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Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa's Chinese Enclaves Author(s): Ching Kwan Lee Source: The China Quarterly, No. 199, China and Africa: Emerging Patterns in Globalization and

Development (Sep., 2009), pp. 647-666 Published by: on behalf of the Cambridge University Press School of Oriental and African

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647

Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of

Casualization in Africa's Chinese

Enclaves*

Ching Kwan Lee

ABSTRACT This article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global

capital flow - the pursuit of flexible labour regimes

- as a window to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. It

analyses the respective "politics of casualization" in the Chambishi mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill in

the port city of Dar es Salaam. Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers

have witnessed and resisted precipitous "informalization" of employment since the Chinese assumed full or majority ownership in the late 1990s.

Wildcat strikes were staged by workers in both cases. Nevertheless, Zambian copper miners, but not Tanzanian textile workers, seem to have

successfully halted this tendency of casualization. After several years of

struggle, in 2007 they signed new collective agreements with the Chinese

management, who agreed gradually to convert all casual and contract jobs into "permanent" pensionable ones. By explaining the divergent outcomes

of these two cases of labour resistance, I hope to identify the major factors

shaping the encounter between Chinese managers and African workers.

China's return to Africa from the late 1990s flows from decades of political, ideo

logical and economic ties cemented since the Bandung Conference in 1955. While

the Bandung rhetoric of anti-colonial, Third World-ist development still finds a

faint echo among both elite and ordinary people in Africa, the more prevalent

public discourse these days is the one promoted by the United States and former colonial powers in Western Europe. It focuses on China's capitalist, even

"imperialist" impulses: its hunger for raw materials and financial prowess, and

its wide-ranging investment portfolio throughout Africa.1 The frenzy of alarmist

* I thank Ron Aminzade, Michael Burawoy, Peter Evans, Alastair Fraser, Amy Hanser, Gary Herrigel, Miles Larmer, Jamie Monson and Mark Seiden for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this

paper. 1 The Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, US Congress, "China's influence

? The China Quarterly, 2009 doi: 10.1017/S0305741009990142

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

media reports as well as a rapidly growing academic literature on China in Africa

have recycled many aggregate statistics of the volume of Chinese investments,

casting China as a formidable competitor for global energy resources and diplo matic influence. Yet without comparative and grounded analysis on how these

investment projects operate, the diverse agents and local conditions that enable

their interplay with workers, unions and communities, these remain sweeping and unproductive generalizations. Neither Chinese capital nor Africa is singular, and the dynamic of their encounters, raw in many ways as this article will show, can be grasped only from within these Chinese enclaves.

This article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global capital flow - the

pursuit of flexible labour regimes - as a window to explore the interaction

between Chinese investments and African communities. Casualization (alterna

tively termed "informalization," "precarious employment" and "non-standard

jobs" in the academic literature) has become a global problem, afflicting even

the advanced industrialized world. In Africa, it is being discussed with great

urgency among trade unionists whenever Chinese investment is the subject.2 This article analyses the respective "politics of casualization" in the Chambishi

mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill (or "Urafiki" as the firm is known in Swahili) in the port city of Dar es Salaam.

Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers have witnessed and resisted precipitous informalization of employment since the Chinese assumed full or majority own

ership in the late 1990s. Wildcat strikes were staged by workers in both cases, and

Zambian copper miners, but not Tanzanian textile workers, seem to have success

fully halted the tendency of casualization. After several years of struggle, in 2007

they signed new collective agreements with the Chinese management to convert,

gradually, all casual and contract jobs into "permanent" pensionable ones.

Just as the "labour question" was key to European colonial domination and

post-independence political struggles, it is also the fulcrum of Chinese capitalism in Africa today. By explaining the divergent outcomes of these two cases of

labour resistance, I hope to identify the major factors shaping the encounter

between Chinese managers and African workers. This involves an understanding of their worldviews and mutual expectations, rooted in their respective classes

and national histories, particularly their experiences with socialism and post socialism. The first part of this article highlights the historical, political economic

parallels across the two cases, providing a baseline for comparison and the back

grounds that inform the behaviour and mentality of the Chinese managers and

footnote continued

in Africa," serial no. 109-74, 28 July 2005, http://www.house.gov/international_relations; "Age of the

dragon: China's conquest of Africa," Spiegel (online), 30 May 2007; "Chinese influx revives colonial

fears," The Guardian Weekly (online), 3 August 2007. 2 I have attended two continent-wide trade union conferences in the past two years on "China in Africa"

and both highlighted casualization as the main challenge for African workers employed by Chinese

companies.

