are, so there are similarities like from the Southern African migrant workers point of view, right? There are similarities between

between um kind of exploitation um and oppression like race a really kind of racist oppression from whether that's you know the the whites from before to chinese today right um and then there also are you know these race you know racialized labor hierarchies and and in in

and employment dynamics, right. That, that are, that are similar, um, that, um, um, so there are some continuities, right. But there are big differences in scale and like the intensity of it, right. Chinese migrant traders are not the same as say Durand mines, right. The scale is completely like, you cannot compare those things, but I do think there are similar dynamics, right. And you, and, and,

you can only see those dynamics from kind of the vantage point of the Southern African worker, right. Who articulates their kind of oppression as laborers kind of through a kind of a consciousness of history. And when you read the mall through the mine and so there, there are some also big distinctions with,

you know, what is the racial of racial capitalism? So what's tricky here is that, you know, race in kind of in Western epistemologies is not the same thing as race in China. So there's a whole other complicated kind of history instead of, you know, meanings and genealogies of race in China, right? Where there is no exact word for race, right? In Chinese, but I do through ethnography, right?

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Thank you. So I will try to move very quickly because of time. In chapter two of the book, you termed the Chinese in South Africa as sojourners. And in my understanding while reading the book, I believe sojourners are also kind of colonialists, like sojourner colonizers.

colonialism you know so i was wondering what makes sojourner i mean the concept of sojourner can you just explain briefly for us and probably uh talking about what make this sojourner right so so to return to that moment of like howard french right china's second continent right he he

In that book, he really makes kind of the Chinese migrant as a kind of pioneer in neocolonial actor, right? That the act of kind of migration is a kind of settlement, right, in Africa. And I wanted to think about this figure of the migrant, of the Chinese migrant as neocolonial actor, as

pioneer as kind of frontier figure differently um so i think of the chinese migrant particularly the chinese migrant trader or entrepreneur kind of as a as a sojourner right one who is not trying to settle permanently right when you think of a pioneer or settler that kind of implies a

a long-term residence, right, in South Africa or to plant roots or to stay. And in this case, these

for the vast majority of these migrants, their goal is to go back to China. It's not to stay. It's not to plant roots, right? It's not to join the Chinese diaspora, right? Of which there is a significant one in South Africa. Their ultimate goal is to like make enough money in South Africa to return to China, right? They locate their future there.

in China, right? And so South Africa is kind of a detour for them to catch up, like economically catch up to the speed of development in China. So most of these, you know, migrant traders, they are from rural backgrounds. You know, they had enough kind of capital to make the journey, but, you know, they are not

they're clearly, they're not well off, right? And so they are trying to achieve a good life for themselves and their families ultimately in China, right? So they're sojourners, right? It's distinctly not a project of settler colonialism. It's a distinctly unsettler project, right? And how some of those kind of colonial dynamics play out has to do with, again, the kind of religious

racialized nature of labor of labor exploitation right in hiring precarious southern african migrants right whom they call like black like they use the term hate hate goal like black labor right um and um also the way that money moves and all the money the profit right the surplus value it goes back to china to be invested in a future there so that's kind of what makes uh

or colonialism, colonial. Thank you so much. Well, your answer is prompting me to ask a question I am actually keeping for the later part of this interview. But I'm going to touch on it lightly. And it is about, you know, China in Africa and what actually constitutes China in Africa. This book actually focused on...

a group of Chinese which are the entrepreneurs. And here in your response, you also mentioned about the Chinese diaspora. So can you help us understand what really constitutes China and Africa? I mean, and probably what lens the impact of China can be judged? I mean, this is actually a question I left

for the later part of this. But I think I'm going to ask it in the light of, you know, Chinese diaspora, Chinese sojourners, colonial, I mean, entrepreneurs. And these people are also separate from the Chinese state. So, you know, can you really touch on this issue? Right. So,

I mean, my study, it's just one little slice, right, of this larger thing that we might call China-Africa, right? There are so many...

