Global China As Method

Franceschini and Loubere
Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political,

media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is
seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the
global socio-economic system, discussions of China continue
to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country
represents a fundamentally different ‘Other’ that somehow Global China
exists outside the ‘real’ world. Either implicitly or explicitly,
China is generally depicted as an external force with the
potential to impact on the ‘normal’ functioning of things. This
core assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised,
and separate ‘Other’, ultimately produces a distorted image of
both China and the world. This Element seeks to illuminate the
Global China
Global China as Method

ways in which the country and people form an integral part of
the global capitalist system. This title is also available as Open
Access on Cambridge Core.
as Method
About the Series Series Editor
The Cambridge Elements series Global Ching Kwan Lee
China showcases thematic, region- University of
or country-specific studies on China’s
Ivan Franceschini and
California,
multifaceted global engagements and Los Angeles
impacts. Each title, written by a leading
scholar of the subject matter at hand,
combines a succinct, comprehensive and
Nicholas Loubere
up-to-date overview of the debates in the
scholarly literature with original analysis
and a clear argument.
Cover image: Dimec / Shutterstock ISSN 2632-7341 (online)

ISSN 2632-7333 (print)
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Elements in Global China
edited by
Ching Kwan Lee
University of California, Los Angeles
GLOBAL CHINA AS
METHOD
Ivan Franceschini
The Australian National University
Nicholas Loubere
Lund University

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Elements in Global China
DOI: 10.1017/9781108999472
First published online: July 2022
Ivan Franceschini
The Australian National University
Nicholas Loubere
Lund University
Author for correspondence: Ivan Franceschini, [email protected]
Abstract: Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political,

media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no.
Even after four decades of integration into the global socio-economic
system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core
assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different
‘Other’ that somehow exists outside the ‘real’ world. Either implicitly or
explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the
potential to impact on the ‘normal’ functioning of things. This core
assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised, and separate
‘Other’, ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the
world. This Element seeks to illuminate the ways in which the country
and people form an integral part of the global capitalist system. This
title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Keywords: labour rights, digital surveillance, academic freedom, Xinjiang,

Belt and Road Initiative
© Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere 2022

ISBNs: 9781108995566 (PB), 9781108999472 (OC)
ISSNs: 2632-7341 (online), 2632-7333 (print)

Contents
Introduction 1
1 Chinese Labour in a Global Perspective 9
2 Digital Dystopias 20
3 Xinjiang 29
4 Belts and Roads 37
5 The Academe 48
A Final Note 58
References 60

Global China as Method 1
Introduction
Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular
discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of
integration into the global socio-economic system, becoming the ‘world’s
factory’ and second largest economy, most discussions of China continue to
be underpinned and bounded by a core assumption – that the country represents
a fundamentally different ‘Other’ that somehow exists apart from the ‘real’
world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is often depicted as something that
can be understood in isolation – an external force with the potential to impact
the ‘normal’ functioning of things. This holds true for those who look at China
from the outside and those who experience it from the inside, as ‘Othered’
representations of China are also common in Chinese official and unofficial
discourses.
Both in China and the West – and across much of the Global South – this
underlying assumption of China’s inherent separation and difference, and its
status as an external agent of change, cuts across political and ideological
spectrums. It frames positive, negative, and ambivalent discussions about the
country, particularly in relation to the increasing presence and entanglement of
Chinese entities in the global socio-economic and geopolitical systems. Leaving
aside the monumental question of Chinese exceptionalism as seen from within
China, this Element focusses on heated international debates around some of the
key issues of our present moment – that is, labour rights, digital surveillance,
mass internment in Xinjiang, investment overseas, and the erosion of academic
freedom. Through an examination of these five topics, we seek to recast the
implicit core assumption of China as an external ‘Other’ that underpins so much
analysis of contemporary China and provide a methodological roadmap for
understanding China not as a discrete unit but as part and parcel of the
contemporary global capitalist system.
Three Frames
So how is China ‘Othered’ and externalised in international political, media,
and popular discourses and debates today? Three competing frames employed
by ideologically distinct camps and with seemingly divergent analyses – but
crucially rooted in the same core assumption of China as a separate ‘Other’ –
currently hold sway. The first one is usually referred to as ‘exceptionalism’ but
we would rather call it ‘essentialism’ to shift attention to how these discourses
often put the emphasis on some innate ‘essential’ characteristics of ‘China’ and
‘the Chinese’. In relation to Western debates, we use this term to refer to those
perspectives that dismiss any attempt to find similarities between dynamics in

2 Global China
China and elsewhere. This form of argumentation tends to emphasise the set of
attributes specific to a certain context as its defining elements, a line of reason-
ing reminiscent of the debates over China’s ‘national character’ (国民性) that
raged in China and the West a century ago and which remain eerily in vogue
today – one just has to think about how Arthur H. Smith’s infamous 1890
‘treatise’ Chinese Characteristics, a scathing racist indictment of China and its
people once admired by revolutionary Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun,
continues to be read today (even in China, where the book earns a surprisingly
high score on the social media platform Douban). While in the past similar
discussions revolved around issues of race, today’s essentialist arguments
mostly centre around the idea that authoritarian China cannot be compared
with liberal democratic countries because they represent fundamentally differ-
ent political systems – and any suggestion that there may be commonalities or
overlaps is immediately and vociferously denounced as whataboutism and
moral relativism.
Essentialism produces a myopic outlook and often manifests as self-
righteous outrage at any suggestion that there might be more to the picture
than what immediately meets the eye. From this perspective, there can be no
linkages, seepages, or parallels between liberal democracies and authoritarian
regimes. China must be analysed in isolation and any analysis must identify the
authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the only constant
underpinning all problems. If outside actors are involved, such as foreign
governments, multinational companies, or universities, their participation is
perceived as the result of their corruption at the hands of the CCP rather than
a reflection of wider systemic issues – hence, for instance, the widespread
surprise when it was revealed that former US President Donald Trump
expressed support for re-education camps in Xinjiang (Thomas, 2020). At
their most extreme, these essentialising views insinuate that those seeking to
identify convergences between China and elsewhere are apologists, useful
idiots who unwittingly reproduce authoritarian talking points, or active agents
undermining democracy in the service of authoritarian regimes.
The second approach is based on the age-old idea of ‘changing’ China. Its
core assumption is that the more ‘we’ engage with China, the more the country
is included in international systems and institutions, the more it will assimilate,
which will hasten its inevitable transition to a free-market liberal democracy.
We call it a ‘maieutic’ approach, in that it resembles the Socratic idea of
dialogue as a way to challenge established ideas to lead to the refinement of
the views and practices of an interlocutor. As such, it is an inherently moralistic
view of China as an externalised ‘Other’ that is in need of reformation and
integration.

This frame was perhaps dominant in the 1990s and 2000s, the golden age of
neoliberalism and the ‘end of history’, but has been dealt a huge blow by the
developments in Chinese domestic and foreign policy during the Xi Jinping
administration (2013–). The crackdowns on Chinese human rights lawyers and
activists linked to international civil society, the mass detention of Uyghurs and
other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, the repression of the Hong Kong movement,
the rise of so-called ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomacy, and the willingness of the
Chinese authorities to arbitrarily detain foreign citizens on spurious charges in
order to use them as pawns on the international stage have undermined the
argument that engagement will lead towards a more liberal democratic future
for China.
As it has become more and more apparent that the likelihood of China
transitioning into this perceived ‘normal’ member of the global community is
low, some of those who previously subscribed to the maieutic approach have
become disillusioned, adopting more essentialist views. This shift is gener-
ally expressed through a growing concern over how China is ‘corroding’
international institutions and norms and placing part of the blame on those
actors (companies, universities, institutions, individuals) that are seen as
complicit. In these cases, the moralism inherent in maieuticism is reconfig-
ured and redirected – with China transitioning from the role of willing
student to corrupting influence. But the inherent othering of the country
remains intact.
The third frame – which we can term ‘whataboutism’ – refers to the dismissal
of any criticism of China (and not only China) as hypocritical. An instance of
this perspective could be seen in 2020 when, as protests against police brutality
and racism erupted in American cities, social media platforms were awash with
voices pointing out the hypocrisy of the US government in condemning the
actions of the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong. Unable to control social unrest
at home, what right do US politicians have to comment on what is going on in
the former British colony? Similarly, in stigmatising the mass incarcerations of
Uyghurs in Xinjiang, how could they ignore their own moral bankruptcy, made
evident by the grim situation of the US prison system, the mass detention on the
country’s southern border, and the disasters unleashed by the global War on
Terror? Conversely, how can anyone connected to the Chinese state (even
loosely) dare to comment on the protests in the United States or the plight of
immigrants in detention centres, considering the situations in Hong Kong and
Xinjiang? These whataboutist arguments inherently frame what is happening in
the United States (or any other Western country) and China as inherently
separate and unconnected in any way – two sides of an equation that ultimately
cancel each other out.

4 Global China
Whataboutism is such a common feature of the current debate that, in a recent

op-ed, US-based Chinese human rights lawyer Teng Biao (2020) argued that
constant comparisons between China and the United States have now become
a ‘virus’ (病毒). Making a compelling case for how meaningless equivalencies
have contributed to poisoning the debate, Teng highlights two types of ques-
tionable comparison: the first one is shallow congruences that do not extend
beyond the surface level; the second is ‘whataboutism’ (比烂主义) proper. As
Teng puts it: ‘You say that corruption in China is serious, they say that the
United States is the same; you say that China is culturally annihilating Uyghurs
and Tibetans, they say that the United States also massacred the Native
Americans and enslaved black people; you say China carries out extraterritorial
kidnappings, they say that the United States attacked Iraq.’
While nothing prevents these criticisms levelled at China and the United
States from being concurrently accurate – indeed, both are true but one does not
excuse the other – Teng is correct in his grim assessment that the current China
debate is mired in superficial comparisons, false equivalencies, and whatabou-
tist argumentation. This is highly problematic for at least two reasons. First,
whataboutism fosters apathy: if any form of criticism is just seen as hypocrisy,
then what is the point of critical analysis? When does one become qualified to
criticise? Second, it blinds by obscuring basic similarities and interconnections,
muddying the waters and making it difficult to identify actual commonalities
that extend beyond national borders and are inherent to the organisation of the
global economy in our current stage of late capitalism. Whether whataboutism
finds fertile ground simply owing to helpless narrow-mindedness or is an act of
purposeful misrepresentation, the result is the same: whataboutist argumenta-
tion breeds myopic passivity, with the focus being placed on the detail rather
than the broader picture. This not only makes meaningful discussion difficult
but also impairs our ability to undertake effective political action.

While the three frames outlined above are obviously ideal types, and in reality
the boundaries between discourses are rarely that clear-cut, they generally
coincide with starkly different political ideologies and thus come to divergent
analyses of China. An essentialist framework is particularly common among
those on the Right who perceive China as an existential (communist and
authoritarian) threat to global capitalism and Western democracy that must be
forcibly subordinated and integrated. Whataboutism is largely the domain of
a growing segment of the Left, disillusioned with electoral defeats in liberal
democracies (in particular, in the United States and United Kingdom), who are

embracing romantic ideas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as repre-

senting a form of ‘actually existing socialism’ with the potential to challenge
global capitalism and legacies of imperialist colonial extraction. The maieutic
framework is more common among liberal voices who see China as an authori-
tarian force – fundamentally distinct from, and incomparable to, Western
democracies – that needs to be further engaged with and coaxed more fully
into the institutionalised international order (including both ‘free-market’ glo-
bal capitalism and global governance institutions) for it to become a ‘normal’
liberal democratic country.
Regardless of the different political stances, these views share one core
assumption: that of China as an externalised, separate, and self-contained
‘Other’. As we mentioned above, this premise serves to obscure rather than
enlighten, and ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the
world. Still, it is important to acknowledge that all these frames contain within
them elements of truth – which is part of the reason why they are attractive for so
many. It is undeniable that China, just like any other place, has its own
historical, social, cultural, economic, and political ‘characteristics’. As such,
understanding Chinese dynamics requires a certain level of particularism and
any analysis that is not historicised and contextualised will unavoidably be
superficial and misleading. At the same time, however, China is obviously part
of the world and therefore shapes and is shaped by broader dynamics. Owing to
this very embeddedness, there are valid debates to be had about ways of
engaging with China that might help to put an end to certain abuses within the
country, as well as Chinese participation in deleterious global trends.
The problem is that, if taken to the extreme and in isolation (as they often are),
these positions lead to the toxic state of the discussion on China we are facing
today, characterised by endless shouting, utter lack of communication, and
a sense of despair due to the perception that we cannot even agree on the
basic terms of the debate. Indeed, when we first tried to propose this argument,
one of the criticisms we received was that there is no such a thing as a ‘China
debate’ today: you either choose to stand up to the Chinese Party-State, or you
are complicit in its atrocities (an assertion that is reversed in whataboutist
discourse). In other words, the debate today is increasingly dominated by people
demanding to know if you are with us or against us – a situation that is obviously
incompatible with critical inquiry and understanding.
In this Element, we attempt to overcome the limitations of these frames by
arguing that China does not exist in a vacuum or outside of the world. We follow
Mizoguchi Yūzō’s ([1989]2016) call to ‘take China as method’ by moving
beyond an analysis of China that renders the country a flat caricature merely
serving to reflect the ambitions and insecurities of those analysing it – a

6 Global China
widespread phenomenon that he described as a ‘reading of China without

China’. In his words: ‘A world that takes China as method would be a world
in which China is a constitutive element’ (p. 516). However, we propose taking
this idea a step further. Rather than merely recognising China’s existence as
a component in the world in its own right, we highlight the importance of
perceiving China as intimately entangled with global histories, processes,
phenomena, and trends. In other words, China should not be seen as a discrete
unit that can be understood in isolation. As such, we argue that understanding
Chinese–global entanglements requires a fundamentally relational perspective,
which moves away from a vision of the social world as comprised of static
‘things’ and conceptualises ‘social reality instead in dynamic, continuous, and
processual terms’ (Emirbayer, 1997, p. 281).
In this way, this Element seeks to provide a framework for understanding the
many manifestations of China in the world as resulting from material and
discursive parallels and linkages, and embodying continuities and evolutions,
as Chinese dynamics interact with and build on the historical legacies of the
dynamic global capitalist system. Only by reconceptualising China as inextric-
ably part of the world can we begin to understand what Chinese developments,
both domestic and international, actually mean for people around the globe and
present a more accurate depiction of the implications of China’s rise on the
global stage. In this, we aspire to follow in the footsteps of the late Arif Dirlik
(2017, p. 1), who in his final book put forward two premises in which to anchor
discussions of China today: first, the integration of the PRC into global capital-
ism over the last two decades requires criticism directed at it also to attend to the
structure of the system of which it is a part; second, given the economic, socio-
political, and cultural entanglements of global capitalism, criticism must
account for outsiders’ complicities – both materially and ideologically – in
the PRC’s failures as well as successes. While recent years have seen consider-
able debate over whether or not the Chinese socio-economic system operates
according to the rules of capitalism, the point of this Element is not to argue for
or against the idea that China should be narrowly defined as a capitalist country
but rather to show how China is not an alternative to but rather an integral part of
a global system that today works according to capitalist dynamics. If we do not
identify and map these critical linkages and connections, our analysis will fail to
illuminate and our criticism of, and struggles against, the overlapping forms of
brutality characterising contemporary China and global capitalism will lose
strength.
As such, we propose ‘Global China’ as an alternative analytical framework
and methodological approach for discussing China today – that is, adopting a set
of framings that interpret issues related to China’s society and domestic and

foreign policy in relation to broader trends and the underlying dynamics inher-
ent to the stage of late capitalism we find ourselves in. While the idea of
a ‘global China’ (lower case) is nothing new – one could easily argue that
China has always been ‘global’, even at the height of the Mao era when the
country was perceived as increasingly secluded from the rest of the world – here
we refer to ‘Global China’ (upper case) as a broader theoretical approach to the
country, its position in the world, and its international engagements. In doing
this, we draw from Ching Kwan Lee’s ethnography of Chinese investment in
Zambia, in which she argues for the need to ‘[push] the empirical boundary of
China studies beyond China’s territorial borders’ (Lee, 2017, p. xiv). Lee has
arguably done more than anyone else to give the concept of Global China
a rigorous theoretical underpinning and popularise the term. In her words:
China casts an outsize shadow on many different arenas of world develop-

ment, challenging the field of China studies to abandon its methodological
nationalism so as to catch up with China’s transformation into a global force.
Global China is taking myriad forms, ranging from foreign direct investment,
labor export, and multilateral financial institutions for building cross-regional
infrastructure to the globalization of Chinese civil society organizations,
creation of global media networks, and global joint ventures in higher
education, to name just a few examples. As many of these strands of outward
development have originated from pressures and interests at home, the
consequences of these external engagements are bound to have boomerang
impacts on the home front, whether on regime stability, civil society growth,
or national economic restructuring. Studying global China means reimagin-
ing China beyond China, connecting, contextualizing, and comparing
‘Chinese’ development with that in other parts of the world. (Lee, 2017,
p. xiv)
In this way, Lee prompts us both to reorient our attention to China’s global
nature and to examine the implications of Chinese globalisation for domestic
developments, thus connecting two domains that have largely been treated as
separate. Our modest proposal is to expand this perspective by consciously and
deliberately situating China globally, highlighting how issues that are often read
as specifically ‘Chinese’ are in fact the result of complex dynamics and inter-
linkages that not only go beyond the Chinese borders but also necessitate
a perspective that illuminates both China in the world and the world in China.
As such, we follow in the footsteps of other scholars who have previously
discussed issues related to the co-construction of ‘China’ as an imagined entity
(see, for instance, Lee, 2018), have traced possible paths forward to go beyond
the emphasis on the local that is typical of Area Studies (see, for example, the
essays included in Nyíri and Breidenbach, 2013), or have pointed out the
intricate entanglements and complex interdependencies between China and

