During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that […]

On 26 March 2018, a milestone in the renminbi’s journey towards internationalisation was reached at the Shanghai International Energy Exchange with the launch of yuan-denominated crude oil futures contracts. The introduction of ‘petroyuan’ futures contracts represents not just an alternative currency for t…

China experts today increasingly describe the current linguistic landscape of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as one of ‘Mandarin hegemony’. But what does this term mean, how was it created, and how is it reinforced? The purpose of this essay is to define the concept and explore the primary tools empl…

On the outskirts of the Uzbek city of Samarkand—a key site on the historic Silk Road and the capital of the ancient Timurid Empire, which stretched from Iran to the South Caucasus and parts of India—lies ‘Silk Road Samarkand’, the largest, most ambitious tourism complex in Central Asia, and a development t…

Chinese overseas direct investment in Southeast Asia is often seen as extending the reach of Beijing’s influence. What this overlooks, however, is the diversity of structural power of Chinese economic actors across different sectors, as well as the agency of actors in the host country. Looking at Chinese c…

Focusing on Venezuela, China’s largest borrower, this essay explores how Beijing’s non-interventionist principles create important limitations on its foreign lending practices. In the case of Venezuela, the governance of commodity-backed loans has ingrained mechanisms that allowed mismanagement and corrupt…

Building on a critical analysis of spatial politics, this essay uses ethnographic evidence from the Chinese state-sponsored Coca Codo Sinclair (CCS) Hydroelectric Project in Ecuador to explore how the transnational Sinohydro organises boundaries between spaces, bodies, and symbolic differences to relationa…

This essay examines the creation of international development studies in China over the past decade as an intellectual project. It traces the genealogy of the nascent state disciplinary apparatus, making visible the evolving landscape of individuals, institutions, and ideologies at a complicated moment of …

China has engaged with Latin America at both bilateral and multilateral levels. This essay focuses on China’s entrance into the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and its impact on regional multilateral governance. It shows that the United States sought to hinder China’s entry, against the will of Latin…

This essay unpacks the personal stories and experiences of two Chinese individuals who have lived in Johannesburg for a considerable time. It offers contextualised glimpses about ageing and living in a city in which inequality, excess, violence, and the mundane coexist in a complicated tension. By using ‘p…