The field of Global China studies burgeoning over the past two decades proclaims that China must be analysed as an integral part of the global capitalist system (Franceschini and Loubere 2022). China’s global footprint takes variegated forms, including state-led and private investments, enterprises, infrastructure, media, cultural exchanges, knowledge, and migration flows (Lee 2017). Studying Chinese outbound migrants and their lived experiences is therefore an inextricable part of understanding China’s global presence, as demonstrated by the breadth of ethnographic research conducted across the African continent in the past decade (see, for instance, Driessen 2019; Franceschini 2024; Hanisch 2022; Haruyama 2022; Huang 2024; Schmitz 2017; Sheridan 2017; Wu 2021). These studies reflect a growing scholarly interest in grassroots interactions between overseas Chinese communities and local populations in Africa. They offer rich insights into how various Chinese actors are either segregated from or engage with diverse local social groups, primarily in workplace settings, and how trust, relationships, misunderstandings, tensions, and even conflicts emerge within these everyday people-to-people encounters. A common feature of this body of research is its ethnographic approach, which involves long-term immersive fieldwork among the studied population or at work sites, wherein a variety of methodological strategies or adaptations, ethical considerations, and researchers’ reflections are required. Indeed, fieldworkers researching Global China must constantly reflect on the potential impact of their field practices and the multifaceted ways in which knowledge is produced (Haraway 1988).

While social scientists have long reflected on how their identities, positionality, emotions, and subjectivity shape the research process (Bourdieu 1978), the geographies of knowledge and knowledge production (Livingstone 2003) remain comparatively underexplored. With the recent reflexive turn, an increasing number of researchers are critically examining how place shapes knowledge production, particularly on a regional (for example, Global North versus Global South) and a national scale—for instance, how Belgium affects research on China (Zhang and Kesteloot 2024). Contemporary anthropological research has undergone a methodological shift from conventional single-site fieldwork—where ethnographers spend significant time immersing themselves in one location—to multi-sited approaches that span both physical and virtual spaces (on multi-sited ethnography, see Marcus 1995; for an example within Global China studies, see Bunkenborg et al. 2022). Yet, there remains a lack of self-reflection, particularly in traditional academic publications, on the spatially differentiated ways in which ethnographic knowledge is produced. Studying Chinese diasporic communities and their interactions with host populations entails conducting field research—ethnographic or otherwise—that follows China’s global footprint across continents. Consequently, engaging with the spatial dimensions of knowledge production becomes an unavoidable and continuous aspect of reflexive Global China research.

Where Do Fieldworkers Live?

Fieldworkers’ living arrangements or accommodation can constitute a key site of knowledge production, as illustrated by the ethnographies of Chinese in Africa referenced above. For instance, Di Wu (2021) conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two sites in Lusaka, Zambia: a state-sponsored Chinese educational farm (also known as an agricultural technology demonstration centre) and a private Chinese family farm. Even before formally entering these two sites, he had begun observing the interactions between the hotel owner, Mother Liu, and others during a one-month stay at a Chinese-run hotel. Wu lived for seven months with Chinese staff, who were also his informants, at the educational farm, including the first month alongside Chinese workers building the centre’s new administrative building. He then spent the remainder of his fieldwork time—during the day, because he kept his accommodation at the first site—with the Zou family, owners of the small vegetable farm next to the educational centre. These living arrangements clearly facilitated Wu’s field access and provided valuable opportunities to observe daily ‘affective encounters’ between various Chinese migrants and Zambians. For his research in Tanzania, Derek Sheridan (2023) also stayed at a Chinese-operated hotel that hosted a variety of Chinese guests—some staying for just a few days, others for more than a year—while conducting fieldwork primarily at the Kariakoo wholesale market. As he noted, ‘The hotel was a space where a heterogeneous set of individuals with varied levels of local knowledge and international experience interacted and exchanged information’ (Sheridan 2023: 3308). It was in such a setting that Sheridan gained rich insights into the intriguing everyday use of the term heiren (黑人, ‘Black people’), which he analysed as part of an in-situ racialisation process.