8 Global China
the global economy (Weber, 2020 and 2021), to argue that issues of Chinese
domestic politics, economics, and social change should not be interpreted as
separate from socio-economic and political developments globally. In our
opinion, it is not enough to just say, as many have done, that Chinese domestic
developments are now so consequential that they have important reverberations
on the global stage – rather, domestic China should be read as an integral part of
the broader global capitalist system and interpreted in this light. In other words,
only by understanding China can one understand global capitalism and only by
understanding global capitalism can one understand China – a fact which
requires a significant conceptual and methodological reorientation.
Structure of the Element

This Element seeks to provide a roadmap for this reorientation by illuminating
the ways in which the country and its people are intimately enmeshed in the
global capitalist system. As we mentioned before, this is accomplished by
examining the entanglements that characterise five key issues which frequently
arise in current discussions about China: labour rights, digital surveillance and
the social credit system, the mass detention of Uyghurs and other ethnic
minorities in Xinjiang, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Chinese invest-
ment overseas, and academic freedom.
In the first section, we examine the issue of the Chinese labour regime since
the country positioned itself as the new ‘world factory’ in the 1990s. The section
challenges the competing narratives of those claiming that Chinese labour
exploitation has prompted a global ‘race to the bottom’ and those who take
the CCP’s pro-labour rhetoric at face value, instead arguing that the configur-
ation of Chinese labour has both shaped and been shaped by intensive engage-
ment with global capitalism. In the second section, we examine Chinese
surveillance technologies through the lens of the emerging social credit system,
arguing that rather than representing a uniquely Chinese form of digital dysto-
pianism, social credit is rooted in, and contributing to, a global trajectory of
rapidly expanding algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism. In the
third section, we examine the mass detentions in Xinjiang, outlining the discur-
sive and material linkages with the US-led War on Terror and the role of
multinational corporations and educational institutions in facilitating these
disturbing developments. In the fourth section, we turn to the BRI and overseas
investment, looking at how Chinese initiatives often build on projects, ideas,
and modes of operation put forward previously by Western actors and how new
Chinese institutions can be seen as attempts to first emulate and then adapt
established models. Finally, in the fifth section, we zoom in on academia, which

has become a site of contention in debates over China’s perceived influence

abroad, outlining how the neoliberalisation of the university has opened up the
possibility for outside actors (including Chinese ones) to threaten the funda-
mental principles of academic freedom.
It is our belief that, when discussing China, it is now more important than
ever to strive to identify meaningful commonalities and interconnections under-
pinning dynamics at both discursive and material levels. If nothing else, that is
where we can still hope to find some power to act. While the situations discussed
in this Element present us with instances of entanglements that are frequently
obscured in current debates on Chinese globalisation, these examples are also
part of an extremely grim broader picture. Around the world we are seeing some
seriously disturbing trends – a general authoritarian shift, the development of
repressive technologies, and the further normalisation of mass detention
regimes. As easy as it is to lay the blame for all this on China – and as undeniable
as it is that Chinese actors are playing an important role in all this – these trends
are not emanating solely from one country. Rather, the case of China is just one
dramatic manifestation of interlinked, global phenomena – phenomena that are,
in turn, shaped by broader forces. For this reason, we need to go beyond
essentialist, whataboutist, and maieutic approaches and carefully document
(and denounce) China’s role in facilitating this dark turn, while also highlight-
ing the ways in which Chinese developments link up with events elsewhere.
1 Chinese Labour in a Global Perspective

Labour has played an important role in defining China’s global image over the
past century. As early as 1919, the first conference of the International Labor
Organization (ILO) recommended that the Chinese authorities adopt a social
legislation, a request motivated more by the desire to protect Western workers
from the ‘unfair’ competition from China’s massive low-cost workforce than by
genuine humanitarian concerns (Van Der Sprenkel, 1983). Although the
internal strife of the Republican era, the Japanese invasion, and the autarchic
policies of the Maoist era somewhat allayed these apprehensions, similar
concerns re-emerged in force in the 1980s and 1990s, as China embarked on
its path of economic reforms. It was then that the figure of the ‘Chinese worker’
made its way back to the international scene, through narratives that depicted
them either as a victim of horrific exploitation or as a fearsome competitor who,
with their willingness to work for next to nothing and accept any sort of abuse,
was challenging the job security of their Western counterparts. In particular, it is
often noted how China’s economic growth in the reform era has been made
possible by the exploitation of a vast surplus of rural workers freed by the land

10 Global China
reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Siu, 2020). As these workers
migrated to urban centres and fuelled the booming private sector, their plight –
long work hours, low wages, lack of access to essential public services due to
the systemic discrimination of the household registration system, and awful
workplace safety and health conditions – came to represent the flip side of the
country’s economic miracle, shaping China’s negative reputation as a ‘world
factory’ founded on the extraction of surplus value from an exploited workforce
(Chan, 2001).
The plight of Chinese labour assumed even more global relevance as China
entered the World Trade Organization in 2001. In the developed world, this
event led to uncountable recriminations by trade unionists and policymakers
about how China’s ‘social dumping’ was undermining the well-being of work-
ers in their countries; in the Global South, China was widely blamed for fuelling
a ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards, as governments chose to stay ahead of
Chinese competition by promising prospective investors ever more favourable
conditions (Chan, 2003). However, these perspectives do not always do justice
to the complexity of the phenomena that were taking place at that time. On the
one hand, they tend to overlook the fact that China inserted itself in an
international context in which workers’ rights and labour conditions were
already being undermined by the global turn to neoliberalism and the collapse
of the communist experiments. On the other, they often neglect to mention how,
while China’s entrance into the global capitalist system did indeed significantly
change the dynamics of international competition with momentous implications
for workers all over the world, China itself was forced to change and adapt in
this process. It is this last aspect that this section examines, first by looking into
the international pressures that the Chinese Party-State has had to face in its
lawmaking efforts in the field of the labour law, then by highlighting the foreign
connections of Chinese grass-roots labour organisations, and finally by discuss-
ing how some of the latest trends in labour activism in China should be read in
a broader context of political desperation over the present and future of labour.
China’s Labour Law

The narrative that portrays the Chinese authorities as wilfully suppressing the
rights of its workers in order to gain competitive advantage in international
markets has merit when it comes to the earliest stages of China’s reforms, but if
we take a closer look at the Party-State’s policymaking efforts in the field of
labour rights over the past two decades a more complex picture emerges. The
most notable discovery is that – contrary to the popular discourse of the Chinese
workplace as a ruthless arena where the law of the jungle prevails – the Chinese

authorities have passed an impressive body of laws and regulations that address
virtually every facet of labour relations. This regulatory effort has generally
sought to parallel international practices in an attempt to bring the country in
line with international standards and thus facilitate a smoother transition into the
global capitalist economy. True, there are significant implementation problems:
the regulations hardly keep pace with the structural changes in the economy (for
instance, the emergence of the digital platform economy) and there is
a fundamental imbalance between individual rights, which are regulated in
detail, and collective rights, which are systematically watered down if not
outright ignored (Chen, 2016). Still, these laws and regulations are far from
inconsequential, especially considering the efforts that the Party-State and its
organs have made to disseminate them among the public.
This turn to the law represents a conscious attempt by the Chinese authorities
to overcome the language of class struggle and worker dominance that marked
the Maoist era and promote a new rules-based order aimed at enticing foreign
investors while also boosting the legitimacy of the Party-State (Gallagher, 2005,
pp. 101–3). This shift has had mixed implications for Chinese workers. On the
positive side, these regulations have provided workers with new tools to
confront employers and local officials. On the negative side, this legislative
activity has narrowed the possibilities for labour activism, both discursively and
practically. From a discursive point of view, the dissemination of the labour law
has established a new legalistic hegemony that has limited the imagination and
repertoires of the workers, coaching them on which demands are permissible
and which remain out of reach, in a dynamic not too dissimilar from the way in
which labour movements in the West have been constrained through legal
frameworks and the infusion of managerialism in labour relations throughout
the neoliberal era (Hui, 2017; Gallagher, 2017). This can be seen, for instance,
in the dominant pattern of industrial actions in China, which to this day remain
atomised and focussed on demanding respect for legal rights, as well as in the
fact that grass-roots organisations aiming to assist Chinese workers over the
past two decades have focussed mostly on legal aid and dissemination (as we
will see, the mid-2010s saw some experiments with collective bargaining
among these organisations but they were quickly put to rest by the authorities)
(Chan and Siu, 2012; Elfstrom, 2021; Friedman, 2014; Lee, 2007). From
a practical point of view, these laws and regulations have managed to channel
many workers’ grievances through sanctioned channels, preventing (or at least
delaying) them from escalating to more disruptive methods. This is apparent
from the skyrocketing number of labour mediation and arbitration cases since
the adoption of the Labour Law in 1994 – from 140,122 in 1996 to 2,119,000 in
2019, according to official data.

12 Global China
Does this mean that the Chinese labour law represents a conscious and
successful ‘soul-engineering’ experiment by the Party-State on the Chinese
working class? Yes and no. There is no doubt that every piece of labour
legislation passed in China over the past decades has been the subject of careful
consideration by Chinese policymakers. Although the debate generally has
revolved around technical issues and the suitability of the said set of rules to
the country’s economy in its current stage of development, concerns about how
the new laws would impact labour activism were always very present. Scholars
have also extensively studied how China’s labour law and legal system have
affected the subjectivities of Chinese workers. For instance, in describing the
Chinese labour law as a massive hegemonic experiment (in the Gramscian
sense) undertaken by the Chinese Party-State in its turn to capitalism, Elaine
Sio-Ieng Hui (2017) has offered a categorisation of Chinese workers in accord-
ance with their interiorisation of this new legalistic discourse. In her ethno-
graphic research conducted at the turn of the millennium, Ching Kwan Lee
(2007) has shown how Chinese migrant workers are more likely to resort to
a legalistic repertoire and go through official channels in their protests, com-
pared with the overtly political language and disruptive methods adopted by
older laid-off workers in the state industry. By focussing on Chinese workers’
experiences of the legal system, Mary Gallagher (2007) has documented how
Chinese workers often get ‘disenchanted’ and radicalised when they face the
inefficiencies and inequalities of this system. In the same vein, we have argued
that most workers who go through their lives without direct involvement in
a dispute are more likely to live in a condition of ‘misinformed enchantment’,
that is, have a very vague idea of the specific provisions of the law but believe
that, should they get involved in a labour dispute, the legal system will come to
their succour (Franceschini, 2016, p. 153). Still, what often goes unnoticed in
these debates is how, in writing and enacting these laws, the Chinese authorities
did not have free rein but had to mediate between the interests of different
actors, both domestic and international. It is in these policymaking dynamics
that we see how the issue of labour rights in China is truly global.
The Case of the Labour Contract Law

The long and troubled process that led to the passing of China’s Labour
Contract Law (LCL) in 2007 provides a perfect case in point to highlight the
global relevance of labour rights in China. For years, the new law – the most
significant piece of labour legislation in China since the passing of the Labour
Law in 1994 – had been debated behind closed doors in Chinese academic
and policymaking circles. Two positions had come to dominate the

discussion: one that advocated for more government control and intervention
in industrial relations to guarantee workers’ rights and another that argued for
better enforcement of existing laws (Gallagher and Dong, 2011). In
March 2006, the Chinese authorities finally published a draft of the law that
strongly leaned towards the former position and asked the public for its
feedback. The response was overwhelming, with over 192,000 comments
submitted in one month, 65 per cent of them allegedly coming from ‘ordinary
workers’ mobilised by the lowest rungs of the Chinese official trade union
(Guan, 2007).
Foreign chambers of commerce in China were also active participants in
the process and their involvement was one of the aspects of this story that
attracted the most attention, both in China and abroad. In particular, the
American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (AmCham), the US-China
Business Council (USBC), and the European Union Chamber of Commerce
(EUCham) all submitted comments that were very critical of the draft law.
Besides a series of technical points, these documents emphasised that the
LCL was going to undermine the attractiveness of the Chinese market in the
eyes of foreign investors. The greatest concern was that the LCL would lead
to a rise in labour costs. As the then President of the EUCham bluntly
remarked to a journalist from the South China Morning Post on
26 April 2006: ‘[T]he strict regulations of the draft new law will limit
employers’ flexibility and will finally result in an increase of production
costs in China. An increase of production costs will force foreign companies
to reconsider new investment or continuing with their activities in China’
(Shi, 2006). Another argument was that it was pointless to enact new regula-
tions when the existing laws were not properly implemented. According to
the comments submitted by AmCham in March 2006:
It shall be noted that the most significant problem existing in labor issues in
PRC is not the lack of protection of laborers by labor laws and regulations,
but the fact that the laws are not fully observed. . . . Solving these long
outstanding problems shall mainly depend on establishing perfect law
enforcement procedures, strengthening law enforcement and putting into
effect existing provisions, but not proposing unduly high requirements in
addition to existing liabilities of enterprises and destroying existing legal
order. Otherwise the abnormal situation that ‘the one who violates laws
remains unpunished while the one who observes laws is punished’ must be
deteriorating. (AmCham Shanghai, 2006, pp. 20–1)
Finally, the law was deemed not appropriate given the current stage of
Chinese economic development. As an AmCham representative wrote to
the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in April 2006:

14 Global China
China is still a developing country and its main focus at this stage is still
economic development, as correctly pointed out by Premier Wen Jiabao. In
making and revising laws, the starting point should be the specific circum-
stances of China, not good intentions, and hastily-set goals . . . In the highly
competitive global economy of today, the welfare of Chinese workers
depends not only on protections afforded by labour law, but also depends
on the survival and steady growth of the enterprises in which they work. It is
not wise to kill the chicken to get the egg. (Cited in Gallagher and Dong,
2011, pp. 47–8)
Facing this kind of pushback from both foreign and domestic companies, the
Chinese authorities substantially revised the draft. This is particularly evident if
we consider the provisions concerning the trade union (Franceschini, 2009).
The draft of March 2006 included at least two provisions which would have
strengthened the role of company unions in their dealings with the employers:
the first provided that company policies and internal regulations which directly
affected the interests of the employees had to be discussed with and approved by
the union; the second mandated that, when a labour contract could not be
fulfilled owing to dramatic changes in the objective circumstances on which
the labour contract was based and it was necessary to lay off more than fifty
employees, the employer had to explain the situation to the company union or
all the staff, reaching a consensus before carrying out the lay-off plans. Even
though grass-roots unions in China are structurally so weak that even with these
new prerogatives they would hardly have posed a threat to managerial authority,
both provisions were drastically revised. Not only was the union’s right of veto
on the internal regulations expunged but the final draft also stated that
a company should ask the opinion of the union only on the matter of lay-offs
involving at least twenty workers or more than 10 per cent of the workforce. In
the same fashion, other articles on delicate matters, such as permanent contracts,
non-compete agreements, and the signing of labour contracts, were substan-
tially revised to accommodate the point of view expressed by the business
community.
Without delving into the issues surrounding the implementation of the LCL –
which was first undercut by the onset of the global financial crisis and then
rendered outdated by structural changes in China’s labour market (Gallagher
et al., 2015; Gallagher, 2022) – the same tension between different interest
groups became apparent on several other occasions. At the national level, in
July 2012 the Chinese authorities published a draft amendment of the LCL
focussed on dispatch labour, which in one month drew 557,243 comments from
the public (Geng and Zhou, 2012). In October, Chinese media reported on
pressures coming from Chinese state-owned enterprises, invested in

maintaining an unregulated labour dispatch system, so it came as a surprise

when the amendment was actually passed at the end of the year (Jiang, 2012). At
the local level, in 2010 local authorities in the Guangdong Province attempted to
rein in a wave of labour activism by pushing forward new rules that, if adopted,
would have significantly empowered workers to bargain collectively with their
employer (Chan, 2014, p. 704; Hui and Chan, 2016). As the Guangdong
authorities discussed a revision of the provincial Regulations on the
Democratic Management of the Companies that would have laid the founda-
tions for genuine collective wage bargaining, the Shenzhen authorities decided
to accelerate the legislative process of a city regulation on collective negoti-
ations. It was expected that both regulations would be passed quickly but in
a matter of weeks they disappeared from the political agenda. According to
scholars and labour activists, this turnaround was due to pressure coming from
the entrepreneurial community in Hong Kong, which had immense economic
interests in Guangdong and had made its displeasure publicly known by acquir-
ing pages in the media of the former British colony in which they expressed
their critical views (China Labour Bulletin, 2014; Hui and Chan, 2016).
There is an argument to be had about how much clout these entrepreneurial
complaints carried in shaping the ultimate decisions of the Chinese authorities.
However, these examples are significant for at least two reasons. First, they
make it clear that, while the Party-State has ultimate authority in shaping policy
in this field, all these laws and regulations are the result of complex negotiations
and represent a balancing act between the agendas of different constituencies,
including global business. Second, they turn the narrative of Chinese labour
forcing a global race to the bottom on its head, as we witness global capital itself
exerting pressure on China to keep down its labour standards.
Globalised Activism
Another important encounter between Chinese labour and the world took place
at the grass-roots, in the realm of labour activism. To this day, only one trade
union is legally allowed to exist in China, the All-China Federation of Trade
Unions (ACFTU 中华全国总工会), a mass organisation structured along
Leninist lines that is supposed to act as a ‘transmission belt’ between the
working class and the Party-State (Harper, 1969). Although on paper it has
around 300 million members, because of its structural subservience to both
managers and officials the ACFTU is notorious for its inability to represent the
interests of its constituency, leaving a gap for worker representation. As
throughout the 1980s the reforms started eroding the welfare and job security
of state workers and migration from the countryside scaled up rapidly,