China's right there's there's there's multiple there's a multiplicity of Chineseness right as as a kind of a racial ethno racial group as a as a national group in terms of language in terms of Chinese capital right so in the book I I use the the phrase Chinese capitalist projects and

instead of Chinese capital, right? And there's lots of wonderful scholarship on Chinese capital and Chinese capitalism and the state and the private varieties, right, that CK Wee has written about for quite a long time. I think of it as Chinese capitalist projects because they're all differently constituted and I'm trying to highlight the plurality of it. So

To me, there's no kind of singular China-Africa, right? It's a loose kind of trans-regional geography, right? It's stitched together through all of these fragments, right, of which, you know, the Chinese wholesale mall along Johannesburg's old gold mining belt that I look at is only one site. So I think the dynamics, we can perhaps generalize a bit here and there, but

But each site is constituted differently. And I think that's also the kind of analysis that I'm bringing with the palimpsest, that there are place-based histories and dynamics at each place, that China-Africa is not a singular thing, that's like the

the product of a totality of global China, like coming to descending on Africa, right. In this top down way that then just like remakes it. And we can say this is neocolonial or not. Rather, I'm trying to think about, you know, a multi multiplicity of, of things that we might think of as global China and Chinese capitalist projects that, you know,

that interact with, uh, you know, these, these really specific places and their dynamics, right. And the kind of sedimented histories, the memories, the actions, right. The acts of African people too, right. To, to, to bring back, you know, Africa, you know, the question of African agency often comes up in these China, Africa discussions as if China's the only actor here. Um,

So I think of, you know, I call it Sino-African worlds and world making that these are kind of dynamic sites, right? This is a dynamic geography that it's really hard to judge it, right?

And throughout the book, I try to give more of a patchwork sense of, you know, to gesture that this is a really multilayered, multivalent world. And the people who populate it, right, who bring it to life, they have all different kinds of interpretation and investments in it, right? That I try to kind of make...

make the sense of it, you know, thinking about what is China, Africa, how should we think of it, as kind of open-ended and ambivalent. So I hope to kind of leave readers with... To make that judgment. Right, to make the judgment, to keep it open-ended, right, to put

put a lot of texture, right. And a lot of ways of thinking about it, but to, I mean, I think for some readers of China, Africa, I think they will place me in this like, Oh, she's saying it's neocolonial camp. Right. Or, and I, I'm sure I could align myself there, but I don't think that's exactly the argument I'm making. I think I'm very critical, right. Of, of, of,

you know, quote unquote China and Africa, but I still think I leave some open-endedness and room for interpretation, right? And to call into question the whole framing, right, of yes or no, it's neocolonial or not, Chinese people are racist or not, right? And I try to at least say, let me take this question and answer it or not answer it from a

from a variety of ways and to perhaps question the question itself. All right. Thank you very much for that clarification. So I'm going to shift more quicker. So this book, in a way, or more generally, is about South Africa. In Chapter 3, it kind of situates these contemporary cultures

Chinese engagement within a longer Afro-Asian and Indian sort of Indian cycles of labor, cultural exchanges, and solidarity. How do historical legacies of Indian indentured labor and Afro-Asian migration help explain these current narratives? Sure. So, you know, I was writing about...

So in the book, I try to place contemporary Chinese migration to South Africa in a variety of different historical frames that probably don't immediately come to mind. People probably think of telling the story of Chinese in South Africa through a story that happened after 1998 when South Africa normalized migration.

diplomatic relations with the PRC or, right. There are other, there, there are other more obvious frames. I, I locate, right. The, these Chinese wholesale malls with the history of gold mining in South Africa. And I also in one chapter look to the history of Asian, right.

indentured labor, both Indian and Chinese indentured labor in South Africa, to think about the enduring and very elastic racialization of Asian capital and labor in South Africa. So that encompasses

Chinese traders today that also includes Indian traders, right? Since the beginning of the Transvaal colony, right? Since apartheid. So when I was writing about Chinese, the kind of Orientalist racialization of Chinese traders as

kind of an economic threat, right, to post-apartheid South Africa, I found a lot of resonance with how Indian traders were depicted as a threat to white settlers in the Transvaal. And there were so many kind of discursive resonances or rhetorical resonances in the kind of these tropes of like influx and flooding and kind of duplicity of the Asian trader, right?

that I think there's something about how Asian racialization through kind of the threat of foreign capital or foreign labor, whether that's to kind of white settlers from the turn of the century to, you know, Black South Africans who rely on

the manufacturing industry who then see, you know, the arrival of Chinese traders and goods as a threat to the post-apartheid economy, how kind of that racialization has been, has been really enduring and, and, and able to remake itself. So I place this kind of China Africa moment in kind of other, other historical frames to make sense of them.

