What are the social costs of extraction? And how does extraction reconfigure traditional power structures and cultural practices? In Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2022), Omolade Adunbi compares the extraction of economic value t…

China scholars in Latin America and the Caribbean have long critiqued the monolithic way in which Chinese identity is represented in the dominant literature. In Transpacific Developments: The Politics of Multiple Chinas in Central America (Cornell University Press, 2021), Monica DeHart tackles this discont…

Why do African students who attend Chinese universities have to teach English as a means of survival, while Chinese students are frantically acquiring the English skills that enable them to pursue studies in the United States and Britain? Why does the Third-World solidarity that Africans hope to find and s…

The past two decades have witnessed an explosive growth in historical scholarship exploring African American connections with China during the twentieth century. In their Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies web resource Teaching China through Black History, Keisha A. Brown, Ruodi Duan, and James Ge…

How has Chinese green tea become Mali’s national drink? By retracing the tea supply chain from Bamako’s corner shops and wholesale markets to southern China’s tea plantations and processing plants, in African Agency in China’s Tea Trade (Brill, 2022), Ute Röschenthaler describes in vivid detail how a disti…

How do we understand the trajectory of Hong Kong’s relationship with China? In The Hong Kong–China Nexus (Cambridge University Press, 2022), John Carroll—one of the foremost historians working on Hong Kong today—introduces the fateful history of the city, from its establishment as a British colony to its s…

Over the past two decades, Laos has been on the front lines of a global rise in transnational corporate land investments. This has been driven by China’s supposedly growing appetite for foreign land and resources, which has featured centrally in coverage of this so-called new global land rush. Mike Dwyer’s…

China and the environment often sit in tension—for example, China is a primary polluter while also the key to our global environmental security, and China is both the largest deforester and the largest planter of trees. How might we reconcile demand for resources within China and the country’s efforts to p…

The rise of ‘Global China’ is the result of sustained economic globalisation in the past decades, undergirded by a generally positive relationship between China and the United States. Since the watershed moment of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the Chinese and US economies h…

Maria Repnikova’s new book, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines China’s visions and practices of soft power. Repnikova starts by analysing Chinese academic writing and official speeches about soft power to grasp whether and how this concept has been transformed in the Chinese co…