16 Global China
discontent simmered, until in 1989 workers turned out en masse to join the
student-led pro-democracy protests and establish their own independent unions
(Zhang, 2022). The ensuing repression disproportionately targeted workers and,
with a few very minor exceptions, in the following years labour activism was on
the ebb (Lin, 2022).
The situation began to change in the mid-1990s and it is at this historical
juncture that we begin to see the global connections inherent in Chinese labour
activism. Two events stand out in this regard. First, in 1993, a fire broke out in
a small Hong Kong-owned toy factory in Shenzhen, claiming the lives of
eighty-seven migrant workers, mostly young women (Chan A., 2022). Labour
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Hong Kong publicised the tragic
incident and an effective international campaign was launched that linked the
big-brand toy companies in the developed world to the exploitation that went on
inside their supplier factories in Asia. This not only resulted in the international
toy industry recognising a code of conduct drawn up by the Hong Kong labour
NGOs but also led to increased international scrutiny of labour conditions in
Chinese factories at both the local and the international levels. Second, the
decision of the Chinese authorities to host the United Nations Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 signalled the beginning of a new stage
for the development of Chinese civil society, including a new type of NGO
focussed on labour issues (Howell, 2022).
While the first labour NGOs had a strong focus on gender issues, the late
1990s saw the emergence of organisations that focussed on the plight of migrant
workers more generally. This cohort further grew in the late 2000s, under the
administration of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, taking advantage of the political
openings offered by the Party-State’s newly minted discourse of social har-
mony. These organisations had strong ties to international civil society and,
indeed, drew most of their funding from international donors, a fact that was
apparent if one considered their geographical concentration in Beijing, with its
large number of embassies and international foundations, and Guangdong
Province, next to Hong Kong and its vibrant civil society. Given the intrinsic
sensitivity of labour issues, these labour NGOs were rarely allowed to register
as non-profit entities and usually ended up with a commercial registration or no
registration at all, which made them vulnerable to crackdowns by the author-
ities, which came periodically (Franceschini and Nesossi, 2018). They mostly
engaged in four kinds of activities: the establishment of workers’ centres, where
they organised educational classes and recreational activities; dissemination of
information on labour rights; social surveys and policy advocacy; and provision
of legal consultation and, in some cases, representation (Chan, 2013; Xu, 2013).
Significantly, in all these activities, these organisations carefully sought to

reproduce the notoriously individualistic language of the legal rights of the

Party-State, a decision made out of necessity that gained them considerable
criticism, in particular from scholars who argued that this strategy had the
adverse effect of undermining worker solidarity (Lee and Shen, 2011).
In the early 2010s, a few labour NGOs started going beyond this legalistic
approach to advocate for collective bargaining (集体谈判) as a new strategy to
protect workers’ broader interests (Chen and Yang, 2017; Froissart, 2018;
Franceschini and Lin, 2019). These organisations began openly intervening in
collective disputes, training workers on how to choose their own representatives
to confront the employers, an important step forward towards the empowerment
of China’s working class. Until then, collective bargaining had remained the
domain of the ACFTU, which had watered it down to ‘collective negotiation’
(集体协商), a largely formalistic method of bargaining that was entirely han-
dled by the official union under the assumption that employers and employees
shared identical interests. Significantly, even in this case, the shift was sup-
ported by global civil society, in particular the China Labour Bulletin,
a prominent labour NGO based in Hong Kong (Froissart, 2018). When the
Chinese authorities clamped down on these organisations at the end of 2015
(and then over and over again in the following years), they took care to
emphasise the foreign connections of these activists, resorting to the state
media to run a smear campaign centred on the alleged embezzlement of
money coming illegally from abroad and links to ‘hostile foreign forces’ hell-
bent on fostering chaos in the country (Franceschini and Nesossi, 2018).
The crackdown on labour NGOs took place within the context of a broader
attack by the Party-State against local NGOs and individual activists engaged in
politically sensitive fields, most of whom received financial support from
abroad and had strong connections with international civil society.
A fundamental step in this sense was the passing, in April 2016, of a Law on
the Management of Foreign NGOs’ Activities within Mainland China aimed,
among other things, at curtailing access to foreign funding by these organisa-
tions and individuals (Franceschini and Nesossi, 2016). What we have wit-
nessed over the past few years is a systematic attempt by the Party-State to
‘cleanse’ Chinese civil society by severing its international ties, which in itself
is a testament to the global nature of these organisations (Snape, 2021).
However, it is also important to note how China is not alone in this rejection
of the global when it comes to civil society. We are witnessing similar dynamics
not only in several authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries where the
spectre of ‘coloured revolutions’ is regularly used as a straw man to justify
periodical crackdowns and more restrictive laws on civil society but also –
perhaps more worryingly – in many liberal democracies, where fears of societal

18 Global China
infiltration and co-optation by agents of hostile foreign forces are becoming

increasingly pervasive. As local and international NGOs scramble to adapt to
the changing circumstances and navigate the political restraints imposed by
both donors and the governments of the countries they operate in, the future of
global civil society appears more uncertain than ever.
Dark Forebodings
The aspects discussed in this section obviously do not exhaust all global
linkages of Chinese labour. Much could be written about China’s technical co-
operation with the ILO, about how labour rights have been used as a diplomatic
tool (for instance, most recently by the European Union, which demanded that
China commit to ratifying ILO conventions against forced labour in order to
move forward with a landmark investment deal), about the various corporate
social responsibility initiatives that transnational corporations push on their
Chinese suppliers, and about how rising labour costs in China are now leading
to a drastic reconfiguration of supply chains in labour-intensive industries. All
of this, however, points to a single fact: issues related to labour rights and
industrial relations in today’s China are deeply intertwined with the global
capitalist system. It is not only about China proactively driving down labour
standards globally through a ‘race to the bottom’ but also about China adapting
to global capitalism, giving in to international pressures, and conforming to
broader trends, all while trying to create a labour regime that allows the country
to accumulate the most capital from integration into global markets.
Long gone are the days when China presented an alternative occupational
model through its ‘work unit’ (单位) system and the ‘iron rice bowl’ (铁饭碗)
of lifetime employment. As Joel Andreas (2019, pp. 8–9) has pointed out,
Maoist China stood out among all the variations of the twentieth-century
communist project for offering its urban citizens employment that was perhaps
more permanent than in any other country and for turning workplaces into sites
of governance of primary importance. Four decades of economic reforms have
seen the unravelling of this model. From the first experiments with Special
Economic Zones in the late 1970s to the mass migrations of rural workers to the
cities starting in the 1980s, from the introduction of labour contracts in 1986 to
the wave of lay-offs of state workers of the 1990s, the legacies of the Maoist
labour policies have been systematically dismantled. Basic social security
policies followed only later, as an afterthought when the social consequences
of this transition were becoming unmanageable and threatened the stability of
the whole system. At the same time, the political discourse of the workers as
‘masters’ of the state and the enterprise has been replaced by the anodyne and

technical language of ‘legal rights’, with the implications described above. The
result is that today, although the CCP still claims to represent ‘the vanguard of
the Chinese working class’ and China’s constitution still extols the virtues of
labour, secure employment has become a myth for the vast majority of the
country’s workforce. Extreme precarity has become the norm, just like in the
rest of the world.
From the revolutionary promise of lifetime employment, China is now at the
forefront of the neoliberal dream of atomised labour, in which the worker is
reduced to a simple homo economicus. This can be seen most prominently in
two regards. First, as we mentioned above, the Chinese trade union is powerless
owing to its structural limitations; at the same time, the Party-State, assisted by
the union, has been clamping down hard on any form of labour activism that
poses even the most basic threat to its monopoly over labour representation, be
that labour NGOs experimenting with collective bargaining or individual activ-
ists attempting to boost workers’ solidarity. While the Chinese case is indeed
extreme, this is just a manifestation of another global trend that began in the
1980s – that of the bureaucratisation of the trade unions and the undermining of
the collective power of the workers. Second, China is a pioneer when it comes to
the ‘new economies’. According to ILO estimates, in 2019 China had only
about 6.23 million workers directly employed in the digital platform economy,
less than 8 per cent of the nearly 80 million that constitute the workforce in the
sector (Zhou, 2020). According to other accounts, China’s digital economy
employs as many as 180 million people, or nearly one-quarter of the total
Chinese workforce (Chen et al., 2020). As the Chinese Party-State struggles
to revise its regulatory apparatus to protect them (Gallagher, 2022), it is these
workers – whether delivery workers subject to impossible work rhythms or
employees in high-tech companies pressured into working impossible hours –
who now most often appear in the local and international news owing to their
dreadful labour conditions, just like their counterparts in other parts of the world
do.
One decade ago, it was the Taiwanese Foxconn, an electronics contract
manufacturer that produces gadgets for some of the main international brands
(most famously Apple), which came to represent the worst excesses of exploit-
ation in the Chinese workplace. In 2010, when the company employed about
one million workers in China, Chinese and international media widely reported
on a series of attempted suicides among its ranks, eighteen in that year alone
(fourteen of whom then died) – all young migrant workers aged between
seventeen and twenty-five – and exposed the alienating circumstances in
which these youths had to toil (Chan J., 2022). Today, the spotlight is on new
professional figures: delivery workers and white-collar employees in high-tech

20 Global China
companies. The difference between the workers who made the news yesterday
and those who do today is that, although Foxconn did not spare any effort when
it came to breaking down any potential for solidarity among its employees, at
the end of the day Foxconn workers still lived and toiled in shared facilities, so
at least had a chance to exchange experiences, discuss their plight, and nurture
a sense of belonging to a group. Workers in the platform digital economies most
often lack even this. Not only are they atomised owing to the very structure of
the sectors they operate in but the Party-State is making sure that they remain
that way by detaining those very few activists who attempt to boost a sense of
class solidarity, such as Chen Guojiang, a delivery worker detained in Beijing in
early 2021 and then charged with the catch-all crime of ‘picking quarrels and
making trouble’ for his activities aimed at exposing the malfeasances of com-
panies and providing support to his fellow workers (Feng, 2021).
In such a context, it is with considerable scepticism that, in 2021, we read
news reports about Chinese youths choosing to ‘lie flat’ (躺平), that is, to resort
to passive resistance or outright opt out of the rat race that is the neoliberal
workplace of today (Chen, 2021; Day, 2021). While commentators are eager to
see in this the sign of yet another impending ‘awakening’ of Chinese workers –
in this case, mostly white-collars, one decade after another much-discussed
alleged ‘awakening’ of which second-generation migrant workers were the
protagonists – we see in it evidence of a defeat. It is when everything else
fails, when there are no venues for organising collectively, when there is no
political imagination left, that one chooses to ‘lie flat’ or resort to other forms of
weapons of the weak. And the fact that in these phenomena many see
a promising sign really says much about the predicament of labour in the
brave new world heralded by these new economies, not only in China. Sadly,
in the neoliberal world of today, the bar for labour activism has now been set so
low that even ‘lying flat’ has become a revolutionary act. Instead of looking at
these situations pertaining to labour rights and worker resistance as an exclu-
sively ‘Chinese’ phenomenon, it is these types of connections and dialectic
interactions between local dynamics and global trends that we should really be
investigating when discussing the plight of Chinese workers.
2 Digital Dystopias
The proliferation of atomised platform labour in China overlaps with other
worrying developments in the digital sphere, both in China and elsewhere. In
recent years, as it has become increasingly clear that the Internet and informa-
tion and communication technologies (ICTs) have largely failed to live up to
their promise of being ‘liberation technologies’ ushering in a new era of

freedom, enlightenment, and democracy, the spectre of the emergence of dark

forms of high-tech surveillance and social control has dominated depictions of
advances in digital technologies. From facial recognition to 5G, China has been
at the centre of the global imaginary of this malevolent technological turn, with
the country being depicted as a site of uniquely authoritarian technological
development and also a ground zero from which oppressive technologies will
emerge before being exported (along with China’s authoritarian model) around
the world. In the words of the social theorist Benjamin Bratton (2021, p. 54): ‘In
the West, China is now so deeply associated with technology that anxieties
about technology are projected into anxieties about China, and to an extent vice
versa.’
The depiction of China as the locus of the perversion of the digital sphere into
a corrupting, illiberal force pervades political, media, and popular discourses in
the West and reaches its zenith around discussions of the country’s ambition to
develop a ‘social credit system’ to monitor the socio-economic activity of
citizens, businesses, and organisations. One only needs to turn to publications
like The Economist, which has run with headlines like ‘China Invents the
Digital Totalitarian State’ (Economist, 2016a), or the tweets of characters like
Donald Trump Jr, who has claimed that vaccine passports in the USA are
a ‘Chinese-styled social credit system’ pushed by ‘authoritarian leftists’
(Villarreal, 2021), to get a sense of the existential dread surrounding the idea
of Chinese-driven digital innovations that have the potential both to surveil and
restrict the individual’s involvement in the social and economic realms. As
such, social credit embodies deeper fears surrounding China’s emergence on the
global stage, paired with imagined visions of the country upending the status
quo socio-economic order in the West and ‘infecting’ Western societies with its
corrupting authoritarian modes of digital existence.
In this way, social credit has come to signify the onset of a dystopian future
that is being seeded in the authoritarian and illiberal context of contemporary
China but which will fan out across the globe, reformulating the relationship
between individuals, corporations, and states and recoding our expectations for
private life. But how unique to China’s authoritarian model is this attempt to
leverage new technologies and big/alternative forms of data in order to more
easily categorise, monitor, standardise, and ultimately quantify socio-economic
activity and moral behaviour? This section seeks to answer this question by
situating the Chinese social credit system in a broader context, outlining the
ways in which the discourses and practices of social credit both parallel and
build on attempts around the globe to assess economic risk, regulate economic
activity, and socially engineer capitalist notions of ‘creditworthiness’ into
society.