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Raw Encounters

African workers discussed in the second part. The third section analyses grass roots militancy, and how Zambian miners are able to exploit a resource nation

alism in national politics and a hike in copper prices in the global market to arrest

the trend of casualization, at least for now. Lacking these favourable conditions, Tanzanian textile workers' resistance has not been as effective.

Of Mines and Mills: From African Socialism to Structural

Adjustment to Chinese Investment

Copper mines and textile mills in Africa have been the sites of hopes, struggles and desperation from the colonial period to post-independent socialism, and more recently neoliberal privatization. Nowhere in the continent was China's

role in African development more prominent than in Zambia and Tanzania.

Presidents Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere were then household names in

China. They consolidated close ties with the Chinese communist government and proclaimed to pursue African socialism (or humanism in the case of

Zambia) after their countries gained independence in 1964. China constructed

the famous TAZARA railway, or "freedom railway" between 1965 and 1975,

linking the Zambian Copperbelt to the port city of Dar es Salaam, and liberating Zambia from its dependence on railways controlled by the then white colonial

regime of Rhodesia.3 In the same period, China also built more than 100 factories

in Tanzania, its largest beneficiary of aid in Africa, including the Tanzania

China Friendship Textile Mill, the largest fully integrated textile mill in East

Africa when it was completed.4 Not even the chaos of the Cultural Revolution

raging through China at that time affected these foreign projects. The Zambian Copperbelt had inspired intense expectations of modernity: it

was where an epochal "African industrial revolution" would transform post

independence Zambia from a middle-income country to one gaining "ultimate

admission to the ranks of the developed world."5 In 1969, Kaunda announced

the nationalization of all major industrial and financial concerns, including all

mineral companies. The Zambian Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) was

formed in 1982, with the Zambian government holding the majority share.

ZCCM operated a cradle-to-grave policy: free education for miners' children, subsidized housing, food, electricity, water and transportation, even burial

arrangement for the dead. However, plummeting copper prices following the

oil crisis of the mid-1970s and 1980s, and huge insolvency and mismanagement

problems led to a deepening production crisis at ZCCM and a debt crisis for

Zambia. Between 1974 and 1994, little investment was made in mining

3 Jamie Monson, Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihood in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

4 Gail A. Eadie and Denise M. Grizzell, "China's foreign aid, 1975-1978," The China Quarterly, No. 77

(1979), pp. 217-34. 5 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian

Copperbelt. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 6.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

equipment and machinery, no new mines were opened, and per capita income of

Zambians declined by 50 per cent, leaving Zambia the 25th poorest country in

the world. Zambia entered its first World Bank Structural Adjustment

Programme in 1983, which entailed the devaluation of currency, a 5 per cent

cap on wage increases, liberalization of prices of essential commodities, and

removal of subsidies on maize and fertilizers. Violent food riots, strike waves

and an abortive attempt by Kaunda to abandon the structural adjustment pro

gramme ushered in a newly elected government in 1991 headed by Frederick

Chiluba, the leader of the national trade union federation. In the second struc

tural adjustment loan package, signed in 1990, privatization of Zambia's 280

parastatals, including ZCCM, was a major condition.6 Between 1997 and

2002, ZCCM was unbundled into seven different units and sold off to investors

from Canada, Britain, India, Switzerland, South Africa and China who bought the Chambishi mine.7

In Tanzania, after the 1967 Arusha Declaration emphasizing socialism and

self-reliance, parastatals were established in all economic sectors: beer, textiles,

diamonds, coffee, cashew nuts, publishing, timber, railways, city transportation and so on. The textile sector, growing from four textile mills in 1968 to 35 by the 1980s, became the largest employer in the country with about 37,000 people, the third taxation contributor to the government, and the largest exporter of

manufactured goods. As in Zambia, mismanagement and corruption plagued the parastatals. In Tanzania, the problem was exacerbated by a near breakdown

in infrastructure, production and distribution in the late 1970s.8 By the

mid-1980s, even Julius Nyerere, the architect of Tanzanian socialism, agreed to

implement market reform. Just as China launched its own market liberalization

at around the same time, and as the developed capitalist world came under the

sway of neo-liberalism, Tanzania embarked on major structural adjustment pro

grammes. In 1995, after Premier Zhu Rongji's visit, the Chinese government decided to invest US$1.7 million in the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill and

became the majority stockholder (51 per cent) of the revamped joint venture

with the Tanzanian government.

Casualization under the Chinese Casualization was among the most salient results of privatization on the

Copperbelt and in Tanzanian textiles, even before the Chinese arrived. It is driven

by a capitalist logic of accumulation and is not a uniquely Chinese practice.

