Differences at the Margin: Understanding Chinese Investment in Africa
About this Event
Speakers: Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman
Date and time: Tuesday 15 September 2026, 6 p.m. -7.30 p.m.
Venue: TRiSS Seminar Room, Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
Elites in Western ex-colonial states disparage China as neocolonialist. Scholars have refuted that notion, but have also shown that the Chinese presence abroad is more than just developmentalism. The West’s distorting “China-in-Africa” framework overstates that presence and often focuses on epiphenomenal aspects of it. Based on documentary evidence and field work in two southern African countries, we seek to understand the basis for Chinese capital and Chinese people’s interactions with Africa and Africans. We show that semi-peripheral China’s investment and population in Africa partly fits into the neoliberal world order. It also differs at the margin, however, from the presence of other countries, particularly in challenging local-level monopoly practices.
Barry Sautman, professor emeritus in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. A political scientist and lawyer, he has worked on ethnic policies and politics in China, including ethnic regional autonomy. He has a particular research interest about Xinjiang Ughur Autonomous Region and Tibet Autonomous Region and has published numerous articles and monographs. His most recent book is Telling Tall Tales: “Uyghur Genocide” as a Political Stratagem (Brill 2026). In recent two decades, he has also co-authored with Yan Hairong on China-Africa links , including research on China/Africa political economy and interactions between Chinese and Africans, having published in Chinese China in Africa: Discourses and Reality (中国在非洲：话语与现实).
YAN Hairong, Professor at Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences and Department of Sociology and honorary professor of the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her earlier research focused on rural-to-urban migrant domestic workers in China. In recent decade, she has become concerned with food sovereignty and agrarian change in China and has conducted field research in rural Xinjiang and rural Tibet. She publishes in the Journal of Peasant Studies and the Journal of Agrarian Change and contributes to the food sovereignty network in China. In 2024 she and her teammates published (in Chinese) 乡村纪事：新型集体经济为什么行 （Documenting the countryside: Why New Rural Collective Economies Can Work）. For the past two decades, she has collaborated with Barry Sautman on China-Africa links and has co-authored East Mountain Tiger, West Mountain Tiger: China, Africa, the West and “Colonialism”.
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