The Global China Pulse journal is an Open Access platform where it is possible to discuss Global China from a more grounded perspective that is not consumed by geopolitical speculations or the abstract and aggregate macroeconomic discussions that dominate current debates. In line with our sister project, The People’s Map of Global China, here we strive to offer perspectives on how Global China is playing out in local contexts, focusing in particular on how Chinese engagements overseas impact, for better or for worse, people’s lived experiences. We do this through contributions written not only by scholars, but also by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), activists, and journalists.
In this issue, you will find five original essays. Benedicte Bull focuses on China’s entrance into the Inter-American Development Bank, showing how the United States sought to hinder China’s entry against the will of many Latin American member countries, resulting in a process that has weakened regional multilateral norms. Han Cheng examines the creation of international development studies in China over the past decade as an intellectual project, tracing the genealogy and evolving landscape of the nascent state disciplinary apparatus at a complicated moment of geopolitical flux. Rui Jie Peng uses ethnographic evidence from her fieldwork at the Chinese state-sponsored Coca Coda Sinclair Hydroelectric Project in Ecuador to explore how a transnational Chinese company organises boundaries between spaces, bodies, and symbolic differences to relationally produce and maintain the hierarchical organisation of work and life at a construction site. Antulio Rosales and Kelsey Shaw take Venezuela, China’s largest borrower, as a case study to explore how Beijing’s non-interventionist principles create important limitations on its foreign lending practices, arguing that rather than a ‘debt trap’, Chinese engagements in Venezuela are to be seen as a lender’s trap for China and a rent trap for Venezuela, in which neither party achieved what it wanted. Finally, Trissia Wijaya and Shofwan Al Banna Choiruzzad look at Chinese capital in the controversial palm oil sector in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer, to make a case for a more nuanced understanding of the diversity of structural power of Chinese economic actors across different sectors, as well as the agency of actors in the host country.
The issue also includes an opinion piece by Petra Kjell Wright from the NGO Recourse in which she explores whether the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s Chinese leadership plays a part in making the bank ‘green’ or whether the institution is simply caught in the same ‘business as usual’ operational model as its peers. In the ‘Voices from the Ground’ section, we also feature two interviews with activists with a long history of engagement with Global China. In the first, Hong Zhang interviews environmental lawyer Jingjing Zhang, the founder and Director of the Center for Transnational Environmental Accountability (CTEA), one of very few environmental NGOs with expertise in Chinese law that actively address the challenges of Chinese investment overseas. In the second, Konstantinos Tsimonis discusses with lawyer Anthi Giannoulou and trade unionist Anastasia Frantzeskaki the case of a successful legal mobilisation against some activities of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO in the Greek port of Piraeus.
We wrap up the issue with four conversations about recently published books. Jessica DiCarlo interviews Annah Lake Zhu about her Rosewood: Endangered Species Conservation and the Rise of Global China (Harvard University Press, 2022). Juliet Lu engages Mike Dwyer about his Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush (University of Washington Press, 2022). Miriam Driessen chats with Ute Röschenthaler about her African Agency in China’s Tea Trade (Brill, 2022). Finally, Denise Y. Ho and John Carroll discuss the latter’s The Hong Kong–China Nexus (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
The Editors