6 Miles Larmer, Mineworkers in Zambia: Labour and Political Change in Post-Colonial Africa (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007); Neo Simutanyi, "The politics of structural adjustment in Zambia," Third World Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1996), pp. 825-39.

7 Alastair Fraser and John Lungu, For Whom the Windfalls? Winners and Losers in the Privatization of Zambia's Copper Mines (Lusaka: CSTNZ, 2006).

8 John Loxley and John S. Saul, "Multinationals, workers and the parastatals in Tanzania," Review of African Political Economy, No. 2 (1975), pp. 54-88.

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Raw Encounters

On the Copperbelt, the new international investors reduced the workforce by almost one-third, from 31,000 at the sale of the first mine in 1997 to 19,145 in

2001, compared to a peak of 62,222 in 1976 under ZCCM.9 When employing new workers, the privatized mines offer casual positions (including day jobs) or

fixed-term contract jobs with no pension or security, or they subcontract entire

units to other companies. The traditional "permanent" positions, those of open ended duration and with pension contributions by employers, account for only half of all mining jobs in the five major mining companies.10

The Chinese company NFC Africa Mining pic (NFCA), which has become the

new owner of the Chambishi mine, adopted a similar flexible strategy in mana

ging its workforce. NFCA is a subsidiary of the state-owned China

Non-Ferrous Metal Industries Corporation and, like many Chinese state-owned

companies, it responded to the new national policy of "going-out" or outward

investment announced in 1997. "Going-out" is meant to create externally driven

economic growth, find new raw material supplies and investment opportunities for state companies, and in the process make them more globally competitive. The Chinese bought the mine for $20 million and have since invested over

$150 million in updating its technology. Among the major mining houses, the

Chinese have had the highest proportion of casual and contract workers.

Before signing the 2007 collective agreement with the two miners' unions, out

of a total of about 2,063 employees only 56 were on permanent contracts.

They were among the original 218 ZCCM employees the Chinese decided to

keep when they arrived in 1998, and have not yet reached the retirement age of 55. There are 189 Chinese "expatriates" occupying major managerial and tech

nical positions. The major drilling and underground mining work, done by more

than 979 miners, has been subcontracted to a company called Mining One, and

the remaining 1,028 employees in the smelter, foundry, exploration and other

mechanical departments are either casuals or are on fixed-term contracts of

between six months and three years.11 These casual workers do not get a pension,

only an end-of-service gratuity, and they are entitled to less housing, medical and

educational allowances than permanent workers. The Chinese are widely known

to be paying the lowest wages among all major mining companies. Workers call

them "slave wages" as they range from 1 million to 2 million kwacha, or $250 to

$500. Only the highest paid among the unionized workforce are able to cover the

costs of the Basic Food Basket computed by a Zambian civil society group.12 Similar casualization took place under Chinese management in Urafiki in

Tanzania. The first Chinese general manager sent to head the mills in 1996

emphasized that the Chinese government at that time already had a transformed

notion of "friendly assistance." "It could not be like foreign aid in the past. It has

9 Fr?ser and Lungu, For Whom the Windfalls? p. 21. 10 Ibid, appendix 4, p. 73. 11 Interview with the human resource manager at NFCA, 28 August 2007. For instance, in 2002, they

employed 627 casuals and 306 contracts; in 2004, the respective figures were 588 and 232. 12 Fraser and Lungu, For Whom the Windfalls? p. 23.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

to be financially viable, although the joint venture is also partially politically motivated," he said.13 The 25-person management team came from a Chinese

provincial state-owned textile company in Changzhou city in Jiangsu province which won the bid for undertaking the project. In 1998, the Chinese selected

1,923 employees from Urafiki's original roster and resumed the three-shift pro duction. The workforce was gradually reduced to about 1,260 by December

2002. Casual workers were recruited from 2003, initially at about 200 a year, or one-fifth of the workforce, increasing to more than half of all the employees