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please apply so um chapter four is perhaps my best chapter of this book uh it talks about the afterlife of gold and you know i keep reading this chapter and i can't stop reading it so thank you you sort of um talk about these moles from the lens of the minds you know uh

and you kind of highlighted how patterns are repeating in these malls that are known in Chinese malls that are known in South Africa. Can you help us understand what's this concept of, at least our audience, what's this concept of afterlives of gold tells about the persistence of racialized labor exploitation? Right. So this actually...

I think really lines up with your own interests on thinking about the legacies of colonialism. So I, I think, I think this is, this is a really critical chapter in the book. Right. And it helps me really shift my thinking right for the whole book. You know, when I started doing research, I didn't,

think too much of the location of these malls, right? I, I recognize that they were on the old mining belts. And I started to think about it more. And once I started to really notice, like, that, you know, the afterlife of industrial gold mining, right, the afterlives of gold, I really sought everywhere, right? So, you know, the

the location of these malls are, are literally on the exhausted gold reef, right? There are old shafts, right? Disused shafts all around these malls, right? There are artisanal miners, right? That are called Zama Zamas in South Africa working nearby. Um, within the mall, there are a lot of Southern African workers from Zimbabwe, from Malawi. Um, many of them have, um,

come from families where people have been going to Johannesburg for generations, right? To work on the mines or to go to Johannesburg to work, you know, as domestic workers, right? For women. So there, so I started to see how the legacy of, you know, colonial labor migrations, right? Around like through, through Johannesburg's gold mines, how they last with,

Southern African migrant workers now coming to Johannesburg, specifically often to work at these Chinese malls. So I started to think about these kind of these patterns, right, that continue even after the mines have been closed. And now we have these

Chinese malls on top of what used to be, you know, gold reef. And so there are material legacies, right, in terms of labor migrations, right, in terms of how these malls even ended up being in this part of Johannesburg, right, had to do with the redevelopment of the gold mining belt. And then from the perspective of workers, right, many of them

like the way that they think about Johannesburg, right, is through narratives of going to Johannesburg to work, right, to labor, to be exploited, also to resist, right, and often to resist the white Afrikaner boss, right? And I started to think about how workers, their consciousness has been shaped, right?

through this history of gold mining, but now it's kind of being rerouted through the day-to-day labor conditions of the mall, right? Of working for Chinese, not white. How they sometimes understand Chinese employers as white, right? Not white as white.

you know, a white body or white phenotype, but white as a position of privilege and power, right? That's structural. So in this chapter, I'm really thinking about how the color line has been reconfigured, right? In the Chinese century. Thank you.

Chapter 5 and chapter 6 are more like the manifestations of the racism in this context, in the context you're writing. And in chapter 5, you highlighted how everyday discourses of crime become vehicles for racial stereotyping. And then in chapter 6, you talked about the biopolitics, how in

you know, uh, Han Chinese racial discourses and anti-Black racism is informed by gender narratives. Uh, so can you help us understand in what ways stereotypes of criminality, uh, self-naturalize and legitimize racial inequalities? Yeah. So I have two chapters, um, in the book that's really looking at, uh,

Racial formations, right? Specifically Chinese racial formations, racial discourses and ways of thinking about blackness specifically, right? And I wanted to really zoom in on this question of anti-blackness and race, right? And anti-blackness as a specific thing.

phenomenon, right, that cannot be subsumed as just one iteration of racism, right? I think often in the study of China-Africa engagements, there's not enough attention to the specificity of race. Often, you know, people think about cultural differences or language or