Similarly, Mingwei Huang (2024) lived in a house with traders from Fujian, whose landlord—a retired human smuggler—served as what she described as her ‘window into migration processes, underground economies, and the network of men who govern the Chinese migrant community’ (Huang 2024: 24). Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz (2017), for her part, moved into a construction company compound midway through her fieldwork in Angola. Meanwhile, much of Justin Lee Haruyama’s (2022) research in Zambia involved living onsite at two Chinese coalmines and a gambling machine company, as well as living with a mineworker’s family near the mine. Nevertheless, ‘living in’ is clearly not the sole effective strategy for gathering rich empirical material. During her fieldwork in Ethiopia, Miriam Driessen (2019) not only lived in Chinese and Ethiopian compounds in Tigray but also transformed her limited mobility—due to not having a car—into an unexpected advantage by hitching rides with her interlocutors from camp to construction sites.

As such, I argue that the place where field researchers live can significantly shape the research dynamics, affecting access to the field, participant recruitment, data collection, and the complex relationships and interactions among informants and with the researcher. In the following sections, I draw on my own fieldwork experiences from an ongoing PhD project, which investigates the ethno-racial dynamics among Sino-Congolese couples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to illustrate how a fieldworker’s accommodation choices can shape research on Global China in Africa. I compare three types of accommodation across different stages of my fieldwork (2022–24): a Chinese-run hotel-restaurant, a Chinese-operated informal hotel, and a homestay with a couple at their residence and workplace.

Peking Restaurant: A ‘Place for the Chinese’ in Kinshasa

Rarely do reference books on fieldwork or academic articles explicitly discuss where fieldworkers should or should not live and how accommodation can impact data collection, especially in the context of fieldwork in Africa, where conditions may be particularly challenging (for the case of field research in the DRC, see Petit and Trefon 2006). For my first fieldwork in the DRC in December 2022, I repeated what I had done previously when the Chinese company for whom I worked transferred me between three West African countries (2016–19): I asked acquaintances or their friends already based in the country to recommend a Chinese-run hotel-restaurant where I could stay for a few weeks while searching for a rental. My choice was primarily driven by practical considerations—affordable full board, easy communication with the owner, and the convenience of meeting other Chinese—rather than any awareness of how it might affect my research.

I arrived in Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, on 14 December 2022, and spent 10 days at a place I refer to here as ‘Peking Restaurant’ (a pseudonym, as are all other place and people names in this essay), a hotel recommended by a friend who had lived in the country for more than a decade. The restaurant had existed for 50 years, passing through the hands of three different owners. Currently owned by Sister Lili and her Chinese husband, it was on the top floor of an eight-storey state building on Boulevard 30 June—the country’s widest avenue, named after its Independence Day. Officially, it operates as a restaurant open to anyone who can afford it, serving Chinese cuisine and offering an all-you-can-eat buffet twice a week, on Wednesday evenings and Saturday at noon. However, it discreetly includes an annexed lodging section reserved exclusively for Chinese guests, with five individual airconditioned rooms sharing a common bathroom. I stayed in one of these rooms for just 10 days before heading to Lubumbashi on Christmas Eve 2022 for the remainder of my pilot fieldwork. While the rate of 50 USD a day with full board was relatively affordable compared with local hotels or Airbnb options, I limited my stay due to budget constraints and the initially unpromising fieldwork outcomes. However, I later returned for a full month between July and August 2023, this time benefiting from a special monthly rate of 1,050 USD. This section draws on both stays at Peking Restaurant.

Thanks to the restaurant’s convenient location in the Gombe District and the availability of Yango (a local ride-hailing service like Uber), I enjoyed considerable mobility to explore the city and connect with friends to expand my network. However, the restaurant-hotel itself turned out not to be the social hub for Chinese migrants and site for exchanging information that I had initially hoped. Based on my observations, the restaurant primarily caters to foreign expatriates and affluent locals with cosmopolitan tastes, making it less appealing to Chinese patrons, though it does serve as an ideal venue for hosting local business partners. In addition, the three daily meals included in the full-board package were delivered as ‘room service’: about 8 am, Sister Lili or her husband would quietly leave my breakfast—typically a cup of hot powdered milk and a piece of round bread—on a small table outside my door; at noon and again about 5.30 pm, before the kitchen became busy, a Congolese waiter would knock on my door and hand me a stainless-steel tray in a Chinese-canteen style, containing three different Chinese dishes, a portion of rice, and a bowl of soup. I was able to enjoy the buffet twice a week with other guests in the main dining area of the restaurant, which offered a scenic view of the Congo River and the capital of the neighbouring Republic of Congo, Brazzaville, just a few kilometres away. Among the guests, I frequently saw European, Lebanese, and Indian patrons, occasionally Congolese, but rarely any Chinese.