(869 casuals to 818 permanent workers) by December 2006.14

Again, as in Zambia, casualization is an industry-wide phenomenon: the entire

Tanzanian textile industry witnessed a dramatic turn towards casual employment between 1991 and 2004. Permanent jobs accounted for 98.5 per cent of employ ment in the industry in 1991, but by 2004 the workforce was about 90 per cent

temporary.15 In November 2007, as the new Labour Law and a new Minimum

Wage Law were about to take effect, Urafiki summarily dismissed all casual

workers, throwing into sharp relief the precariousness of casual employment. In short, casualization is part and parcel of the respective post-socialist tran

sition in Tanzania and Zambia, and not least in China. By the 1990s, all three

countries had dismantled their socialist employment system. For the Chinese

managers, adopting a casual employment system was a natural response to the

political economic circumstances in both China and Africa. China's own

state-owned enterprise reform had smashed the "iron rice bowl" and stripped

enterprises of all welfare functions. Twenty years of reform shed about 55 million

workers from the state and collective sectors.16 But China's post-socialist reform

has been undertaken largely independently of the dictates of the World Bank and

the IMF, which thrust upon these two African countries extremely unpopular

austerity measures without bringing about the economic growth that China has

achieved. These conditions have converged to produce a consequential irony: China has become a compelling and effective conduit of capitalism in Africa.

Its unparalleled rise from a Third World socialist country to the growth engine of the world economy have given it enormous credentials as a model of develop ment for many African countries struggling to catch up. This pre-eminent "model" status is enhanced by the strong foundation of Sino-African "socialist"

friendship from previous decades. While the governments and political elite wel come China's return, African workers are less sanguine. They bear the brunt of a

total collapse of the socialist social contract and a cadre of Chinese managers

13 Interviews with Urafiki management, 22 August 2007. 14 Data compiled by the Urafiki branch secretary of Trade Union of Industrial and Commerical Workers

(TUICO), 15 December 2007. 15 George Kebelwa and Josaphat Kweka, "The linkage between trade, development and reduction (TDP):

a case study of cotton and textile sector in Tanzania," Economic and Social Research Foundation (June 2006), p. 13.

16 Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), ch. 2.

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Raw Encounters

convinced by reform at home that China and they know the way to break out of

poverty and underdevelopment.

Inside the Chinese Enclaves: Managerial Ideology and Worker Consciousness The notion of "enclaves," as distinct territorial, cultural or social units enclosed

within or as if within foreign territory, quite aptly describes China's presence in

Africa. The Chinese translation of "enclaves,"feidi "tSiifc, meaning "flying lands," even captures the alien nature of these spaces. But there are significant variations

among the enclaves, some more socially embedded and integrated with the local

society than others. This section shows that despite maintaining similarly strong social and cultural boundaries, the Chinese company in Chambishi has been

compelled to develop a greater community presence than the one in Dar. This

is because of the different imperative of the respective type of capital and varied

pressure from workers and civil society in each locale.

The Chinese management teams in both firms lead segregated lives from the

local workforce. The "China houses" in Chambishi and Kitwe (a major town

on the Copperbelt about 15 miles from Chambishi) and the "Chinese compound" across the street from Urafiki are secluded residential quarters for Chinese per

sonnel, complete with their own security guards, cooks, satellite dishes, television

and karaoke rooms, videos and DVDs from China, ping-pong tables and basket

ball courts. Inside the Chinese compound for the 25 Urafiki managers, engineers and office staff, there is a huge vegetable garden where African caretakers grow Chinese vegetables, and raise pigs, ducks and chickens. They rarely buy food

from the local market. They even dug their own wells. A Chinese-style stone

bridge, with engraved Chinese characters for "friendship" on the side, crosses a

small creek. Traditional Chinese New Year couplets and paper decorations

don the entrance to the dormitory quarter. The Chinese are chauffeured every

day from the factory to the canteen in the compound for lunch and dinner, even though they are only half a mile apart. The China house in Kitwe, Zambia is also a spacious compound, with basketball fields, large areas of green

ery and low-rise staff quarters, and it is more heavily guarded than the one

in Dar.

Over lunch, a Urafiki manager explained why the Chinese managers do not get

paid locally: Our staff doesn't get paid in Tanzania. Their salaries go directly to their bank accounts in China

where their families can withdraw the money. This way, they can save. Everything they need

here is provided for. But they need some local money to buy little things like fruit or toiletries.

So we give them allowances every month, which amount to an annual bonus of 10,000 yuan per

person. We also advise them not to go downtown or mingle with the locals, for their own

safety.17

17 Interview with Urafiki management, Dar es Salaam, 24 August 2007. Thanks to Jamie Monson who

pointed out to me that this salary payment practice was already in place in the 1960s and 1970s.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

Language barriers only reinforce the company policy of not venturing into town

or going to films or other local entertainment. Chinese managers in their 50s and

