Colloquium

 

Thursday, January 8, 2009
4:00 pm
6275 Bunche Hall

 

Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers, and Social Change in the Zambian Copper Belt

Presented by Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA, Department of Sociology

 

About Professor Ching Kwan Lee:


Ching Kwan Lee is a professor in the UCLA Department of Sociology. Professor Lee's research interests are currently focused on two projects. One project is on the politics of rights and changing citizenship regime in China. Professor Lee is examining the effects of three major national laws respectively giving citizens labor rights, land rights, and property rights. By examining how ordinary Chinese mobilize legal and extra-legal resources to battle for their rights as citizens, engaging the legal profession, the local and central governments, Professor Lee seeks to understand the micro-foundations or the lack thereof, for the formation of new citizenship regimes in China.

Professor Lee's second project deals with Chinese investment and labor practices in Africa. The key question is whether Chinese capitalism, as it becomes a global force, represents an alternative form of modernity bringing development outcomes in the third world different from previous colonial powers. Or, whether or not China merely unleashes another round of imperial domination. This is a long term project involving comparisons of Chinese investment projects in several industries and countries. So far, her research has focused on Chinese firms in copper mining in Zambia and in the construction industry in Tanzania, Zambia and Nigeria.

Professor Lee has published a number of books including Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China, Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Best Book Award Selection), and Reclaiming Chinese Society: Micro-Foundations of Social Activism in Contemporary China.

In addition to these books, Professor Lee has written a number of articles including, “The Paradox and Possibility for a Public Sociology of Labor in China,” "Rights Activism in China,” "From the Specter of Mao to the Spirit of the Law: Labor Insurgency in China," "The Revenge of History: Collective Memories and Labor Protests in Northeastern China," "Engendering the Worlds of Labor: Women Workers, Labor Markets and Production Politics in the South China Economic Miracle," and the forthcoming article, “Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves.”

 

This event is co-sponsored by Department of Sociology and the Center for African Studies