And I do think there's something specific, specifically racial, right, about how power is working. And within kind of the racial and racism, I think anti-Blackness is even more specific. And so these two chapters are thinking about how Chinese migrant traders kind of how they think about Blackness and race through racism.

through this kind of specter of crime, right? And through the everyday talk of crime. So I'm less interested in like actual crime incidents and more about how Chinese imagine crime, how they organize their day-to-day lives around fear of crime, right? You know, you have Chinese traders who deal in cash, right? Who are doing large amounts of wholesale trading in cash, right?

in Johannesburg where not just Chinese but everyone is to a degree preoccupied with crime and how they really kind of produce this figure of the kind of black South African or African migrant worker right coming from their own kind of shops as a potential criminal right and how that shows

shapes day-to-day kind of distrust and relationships between Chinese traders and African workers. Um, it informs how Chinese move around the city, right? Um, it informs how they conjure Africa, how they talk about Africa as a place that's dangerous or backwards, right? Um, and

And that's a really important feature of, you know, Sino-African worlds, right? And then I also, you know, write about these kind of the intimacies, the day-to-day intimacies and proximities between children.

Chinese traders and African workers and all of these kind of anxieties around racial mixing and touching and things like that. Right. These are things like crime that are really important to the shaping of day to day interactions. Right. But are usually not written about. And I think they're important that we can't we

we can't understand labor relations or right. The, the, the wage relation only through, you know, these dynamics of, you know, exploitation and, and pay and things like that. I think that the, that these kind of more granular workings are, are how these power dynamics are lived. Right.

And there's a specificity to them, right, to Chinese racial formations and the role that gender and sexuality play in kind of animating these like racialized forms.

fears in dynamic employment. Thank you so much. So one thing you did was actually to trace these patterns of, I would call it subjectivities, tracing them back to traditional sort of cultural and traditional subjectivities. So can you

help us understand this from the perspective of the Chinese, specifically the Han Chinese because you are very specific. You know, how it traces back to traditional ways of thinking or episteme. So I...

attempts to kind of lay out a short history of kind of Chinese racial thought. And there are scholars who've done more work on this than I have. I mean, it's mostly an ethnography of, you know, Chinese racial formations that I also try to historically situate. And, you know, I bring in how...

you know, there, there are these modern and even pre-modern, right. Chinese ideas about black, white, and yellow, right. How kind of ideas of race were organized through color and through a sense of civilization, right. That, right. There are kind of much older ideas about how, right.

right, of the, of the yellow emperor and the Han dynasty and the Han people, right, as being racially and civilizationally superior. And actually, uh, white and black were, were beneath, right. But also there was more of a white was more valued, um, than, than black and black here mapped onto, you know, the place of Africa and the world. So I tried to, um,

look at these older racial ideas, right, and how they are, again, being reconfigured, right, to use my book title word, in this moment of China rising, right, where now there's a new hierarchy of

you know, Chinese, right, through kind of Han racial nationalism, kind of Chinese and the Han people at top, at the top, right, with that's superseding like the West, right, and the U.S. and whiteness, right? And Africa and Black still remains at the bottom, right? And that's significant.

You know, after reading this chapter, I, you know, kept on asking the question because there is a pattern I observed within the Chinese state contest whereby deniers are usually excuses to sort of over such narratives of racism in this contest. But I would like to understand, sorry,

Okay. So in chapter seven, it's some sort of a continuation of chapter two, in a way. Here you highlighted the extra legal practices of slavery.

remittances within the Chinese perspective, amongst the Chinese entrepreneurs in South Africa. How does, following the surplus, the chapter is actually following the surplus, how does the U.S. understand exploitative flows between South Africa and China?

