The claim at the heart of Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China (2017) is that Chinese state capital differs from other forms of global private capital. But Lee acknowledges that ‘state capital’ is a complicated category—not all state-owned enterprises share similar connections to the state, and many private companies have robust ties to […]

At a moment when many politicians and media outlets in the ‘West’ seem adamant to portray China as an antagonist to the United States eager to craft a less-than-capitalist new world order, Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China (2017) offers a breath of fresh air. Lee’s meticulous investigation of the varieties of Chinese […]

How do we approach the internationalisation of Chinese capital? With US company expansion came Americanisation and Fordism; with Japanese internationalisation, Japanisation and transplantation. So does the geographical shift of Chinese multinational companies (MNCs)—often under state ownership—bring with it Sinification? The recent work of Ching Kwan Lee (2017), on Chinese companies in Zambia may offer some […]

When Dr Li Wenliang died from Covid-19 on 7 February, the Chinese Internet saw an unprecedented outpouring of grief and anger. The universal mourning for the reprimanded doctor, who had warned his colleagues about a potentially infectious coronavirus in late December and had been silenced by authorities, was also an expression of the public anxiety […]