40s usually speak little English, and younger ones who can, complain about the

"impure" and heavily accented English which Zambian and Tanzania workers

speak. Almost no one among the Chinese speaks Bemba (a Zambian dialect on

the Copperbelt) or Swahili (the national language of Tanzania). At Urafiki, a

young college graduate with a degree in Swahili was recently hired as a translator

for the managers, and the human resource managers in both Chambishi (until

recently) and Urafiki are Africans who have studied or worked in China and can speak fluent Mandarin. African workers complain all the time about the

Chinese playing games with the language barrier. Their general observation is

that when African workers make demands, the Chinese pretend they do not

understand English. But when vendors or government officials visit, the same

people suddenly become conversant in English. A trade union representative in

Chambishi who has met senior managers several times during annual collective

bargaining sessions said: "They do not speak to us directly, only to their trans

lators. But it is obvious that they speak English very well. I saw one manager who did not utter a word of English ... start correcting errors in the draft of the

collective agreement while the translator did all the talking." More profound than the communication barrier is the gap between what man

agers call "work ethics" and workers see as "exploitation." Modern conflicts echo

the colonial discourse of African indolence and poor work ethics of earlier

periods,18 but with a post-socialist twist. Both sides use their respective experience with socialism and underdevelopment.19 Chinese managers have come to Africa

with personal career experience in reformed state-owned enterprises, and have now basically rejected the socialist firm as a viable form for economic develop ment. They often attribute China's lift from backwardness and poverty to its

abandonment of the "iron rice bowl" mentality and practice. They demand of

their African workers the same work ethics and sacrifice they believed have

allowed the Chinese to develop, and which have yet to be found among the

African workforce. Zambian and Tanzanian workers, on the other hand, appeal to the moral economic standards and labour rights that were established during the "government periods" and insist that foreign investors today should at least

match those conditions of service. The socialist ethos lingers as standards of

fair return to labour, an ethos that the Chinese (along with other foreign inves

tors) insist on wiping out and deem unproductive.

18 See for instance, Frederick Cooper, "Colonizing time: work rhythms and labor conflict in colonial

Mombasa," in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 209^5; Keletso Atkins, '"Kafir time': preindustrial temporal concepts and labour dis

cipline in 19th century colonial Natal," Journal of African History, No. 29 (1988), pp. 229-44. 19 In Tanzania, during the construction of the Tazara, the Chinese also demanded and demonstrated an

ethics of "hard work," a desire for haste and for accomplishing tasks ahead of schedule, in the name of the superiority and efficacy of socialism. Monson, Africa's Freedom Railway.

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Raw Encounters

The manager of Urafiki's finance department reflected on his experience with

Tanzanian workers at the end of a nine-year stint at the textile mill. He was about

to return to China for good. Contrasting African workers' "backward" work

ethics and their unwillingness to make sacrifice with his own efforts in breaking out of poverty, he insinuated racial stereotypes:

Maybe because they have lived a much longer time in a primitive state. So much land with so

little industry. You see Africans sleeping under the trees all the time and when they wake up

they look for fruits on the trees. They are content with having enough to eat ... Workers

said our wages are too low. But they do not want to work harder for more. I understand

their lives are hard, prices are high and they have to support six to 12 people in the household. I told them to be more serious about work. I grew up in very poor and backward rural areas in

Anhui province. Before I turned 17,1 had never tasted milk. When I first arrived at Changzhou, I did not have enough to eat. No rice, just porridge, a bit of cabbage, salt and oil. Three times a

day, the same porridge. Now these Africans all spend their money on Coca Cola. They could

use the same money to buy eggs or milk to get more nutrition. Chinese would never waste their

money on Coke. We Chinese will save their money for the family. But here whenever they have

money in their pockets, they just spend it without thinking. One month's wage can only support half a month's expenses. Then they turn to stealing.20

Indolence and poor work ethics constitute the frame through which managers

interpreted the union's rejection of a more flexible and intensive work schedule.

To the Chinese management, the cyclical product market requires flexibility of

employment. Each year, the high season for kangas, the cloth that Urafiki pro

duces, runs from July to October, because those are the months when farmers

obtain cash after their harvests, and they will buy kangas for themselves and as gifts. Orders and labour requirement will then shrink from December to

June. Managers have repeatedly demanded a 12-hour work schedule during the busy months but the union does not approve of overtime work because

workers do not want to work more than eight hours a day. To the Chinese, this just confirms their views that African workers are lazy.