The only people with whom I could frequently talk were the Congolese waiters—all male—during their afternoon breaks. They were surprised to encounter a Chinese guest who spoke French and showed interest in knowing them. Unfortunately, none of them knew any Sino-Congolese couples beyond the one I had already contacted before my trip. I met that couple, Liyuan and Héritier, once at Peking Restaurant, where I conducted an interview with the Congolese husband over a shared meal. One of the few advantages of staying there was the facility to invite my informants to the restaurant—not necessarily for formal interviews, but to connect over a meal. During my second stay, I twice met and dined at the restaurant with Juan, a Chinese woman married to a Congolese man: once with her alone, and once with her daughter and one of her friends. In Chinese social worlds, sharing food is a common way to build relationships and have extended conversations around the table. Such commensality also took place in many other settings, such as in other restaurants (including the one owned by Liyuan and Héritier), at social gatherings, and at Juan’s home.

Peking Restaurant could be described as ‘a Chinese place’—a term I borrow from an employee in the same building whom I met in the elevator (a field anecdote recounted in Chen 2024a)—for several reasons. First, it is a Chinese restaurant, serving Chinese cuisine, owned by Chinese, and decorated with traditional red interiors, red lanterns, Chinese cultural symbols, and iconography. Second, despite its international clientele, the place is perceived by locals to cater to Chinese migrants’ home food needs. Third, the restaurant is symbolically and physically set apart from the building’s other floors—occupied by Congolese administrative offices—by distinct boundaries, including multiple red-painted metal gates adorned with Chinese motifs, and a dedicated elevator for the exclusive use of restaurant patrons and staff, which functions only during business hours. The outermost door is locked at 10 pm, when the restaurant closes. As Wu (2021: 51) writes about the Zou family’s residence in Zambia, ‘the gate is a symbol of protection that reassures them of their control over access between the two parts of the world, inside and outside’. However, this place is not ‘Chinese’ enough in the sense that it neither attracts nor attempts to attract Chinese customers, and it has not become a hub of information exchange or interaction among them. As a result, I was unable to meet other Chinese migrants during my stay, let alone reach potential couples. The dynamics at Sister Liu’s place in Lubumbashi, where I conducted the rest of my first fieldwork, were entirely different—a contrast I will explore in the next section.

At Sister Liu’s: The ‘Little Wenzhou’ in Lubumbashi

Sister Liu runs a semi-operational hotel in Lubumbashi, the capital of Haut Katanga Province and a key mining hub in the southeast of the DRC. Thanks to the introduction of my friend and ‘fellow villager’ from my municipality Brother Li, I was able to stay in one of the rooms with an ensuite bathroom for more than a month until the end of January 2023. I later stayed for more than a month in August–September 2023. The hotel used to be a popular Chinese restaurant and hosted all kinds of banquets, but it closed due to poor management. Sister Liu is now in the business of an artisanal mining depot (trading centre), and this hotel only receives long-stay tenants as well as short-term guests referred by close friends, of whom I was one. Like Peking Restaurant, Sister Liu’s establishment also provided three meals a day, but these were prepared by Sister Liu herself. Occasionally, residents had to cook for themselves, particularly when she was away at the mines. Originally from Wenzhou—a well-known ‘hometown of overseas Chinese’ (侨乡)—Sister Liu arrived in Lubumbashi about 20 years ago to start her own business. She purchased a plot of land of about 500 square metres beside a main road and developed several structures. Facing the street, a two-storey building includes multiple small shops for rent and the entrance to what was once the restaurant, now closed. These shops remained vacant during my stay. Behind them were individual guest rooms. Across from this building was a warehouse rented to a shoe vendor from Fujian. Adjacent stood a detached house where Sister Liu and a few long-term residents lived and where other guests took their meals. Opposite this house stood a row of barracks: one former restaurant manager’s office was repurposed as a storage space, while another with a broken door served as the living quarters for the doorman. Near the gate was a small kennel-like structure for the watchdog, which was allowed to roam the yard freely only at night.