22 Global China
Making Credit Social

So what is social credit and how is it linked to emerging forms of data-driven
governance? In Western discourse it is frequently depicted monolithically, as an
all-encompassing, technologically sophisticated, big-data-driven rating appar-
atus where people receive scores based on their social and economic activities
that then facilitate or limit their socio-economic participation (Carney, 2018).
When comparisons are made, it is often likened to an episode of the dystopian
sci-fi show Black Mirror and/or is depicted as an extension of some traditional
Chineseness – either a new manifestation of Confucian ethics or the realisation
of the goals of Mao-era surveillance (Clover, 2016; Palin, 2018; Zeng, 2018).
As such, social credit is depicted as a dark digital perversion that is able to
emerge in the particular authoritarian context of contemporary China – a place
characterised in orientalist terms as both having a uniquely totalitarian history
and being at the forefront of the development of new digital technologies. In the
words of The Economist:
In the West, too, the puffs of data that people leave behind them as they go
about their lives are being vacuumed up by companies such as Google and
Facebook. Those with access to these data will know more about people than
people know about themselves. But you can be fairly sure that the West will
have rules – especially where the state is involved. In China, by contrast, the
monitoring could result in a digital dystopia. (Economist, 2016b)
This form of essentialist argumentation has the potential to be convincing

because it contains a kernel of truth: there are fewer impediments to the creation
of a big/alternative-data-driven mass surveillance regime in China than in the
West. However, it also sets up a false binary between the West and China that
can cause us to miss the crucial ways in which particular practices in China are
both shaped by and contribute to shaping global processes and tendencies that
transcend states or political systems. In other words, it obscures the parallels and
linkages, as well as the ways in which Chinese experiments with social credit
build on and evolve out of established modes of assessing socio-economic risk
and engineering economic moralities, that are crucial for understanding the
dynamics of Chinese social credit and its implications for people both inside and
outside of China.
In order to really come to grips with the full ramifications of Chinese social
credit, it is necessary to move beyond a singular focus on authoritarian social
control. While Chinese policymakers undeniably see social credit as a tool for
surveilling the population, this is far from the only ambition for the system.
Social credit can be seen as an outgrowth of Chinese experiments with integrat-
ing excluded and marginalised populations (particularly in rural areas) into the

formal socio-economic system. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a number of

microcredit and financial inclusion initiatives were initiated by the Chinese
government, often inspired by or in conjunction with international financial
institutions and the global microfinance movement. For instance, the China
Association of Microfinance – an institution aiming to support the establish-
ment of microcredit programmes and promoting inclusive finance – was estab-
lished in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences with support from CitiBank
and other international financial institutions (Loubere, 2019). However, despite
these attempts at integrating excluded individuals, groups, and areas into the
formal economy, lending bottlenecks persisted at least in part due to a lack of
credit information for risk assessment. As such, there have been discussions
about streamlining the monitoring of the economic activity of citizens, busi-
nesses, and organisations in China in order to improve and monitor the func-
tioning of the economic system going back to the beginning of the century
(Zhang, 2020). These discussions took a much more concrete form in 2014,
with the publication of a notice from the State Council outlining plans to build
a nationwide social credit system by 2020. This high-level policy document
outlined steps that should be taken in order to create a system that collects credit
records and information for all citizens while also promoting a culture of
trustworthiness. The ultimate aim is for the system to facilitate commercial
activity and promote socio-economic development (State Council, 2014).
Despite the goal of having an integrated, nationwide system by 2020, social
credit is still not fully unified or centralised. Like most policy frameworks in
China, the social credit system is being subjected to the country’s distinctive
policy modelling process, where local governments produce their own inter-
pretations of policies, which then vie to become national models (Heilmann,
2008). As Zhang Chenchen has pointed out, the ongoing construction of social
credit includes ‘an extremely diverse range of decentralized, experimental, and
fragmented programs across social, economic, and legal fields’ (Zhang, 2020,
p. 566). By 2019, approximately twenty-eight localities were labelled official
‘demonstration cities’ and allowed to experiment and innovate within the
limitations of the policy framework (Daum, 2019). A novel aspect of social
credit, however, was that eight large internet companies were also initially given
licences to run their own pilots (Loubere, 2017). The most widely discussed
private social credit system (often conflated with social credit more broadly by
those outside China) is Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, which utilises opaque algo-
rithms to arrive at social credit scores for their customers. Those with high
scores have been able to access a range of benefits from other Alibaba busi-
nesses and their partners (Bislev, 2017). However, while Sesame Credit is
significant because of the huge amounts of economic data held by Alibaba

24 Global China
through Alipay and Ant Financial, the Chinese government ultimately cancelled
its pilot status along with the other private companies, and these initiatives now
‘essentially function like loyalty rewards programs’ (Matsakis, 2019). In recent
years, different aspects of the social credit system have increasingly come into
focus, particularly with regard to which entities will collect and report which
types of data, but the system nevertheless remains in flux and in development.1
Based on the above, Chinese social credit should be understood as an
evolving policy framework with a number of facets – all of which are under-
pinned, but not solely defined, by modes of surveillance. For one, social credit is
envisioned as an administrative enforcement mechanism, which will utilise data
analytics to ensure regulatory compliance through rewards for companies and
organisations that consistently comply with regulations and various blacklists
and other forms of punishment for violators (Daum, 2019; Zhang, 2020). This
component of social credit reflects the wider global expansion of data-driven,
algorithmic governance techniques, and to fully understand the dynamics at
play it is necessary to highlight commonalities and divergences between
China’s social credit system and emerging regulatory regimes around the
world (Backer, 2018). At the same time, social credit is a response to the fact
that China lacks the infrastructure to systematically assess and evaluate eco-
nomic risk for individuals, businesses, and organisations (Daum, 2017), which
adds costs to commercial activity and has created a situation where there is
a perceived general lack of ‘trustworthiness’ in society that is holding back
socio-economic development. As such, Chinese social credit should be under-
stood as an attempt to build a comprehensive economic risk assessment system
(which draws on data from the social realm) allowing for smoother economic
integration, increased participation in the formal economy, and a form of moral
social engineering aimed at creating a trustworthy (or creditworthy) citizenry.
Social Credit as a Credit System

While the predominant depiction of social credit is as an exoticised, novel,
dystopian practice, it is more accurate (albeit more boring) to take credit rating/
scoring systems as our initial point of comparison and analysis. As mentioned
above, China’s lack of a uniform credit rating infrastructure has proved difficult
for financial institutions and has resulted in high transaction costs and lending
bottlenecks. The social credit system seeks to fix this problem by helping
financial institutions assess risk, essentially greasing the wheels of Chinese
capitalism. The difference between social credit and traditional credit scoring
1
For up-to-date analysis and translations of key developments in the social credit system, see the
website China Law Translate https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/.

systems elsewhere (which generally base scores on economic factors alone) is

that the Chinese version proposes to draw on larger amounts and alternative
types of data from both the social and economic spheres. However, this is
a difference in degree, rather than of fundamental nature. As such, we can
gain important insights into the potential functioning of social credit in China by
looking at the practices and outcomes of credit scoring in other contexts, and by
examining Chinese social credit we can anticipate the ways in which credit
scoring systems elsewhere might expand their risk assessment criteria in the age
of big and alternative data.
Indeed, if one bothers to look, it quickly becomes apparent that Chinese
ambitions to leverage different forms of data from the social realm for assessing
economic risk are not unique at all. For example, the San Francisco-based
company Affirm, which was founded by PayPal’s Max Levchin, scrutinises
the digital footprints of potential customers to make lending decisions
(Reisinger, 2015). And more cases can be found among an emerging class of
digital lenders across the Global South that are ‘innovating’ new methods for
assessing risk, often using methods such as psychometric tests in order to ‘judge
the character’ of potential borrowers (Economist, 2016c; Loubere and Brehm,
2018).
The financial technology (fintech) company LenddoEFL provides a glimpse
into how the global digital finance sector envisions data collection, personal
privacy, and the future of credit scoring. Lenddo began as a digital lending
company and was one of the first to lend through the Facebook platform.
However, the company quickly moved out of the lending business and into
providing credit rating and identity verification services based on big/alterna-
tive data analysis to other lenders. In 2017 Lenddo merged with the
Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) – founded at Harvard – which utilises
psychometric testing and other forms of data collection to create credit scores.
LenddoEFL uses a huge amount of private personal data from their customers to
assess risk, including information about contacts, social media activity, messa-
ging and emails, browsing history, and user location, to name just a few.
Moreover, their collection of data extends beyond their own customers and to
their contacts, with these interactions feeding into the risk assessment. Jeff
Stewart, the founder and CEO of Lenddo, has described the company’s ‘innova-
tive’ use of data by saying: ‘I think that what we’ll see in the data and as society
evolves . . . [is that] who you hang out with and how you interact with them is
going to be part of how you’re judged’. He has also articulated a vision of future
credit scoring based partially on a customer’s social connections, with those
having ‘high-quality’ friends receiving a higher score (Privacy International,
2018).

26 Global China
If these words had come from a Chinese official rather than the CEO of
a major fintech company, we could be relatively sure that there would be a flurry
of mainstream media activity clearly highlighting the dystopic implications,
replete with references to Black Mirror. However, if we turn again to The
Economist, we find that in contrast to their fears surrounding China’s ‘digital
totalitarianism’, the magazine writes glowingly of the potential of psychomet-
rics and alternative data collection utilised by EFL and other fintech providers in
their quest to ‘financially include’ the Global South. While Chinese social credit
is presented as an existential threat, fintech surveillance capitalism is seen to be
ushering in a non-threatening future ‘in which lending is almost entirely
digitised, combining psychometrics with social media and mobile phone
records . . . Lenders, looking for an edge, will find ever more ways to peer
into their customers’ souls’ (Economist, 2016c). The point here is not to
highlight the double standards of The Economist but rather to illuminate the
ways in which the practical aspects of the collection and analysis of big/
alternative data that underpins Chinese planning around social credit parallel
developments in the broader fintech sector and the evolution of digital financial
capitalism globally.
Social Credit as Social Engineering

Part and parcel of the quest to draw on alternative forms of personal data to
assess risk and create a credit rating system is the aim to socially engineer new
forms of socio-economic relations into the population based on capitalist
notions of ‘creditworthiness’ and participation in the formal market. In the
case of the Chinese social credit system, there is an explicit ambition to facilitate
market participation by increasing ‘trustworthiness’ (守信) and ‘integrity’
(诚信) through moral education as part of a wider civilisational imperative
(Daum, 2019). While this civilising component of social credit is rooted in long-
standing Chinese state goals of creating a ‘modern’ citizenry, it also draws on
global discourses associated with good governance, socio-economic develop-
ment, and economic participation. In particular, the moral and developmental
language of social credit parallels much of the discourse utilised by microcredit
and financial inclusion programmes that aim to transform ‘underdeveloped’
places and people into developed subjects through integration into the market.
For microcredit and financial inclusion proponents like Muhammad Yunus (the
Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank), inclusion into the
market is actually a matter of life and (developmental) death. In his words:
‘Financial services are like oxygen. We need to breathe, without it we collapse.
The absence of financial oxygen makes people collapse, makes people

dysfunction . . . The moment they are connected to financial services, they

become active’ (Arns, 2018).
Echoing the psychometric turn discussed above, Chinese social credit also
resonates with the idea pushed by behavioural economists – and promoted by
the World Bank – that good economic decision-making and behaviour can be
instilled through ‘tweaks’ and ‘nudges’ targeting individuals, ultimately result-
ing in broad social benefits (World Bank, 2015). These ideas have been popu-
larised in recent decades, culminating in the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics
being awarded to Richard Thaler for his work on ‘nudge theory’ and the 2019
Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded to three development economists who
pioneered the randomised control trial (RCT) for socio-economic development.
Both of these approaches have been key to the expansion of social experiments
on populations (mainly in the Global South) in an attempt to socially engineer
different types of behaviour (Chelwa and Muller, 2019). These behaviouralist
and experimentalist approaches see individual poverty and broader patterns of
underdevelopment as being partly the result of difficulties surrounding making
decisions under conditions of pervasive distrust. From this perspective, one of
the solutions to underdevelopment is the creation of trusting societies, as
highlighted in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2015: Mind,
Society, and Behavior: ‘Social preferences and social influences can lead soci-
eties into self-reinforcing collective patterns of behavior. In many cases, these
patterns are highly desirable, representing patterns of trust and shared values’
(World Bank, 2015, p. 9). The parallels with the Chinese government’s ambi-
tions for social credit to ‘build an environment of trust’ (General Office of the
State Council, 2016) are obvious.
Credit and Surveillance Old and New

As legal scholar Jeremy Daum points out: ‘There can be great comparative
value for democracies in watching China’s integration of technology, govern-
ance, and society, but meaningful comparison requires accurate understand-
ing’ (Daum, 2019). Taking this one step further, accurate understanding
cannot be rooted only in detailed comparisons of technology, governance,
and surveillance capitalism in separate contexts, but rather must be based on
analysis of parallels, divergences, overlaps, and entanglements globally. As
such, it is necessary to be able to identify crucial commonalities with what is
happening in China and elsewhere and how these things are connected both
materially and discursively. If we fail to do this, then we either ignore one of
the most important developments in digital social control because we relativ-
ise through whataboutist arguments (i.e. everyone is doing it so who cares);

28 Global China
adopt an essentialist stance and assume that emerging forms of dystopian

digital surveillance, such as social credit, are something unique to China’s
brand of authoritarianism; or perceive Chinese digital experiments as
a corruption of the liberatory teachings of digital technologies, without
recognising that what is happening in China is actually the logical continu-
ation (and intensification) of phenomena elsewhere – and in this sense China
has been an exemplary, not subversive, student in the classroom of global
capitalism. In short, any of these approaches makes it impossible to see how
developments in China are actually rooted in, and contributing to, a global
trajectory of rapidly expanding alternative data analytics, algorithmic govern-
ance, and surveillance capitalism.
As such, rather than seeing technology itself as something neutral that can be
turned to good or evil depending on which actor is utilising it, we should
perceive these forms of high-tech surveillance capitalism as emerging through,
and facilitating the ambitions of, the global capitalist system and its participants.
Dreams of fully integrating populations into the formal economy allowing for
‘frictionless’ commercial activity, as well as the transformation of individuals
into both market consumers and producers of market-relevant consumption
data, are ultimately dreams moulded by capitalism.
They are also nothing new. The functioning of debt in capitalist societies has
always been underpinned by technologies of surveillance of both individuals
and their social networks. Traditional credit scores have sought to surveil
economic activity in order to judge if someone is creditworthy, and those
without a sufficient paper trail (i.e. not sufficiently surveillable) need to turn
to family or friends who can act as guarantors and be subjected to surveillance
themselves (Loubere, 2021). The ability to leverage digital technologies to
collect huge amounts of different types of data, along with the algorithmic
automation of data analysis, represents the next logical step in the evolution of
capitalist credit rating systems and the wider goal of expanding economic
integration. Chinese social credit certainly represents an important example of
this development, alongside others around the world. The fact that China is not
unique does not render these developments any less dystopian, but rather more
so. As we continue to see the inevitable sharpening of repressive tools of
surveillance and socio-economic control wielded by the rich and powerful in
ways that will only entrench and exacerbate the inequalities and forms of
subjugation inherent to the capitalist political economy, it becomes more
important to clearly illuminate the shared rationalities, practices, and potential
outcomes of these systems, as the failure to do so will doom our chances of
collectively militating against them and reorienting these technologies towards
the creation of more just societies.

3 Xinjiang
Another example of dynamics in China that require us to identify global
linkages can be found in the ‘re-education’ camps of Xinjiang, which have
become a major focal point of international tensions in recent years. These
camps constitute a fundamental part of the ‘People’s War on Terror’ initiated by
the Chinese authorities in response to a rise in violent attacks carried out by
Uyghur civilians against Han civilians in late 2013 and 2014 (for a detailed
timeline of these events, see the appendix to Byler et al., 2022). While initially it
was only religious leaders who were sent to the camps, by 2017, after Xinjiang
came under the administration of hard-line governor Chen Quanguo, the Party-
State began assessing the whole Muslim population in the region for signs of
‘extremism’, which often meant simply practising their religion in any visible
form. Since then, Uyghur, Kazakh, and other peoples have been increasingly
prevented from practising their traditional ways of life, and their mosques and
other sacred places demolished or transformed (Thum, 2020). Not only have
hundreds of thousands of people – and this is a conservative estimate – been
detained in prisons and ‘re-education’ camps but many of their relatives have
been assigned to work in factories far from their homes and their children placed
in residential boarding schools where they receive ‘patriotic’, non-religious
education. These camps also do not exist in a void but have deep historical
roots and significant global connections. It is to these roots and connections that
we turn in this section.
Historical Precedents
Scholars have pointed out how the current situation in Xinjiang is rooted in
long-standing Han suppression of Uyghur identity, as well as in discourses of
‘blood lineage’ and ‘thought reform’ emerging in the Maoist era (Cheek, 2019;
Cliff, 2016; Yi, 2019). However, what is unfolding in Xinjiang can also be
considered an extension of settler colonial logics and practices dating back to
European colonialism, where native populations were brutally suppressed and
concentrated on reservations (Nemser, 2017). For instance, the recent revela-
tions that the Chinese government is engaging in the forced sterilisation of
Uyghurs echo the eugenics campaigns targeting native populations in the
United States and elsewhere in the twentieth century (Amy and Rowlands,
2018). Similarly, the dispossession and relocation of Kazakh and other
nomadic-pastoralist communities in Xinjiang to make space for state-led
enclosures of Kazakh grasslands for ecotourism purposes find echoes in green
colonial land grabs that have taken place across the world – from the establish-
ment of the national parks in the United States through the dispossession and