If the Chinese managers see themselves as imparting a more modern work ethic

and discipline to the Africans, they are quick to refer to their own working con

ditions and hard work as living proof. Chinese managers constantly referred to

"eating bitterness" when speaking about their experience in Tanzania. The first

general manager of the mills recalled with gruelling detail how the Chinese

staff suffered and overcome a serious drought in 1997:

Altogether I have worked here for eight years. I have many stories of eating bitterness. When

I first arrived in September 1996, it was really really harsh. Power and water stoppage was

so frequent and irregular that we did not even count that as hardship. In China, we had rolling blackouts; here no plans, no warning, that's Tanzania's national situation ... I went to the elec

tricity bureau and water bureau numerous times, all days, asking their heads to give us special consideration. The living conditions, sanitation and housing for Chinese personnel were really terrible. Only in 2002 did we renovate the Compound. We had the money but at that time we

wanted to uphold the principle of productive investment first, living conditions second.

Bitterness first, enjoyment later, this is our old Chinese wisdom. We only had oil lamps in

the dormitory. I still remember the historic drought in 1997. When we ran out of water, we

found a large tank of dead water inside the factory, covered with dead rats and cockroaches.

20 Interview with Urafiki management, Dar es Salaam, 23 August 2007.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

The 23 of us removed the dirt and sterilized this dead water for our daily use for an entire month. Still we could not use that as drinking water. So, we went to the Chinese expert team

at Tanzara who shared their well with us.21

Similar stories of overcoming hardship were related by Chambishi managers: "The geological conditions here are very complex. We have to dig down to

900 metres below the ground to find any ore. The British only dug down to

480 metres. Only the Chinese have the technology to do this, the Zambians can

not do it themselves. This mine was abandoned for years when we bought it."22

In both the Chambishi mine and the Urafiki mill, Chinese "work ethics" and

Chinese experience with reforming old socialist practices are ubiquitous refrains

among managers, whether Chinese or African. Work ethics, understood to be a

devotion to work, a willingness to make sacrifices without a concomitant demand

for rights, rewards or privileges, is invoked by these managers to explain China's

recent economic development and to justify their demands on workers. At the

Chambishi mine, the Zambian human resource manager related to me what to

him was the most "inspiring" moment of his visit to NFCA's headquarters in Beijing: This lady in the head office is amazing. She works so fast, walks so fast in the office that she was

literally running from one desk to another, only two metres apart, to grab things for her work.

She is a high achiever, very motivated, but not necessarily for the salary. Here [in Zambia] you see people dozing off at their desks. Zambian government employees are four times slower than

those here in the mine whom I think are slow. We don't have a clocking system yet, and every one was up in arms when I tried to introduce one. Now I am trying a "discipline campaign," to

raise consciousness among our employees about the importance of being on time, putting in

effort at work, etc.23

Chinese managers use their own hard work as examples to demand similar sacri

fices from their African workers. Echoing a popular saying in post-socialist China, managers in these two plants in Africa claim "sacrifices are necessary for economic take-off," and workers are the implicit sacrificial lambs.24

At Urafiki, a Chinese senior manager related the experience of his Tanzanian

human resource manager who spent seven years in Shanghai as a foreign student:

Mr Swai has seen how China was once backward and poor too. People did not have cell phones or televisions. Why did the country develop? We eat bitterness and make sacrifices. [African]

Workers do not see that Chinese made sacrifices for progress. Here they think because this is a Chinese-owned factory, that we have come to assist them so it's natural that we should

feed and pay them everyday they are alive. They don't have any ambition, or motivation to

improve themselves or work hard. China's reform experience has taught us that you need sacri

fice. Our own industrial enterprises have turned the corner from losing money to making profits

by intensifying the labour process and reducing manpower.25

Workers, on the other hand, have an alternative standard of fairness. Despite their different capacity to assert their demands on the Chinese, as the following section explains, Zambian and Tanzanian workers share a similar understanding

21 Interview with Urafiki management, Dar es Salaam, 22 August 2007. 22 Interview with NFCA management, Chambishi, 1 July 2007. 23 Interview with NFCA management, Chambishi, 28 August 2007. 24 Jamie Monson described a similarly insulated living arrangement, relentless work pace and an ethics of

hard work among the Chinese sent to build the Tazara in the 1970s. See her Africa's Freedom Railway. 25 Interview with Urafiki management, Dar, 24 August 2007.

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Raw Encounters

of worker rights that have roots in their respective "government periods." Zambian miners in particular have been used to a rather paternalistic labour

regime since the colonial period when the Roan Selection Trust and the

Anglo-American Corporation ran the mines. The government-controlled ZCCM continued many of the welfare provisions including housing, free water

and electricity, medicine for miners and their dependents, and a football team.

