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 soci…

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 lo…

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…

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…