30 Global China
genocide of Indigenous people, to the less bloody development of wind farms

within reindeer herding lands in Norway (Salimjan, 2022).
More specifically, the Xinjiang camps as carceral infrastructure aimed at
reinforcing a colonial presence represent the culmination of a century-long
global process in which concentration camps were first conceived by the
Spanish in Cuba in the late 1890s, expanded by the British in South Africa
during the Boer War, normalised by all warring factions during the First World
War, and finally manifested in the extreme variants of the Soviet Gulag and the
Nazi Lager, before lapsing into the more familiar forms of ‘black’ detention
sites that became common in Latin America in the 1970s. In this regard,
proponents of whataboutist arguments relentlessly point out how Western
liberal democracies have also repeatedly established concentration camps in
recent history. And they are not wrong. As Tzvetan Todorov (1986, pp. viii–ix)
wrote in his preface to Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved:
illegitimate (if not ‘useless’) violence [such as that of the concentration

camps] is not a prerogative only of nazi and communist regimes, it can also
be encountered in the authoritarian states of the third world and even in
parliamentary democracies. It is only needed that the voices of the political
leaders present it as necessary, even as urgent; immediately it will be raised
by ubiquitous media and soon thereafter supported by the court of authors and
intellectuals who know well how to come up with rational justifications for
the choices of those in power: these choices are always made in the name of
the ‘defence of democracy’ or the ‘lesser evil’.
From the British experience in Malaysia and Kenya in the 1950s – stories that
the British government has consistently attempted to hide and manipulate
(Monbiot, 2020) – to the latest experiments of the US government with extra-
judicial detentions in Guantánamo Bay and the mass internment of undocu-
mented immigrants, examples abound.
And there is another unsettling historical lesson that should be considered. As
journalist Andrea Pitzer (2018, p. 13) has argued, concentration camps are
deeply rooted in modernity, particularly in advances in public health, census
taking, and bureaucratic efficiency that took place in the late nineteenth century.
They are also inextricably linked to inventions like barbed wire and automatic
weapons. At the same time, ‘only rarely have governments publicly acknow-
ledged the use of camps as deliberate punishment, more often promoting them
as part of a civilizing mission to uplift supposedly inferior cultures and races’
(Pitzer, 2018, p. 6). In this sense, the Chinese authorities are not only maintain-
ing this tradition by maximising the ‘benefits’ of the latest progress in surveil-
lance technology to establish its twenty-first-century version of concentration
camps in Xinjiang, but they are also lifting heavily from established discourses

to justify such an endeavour. From this point of view, it is possible to argue that
while the Xinjiang camps are eerily similar to their predecessors in terms of
power dynamics and discursive justifications – which makes the testimonies
from the Nazi camps or the Soviet Gulag particularly poignant when read in
light of what is happening in Xinjiang today (see, for instance, the discussion of
the work of Primo Levi in relation to Xinjiang in Franceschini and Byler,
2021) – they are also distinct in that their operation is shaped by the latest
technological advancements.
Discursive Links
Concentration camps in Xinjiang are not monads even in the context of
today’s world. On the contrary, it is possible to identify both discursive and
material linkages between the events unfolding in northwest China and global
trends. On the discursive side, the Chinese authorities have widely appropri-
ated international discourses of anti-terrorism related to the US-led War on
Terror to justify their securitisation of Xinjiang (Roberts, 2020). David
Brophy (2019) has written about the ‘war of words’ over the Xinjiang
question between Chinese authorities and foreign critics, pointing out how
Chinese officials justify the camps by citing what they see as a worldwide
consensus – which emerged in the wake of the global War on Terror – on the
need to combat radicalisation through pre-emptive measures that identify,
isolate, and rehabilitate potential extremists. According to the logic of the
Chinese authorities, if the camps in Xinjiang go beyond any Western attempt
at countering extremism, it is simply because counter-extremism policing in
the West, focussing only on select individuals, has not done enough to prevent
acts of terrorism.
In the same vein, Darren Byler (2019b) has put on display the poignant
similarities between the attempts to construct a ‘human terrain system’ through
weaponised ethnography by the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and the way
in which the Chinese authorities are acting in Xinjiang, while also unearthing
how shifts in US military doctrine in the field of counter-insurgency since the
late 2000s were first received and adapted in China before being put into
practice in Xinjiang. This link is also made in a recent influential, and contro-
versial, paper by Sheena Greitens, Myunghee Lee, and Emir Yazici (2020), in
which the authors argue that China’s rhetoric about Central Asia’s Uyghur
diaspora began to shift following the attacks of 11 September 2001, with the
Party-State drawing connections between Uyghur organisations and jihadist
groups, especially those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, instead of emphasising
pan-Turkic separatism.

32 Global China
It is also possible to find less explored but no less poignant assonances

between discourses adopted by the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang and those
pushed by some governments in the West in relation to their minority, immi-
grant, and refugee populations. One such example is the language of ‘gratitude’.
As Christian Sorace (2021) has highlighted, the Party-State in Xinjiang is
enacting ‘gratitude education campaigns’ as a direct instrument of control
within the re-education camps, where, to prove that they are rehabilitated,
detainees must convincingly demonstrate their absolute loyalty and gratitude
to China, the Communist Party, and Xi Jinping himself. Besides testimonies of
‘graduates’ from the camp presented by Chinese state media, Sorace quotes
a campaign launched in early 2017 in Ürümqi under the name of ‘three
gratitudes, three wishes’ – that is, ‘gratitude to General Party Secretary Xi
Jinping’, ‘gratitude to the Communist Party, ‘gratitude to the mighty mother-
land’, ‘wishing General Party Secretary a healthy life’, ‘wishing the mighty
motherland glory and prosperity’, and ‘wishing for ethnic harmony’.
Although such ritualised incantations and repetitions are the legacy of a sort
of campaign politics that has been perfected by the CCP over the century of its
existence, in a separate essay Sorace (2020) points out how such demands for
gratitude are not uncommon even in the West. As examples, he quotes former
President Donald Trump’s delay in approving COVID-19 relief cheques
because he insisted that his signature be on them, as well as George W. Bush
complaining in 2007 that the Iraqis whose lives he destroyed did not feel
sufficiently grateful. This echoes Mimi T. Nguyen’s (2012) research, which
has shown how, after being granted citizenship in the United States, refugees
from areas devastated by US imperialism are expected to show ‘gratitude’ for
the ‘gift of freedom’. According to Sorace (2020, p. 168), ‘these hysterical
demands reveal the insecurity of sovereign power’ and are aimed at maintaining
a status quo that the authorities perceive as precarious, in China and beyond.
Material Connections
The implications of this co-optation of counter-insurgency discourses emanat-
ing from the War on Terror by the Chinese authorities remain highly controver-
sial in that taking the ‘anti-terrorism’ rhetoric at face value risks legitimating the
policies of the Party-State in Xinjiang (Robertson, 2020). However, the material
side of the global dimension of the camps presents us with a more straightfor-
ward example of the ‘complicities’ existing between Western capitalism and the
People’s Republic of China (Dirlik, 2017). Indeed, while the dominant narra-
tives about the camps revolve around essentialist authoritarian or even totalitar-
ian frames, there are good reasons to present a critique of the camps framed in

terms of their embeddedness in the global capitalist system, if not as an extreme

manifestation of a new form of capitalism itself. For instance, in light of the fact
that the camps system is enforced through a comprehensive infrastructure of
biometric surveillance and physical checkpoints, as well as an army of police
contractors, Darren Byler (2022b, p. xiii) has argued that camps are a symptom
of ‘terror capitalism’, which he defines as ‘a distinct configuration of state
capital, techno-political surveillance, and unfree labor, [which] might begin
with targeted groups like the Uyghurs, but . . . might also find similar expression
among Muslim populations in Kashmir or with watch-listed Latinx asylum
seekers in Texas’.
‘Terror capitalism’ – or whatever we call this new facet of capitalism – is
global in nature. There is no denying that both Chinese and multinational
corporations are deeply involved in the development of surveillance technolo-
gies that are used in Xinjiang. As Darren Byler (2020) has highlighted, local
authorities in Xinjiang have recently started outsourcing their policing respon-
sibilities to private and state-owned technology companies in order to enhance
their surveillance capacities through private–public partnerships. These com-
panies, especially those that are leading the way in the field of artificial intelli-
gence, operate well beyond Chinese borders. In an uncanny instance that he
cites, in April 2020 Amazon received a shipment of 1,500 heat-sensing camera
systems to take the temperatures of its workers during the coronavirus pan-
demic. These units came from Dahua, a Chinese company that in 2017 received
over 900 million USD to build comprehensive surveillance systems to support
the expansion of extra-legal internment, checkpoints, and ideological training in
Xinjiang (Hu and Dastin, 2020).
As documented by Gerald Roche (2019), the situation in Xinjiang has also
involved the global mercenary industry. In January 2019, the Frontier Services
Group (FSG), a private security firm spearheaded and led by Blackwater
founder Erik Prince from 2014 until April 2021, announced plans to open
a ‘training centre’ in Xinjiang (Shepherd, 2019). The company was established
by Erik Prince with investment from Citic Group, one of China’s largest central
state-owned investment companies, as a publicly traded aviation and logistics
firm specialising in shipping in Africa and elsewhere, as well as conducting
high-risk evacuations from conflict zones, declaredly with a particular focus on
helping Chinese businesses to work safely in Africa (Cole and Scahill, 2016).
FSG first announced plans to open an office in Xinjiang in March 2017 (Fan,
2017) and a few months later it appointed Lü Chaohai as head of its northwest-
ern regional operations (Bloomberg, 2019; FSG, 2017). Previously, Lü was the
vice-president of the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps, also known
as bingtuan, the paramilitary-commercial organisation that has been tasked by

34 Global China
the CCP with the development of Xinjiang’s economy since the 1950s.
Although all the information about the company’s involvement in Xinjiang
has since been taken offline (Ordonez, 2019), the announcement highlighted
another problematic set of complicities between global capitalism and repres-
sive practices of cultural suppression in China and beyond.
At the same time, foreign universities are actively taking part in developing
the technology and techniques that the Chinese authorities are using to ramp up
surveillance in Xinjiang. Leading international academic institutions, including
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have come under scrutiny for having
research partnerships with artificial intelligence companies that have business
ties with state security organs in the region (Harney, 2019). To cite just a few
specific examples, in August 2018 Anil K. Jain, head of Michigan State
University’s Biometrics Research Group, travelled to Xinjiang’s capital,
Ürümqi, and gave a speech about facial recognition at the Chinese
Conference on Biometrics Recognition, for which he also sat on the advisory
board (Rollet, 2019). In 2019, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and
Curtin University in Perth both had to review their links to Chinese companies
and researchers over concerns that the partnerships could be helping China
persecute Uyghurs (McNeill et al., 2019). UTS, in particular, was revealed to
have a 10 million AUD partnership with CETC, a Chinese state-owned military
tech company that developed an app used by Chinese security forces to track
and detain Uyghurs. Finally, also in 2019, it emerged that to bolster their DNA
tracking capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police force drew on
material and expertise provided by Kenneth Kidd, a prominent Yale
University geneticist, while using equipment made by Thermo Fisher,
a Massachusetts company (Wee, 2019). Over the past couple of years, academic
journals have had to retract articles for ethical violations related to the informed
consent procedures followed by the authors in collecting DNA samples from
Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in northwest China, while several more
cases are still under investigation (Marcus, 2020; Wee, 2021).
In fact, there are many instances of Chinese companies approaching foreign
universities, either directly or through their shadow subsidiaries, and offering
funds under the generic banner of ‘supporting collaboration between academia
and industry’. While fostering international partnerships and collaboration is
undoubtedly part of the core mission of universities, as James Darrowby (2019)
has pointed out, the key areas for proposed collaboration in the case of Chinese
companies often focus on the development of the next generation of audio-
visual tracking tools, which represent significant potential for military and
domestic surveillance applications. With neoliberal universities often forced
to seek and accept funds from any available source to justify their very existence

in the eyes of the government, they frequently sidestep due-diligence proced-

ures and end up abetting projects that contribute to ramped-up surveillance and
repression in China and elsewhere. And this kind of complicity does not even
touch upon matters such as the nature of research affiliations with foreign
institutions, conflicts of interest, undisclosed double appointments, and the
dissemination and application of sensitive project outputs. Essentialist depic-
tions of this situation are widespread but again only provide us with a partial
picture. While emphasis is frequently placed on the nefarious activities under-
taken by Chinese state actors aimed at corrupting Western higher education
institutions, there is much less attention paid to the ways in which the market-
ised and managerialised university has become eminently pliable to outside
interests through funding and research partnerships, a topic which we will
return to in more detail in Section 5.
It would be a mistake, however, to reduce corporate involvement in Xinjiang
to high-tech actors involved in surveillance and carceral capitalism, as the
camps also represent an opportunity for more ‘traditional’ business. As
Darren Byler (2019a) has shown, since 2017 Chinese factories have been
flocking to Xinjiang to take advantage of the cheap labour and subsidies offered
by the re-education camp system, a move that can partly be explained by the
rising labour costs in more developed parts of the country. Significantly, even
before the beginning of the camps, the Chinese Party-State was already plan-
ning to move more than one million textile and garment industry jobs to the
region (Patton, 2016). And these domestic companies are not the only ones
benefiting from the ramped-up securitisation of the area. Far from producing
exclusively for domestic consumption, forced Uyghur labour feeds directly into
the supply chains of at least eighty-three well-known global brands in the
technology, clothing, and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap,
Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Volkswagen (Xu et al., 2020). This connec-
tion has become so notorious that in October 2020 concerted pressure from
trade unions and advocacy groups led ethical trade associations such as the
Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) to announce that they would no longer work in
Xinjiang (BCI 2020), while several affiliated brands declared they would no
longer source cotton from Xinjiang or work with suppliers who employed
labour from Xinjiang.
In that ‘the goal of the internment factories is to turn Kazakhs and Uyghurs
into a docile yet productive lumpen class – one without the social welfare
afforded the rights-bearing working class’ (Byler, 2019a), the camps in
Xinjiang appear to be a manifestation of a capitalist system always hunting
for new workers and markets to exploit in order to sustain itself. In other words,
it could be argued that the camps are not really an anomaly, nor are they a sign of

36 Global China
the capitalist system being corrupted by China, but simply a feature of the
system itself. These systemic features can also be seen, for instance, in the
policing and incarceration systems of the United States, where widespread
racial profiling leads to the detention of a hugely disproportionate number of
young black men – a demographic that is systematically maintained and repro-
duced as a low-wage labour supply (Benns, 2015). In fact, if we consider the
discursive and material linkages and parallels outlined above as a whole, the
Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act as passed by the US legislature in 2020 and
the blacklisting of a few Chinese companies working on artificial intelligence
and facial recognition, while highly symbolic and undoubtedly important, play
little more than a cosmetic role rather than addressing the root causes of the
abuses.
The Limitations of the Debate

In such a context, both whataboutist and essentialist arguments, while con-
structed in opposition to each other, serve to obscure the situation in Xinjiang in
similar ways – by fragmenting and atomising our analysis and thus causing us to
miss crucial parallels, linkages, and complicities. Whataboutism does this
dismissively, resorting to moral relativism and claims of hypocrisy to rationalise
away wrongdoing while failing to recognise that global practices are connected.
Essentialism does it by attributing the horrifying situation in Xinjiang solely to
the CCP, thus failing to identify the linkages emerging from the global system.
As such, both whataboutism and essentialism serve as blinders, forcing us to
focus on a single part of the picture while ignoring the bigger story. These
atomised and myopic perspectives fail to provide us with the analytical tools
necessary to diagnose and organise against the horrors unfolding in Xinjiang
and elsewhere.
Instead, frames such as Darren Byler’s (2022b) ‘terror capitalism’ are better
suited to capture the situation in Xinjiang, in that they focus on both the
atrocities taking place in the region and the global connections underpinning
these dynamics. By perceiving the Xinjiang camps as a result of processes of
state power being channelled through private and public infrastructure and
institutions to intensify ethno-racialisation and produce a contemporary colo-
nial system of exploitation and dispossession at a frontier of global capitalism,
we are better equipped to understand what is happening in northwestern China
today and to attempt to organise against the processes that are the root cause of
the crisis. This perspective also increases our grasp of the manifold socio-
economic implications of the rapid development of surveillance and other
groundbreaking technologies of control in China and beyond.

