Ching Kwan Lee graduated from the University of California-Berkeley Sociology Department, and is the author of the award winning Against the Law. Her talk analyzes the peculiarity of outbound Chinese state capital by comparing it with global private capital in copper and construction in Zambia. Refuting the dominant narratives of "Chinese colonialism" and "south-south cooperation," comparative ethnographic data collected over a 5-year period chronicle the multi-faceted struggles that confront and differentiate these two varieties of capital entailing uneven potentials for post-colonial African development.
There will also be a small workshop on doing ethnography in China at 10AM on the same day. (Please contact Thomas Janoski at tjanos@uky.edu for details)