I refer to this place as ‘little Wenzhou’ because three of the four long-term residents are Sister Liu’s compatriots, also from Wenzhou or neighbouring parts of Zhejiang Province. Every evening, two other Wenzhounese, who ran baihuo (百货, general merchandise) businesses (see Haugen and Carling 2005), would join us for dinner after work before they headed home. During these meals, they often conversed in Wenzhounese—a regional dialect unintelligible to Mandarin speakers—which frequently made other guests, including myself, feel like outsiders. As an ‘Old Congo’ (老刚果)—a term used to describe someone who has lived in Congo for many years—Sister Liu is highly respected within the local Wenzhou expatriate community. Her generous hospitality draws frequent visits from fellow Wenzhounese and, during major holidays, she hosts celebratory feasts at her home. These gatherings often bring together 20 to 30 people and fill two large round tables. During my first stay, I joined the celebrations for New Year’s Day and Chinese Spring Festival, which offered a vivid sense of how the local Wenzhou community came together to mark these occasions. During my second stay, I also attended the birthday celebration of one of her fellow Wenzhounese. The house is also known as a stopover for Wenzhou migrants from other cities. That is how I met Boss Yang, who is married to a Congolese woman and lives with his wife and three daughters in Kolwezi, the capital of Lualaba Province, renowned for its cobalt mining industry. He stayed at Sister Liu’s multiple times and, during his third visit, I finally had the chance to interview him. We built a trusting relationship, and he later invited me to visit his home during my field trip in Kolwezi, where I also interviewed his wife, Tina.

Sister Liu also hosts other guests, primarily drawn through acquaintances—typically Chinese travellers transiting through Lubumbashi or conducting business there. These include people flying in from China via Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, or those arriving early for return flights from other Congolese regions. In addition to providing accommodation, Sister Liu—together with a local official—offers a paid ‘pick-up and drop-off’ service at the airport, allowing travellers to pass through passport control and customs without complications, and sometimes even bypass baggage inspections. Unlike the Peking Restaurant, her place was not exclusively for Chinese guests. For instance, three Chinese travellers en route from Ghana to Kalemie via Lubumbashi once stayed there together with two Ghanaian co-workers. Although guests came and went frequently during my stay, through shared meals, casual conversations, and assisting them with basic translations or Covid-19 travel forms, I gained insights into their migration aspirations, individual trajectories, as well as knowledge of and feelings about Sino-Congolese couples.

Beyond the variety of Chinese guests, what surprised me most about this residence was the opportunity to interact with many Congolese individuals, such as Sister Liu’s doorman, two domestic workers, her business partner in the mining sector, who occasionally came by, and several drivers employed by other guests. Moreover, Brother Li used Sister Liu’s courtyard as his daytime office. On days when he delivered fresh Chinese vegetables and other supplies to the mining sites, drivers and local vegetable vendors who worked with him would gather there and often stay the entire morning. Since I occasionally served as an interpreter, I got to know them quite well. Because I speak French fluently, these locals were eager to chat with me, often asking questions about the Chinese residents, such as what the hot drink (green tea) they drank every day was or more broadly about life in China. These informal conversations helped me better understand Congolese society, particularly the contexts in which their interactions with Chinese people take place in these so-called Chinese spaces, and how these encounters reflect broader people-to-people dynamics within China–Africa engagements.

During the final days of my first stay, I witnessed a targeted raid by the judicial police on Sister Liu’s properties. Brother Li, a Congolese and I were indiscriminately handcuffed. Although I managed to explain myself in French and was the first to be released, both Brother Li and Sister Liu were subjected to extortion; Brother Li lost several thousand dollars. On the one hand, this incident strengthened my bonds with fellow residents and Sister Liu during my second stay, reinforcing my sense of belonging in the space, even though I may have already been accepted before this event, unlike Clifford Geertz’s (1979) dramatic entry into a Balinese village through a shared flight from the police. On the other hand, this experience gave me firsthand insight into what Sheridan (2019) describes as the vulnerability of Chinese migrants in their encounters with local street-level bureaucrats in Tanzania (see also Chen 2023). Although this accommodation offered a truly immersive field experience, it still appeared distant from my research subjects: Sino-Congolese couples. In the final section, I will explain how the living arrangements brought me closer to their everyday lifeworlds.