The centrality of copper mining to the national economy made miners the labour

aristocracy enjoying high salaries and social prestige unavailable to the ordinary

working masses. What were then the standard terms of employment have to be

fought for under the Chinese. Whereas the Chinese allowed medical coverage of one child per family, Zambian miners demanded all dependents, usually four to six, to be included. "How could the Chinese impose such painful choice on us? All four are my children and they make me choose only one? Can you do

that? During the government period, all miners' children were covered. We are

not Chinese who only have one child!"26

Whereas Chinese managers drew moral boundaries between themselves and

Africans around the theme of "work ethics," the latter explicitly talked about

class exploitation, especially in Urafiki where workers' pay rates were lower

and the Chinese managers made fewer concessions to workers' demands, a differ ence explained below. At Urafiki, comments about "cruel" Chinese "exploita tion" were common, and reminiscent of a long tradition of antagonistic discourse against foreign, non-African exploitation.27

During the government period, we had thieves [corrupt officials] but the stolen wealth was maintained in our country; but in the current period, the Chinese steal our labour power and

wealth and profits and send them to China.28

The Chinese are cruel: they don't treat us like people, but like animals. Many workers only get little transport allowance but have to travel 16 or 20 kilometres to get home. The Chinese live in

the Compound across the street but they have a car to take them back and forth. They don't

even want to walk that short distance.29

Even the dogs owned by the Chinese were well off compared to the Tanzanian workers.30

If you want your cows to give more milk, you have to give them more grass, but the Chinese

give them less grass. They are really bad employers. White colonialists were better, at least

they greet you. The Chinese don't greet you when they pass by you. Last year, there was a leak

ing problem; I asked the Chinese to buy some tarmac but the Chinese said to me that I am Tanzanian and therefore I cannot give him advice. A year later, they finally bought the tarmac, but from China, at a price three times higher than local Tanzanian tarmac

... The Chinese are

thieves. They steal our wealth and send it to China. Everything used in the mills is from China.

26 Interview with a union representative, Chambishi, 29 August 2007. 27 James Brennan, "Blood enemies: exploitation and urban citizenship in the nationalist political thought

of Tanzania, 1958-1975," The Journal of African History, Vol. 47, No. 3 (2006), pp. 1-25, and Ronald

Aminzade, "From race to citizenship: the indigenization debate in post-socialist Tanzania," Studies in

Comparative International Development, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2003), pp. 43-63. There are differences in African perceptions of Chinese as compared with European, South Asian and white domination, but this will require a separate analysis.

28 Interview with a female electrical engineer at Urafiki, Dar es Salaam, 20 October 2007. 29 Interview with a female weaver at Urafiki, Dar es Salaam, 12 December 2007. 30 Interview with a male technician at Urafiki, Dar es Salaam, 15 October 2007.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

Even second-hand and poor-quality machines are from China, bought with Tanzanian

shillings.31

On the Copperbelt, on the other hand, people's views are more mixed and

layered. The intense public discontent caused by the fatal explosion in an

NFCA-affiliated facility in 2005, killing 52 casual workers, is still palpable but it is counterbalanced by the prosperity that the Chinese have brought to the com

munity. While assailing the Chinese for treating them as cheap labour, many miners also credited them for reopening a bankrupt and abandoned mine and

creating employment. Their Zambian government managers during the ZCCM

period had failed them abysmally and Chambishi was resuscitated by the infusion of Chinese capital and technology. Some miners also appreciated the Chinese work style, especially when compared to expatriates of other nationalities on

the Copperbelt. Comments like these are common:

The thing I like about the Chinese is that if a Chinese is not designated as a boss, they will bring him down to work with us and they will not discriminate in his favour because he is a Chinese. He will do the same job as everyone else. I had Chinese guys working under my supervision. This is something you don't see a Boer, a Canadian or Indian doing. To me, who has worked with them closely, I like them because they are down to earth.32

There was massive unemployment in Chambishi... But with the coming of the Chinese you find that almost everybody, as long as he can work, is now employed in the Chinese mines. So we are

happy ... the Chinese are able to give us at least an income to feed and keep our children. Before

the Chinese came people would just be loitering on the streets while some would go into the plant to steal things like cables and scrap metals but those are things of the past. So despite the poor conditions being offered we appreciate what the Chinese are doing.33

New investments by the Chinese also have also created a sense of optimism:

This town has been designated a Free Economic Zone and the Chinese are to build a multi

facility economic zone. As such workers are to benefit because by next year worker housing will be built, two big colleges and two stadiums, a shopping complex and a smelter which is in progress.34