4 Belts and Roads

Recently, a friend who works in an NGO was interviewed by a journalist. After
discussing the risks and challenges involved in Chinese coal projects in a certain
country, the friend explained that, despite the local authorities’ supposed com-
mitment to working towards a coal-free future, a handful of these projects were
still moving ahead. At that point, the journalist asked, ‘Are any of these projects
part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)?’, to which the friend pointedly
retorted, ‘Does it really matter, since they are all moving forward?’
This anecdote illustrates not only how today’s international discussions about
China’s global engagements have come to be predominantly framed in terms of
the BRI but also that problems that extend far beyond the nationality of the
actors involved – such as coal and the environmental catastrophe that we are all
facing – are reduced to petty politics and perceived through the lens of national
units rather than at the system level. To paraphrase our friend’s retort: does it
really matter whether the coal plants are part of the BRI (whatever that might
mean) when they should not exist regardless? Whether the investors behind
them are Chinese, Australian, or European? Shouldn’t we instead focus on
addressing the root causes of the problems at stake, which in this specific case
is the persistence of an economic system that still heavily relies on, and
continues to incentivise, fossil-fuelled power despite all the evidence that this
is leading to disaster?
Much of the discussion surrounding the BRI in recent years has had the
consequence of obfuscating broad common challenges that we are facing in our
current iteration of global capitalist development – from eroding labour rights to
massive indebtedness, from widespread dispossession to environmental deg-
radation. The framing of the BRI as a massive scheme by the Chinese Party-
State to subvert democratic institutions in some settings, reinforce authoritarian
tendencies in others, and enhance China’s overall political and economic influ-
ence abroad has prompted endless discussions about the challenges posed by
Chinese actors abroad. Because of this renewed focus on Chinese overseas
activities, broader issues related to the very functioning of capitalism have been
relegated to the background. Yes, there is no denying that massive influxes of
investment and aid from China have buttressed authoritarian governments, that
loans from China have contributed to huge debt in certain countries, and that
Chinese projects all over the world have led to labour exploitation and environ-
mental damage. Yet, by focussing our attention exclusively on the BRI we often
miss how these dynamics are rooted in broader, long-term domestic (both in
China and in the host countries) and international trends that have much deeper
roots than the ephemeral phenomena that we see today. Similarly, by putting the

38 Global China
emphasis exclusively on the negative impacts of China’s international engage-

ments, we risk overlooking how these problems are situated within the broader
picture of global capitalism. This, in turn, not only leads us to adopt an
exceedingly essentialist view of China in relation to its international activities
but also causes us to lose sight of the biggest questions of our age. To avoid this
pitfall, we suggest that an accurate analysis of China’s international role today
cannot focus on China in isolation but rather needs to identify the ways in which
Chinese overseas engagements parallel, link up with, and build on local and
global capitalist dynamics.
One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand BRIs

Where does this obsession with the BRI come from? If we look back at the
recent history of Chinese engagements abroad, it becomes clear that the level of
contentiousness that we witness today is nothing new. Already in the 1950s, the
Chinese authorities played a fundamental role in the creation of the non-aligned
movement and began sending technicians and workers abroad to provide
assistance to other developing countries in what would later come to be
known as the Global South (Sorace and Zhu, 2022). In the 1960s, in the wake
of the Sino-Soviet split and at the height of the Cold War, the Chinese leadership
committed to waging Third World struggle against the twin imperialisms of the
United States and the Soviet Union, a position known as ‘Third-Worldism’
(Bräutigam, 2009, p. 37; Galway, 2022; Teng, 2019). Although in later decades,
as the Cold War wound down and China embarked on its path of economic
reform, the Chinese Party-State set aside the anti-colonial project underpinning
this rhetoric, China’s global role continued to be at the centre of heated debates.
The 1990s saw Chinese companies beginning to ‘go out’, but the real turning
point for China’s international engagement came in the late 1990s and early
2000s, as Beijing officially announced the ‘China Goes Global’ strategy and
concurrently joined the World Trade Organization (Hong and Sun, 2006; Ye,
2020, chapter 4). If, on the one hand, this landmark event fostered liberal hopes
for the country’s supposed democratic future, on the other it led to widespread
concern about how China’s compressed labour costs might affect other econ-
omies (Solinger, 2009).
However, over the last decade, as the Chinese government, companies, and
organisations have become increasingly assertive on the global stage, the
imaginaries of the potential of the BRI to alter the existing order have intensified
the alarm about China’s global rise. Xi Jinping first announced the BRI during
state visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia in late 2013, but the Initiative gradually
took shape over the following months and years. Although international

attention usually focusses exclusively on its infrastructural component, accord-

ing to the official action plan released in March 2015, the BRI rests on five
pillars – policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial
integration, and people-to-people contacts – all of which should be considered
equally important (Xinhua, 2017; Garlick, 2019; Zhang, 2021b). Soon, wild
figures began circulating, the most widely cited one being the estimate that BRI
investment would add over one trillion USD of outward funding for foreign
infrastructure in the decade starting from 2017 (OECD 2018, p. 3). Such
ambitiousness rattled nerves in Western policy circles. Some scholars have
since highlighted how the BRI is in many regards chaotic and very far from
being a masterplan for world dominance envisaged by the Chinese authorities
(Jones and Zeng, 2019; Ye, 2019); others have pointed out that, despite the
apparent chaos, particular mechanisms in China’s governance system have
enabled Chinese policymakers to coordinate different actors in pursuit of
China’s core national interests in its international interactions (Zhang, 2021b:
chapter 3). This general uncertainty about what the BRI is and how it works has
had the effect of rekindling old Cold War fears about China’s global rise and
influence.
Boosted by propaganda efforts from the Chinese authorities and an equally
robust critical response, the debate has become extremely polarised. On one
extreme are those who see the BRI as a benign plan under the aegis of South–
South co-operation, which will boost infrastructure in countries that could not
otherwise afford it, thus reviving their ailing economies; on the other are those
who argue that development aid and foreign investment are ultimately a Trojan
horse through which the Chinese authorities aim to extract much-needed
resources, appropriate strategic assets, and boost their political influence world-
wide. This, combined with the fact that today Chinese actors are more eager
than ever to associate themselves with the BRI for purposes that range from
economic gain to political legitimacy, has led to the disproportionate focus on
the Initiative as a frame to understand China’s global engagements mentioned
above. This, in turn, has produced a number of cognitive biases.
Confusion and Cognitive Biases

First, by employing the BRI as a frame to analyse China’s international engage-
ments, we end up neglecting other significant manifestations of the phenom-
enon that we refer to as ‘global China’ (lower case, as opposed to the ‘Global
China’ of the theoretical approach that we outlined in the introduction). As
Ching Kwan Lee (2017, p. xiv) has argued: ‘Global China is taking myriad
forms, ranging from foreign direct investment, labor export, and multilateral

40 Global China
financial institutions for building cross-regional infrastructure to the globaliza-

tion of Chinese civil society organizations, creation of global media networks,
and global joint ventures in higher education, to name just a few examples.’ As
such, by restricting our focus to the BRI we end up overlooking many important
aspects of contemporary Chinese globalisation. In particular, the BRI lens tends
to orient us towards the large and formal aspects of global China, implicitly or
explicitly producing an image of the Chinese state as a monolithic actor pushing
forward a coherent, top-down global strategy. What is missed in this depiction
of China’s global engagements are the multitude of small- and medium-scale,
informal, and often (semi-)illicit forms of Chinese investment and interaction
overseas. From the political upheaval and environmental ramifications pro-
duced by the sudden irregular migration of tens of thousands of Chinese alluvial
gold miners to Ghana (Loubere et al., 2019), to the struggles and negotiations
between Chinese petty entrepreneurs and a variety of local actors in diverse
contexts around the world (Xiao, 2015), ‘bottom-up global China’ is arguably
just as important for understanding contemporary Chinese globalisation as
anything associated with the BRI but has only received a fraction of the
attention.
At the same time, since there is a substantial lack of clarity about the nature of
the BRI – no official list of BRI-related projects exists, nor are there stringent
criteria for a project to qualify for the BRI label – there are instances of some
grass-roots or ‘bottom-up’ engagements being depicted or even marketed as part
of the BRI, even though they have no connection whatsoever to the Party-State
and are certainly not part of Chinese development planning. This compounds the
confusion and strengthens the impression that the Chinese authorities have a hand
in nearly everything that involves Chinese actors abroad. In other words, frag-
mented and chaotic ‘bottom-up global China’ sometimes gets recast as part of the
monolithic centralised vision in ways that at best mislead and at worst completely
distort. For instance, in a recent case that attracted considerable negative media
attention, a Chinese fugitive with a Cambodian passport named She Zhijiang
established a partnership with a local warlord to turn the latter’s headquarters in
Shwe Kokko village, in Myanmar’s Kayin State, into a ‘smart new city’ osten-
sibly catering to the development of the IT industry, but actually a safe haven for
online gambling and fraud operators (Cheng, 2021). She Zhijiang engaged in
a high-profile public relations campaign to fashion himself as a successful
patriotic member of the Chinese business community overseas and his project
as an important component of the BRI in the region, only to have the Chinese
Embassy in Myanmar publicly disavow the project – although this did not do
much to persuade many external observers, who, to this day, still refer to Shwe
Kokko as a ‘BRI project’.

Cases like these remind us that global China is far more than the BRI alone
and should be understood not only through the geopolitical and economic
frames that dominate the current debate but also in broader terms that
consider the extreme variety of Chinese international engagements and with-
out losing sight of how these are connected to domestic actors and dynamics
both in China and abroad. At the same time, the BRI itself should not be
understood as a monolithic and coherent strategy by the Chinese state.
Rather, the Initiative and everything within its orbit should be perceived
through the lens of domestic Chinese policy formulation and implementation,
which is characterised by high levels of vagueness, fragmentation, and
experimentation at the local level (Heilmann, 2008; Mertha, 2009). In this
sense, the BRI parallels the ways in which domestic central development
frameworks – such as the Open Up the West Programme (西部大开发) and
the Construction of a New Socialist Countryside (建设社会主义新农村) –
come to be embedded in local contexts and utilised by diverse local actors to
push forward agendas and projects pre-dating the policy itself and reflecting
local and often personal – rather than central – priorities (Loughlin and
Grimsditch, 2021).
Second, many of the current analyses that focus on the BRI tend to put too
much emphasis on what is observable at this moment, neglecting the history and
background of what we are witnessing today. A solid understanding of China’s
politics, society, and foreign policy in historical perspective should be
a prerequisite for any analysis of global China’s contemporary emergence.
For instance, one cannot discuss China’s engagements in Southeast Asia with-
out referring to how the BRI has integrated with the Greater Mekong Subregion
programme, a minilateral regulatory dialogue comprising the five Mekong
states – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand – and China’s
Yunnan province and Guangxi autonomous region that began in the 1990s
(Raymond, 2021). Nor should one overlook how today’s cultural diplomacy
and people-to-people initiatives discursively build upon China’s legacy of
‘Third-Worldism’ and engagement with the Global South since the middle of
the last century (Galway, 2021). Indeed, by neglecting how certain dynamics
that we witness today have their roots in China’s not-so-distant Maoist past – as
well as longer-term histories of Chinese overseas migration and diaspora
communities – we risk missing important insights. Hong Zhang (2020 and
2021a) provides a fitting example of this in documenting how China’s inter-
national construction and engineering contractors (ICECs) are born of aid-
delivering entities that initially were administered by China’s ministries and
subnational governments in the pre-reform era. Stripped of their governmental
status and incorporated into firms in the 1980s and 1990s, today China’s ICECs

42 Global China
play a fundamental role in determining the agenda of the Chinese authorities

when it comes to their ‘development finance’.
Third, and most importantly, by focussing our analytical gaze on the BRI, we
miss how Chinese actors overseas are, like anyone else, embroiled in the
specific circumstances of the host country as well as the dynamics of global
capitalism and are therefore subject to similar rules of the game as their Western
counterparts, with all the implications this entails. This can be seen, for instance,
in the structure and functioning of the multilateral financial institutions whose
establishment was promoted by the Chinese authorities in recent years, in
particular the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which is often seen
as an instrument to promote China’s geopolitical interests. There is no doubt
that the AIIB represents a clear attempt by China to play a more influential role
in the area of global multilateral finance. It was proposed by China, is head-
quartered in Beijing, and China holds by far the largest number of shares and
voting rights. However, rather than overturning the existing model used by
established multilateral development banks, the AIIB has emulated the models
of other banks – although in a much more stripped down and ‘lean’ manner. It
has also recruited numerous veterans from the World Bank, Asian Development
Bank, and other international financial institutions, and to date has over 100
members. The AIIB is explicitly mentioned in official BRI documents but in
terms of enhancing China’s role in ‘financial integration’ (National
Development and Reform Commission et al., 2017). As can be seen in the
first few years of operation, around half of the Bank’s projects were co-financed
with Bretton Woods banks, and the top recipient of AIIB loans has been India,
which views the BRI with significant suspicion (Inclusive Development
International, 2020).
Even one of the cases that are most often cited as proof that China is resorting
to ‘debt trap’ diplomacy – that of the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka – is, in fact,
an apt example of how taking Chinese loan (mis)practices out of context can be
severely misleading (for a detailed discussion of the case, see People’s Map of
Global China, 2021). Rather than being seen as a case of nefarious Chinese
plotting to take over strategic foreign assets, the Sri Lankan government’s
decision in 2017 to enter into a public–private partnership with China
Merchants Group (CMG) and transfer 80 per cent of the shares of the port to
the company is actually the result of multiple forms of indebtedness (and the
different strings that come attached) to a variety of international actors. On the
one hand, the port project was conceptualised as being a joint venture between
Sri Lanka and a private company and was primarily financed through both
commercial and concessional loans from the Export–Import Bank of China. So
certainly there was plenty of Chinese debt, as well as an understanding of

Chinese commercial actors being involved. But the reason for the terms of the
port project being renegotiated and the shares going to CMG is an economic
downturn forcing Sri Lanka to turn to the IMF for an emergency bailout. The
IMF’s terms (as they often are) were that non-strategic public assets would be
privatised and the proceeds used to service debt obligations. It is in this context,
under duress and being pressured into quick action by the IMF, that Sri Lanka
made the decision to transfer the majority of the port to CMG. As such, the
Hambantota Port incident is less a story of Chinese debt trap diplomacy and
more a story of Chinese actors wading into a complex local environment,
getting bogged down in questionable local state budget management, and then
seeking to address the situation through a markedly status quo approach.
Finally, that Chinese investment is not necessarily exceptional is also evident
when we consider that Chinese projects overseas are often built upon pre-
existing developments initiated by other local or international corporations,
facilitated by international financial institutions, and in some cases even imple-
mented in partnership with Western companies. This can be seen, for instance,
in how Chinese mining companies have repeatedly taken over controversial
concessions from other Western companies. This is the case of the Toromocho
copper mine in Peru, located in an area that had originally been mined at a small
scale by companies of various origins, until a Canadian prospecting firm
acquired concession rights in 2002 just to sell them to the Chinese Cinalco in
2007 (Lin, 2021). It is also the case of the Rio Blanco and Mirador mining
projects in Ecuador, which were both initiated by Canadian companies in the
late 1990s and then taken over by Chinese companies in the ensuing two
decades (Initiative for Sustainable Investments China-Latin America, 2020a
and 2020b). Similar dynamics can also be found in Asia, for instance in the
controversial Letpadaung copper mine in Myanmar (Yu, 2021). In other con-
texts, Chinese companies have been able to come in and secure concessions
thanks to external policy prescriptions of multilateral international institutions
such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, for instance in the
case of Zambia, where debt relief assistance was made conditional on the
privatisation of the copper industry, which had previously been nationalised
(Lee, 2017; Li, 2010). Occasionally, Chinese companies and Western counter-
parts team up to push forward controversial projects. This is what is happening
today in Papua New Guinea, where Canadian conglomerate Barrick Gold and
China’s Zijin Mining are jointly running the problematic Porgera gold mine,
which has been marred by severe human rights abuse and environmental issues
(Beattie, 2021). In East Africa, France’s Total and the majority state-owned
China National Offshore Oil Corporation Ltd (CNOOC) are planning to build
the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline, running from Hoima in Uganda to

44 Global China
the port of Tanga in Tanzania, despite local communities’ and civil society’s
concerns regarding extensive displacement and impacts on the critical ecosys-
tems of the Lake Victoria basin area. This pipeline links to CNOOC-developed
gas fields, and the majority state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of
China is advising CNOOC on project financing (Inclusive Development
International, 2021).
There is an argument to be made for Chinese companies being exceptional in
that, in some cases, they are more prone than others to take on uncertain, risky,
and even unlikely projects that fit the geopolitical agenda of the Party-State.
There is also evidence that Chinese companies and banks are less transparent
and accountable than their peers from other countries (BHRRC, 2021).
However, Chinese actors definitely do not operate in a void and are subject to
similar logics and rules as their competitors (or their partners).
Eroding Labour Standards?

An idea that has gained currency in discourses on the exceptionality of Chinese
investment and projects overseas is that Chinese investors are more likely to
disregard existing local regulations in their quest to maximise profit and bring in
their own workers, to the detriment of the local communities. The debates and
the literature about labour rights on Chinese-invested projects overseas present
a slightly more complicated picture.
In the Global South, local media often voice concerns about supposed
‘invasions’ of Chinese workers taking away job opportunities from local
populations. For instance, in an article published in February 2019 with the
headline ‘How Come There Are So Many Chinese Workers Here?’, the
Philippine Daily Inquirer lamented the presence in the Philippines of between
200,000 and 400,000 Chinese workers, in competition with 2.3 million
unemployed local people for jobs in the construction, mining, and entertain-
ment sectors. A few months later, in June 2019, an article in the South China
Morning Post wondered: ‘Why Are Chinese Workers So Unpopular in
Southeast Asia?’ (Siu, 2019). Such discourses are often grounded in the
decades-old ideas of Chinese labour as extremely cheap, when in fact there
is evidence that Chinese companies in developing countries resort to workers
imported from China when they face challenges to secure local manpower or
have difficulties utilising local labour owing to language barriers or skill level
(Chen, 2021). In Cambodia, for instance, we found that Chinese construction
workers were paid between five and seven times as much as their local
counterparts, even in situations in which they had to carry out basically the
same tasks (Franceschini, 2020a).