‘Chinese Hospital’: A Live–Work Complex Across the Colour Line

Since I always travelled on flights via Brussels to Kinshasa, I generally began my fieldwork in Kinshasa, then continued to Haut Katanga and Lualaba in southeast DRC, before returning to Kinshasa one to two weeks before the end of my fieldwork. I got to know Juan during my fieldwork in Kinshasa in the summer of 2023 and was invited to her home for dinner on two occasions. When she learned that I would be returning from Lubumbashi to Kinshasa for two weeks a little over a month later, she invited me to stay at her house, as there was an unoccupied guestroom. I accepted this invitation, knowing that her home was not a typical family house or apartment and feeling that my presence would not be a total ‘intrusion’ into their personal space. It also provided a valuable opportunity to practise what Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot (2022) calls an ‘intimate method’, homestay, to better understand the daily life and internal dynamics of Juan’s ‘special’ family. I refer to it as the ‘Chinese hospital’ because Juan operates a clinic mainly for Chinese patients and her family lives in the same premises. When a friend of mine who worked as a French interpreter for a Chinese state-owned enterprise first told me about Juan, I asked where I could find her. He did not seem to know the precise address; instead, he explained that whenever he told his Congolese driver ‘hôpital chinois’ (Chinese hospital), the driver would know where to go. I later observed that the same term was commonly used by Chinese patients and their local drivers, and even by Juan and her employees. In fact, there are several clinics and true hospitals in Kinshasa established by and for the Chinese community.

My first visit to the so-called Chinese hospital was with Liyuan, the other Chinese woman married to a Congolese man whom I introduced earlier. She was taking her daughter to a doctor’s appointment and agreed to introduce me to Juan. Tucked away in an extremely secluded area, the place had no signage identifying it as a hospital or clinic, in French or Chinese. Set within a courtyard surrounded by state administrative buildings, the ‘clinic’ looked more like a construction camp, with prefabricated tin houses arranged in a square. It was only later, when Juan invited me to dinner, that I realised this was just her workplace. Her residence, located at the back of the courtyard, was a separate two-storey building that closely resembled a typical Chinese home, from the architectural style to details like the front door and stainless-steel security grilles. In fact, the site had originally been the camp of a construction team from China who built a Chinese-aided government building only one doorstep away. The two-storey building that was now Juan’s home had previously housed the managers of the construction company. As the area was temporarily zoned, the director of the government agency using the building agreed to rent out both the camp and the house to Juan or, more precisely, to her and her Congolese husband, Kevin, who played a pivotal role in securing the deal.

Today, the site functions as a mixed-use residential and commercial compound. One part of the courtyard has been converted into a rebar distribution centre, with trucks frequently coming and going. On the other side, a warehouse is rented out to a Fujianese couple and their baihuo business. Juan’s clinic occupies much of the courtyard space, comprising a few consultation rooms, a perfusion room, a laboratory, a pharmacy, a traditional Chinese medicine room, two inpatient wards, and a small canteen. Next to the clinic are her husband’s office and a large conference room used for meetings of the political party of which he serves as chairman. The remaining part of the complex is rented to a Chinese businessman who operates a Chinese vegetable farm and grocery store; he and his partner live in the room just next-door. On an otherwise ordinary day, I observed a dozen Chinese and Congolese individuals coming and going for various reasons, and I was able to engage in conversations of varying length with some of them. The place resembled an expanded version of ‘little Wenzhou’—a miniature Chinese society—while also serving as a rare site where Chinese and Congolese people worked side by side. This enabled me to capture a broader range of grassroots interactions, particularly among individuals from diverse social classes and backgrounds. Naturally, it also gave me deeper insight into the everyday dynamics of Sino-Congolese couples.

Although I had stayed at Juan’s house for only two weeks during my second field trip, I ended up living there for six months during my third, more extended period of fieldwork in Kinshasa, from February to August 2024. During my initial homestay, as a gesture of thanks, I offered Juan free translation services and helped her design posters while she was preparing to open a dental clinic for Congolese clients in the city centre. On my third trip, I worked for some time as an interpreter at the newly opened clinic, facilitating communication between the Chinese dentist and local patients, and lived in her home with other Chinese doctors. Our rooms were on the ground floor, while Juan and her family lived upstairs, maintaining a clear spatial division. I did not work at the site of the compound I refer to here as the ‘Chinese hospital’, which was Juan’s primary workplace. This separation of living and working spaces helped me navigate the complexities of my dual positionality as both a researcher and an ‘employee’ in Juan’s household. While I acknowledge the importance of reflecting on this dynamic, such discussion falls outside the scope of this essay.

