The tech rivalry between China and the United States is often portrayed as a battle for control over the future of the internet. Media and political discourse fuel the idea of two competing cyberworlds: a United States–led internet and a China-led alternative. In this essay, I show how this binary view overs…

Over the past two decades, Chinese companies have undertaken numerous infrastructure development projects across Africa, contributing to local development. However, these high-profile projects have often attracted significant criticism due to ecological and environmental concerns, local conflicts, and socioe…

China is home to the world’s largest aquaculture industry, raising aquatic plants and animals for food, and was responsible for more than half of global production by 2016 (Zhao et al. 2021). Domestically, Chinese demand for seafood is expected to grow dramatically, with the gap between local demand and loca…

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 tra…

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 tha…

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 cap…

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 corruptio…

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 relationall…

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 ge…

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 A…