In developed countries, there is plenty of anxiety about what takeovers by

Chinese companies entail for local workers, feelings that have been well
represented, for example in Netflix’s 2019 documentary American Factory
(Chan, 2019). Although this type of concern is generally articulated from the
perspective of the local workforce, there is plenty of evidence that Chinese
workers on Chinese projects overseas are not faring very well either (Halegua,
2022). For instance, Aaron Halegua (2020a and 2020b) has extensively docu-
mented the vicissitudes of thousands of Chinese workers working on the
construction sites of a casino and luxury resort marketed as part of the BRI in
Saipan, a US territory in the Pacific. Employed by different Chinese compan-
ies – both state-owned and private – these workers were promised well-paid
jobs only to find themselves forced to work interminable shifts, for wages below
the local legal minimum, and in precarious health and safety conditions, all the
while being unable to return to China because the managers had taken away
their passports and because of fears of arrest due to their irregular immigration
status. In discussing the case, Halegua emphasises that, in the absence of trade
unions, local media and international public opinion are of the utmost import-
ance in addressing this kind of situation.
Zhang Shuchi (2018) has described the legal odyssey of a Chinese worker
who was dispatched to a subsidiary of a Chinese-owned enterprise in Papua
New Guinea. After suffering from serious health problems due to an attack by
disgruntled local employees, this worker found himself unable to seek compen-
sation from his employer because of the ambiguity of his employment relation-
ship and the inadequacy of the Chinese regulations in this field. And the
vagaries of China’s labour dispatch system – which remains largely understud-
ied, with only a few commendable exceptions such as the recent articles by legal
scholars and practitioners Aaron Halegua and Xiaohui Ban (2020a and 2020b) –
are also behind a couple of cases of Chinese and Vietnamese dispatch workers
employed in awful conditions in important Chinese projects in Serbia that made
headlines in 2021 (for a detailed discussion of these cases, see Matković, 2021).
Finally, we ourselves have documented the situation in Chinese-owned con-
struction sites in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, where both Chinese and Cambodian
workers were often victims of agencies and subcontractors who resorted to
predatory practices, until a ban on online gambling in 2019 led to the collapse of
the local economy, leaving uncountable Chinese workers stranded owing to
wage arrears and contractual traps (Franceschini, 2020a).
While all the abuses described above are undoubtedly true and should be
denounced, there are at least two reasons to question the framing of these issues
as a typical feature of ‘Chinese capital’. First, existing research shows that
Chinese investors are remarkably flexible in adapting to local circumstances.

46 Global China
Looking at Chinese investment in Europe, Yu Zheng and Chris Smith (2017,

p. 31) have highlighted how in the European labour market Chinese companies
have found ‘more space to negotiate with existing institutional players (national
states, trade unions, employment agents) to develop divergent employment
practices’, a process in which they have proven ‘extremely pragmatic, adaptive,
and willing to work with local institutions’. In a similar vein, in a survey
conducted in 2017 on a sample of forty-two of approximately seventy Chinese-
invested companies (including ‘green field’ investments) in the manufacturing,
logistics, and service sectors in Germany, trade unionist Wolfgang Mueller
(2018) concluded that after the entry of Chinese investors, the co-
determination culture at the factory and company level, as well as the collective
agreements, remained essentially unchanged or, in some cases, even improved.
According to his findings, fears of widespread job losses did not materialise and
while know-how is indeed being transferred to China, at the same time the
research and development capacities have expanded in the Chinese-invested
companies. If we compare these studies in European settings with the stories
described above taking place in Saipan, Cambodia, and Papua New Guinea,
there is an argument to be made that where local institutions and the rule of law
are strong, Chinese investors tend to adapt; conversely, where institutions are
weak and the law is scarcely implemented, they tend to take advantage of the
situation to maximise profit to the detriment of the interests of the workers –
a situation that is common among corporate actors around the world and in no
way unique to Chinese capital.
Second, the very idea that there is such a thing as an organically coherent
‘Chinese capital’ is questionable. In the field of labour rights and industrial
relations, Chris Smith and Yu Zheng (2016 and 2017) have challenged the very
idea that there exist occupational practices that are typically ‘Chinese’, which
can function as a model for Chinese companies overseas. Examining Chinese
investment in the mining and construction sectors in Zambia, Ching Kwan Lee
(2017) noticed some differences between Chinese state capital and international
private capital. While both types of investors were not particularly benevolent
towards workers, Chinese state companies in Zambia resorted to an employ-
ment model that Lee defines as ‘stable exploitation’, characterised by low
salaries and relative stability, against the ‘flexible exclusion’ that could be
found in private companies from other countries, where higher salaries were
accompanied by higher precariousness. In explaining this difference on the
basis of the different logics of accumulation behind the two types of capital –
Chinese state investors tend to not only seek profit but also follow the political
agenda of the Chinese Party-State and therefore are more sensitive to issues
related to their public image, for instance – Lee shifted the attention from

a racialised view of capital to a more nuanced understanding in which other

criteria, such as ownership, determine its behaviour. Finally, drawing from her
research in Ethiopia, Ding Fei (2021) has pointed out how the way that Chinese
companies manage their employees is largely influenced by the type of com-
pany, its business model, local market conditions, and the support it receives
from headquarters back in China.
Based on his research in the Caribbean, Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente (2020) has
argued that to find differences between Chinese and other types of capital we
should look at the ‘predistribution stage’ – that is, those enabling environments
that allow capital to form and accumulate, which are not naturally pre-existing
but rather established by government-to-government agreements involving
Chinese diplomatic branches, policy banks, companies, and host country insti-
tutions. It is in this primary stage that there is some evidence of Chinese actors
trying to change the rules of the game. In Serbia, for instance, the Hesteel
Smederevo Steel Plant, acquired by the Chinese provincial state-owned enter-
prise Hesteel in 2016, successfully pressured the country’s Ministry of Labour
via the Chinese embassy to water down the legislation on sick leave rights
(Rogelja, 2021). In Cambodia, we have documented how the Chinese trade
union is engaging with government-aligned local unions, providing them with
financial support and training opportunities, a situation which, when combined
with the Cambodian government’s crackdowns on independent unions, can
potentially undermine the local labour movement (Franceschini, 2020b).
However, cases in which China’s clout is used to undermine existing labour
standards remain an exception (at least for the time being) and an examination
of the ‘predistribution stage’ most often shows that Chinese actors are subjected
to the same pressures and rules as their competitors and those who came before
them.
Towards a More Granular Understanding

In discussing the complexities underlying the idea of global (and Global) China,
Ching Kwan Lee (2017, p. 161) warns against ‘the facile resort to sweeping and
grandiose generalization in terms of hegemony, empire, and neocolonialism’,
arguing for ‘fine-grained, grounded empirical and comparative research’. To be
able to do this, it is important that we taper the often unnuanced obsession with
the BRI and start focussing instead on the actual behaviour of Chinese actors on
the ground, making the effort to go beyond entrenched preconceptions to
unearth hidden parallels and linkages, as well as the ways in which Chinese
patterns of globalisation have evolved out of, and built on, pre-existing arrange-
ments and formulations. While the scholarly debate – and, even more, media

48 Global China
and policy discussions – remains dominated by perspectives that examine

Chinese global engagements in geopolitical and macroeconomic terms, in
recent years several young anthropologists and social scientists have produced
excellent studies of how global China is experienced in various settings (in the
labour field see, for instance, Driessen, 2019; Schmitz, 2020; Zhu, 2020; Chen,
2021; Hofman, 2021). There have also been efforts to build links between
academia and civil society to create synergies to better document the social
impact of Chinese projects overseas in a grounded, empirical perspective,
including the pioneering, environment-focussed China Dialogue and our
more recent experiment, The People’s Map of Global China. While these
studies and efforts will hardly produce a narrative as appealing as those put
forward by the proponents of ‘debt traps’, ‘silent invasions’, or benevolent
‘win-win’ rhetoric and ‘South–South co-operation’, they might get us closer
to understanding what global China really means for the people who experience
it in their everyday lives and help us to better visualise the broader implications
of Chinese globalisation going forward.
5 The Academe
We conclude this Element by turning our attention to the nexus between China
and Western academia, which has become a heavily contested and controversial
sphere. Since the late nineteenth century, foreign governments and religious
societies have been sponsoring educational institutions in China with the
ultimate objective to boost their political influence, spread Christianity, or for
simple humanitarian reasons (Hayhoe, 1996). Peking University, which to
this day remains China’s foremost academic institution, was established in
this fashion in 1898. In a similar vein, today’s proponents of the ‘maieutic
approach’ see increased Chinese participation in Western academia – mostly
through the rapid growth of Chinese student numbers and research collabor-
ations – and the involvement of Western academia in China as key tools in the
broader strategy of ‘educating’ China in the norms and values of the liberal
international system. However, in recent years universities, publishers, and
researchers have found themselves embroiled in escalating scandals related to
their collaborations with Chinese actors. This situation has resulted in Western
academic engagements with China increasingly being depicted in negative
terms – a discourse that is dominated by an essentialised vision of China as an
external, corrupting force within the Western university.
In this section we examine some of the recent scandals and unpack their
underlying dynamics. We start by focussing on the much-debated Confucius
Institutes (CIs), then move on to examine other forms of partnership between

Western universities and Chinese actors (both universities and companies), and
conclude the section with a reflection on how the commercial nature of much
academic publishing today facilitates the demands for censorship from the
Chinese Party-State.
Globalising the University with Chinese Characteristics

(and Money)
Over the past decade, CIs have featured prominently in discussions about
Chinese influence in international academia. Established in the early 2000s,
the CIs are an educational institution aiming to promote the learning of Chinese
language and culture worldwide and falling under the purview of China’s
Ministry of Education. Different from the German Goethe-Institut or the
Spanish Instituto Cervantes – which are stand-alone institutions operating
independently of universities – CIs integrate into universities and are formed
as a partnership between a Chinese university and a foreign counterpart where
the CI is housed, a mode of operation that Marshall Sahlins (2015) famously
dubbed ‘academic malware’. CIs have substantial flexibility and engage in
different contractual arrangements based on local contexts, making it impos-
sible to generalise about their practices globally (Repnikova, 2022). However,
over the years CIs have been involved in a number of high-profile incidents
related to free speech and academic freedom on campuses around the world. For
instance, in 2009 North Carolina State University cancelled a talk by the Dalai
Lama after alleged objections from the CI, and in 2013 a similar thing happened
in Sydney (Guardian, 2013; Washington Post, 2014). Then in 2014 there was
a major scandal at the European Association for Chinese Studies conference in
Braga and Coimbra, Portugal – which was partly funded by the Hanban, the
headquarters of all CIs – when then Director-General of the Hanban, Xu Lin,
ordered the removal of the pages of the conference programme containing
information about the Taiwanese Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and Taiwan
National Central Library, unbeknownst to the conference organisers (Greatrex,
2014).
While dramatic events like these are not uncommon, the more pernicious
impact of the CIs on host universities is twofold. On one side, there is the risk of
self-censorship around ‘sensitive topics’ by many of those involved with the
CIs, which has served to subtly (or not so subtly) co-opt non-Chinese institu-
tions into the PRC’s wider project of ‘telling the Chinese story well’ (Barmé,
2012; Sahlins, 2015). On the other, given the scarcity of resources for activities
on China-related issues in smaller universities, CIs often end up monopolising
the discourse about China. In the absence of other sources of funding,

50 Global China
universities often have to either accept the money offered by a CI or give up on

the idea of having any instruction or activities related to China at all, to the
detriment of both academic staff and students. As CIs tend to offer a positive
(and, curiously, often orientalist) image of China – which is perfectly under-
standable considering the mission of these institutions, but no less problematic –
this leads to obvious dilemmas. In an example of this type of dynamic, the
Chinese co-director of a CI in a European university once openly offered one of
us a substantial amount of funding to work on literary translations from
Chinese, as long as he gave up conducting research on other, more politically
sensitive issues – an offer that was obviously declined but which others might
not have the luxury to refuse.
Considering these problems, it is unsurprising that many universities in
Europe and North America are opting to shut down their CIs or not renew
agreements, particularly in countries where relations with China are tense. It is
equally unsurprising that CIs remain widespread, particularly in smaller and
less well-funded institutions, and that they remain in high demand across the
Global South (Repnikova, 2022). This is because for many institutions, having
a CI is first and foremost a way to secure much-needed funding for Chinese
language instruction and Chinese language resources. The CIs come with
substantial start-up capital, as well as Chinese teachers and classroom materials
(Repnikova, 2022). In some cases, the CIs also represent an opportunity to
subcontract out the work of already existing China Studies departments in a bid
to save money – a situation that occurred at Newcastle University in Australia
and was met with pushback from both faculty and students (Sahlins, 2014). As
a result of the structural shortcomings of the neoliberal academe in the West, CIs
are able to incorporate themselves into universities and exert influence in more
or less explicit ways depending on the place. As contracts are tailored to
different institutions and the CIs often utilise non-disclosure agreements, the
terms are generally not transparent (Hunter, 2019).
One of the more troubling aspects of this arrangement is the issue of new
academic hires in China Studies programmes that collaborate with CIs. In
recent years there have been numerous examples of universities putting out
adverts for ongoing positions in China Studies, where the role is both university
lecturer and the director or deputy director of the local CI. In this way, the CIs
become directly involved in the vetting and hiring of academics who will not
only direct the CI activities but also go on to shape the direction of China
Studies at the universities going forward. While there are many excellent
academics working on topics deemed acceptable by the CIs, in the current
context, where academic positions are scarce and highly competitive, being
able to influence hiring in China Studies has significant implications for the

field. And there is certainly evidence to suggest that CIs do not shy away from
imposing ideological demands on the hiring processes they are involved in. For
instance, in 2012 McMaster University was forced to deal with a lawsuit from
a CI teacher who was unable to keep her position when it was revealed that she
was a follower of Falun Gong (Sahlins, 2014).
Other Controversial Collaborations

But CIs are not the only Chinese academic collaborations that potentially shape
research and teaching on China in Western universities. Chinese government
funding has been used to set up a range of different partnerships, centres,
institutes, and so on, both within Western institutions and with Western institu-
tions in China. For example, in 2018 Cambridge University’s Jesus College
established the UK-China Global Issues Dialogue Centre with a grant of
200,000 GBP from the Chinese government’s National Development and
Reform Commission. The College also received 155,000 GBP from Huawei
and subsequently produced a white paper that portrayed the company in
a flattering light (Fisher and Dunning, 2020). Jesus College also houses the
offices of the Cambridge China Development Trust, an organisation that runs
training programmes for CEOs of Chinese state-owned companies and govern-
ment officials and which has received large donations from multinational
corporations operating in China (Dunning et al., 2021). Finally, in 2018 the
University established the Cambridge University-Nanjing Centre of
Technology and Innovation with 10 million GBP of funding from the Chinese
government. Located in Nanjing, this is Cambridge’s first research centre
established abroad and aims to foster research on smart cities and attract tech
companies as partners. While there has not been any suggestion that this Centre
has been involved in controversial research, in Section 3 we have seen how
leading international academic institutions, including the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, have come under scrutiny for having research partner-
ships with artificial intelligence companies that have business ties with Chinese
state security and other problematic actors involved in enhancing the Party-
State’s surveillance capabilities in Xinjiang, often under the very aegis of
‘smart’ or ‘safe’ cities projects (see also Byler, 2022a).
Similar questions linger about the overseas campuses of Western universities
in China and, in rarer instances, prospective campuses of Chinese universities
abroad. As an example of the latter situation, over the past year, plans to build
a campus of Fudan University in Budapest, Hungary, while strongly supported
by the Hungarian central government, have triggered a negative public reaction
for a number of reasons, including an utter lack of transparency and many

