China’s Going Out: The Ethnic Complexities of Semiperipheral Transnational Capitalism in Subsaharan Africa, 2000-2014

• In Event: 156 - Regular Session. Race and Ethnicity in the Capitalist World-System I

Abstract

Employing the US centric race paradigm, many scholars analyze the capitalist world-system in terms of the polarization between a white Euroamerican core and a nonwestern periphery of peoples of color. In an ahistorical and ethnocentric manner, this western dualist model ignores Japan as part of the core, denies past nonwestern imperialism, and obliterates the third semiperipheral tier of the modern world-system. As a result, two emergent global ethnic trends are obscured. First, the transnational capitalist class no longer reflects the “core whiteness” that the race paradigm leads scholars to expect. Second, Southern semiperipheries now exploit peripheries in ways that parallel historical core patterns. More than one-third of the world’s largest corporations are now based in Southern semiperipheries, as are nearly two-fifths of the world’s billionaires. We focus on the entry of the world’s largest semiperiphery (China) into the world’s poorest, resource-rich periphery (Subsaharan Africa). In 2012, China accounted for one-third of the FDI going into this region, and 2,000 Chinese companies operated there. Chinese corporate projects in these countries are concentrated in the extraction and refining of oil and minerals and infrastructure construction. Drawing upon a mix of theoretical explanations that avoid the biological and colonialist biases of the race paradigm, we investigate (1) ethnic complexities of the Chinese transnational capitalist class within Africa, (2) the ways in which Chinese land concessions and export projects exacerbate ethnic exclusion and oppression and (3) African resistance against Chinese development projects, imported workers and settlers.

Authors

• Wilma A. Dunaway, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Donald A. Clelland, University of Tennessee