My extended homestay gave me an intimate view of Juan’s complex family dynamics, hence my earlier reference to her ‘special’ family. On the one hand, Juan and Kevin form a blended family: they have a daughter together, and Juan’s son from a previous marriage to a Chinese man lives with them. Kevin was previously married to a Chinese woman, whom he met and built a relationship with while studying in China. Following their divorce, their two children remained in the DRC to live with him. On the other hand, between his two officially recognised marriages, Kevin also entered a (customary) marriage with a Congolese woman and had children with her. As he explained, this was because he needed someone ‘to take care of his family and children’. As a result, the family functions as a de facto polygamous family, and Kevin maintains two separate households. Without ‘living in’ Juan’s home, I would likely not have been able to observe firsthand the intricate dynamics of this family or how its members navigate the everyday tensions both within the household and across the colour line in the compound.

Epilogue

These three living arrangements do not encompass the entirety of my accommodation experiences during the three rounds of fieldwork I conducted in the DRC. For instance, I spent three nights at another hotel, owned by Sister Lili, outside the city centre, to avoid roadblocks and traffic control during the late Pope Francis’s visit to Kinshasa in January 2023. I also stayed one night in a casino hotel near major Chinese-operated mining sites in Fungurume, Lualaba Province, and another night in a Chinese family-run restaurant-hotel in Kolwezi. Choosing where to live has posed a constant challenge for my ethnographic research across three Congolese provinces, due not only to the country’s inadequate infrastructure and security concerns, but also to limited fieldwork funding on my part. Paradoxically, these diverse and sometimes improvised living arrangements became unexpected yet grounded entry points for understanding grassroots interactions between Chinese and Congolese, as well as gaining deeper insights into the intimate everyday lives of Sino-Congolese couples.

That said, place—specifically, the living places of ethnographers—is deeply implicated in field research and knowledge production (Livingstone 2003). However, these reflections do not exhaust the scope of what I bring forward as spatially differentiated ethnographic knowledge production. My focus here is primarily on the conditions under which specific data could be collected, with limited account of how this situated knowledge is ultimately theorised. Nor do I intend to discuss in this short essay how place intersects with other social matrices in shaping this process. Nonetheless, navigating my multiple identities—not only the outsider–insider dynamic, but also my national, social, and regional affiliations—along with the positionalities, emotions, and subjectivities these entail, has been an exercise in continuous reflexivity throughout my research journey (see Chen 2024b).

Researching Global China or the Chinese presence in Africa is often perceived as particularly challenging, especially for those working outside the field. This is particularly true when long-term, multi-sited fieldwork in the countries under study is required. Nevertheless, fieldworkers—like those cited in this essay and myself—can find ways to exercise their agency, transforming challenges into valuable opportunities to reveal social dynamics that are often otherwise overlooked. Ultimately, this essay seeks to demystify field research on Chinese in Africa by reflecting on the three distinct living arrangements that I experienced during my fieldwork in the DRC, and to invite further reflection on underexplored aspects of the geographies of knowledge and knowledge production in Global China studies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who facilitated my living arrangements during fieldwork, as well as my informants for their generous participation. This fieldwork was supported in part by the EASt-MSH seed-money doctoral grant (2022–23), the ULB-CCCI grant for research stay abroad (2024), and the Noria field grant (2024). The material presented in this essay draws from a talk I gave at the ‘Retour de terrain’ (Back from the Field) seminar, held on 22 January 2025 and organised by the Centre for East Asian Studies (EASt) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). I am grateful for the valuable feedback from my co-panellists Vanessa Frangville, Pierre Petit, and Virginie Arantes, as well as for the thoughtful remarks from the audience, including my supervisor, Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, Marion Bottero, Lisa Richaud, and Mimy Keomanichanh. My gratitude also extends to the editorial team of Global China Pulse and the external referee for their insightful feedback and kind support.