52 Global China
practical concerns regarding budgetary capacity (Strelcová, 2021). New York

University Shanghai – a joint venture between NYU and East China Normal
University established in 2012 and currently undergoing expansion – is a case in
point of the former type of controversy. New York University has always
insisted that academic freedom is a core principle of the Shanghai campus,
with the community standards handbook saying: ‘The University is
a community where the means of seeking to establish truth are open discussion
and free discourse. It thrives on debate and dissent, which must be protected as
a matter of academic freedom within the University’ (NYU Shanghai, 2019).
However, recent interviews with NYU Shanghai faculty reveal that there is
a general understanding that certain sensitive topics are not to be broached. In
the words of an anonymous faculty member: ‘Everyone is under a bit of a cloud
of fear . . . there is a general idea that there are certain topics you don’t discuss’
(Levine, 2019). And the pressure to self-censor has been felt outside of
Shanghai. Rebecca Karl – Professor of History at NYU in New York and one
of the world’s leading experts on modern Chinese intellectual history – has
revealed that she is blacklisted from teaching at the Shanghai campus and that
she had been told by fellow academics not to organise an event on protests in
Hong Kong as it would be detrimental to colleagues in Shanghai (Levine, 2019).
In response to these revelations, NYU Shanghai Associate Dean of Students
Lauren Sinclair said: ‘Here at NYU Shanghai, we speak with the intentionality
not to be offensive’ and ‘NYU isn’t trying to change places’ (Barkenaes, 2020).
This has led to questions about NYU’s supposed commitment to the core
academic principles of ‘open discussion’ and ‘free discourse’, and its mission
‘to produce original, rigorous, and important insights . . . [that] promise to have
a significant influence on the thinking of others’.
So how do we understand cases of Western academic institutions more or less
covertly jettisoning commitments to academic freedom – and their implied
mission to change the world for the better – in order to safeguard collaborations
with, and funding from, Chinese political actors? Do these examples represent
the unprecedented corrupting power of the CCP, with naive Western institutions
entering into these partnerships in a good faith attempt to spread their liberal,
democratic values into China only to find themselves compromised by the
encounter? As Margaret Lewis (2021) has discussed in considerable detail,
this would seem to be the essentialist perspective underpinning the US
Department of Justice’s ‘China Initiative’, which aims to identify scientific
espionage in US universities. Unfortunately, in attempting to root out these
‘corrupting forces’ from China, innocent victims are caught up in the dragnet, as
is the case with Chen Gang from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Hu Anming from the University of Tennessee – both of whom were prosecuted

under the China Initiative for supposedly having ties to China. In both cases, the
charges were dropped and the academics returned to their jobs, but not before
suffering substantially both personally and professionally (Barry, 2022; Wright,
2022). These cases recall the dark days of the 1950s when an essentialised
vision of a threatening China also loomed large and academics were similarly
targeted for years of persecution (Lattimore, 1950).
The excesses of the China Initiative and much of the debate surrounding the
malign influence of Chinese funding have not only been devastating for the
innocent researchers targeted but ultimately have also obscured more funda-
mental issues plaguing the neoliberal university of today and undermined the
cause of those who have been arguing for more efficient strategies to prevent
problematic academic partnerships that might lead to IP theft or to the develop-
ment of new technologies that might be used for repressive purposes (for
a discussion, see, for instance, Darrowby, 2019). In fact, if we de-emphasise
the ‘Chineseness’ of examples of ‘Chinese influence’ and instead shift our focus
to the model of the neoliberal, managerial university – perpetually facing
reduced budgets and focussed on vacuuming up as much external funding and
tuition fees as possible – which currently dominates the Western academic
landscape, we can then find innumerable examples that parallel the ones
outlined above in their deleterious impacts on academic dynamics, but without
Chinese actors involved.
For instance, we find private companies like Study Group that partner with
universities to provide special courses ‘to prepare’ students for their under-
graduate or master’s studies (Study Group, n.d.). If students pass these expen-
sive courses, then they can be admitted while bypassing certain parts of the
normal admissions procedure. Like the CIs, companies like Study Group are
external entities that enter and operate within the university structure without
obvious oversight, taking advantage of budget gaps to achieve their aspirations.
Also, both CIs and these companies hire their own staff, who are often not
afforded the same protections as formal university employees, capitalising on
and reinforcing the trend of creeping casualisation in academia.
We also find plenty of worrying examples of partnerships between academia
and the military-industrial complex in the West, with Western universities
receiving huge amounts of money from questionable stakeholders to pursue
research with potential military and other ethically dubious applications
(McCoy, 2014). Finally, there is no lack of instances of non-Chinese private
actors aspiring to enter Western universities to promote their own ideological
agendas and wield control over academic hiring. For instance, Charles Koch
and his now-deceased brother David – owners of Koch Industries – have
actively invested in financing research centres and other activities within

54 Global China
universities aimed at pushing conservative policy agendas in the United States,

prompting the ‘UnKoch My Campus’ campaign (UnKoch My Campus, n.d.). In
2021 Professor Beverly Gage resigned from the leadership of the prestigious
Grand Strategy course at Yale University because of attempts by the pro-
gramme’s billionaire donors to influence curriculum and teaching – threatening
funding withdrawal if they did not get their way (Schuessler, 2021).
Perhaps the most notorious case in point is that of the Ramsay Centre for
Western Civilisation, which was set up in 2017 as part of the bequest of
Australian businessman Paul Ramsay with the ambition to celebrate Western
civilisation. The Ramsay Centre’s overtures to a number of Australian univer-
sities caused much controversy and the offer was ultimately rejected by the
Australian National University because of worries about academic integrity, as
well as control over staffing and the curriculum (McGowan, 2018). However,
this did not deter the University of Wollongong from accepting Ramsay funding
to start a BA in Western Civilisation after confidential negotiations (University
of Wollongong, 2019).
Read within this context, the CIs and other forms of ‘Chinese influence’ in
Western academic institutions represent a symptom of the broader decay of
neoliberal academia, which is the more fundamental problem that should be
addressed. In arguing this, our point is not to downplay the fact that Chinese
political actors are challenging some of the stated core values of Western
academic institutions. Rather, it is to emphasise that, in explaining their exist-
ence and activities, we should look at how the Chinese examples parallel the
ways in which a variety of external interests co-opt the neoliberal university –
providing relatively minimal resources in exchange for access and the ability to
drive research infrastructures built up over decades, often primarily with public
money, in order to forward their agendas. And frequently these agendas are
explicitly in contradiction to the values that these institutions still claim to
uphold.
The Pitfalls of Commercial Academic Publishing

The commercialisation of academic publishing offers another example of how
engagements with Chinese actors illuminate the general decay of neoliberal
academia. In August 2017, it was revealed that Cambridge University Press
(CUP) had capitulated to the Chinese censors, blocking access to 315 articles in
The China Quarterly, one of the leading academic journals in China Studies
(Phillips, 2017). At the time, this act of censorship was met with widespread
protest and threats of a boycott, and, to its credit, CUP eventually reversed its
decision (Kennedy and Phillips, 2017). It was soon discovered that CUP was not

alone, as anonymous interviews with commercial publishers revealed wide-

spread practices of self-censorship in China (SCMP, 2017). A few months later,
in October 2017, Springer Nature – the world’s largest academic publisher –
admitted to ‘limiting’ at least 1,000 articles on their Chinese website at the
request of the Chinese government. At that time, the publisher declared: ‘We do
not believe that it is in the interests of our authors, customers, or the wider
scientific and academic community, or to the advancement of research for us to
be banned from distributing our content in China’ (Reuters, 2017). The
following year, several scholars publicly complained that Springer Nature
was removing ‘politically sensitive’ content published in the Transcultural
Research book series from their Chinese website at the request of the Chinese
authorities (MCLC, 2018). When confronted by the editors of the series, the
publisher countered that they were merely following local laws and pointed to
the fact that Chinese sales had increased in the wake of the act of self-
censorship.
These incidents are widely interpreted as a dramatic demonstration of both
China’s increasing assertiveness and confidence and the lengths that aca-
demic publishers are willing to go to in order to maintain access to the
Chinese market. However, while most commentators focus their indignation
on the censoring practices of the Chinese authorities, it is our contention that
such dynamics should be understood in the wider context of the academy’s
acquiescence to commercial modes of publishing that have turned the dis-
semination of scientific results into a highly profitable and exploitative
business. Springer Nature has been at the forefront of the commercial
revolution that in the post–World War II period saw academic publishing
transformed from a varied landscape of small-scale journals and books
published by a variety of institutions or professional societies into a vast
market raking in higher profits than the leading tech companies of today.
This profit is achieved through a ‘triple-pay system’ where the public: a)
funds the research; b) funds the salaries of the authors, editors, and peer-
reviewers; and c) purchases the published output through university library
subscriptions (Buranyi, 2017). To make matters worse, the research is then
locked behind outrageously expensive paywalls, making it inaccessible to the
public that financed it in the first place (Monbiot, 2018). This system blocks
access to academic research much more efficiently than any government
censorship regime could dream of (Loubere and Franceschini, 2017). And,
in fact, some corporate publishers are currently developing new forms of
spyware to install on the proxy servers run by academic libraries in order to
surveil users, ensuring that paywalls remain unbreached and profits secure
(Mehta, 2020).

56 Global China
While the current situation is obviously absurd, particularly considering that

the Internet allows for the easy and cheap dissemination of scientific findings, it
is nevertheless a status quo that has proven very difficult to effectively contest.
While there are open access movements, they often seek to operate through the
existing publishing system, rather than outside it, for instance by paying
publishers for the right to put articles online without any restriction. The profit-
oriented publishing industry has been highly effective in limiting the space
available to challenge its domination. Commercial entities control the journals,
the citation indexes, and the official ‘impact factors’ that are used to rank
journals. The ability to publish in the ‘top journals’ – as defined by this system –
is crucial in order to find an academic job, achieve tenure, get promoted, and
successfully apply for funding (Heckman and Moktan, 2018). Additionally, the
number of articles published in top journals plays an important role in the
university ranking systems (which are also commercially owned). This has
made it extremely difficult for academics to extricate themselves from exploit-
ative relationships with commercial academic publishers.
In this context, where academic subjugation to profit-oriented publishers is
the normal state of affairs, commercial publishers opting to adhere to the
demands of Chinese government censors or even pre-emptively self-
censoring in order to ensure continued access to the Chinese market is unsur-
prising. After all, in a market system that prizes profits above all else, this
decision makes perfect sense. Calls to boycott publishers in order to threaten
their bottom line might work if their commercial interests are actually threat-
ened by the boycott, but it only does so by feeding into the same profit-seeking
mechanisms that prompted the bad behaviour in the first place. Equally, simply
pointing the finger at the Chinese government for its successful attempts at
censoring international academic publications risks obscuring the root cause
that make such events possible – that is, a fundamental crisis in the mechanisms
of academic publishing.
Beyond Dark Academia

Much has been written in recent years about the degeneration of universities
into ‘zombie’ institutions working according to neoliberal logics and run by
a ‘dark academia’ composed of bureaucrats only interested in reaching numer-
ical targets and making a profit (Murphy, 2017; Fleming, 2021). This has had
several implications. According to David Graeber (2015: 141), the commercial-
isation and bureaucratisation of academia have led to a shift from creative
‘poetic technologies’ that transform the status quo to ‘bureaucratic technolo-
gies’ which simply buttress it. As universities are bloated with ‘bullshit jobs’

and run by a managerial class that pits researchers against each other through
countless rankings and evaluations, the very idea of academia as a place for
pursuing groundbreaking ideas dies (Graeber, 2015, p. 135; 2018). With con-
formity and predictability now extolled as cardinal virtues, the purpose of the
university is increasingly simply to confirm the obvious, develop technologies
and knowledge of immediate relevance for the market, and exact astronomically
high fees from students under the pretence of providing them with vocational
training (hence the general attack on the humanities).
As Peter Fleming (2021, p. 5) has argued, we are now at a stage when
corporatisation ‘has been so exhaustive (on a financial, organisational, individ-
ual and subjective level) that reversing it in the current context feels nearly
impossible. Rather than fighting back, most academics have merely found ways
to dwell in the ruins’. In such a context, it is easy to see how key principles of
academic life, such as ‘academic freedom’, have come to be substantially
subverted (Franceschini, 2021). It is our conviction that the activities and
influence of Chinese actors should be interpreted in this context – as yet another
serious symptom of the terminal disease of the neoliberal university.

A Final Note
Over the past few years, we have had opportunities to present parts of this
Element and some of the arguments that we advance in it to different audiences.
On those occasions, we have often found ourselves stuck between a rock and
a hard place, confronted by those holding ‘essentialist’ perspectives for
allegedly downplaying the crimes of the Party-State by shifting focus to the
dynamics of ‘global capitalism’, and also criticised by proponents of ‘whata-
boutist’ arguments for being blind to both the rapid progress in China and the
shortcomings (and imperialist history) of the West. In other words, the argument
that we put forward in this Element – that is, the crucial importance of context-
ualising the emergence of China as a key actor in longer-term histories of global
capitalism and international engagement – does not fit neatly into the dominant
frames of reference that exist for understanding either China’s contentious
domestic policies or its increasingly global presence.
As such, it is our conviction that a project of reconceptualising China in the
world, or taking Global China as method, is an endeavour of crucial importance
if we hope to come to grips with what Chinese globalisation in the twenty-first
century means for our collective future. Global China as method thus entails
a reimagining of China from a more contextualised global, historical, and
relational perspective. It means acknowledging that China is not a discrete
entity that can be analysed in isolation – an externality that exists outside of
or beyond the ‘real’ world. Instead, taking Global China as method prompts us
to focus our analytical lens not just on the particularity of ‘Chinese phenomena’
but rather on the processes underpinning Chinese globalisation – on the linkages
and parallels, continuities and evolutions, as well as the ruptures, resulting from
the intensification of Chinese entanglements in the global system.
As the discussions surrounding China become increasingly polarised
between the ‘essentialist’ and ‘whataboutist’ frames (and with the ‘maieutic’
approach now seemingly in terminal decline but still deployed to justify the
continuation of problematic partnerships under the pretence that the engage-
ment is aimed at ‘improving’ China), with this Element we aim to provide
a blueprint for a possible alternative approach to understanding China, which
demonstrates that it is possible to remain highly critical of the policies adopted
by the Chinese authorities in recent years – for example, the detention of
hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other minorities, the crackdown on the
labour movement, the ramping-up of surveillance, and the choice to censor

A Final Note 59
critical content – while at the same time not losing sight of how these develop-
ments are embedded within, and reflective of, broader global trends. It is our
belief that looking for these parallels, linkages, continuities, and evolutions is
the necessary precondition for meaningful political action aimed at addressing
the fundamental flaws of the system we all find ourselves living in.

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Acknowledgements
This Element draws from our work over the past decade, so parts of it have been
previously published elsewhere. We first presented the general argument in an op-ed
published in the Made in China Journal in July 2020 under the title ‘What about
Whataboutism? Viral Loads and Hyperactive Immune Responses in the China
Debate’. Section 2 on social credit and digital surveillance draws on an essay titled
‘The Global Age of Algorithm: Social Credit and the Financialisation of
Governance in China’, co-authored by Nicholas Loubere and Stefan Brehm and
originally published in the Made in China Journal in 2018. Section 3 on Xinjiang
reprises arguments that we advanced in the introduction to the volume Xinjiang Year
Zero, which we co-edited with Darren Byler and which was published by ANU
Press in 2022. Parts of Section 4 on the BRI appeared in an editorial titled ‘Global
China beyond the Belt and Road Initiative’ that Ivan Franceschini wrote for China
Perspectives (no. 4/2020). Finally, Section 5 on academia builds on arguments we
made in an op-ed published in the Made in China Journal in 2018 titled ‘How the
Chinese Censors Highlight Fundamental Flaws in Academic Publishing’ and an
essay titled ‘The New Censorship, the New Academic Freedom: Commercial
Publishers and the Chinese Market’ published by Nicholas Loubere in the
Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. We are grateful to all
those friends and colleagues who provided feedback on earlier, partial drafts of the
sections included in the Element, in particular to Darren Byler, Mark Grimsditch,
Diego Gullotta, Jane Hayward, Gerald Roche, Christian Sorace, Konstantinos
Tsimonis, Chenchen Zhang, and Stella Hong Zhang, as well as to the anonymous
referees. Responsibility for omissions and mistakes obviously lies entirely with us.
We are also thankful to Ching Kwan Lee for supporting the idea of such a book from
the beginning and to the Per Anders och Maibrit Westrins Stiftelse for generous
financial support to make the book Open Access.

Global China
Ching Kwan Lee

University of California, Los Angeles
Ching Kwan Lee is professor of sociology at the University of California–Los Angeles. Her
scholarly interests include political sociology, popular protests, labor, development,
political economy, comparative ethnography, China, Hong Kong, East Asia and the Global
South. She is the author of three multiple award-winning monographs on contemporary
China: Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against
the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global
China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her co-edited volumes include
Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (2019) and
The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (2019).
About the Series

The Cambridge Elements series Global China showcases thematic, region- or country-
specific studies on China’s multifaceted global engagements and impacts. Each title,
written by a leading scholar of the subject matter at hand, combines a succinct,
comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the debates in the scholarly literature with
original analysis and a clear argument. Featuring cutting edge scholarship on arguably
one of the most important and controversial developments in the 21st century, the
Global China Elements series will advance a new direction of China scholarship that
expands China Studies beyond China’s territorial boundaries.

Global China
Elements in the series

Chinese Soft Power
Maria Repnikova
The Hong Kong-China Nexus
John Carroll
Clash of Empires
Ho-fung Hung
Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/EGLC

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Franceschini and Loubere

Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political,

Global China as Method

Cover image: Dimec / Shutterstock ISSN 2632-7341 (online)

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Elements in Global China

Abstract: Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political,

Keywords: labour rights, digital surveillance, academic freedom, Xinjiang,

© Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere 2022

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

1 Chinese Labour in a Global Perspective 9

4 Belts and Roads 37

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Whataboutism is such a common feature of the current debate that, in a recent

Global China as Method

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

embracing romantic ideas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as repre-

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

widespread phenomenon that he described as a ‘reading of China without

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

China casts an outsize shadow on many different arenas of world develop-

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Structure of the Element

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

has become a site of contention in debates over China’s perceived inﬂuence

1 Chinese Labour in a Global Perspective

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

China’s Labour Law

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

The Case of the Labour Contract Law

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

maintaining an unregulated labour dispatch system, so it came as a surprise

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

reproduce the notoriously individualistic language of the legal rights of the

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

inﬁltration and co-optation by agents of hostile foreign forces are becoming

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

freedom, enlightenment, and democracy, the spectre of the emergence of dark

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Making Credit Social

This form of essentialist argumentation has the potential to be convincing

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

formal socio-economic system. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, a number of

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Social Credit as a Credit System

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108999472 Published online by Cambridge University Press

systems elsewhere (which generally base scores on economic factors alone) is