This chapter, I put it at the very end of the book, right? Because I want the reader to work their way through all of the racial capitalist dynamics, right? And then to end with, well, what happens to the money, right? And then this kind of circles back to the question of colonialism, the sojourner colonialism, right? That what makes sojourner colonialism colonial is...

because the money goes back to China, right? Because ultimately migrant traders, their goal is to go back to China, right? With on kind of higher footing, right? And I trace the way that, you know, this money, right? Which is surplus value, which is profit produced through the exploitation of African migrant labor, right?

that this money moves back to China as remittances through extra legal channels, right? You'll just have to read the book to find out how, but my critique here is that these outflows, right, of capital, we can think of these as kind of neocolonial outflows, right? In here, I'm drawing heavily from, you know,

Walter Rodney's incisive critique of colonialism in how Europe underdeveloped Africa, right?

Where he kind of lays out this dialectical argument that Europe, Europe was developed right through by underdeveloping Africa. Right. And that the outflow of the net outflow of money, right. Of surplus was, was critical, right. What to, to the colonial relationship between metropole and colony, right.

So here I think about how the outflow of surplus, right, from South Africa to China kind of constitutes that specifically colonial relation. And here, perhaps in thinking about, right, in judging, right, China, Africa, is it colonial or not?

I do think here that perhaps, right, we can think about it as perhaps how China underdeveloped Africa, right? How there's a dialectics, right? There's a dialectics happening, right? Where these Chinese migrant traders, right? They lift up their lives back home, right? Right through the surplus value, right? That's extracted from African trade.

At the same time, I also qualified that with Southern African workers who are undocumented, who don't have other means of finding work in Johannesburg beyond piecework.

that even though they are underpaid and exploited, they are also making money to send back to their families, right? The jobs are meaningful to them, even as problematic as they are. And that they

these Chinese migrant traders, they also are in South Africa because they have been kind of left on the margins, right, of Chinese domestic development, right? So it's complicated in that way, right, that it's not quite as simple as like Chinese traders are just taking the money and running and, you know, being bad, you know, neocolonial actors. So again, I try to

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That's 1-800-Flowers.com slash Spotify. You know, what this chapter kept me thinking is about the general ability of these patterns. I was thinking, like I highlighted in my script, I was also thinking about probably African migrants, entrepreneurs in China, you know, and immigrants.

I was thinking about how these extra legal practices of remittances are either peculiar to the Chinese in South Africa, or if it's a practice that is prevalent among migrants engaging in a sort of profits-driven activities. Is it something? Yeah. Sorry. Go on. You know, I haven't done research on African migration yet.

But I will say what's critical here is that this is a surplus value that's generated through the exploitation of African labor. So that's critical. So it depends on the...

how the surplus is being generated. That's important. But migrants all over the world, right, are sending remittances through extra legal channels, right? So there's lots of work on Havala, right? So it's not particular to Chinese, right? But the critique that I'm making is like, you know, through building on raw meat and a particular, right, to China, Africa. And I'm curious to see how that

critique holds up right in other sites of this like large amorphous thing that we call China Africa.

Okay, so we're almost coming to the end. In the epilogue, it's a sort of meditation, meditation about or reflection about this China-African engagement. And what you highlighted was the project, field projects, you know, that are also embedded in this engagement, you know. So I am thinking about this from the promises of Global South, right?

China relationship being confined more to global south relations and global south interacting amongst themselves and probably advancing into development as a result of their engagement. So how do you reconcile the promises of global south cooperation with these enduring legacies of colonial racial capitalism?

That's a great question. And one that I still, after writing the book, don't have an easy answer to, or a good answer to. I, you know, I started the project, um,

quite naively thinking I would look for solidarity, right, in the age of BRICS. I was looking for Afro-Asian solidarity, right? I was hoping to find, you know, stories of friendship, right? And solidarity, right, in this age of BRICS, of China and South Africa being economically conjoined. And

I think sometimes the idea of South-South cooperation is an alibi for forms of exploitation. I, you know, I, I'm careful with state narratives, right. Of this kind of cooperation. I think it's productive to think about how people, ordinary people kind of attach aspirations for the future to

through kind of how kind of South-South solidarities are remembered. I think there also are a lot of colonial legacies, right, that are shaped the present and kind of like anti-colonial kind of aspirations, you know, in the kind of unfinished project of decolonization. So it's very difficult to reconcile them. But I just think that

I think of the present as being shaped by kind of the unfinished project of decolonization and anti-colonial solidarities and the legacies of Euro-American colonialism. And in South Africa, right, the continuation of settler colonialism.

