UC Davis

This dissertation examines the controversial presence of Chinese migrants and investors in Zambia today. It brings together the study of racialized conflict and labor migration, neocolonialism and resource extraction, Christianity and new religious movements, and emerging transformations in global capitalism. Throughout, the dissertation explores the diverse forms of relationality enabled by Chinese-African encounters, ranging from intimacy and fellowship, to exclusion, to mutual dependence and obligation. Drawing upon over two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in both Zambia and China, the dissertation examines relations at Chinese-operated coal mines in Zambia as well as in the hometowns of their miners in both countries. The dissertation focuses especially on these relations as they manifest in two different domains. The first domain is that of religion, through a Jehovah’s Witness congregation that, though overwhelmingly composed of local Zambian congregants, nevertheless conducts its meetings exclusively in Mandarin Chinese in order to better evangelize Chinese expatriates. The second domain is that of labor, through a Chinese-operated coal mine in Zambia which has engendered not only violence but also new linguistic and familial formations that put the very categories of “Zambian” and “Chinese” into variation. Taking issue with simplistic narratives that have too frequently painted Chinese companies and individuals in Africa as either neocolonial exploiters or South-South, “win-win” development partners, the dissertation brings these two domains together to demonstrate that concrete encounters between Chinese and Zambians in a contact zone are far more ambivalent and open-ended than is often portrayed by contemporary rhetoric about “China in Africa.”