So the point you make about aspirations is actually something that resonates with me, my thinking so very well, because I've been reviewing literature on, you know, China-African engagements, and I see so many authors that write about how, you know, Africans are attracted to China. As a result, you know,

so many reasons, but what I haven't actually seen is, um, um, sort of an analysis of aspiration and outcomes in terms of, you know, what motivates people, uh, to want to associate with China and what is the, uh, what is the outcome of these, um,

interactions afterwards. For example, people, people, a lot of people want to go to Confucius Institute, but at the end of it, you know, what is there? Are they, are they enthusiastic as they were before, you know, they went? Issues like these are something that I really haven't seen. And I'm, and I'm hoping that someday I could see such literature or even write one.

Right. And I think this is, this is, again, like the idea of the Chinese century, right? That there's something, you know, promising about, about kind of China leading the world. Is that how the world is going to unfold?

I'm not sure. The book is unfinished. In the sense of it's an unfinished history of the present. We don't know how the rest of the Chinese century will unfold. At the moment, with trade wars, with the late stage of US neoliberal rule,

empire kind of blowing out, right? It's hard to tell what the world order is going to look like. But I think the idea of China has had so much kind of promise and aspiration, right? The idea of going to China or participating in a Confucius Institute, right? There's ideas of mobility right there.

All right. Thank you so much, Dr. Huang. Uh, we, we have two more questions left, though is something you have sort of addressed. I, I was prompted to ask the questions earlier, but I mean, I'll still touch on it just briefly. Uh, the, the question I have is that this book is sort of contextualizes these engagements, uh,

puts it in the context of Chinese entrepreneurs' anger.

African, Southern African migrants in South Africa. But I was curious about the relationships between Black South Africa, South Africa as a country, the Blacks there and the Chinese. I mean, what makes, what gives, if I understand it very well, what gives the Chinese entrepreneurs this power of hierarchical

sort of power over these Blacks is the fact that most of the Blacks are illegal in South Africa. In South Africa, now I'm talking about the country. But what about those Black South Africans that are in South Africa legally? Do they get hired by the Chinese? And are they also exploited in the way these other Africans, the Malawians, Zimbabweans, and Nigerians?

you know, get exploited. Right. So just to very briefly answer your question, they only, at my field site, they only hired undocumented, right, without papers, right, Southern African workers, right, because they have no recourse, right? Okay. Okay. So,

So it means the only higher South Africans, like, sorry, Southern Africans and not the Black South Africans. That's correct. Wow. All right. That is interesting. So my final thoughts also is about...

the monolithic discourses of China and Africa, which you already pointed out, there are so many Chinese. There is no one Chinese in Africa. Right. And then we talked about how

how the impact of China in Africa can be judged. But I think the answer you gave was that it is left for the audience to imagine that. Is that correct? Right. Like, I don't want to give a final judgment, right?

I want to kind of explore, I want to explore how we construct questions and judgments, right? And also to give like a deep ethnographic perspective, right? That kind of refuses the simple way of answering that question. Well, thank you, Dr. Kwan.

I think this is our, this, we have to leave it here. It's, it's over an hour. So, I think our audience should go get the book, read it for themselves and also, you know, write a review of it and make your own critics and, you know, imagine,

imagine that is what you want your audience to do. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you for so closely engaging with my work. And I,

I couldn't have asked for a more kind of aligned reader in you. Thank you. So are there any other thoughts that I might have missed in the course of framing my question that you probably want to share with our audience regarding the book? I think the only thing I'll say is that since writing the book a year, well, I've been writing the book for a long time, but it was published last year.

And now, you know, under Trump, we're under such a different world already in terms of the world order, right? And I, it's hard to say, um,

how my arguments are going to hold up over time, right? About a Chinese century and the twilight of U.S. empire. And so, but I still hope that the kind of model of thinking like about history of the present, about palimpsests, about, you know, these place-based sedimentations of history, that it's still useful, right? Thank you. Thanks so much.