The difference in the degree of class and racial tension between the two cases also

throws into sharp relief the need to distinguish different types of Chinese capital, with their varied degree of (dis)connection from local communities. The parent company of NFCA is one of China's largest state-owned enterprises and has

branches in many countries. Chambishi has also been designated the site of the

first of the five special economic zones which the Chinese government has

pledged to construct in Africa. On the other hand, the Changzhou No. 2

Textile Company that holds the majority share of Urafiki is a provincial-level share-holding company, and does not carry the same level of state economic and political mission. The nature of their industry also generates different incen

tives to be embedded in the local society. Copper mining is place-dependent whereas textile mills are more foot-loose. The different interests of these two

31 Interview with a construction department worker at Urafiki, Dar es Salamm, 10 December 2007. 32 Interview with a miner, Chambishi, 29 August 2007. 33 Interview with a worker in the concentrator, Chambishi, 28 August 2007. 34 Interview with a shop steward, Chambishi, 28 August 2007.

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Raw Encounters

investment projects produce different patterns of engagement with the local com

munities. NFCA's long-term interest in Chambishi and the Copperbelt region makes it very sensitive to local popular sentiments, and attempts are made to

shore up its image as a good corporate citizen. For instance, in 2007, NFCA

launched a Corporate Social Responsibility Plan, which covers repairing roads,

building bus shelters, setting public recreation facilities on the Copperbelt, donat

ing stationery to Chambishi school children, supporting the women empower ment plan, and participating in Malaria and HIV/AIDS campaigns. In

contrast, at Urafiki, Chinese managers have no plans to make similar social

investments. In short, the more capital-intensive extractive project in

Chambishi turns out to be more constrained by and responsive to local pressures than a manufacturing concern in a competitive sector. This difference also shows

up in the ways the two companies react to worker resistance, and cautions against an undifferentiated view of "Chinese capital."

Grassroots Militancy and its Divergent Outcomes Strikes occurred in both the enterprises in this study after the Chinese became

owners, staged by disgruntled workers demanding higher wages and more secure

terms of employment. Zambian miners' misgivings about "low" wages arose in

relation to wages at other foreign-owned mines on the Copperbelt and to the

windfall profits the Chinese were presumably reaping with the sharp rise in cop

per prices. Thanks to the transparency of the global copper trade, centralized and

priced at the London Metal Exchange, miners know the value of the commodity

they produce and use it to claim for better conditions of work:

We are lowly paid compared to other mines. Even when you compare our wages with

Chambishi Metals which is in the Chambishi area, we are paid less. If you compare with

other mines like KCM, Kansanshi Mines and Lumwana Mines, the disparity is even greater. It is like we are just paid to get some strength to work in the plant, and not to live. At

Kansanshi Mines, workers are getting about 5 million Kwacha per month, and what about

us, we only get 1 million.35

For workers, this became particularly unacceptable when copper prices rose from

$1,400 a ton in November 2001 to about $7,000 a ton in April 2006.36 Miners

refer to the BBC broadcasts and their company magazine as sources of infor

mation on copper prices and are enraged by the gap between corporate profits and worker salaries.

At Urafiki, livelihood is even more precarious than on the Zambian

Copperbelt, if only because workers' earnings are much lower. Miners take

35 Interview with a NFCA miner, Chambishi, 28 August 2007. 36 Copper prices have been stable for many years. In fact, from the late 1990s to 2003, the London Metal

Exchange copper price sat below US$2,000 per ton. It climbed sharply in 2004, peaking in mid-2006 at almost $9,000 a tonne. More recently it has traded between $5,000 and $7,000. It's worth noting that the

average price between 1998 and 2003 was only $1,650 a ton. Paul Stathis, "What's really driving the

price of copper?" 20 August 2007, http://www.electricalsolutions.net.au/feature_article/article.asp? item-143 5.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

home on average $250-$500 at Chambishi, but casual workers at Urafiki are paid

only $50 and permanent workers $65, inclusive of transportation allowance and a

sick leave allowance. Workers reported accruing multiple debts, cutting back on

food, eating only beans and rice without meat or fish, not being able to send their children to school and having to rely on irregular incomes from informal jobs (usually peddling vegetables and other sundry items on the streets). When asked about the main differences between the government and the Chinese

periods at Urafiki, most workers pointed first and foremost to the decline in liv

ing standards. They earned less in terms of shillings during the government

period, but were able to afford more food, clothes and services. But unlike copper miners, textile workers in Urafiki cannot easily establish how much surplus value is produced and extracted by their employers, as there is no international pricing

mechanism for textiles.

"Putting fear among the Chinese"

In Chambishi, workers reported two strikes (June 2004 and July 2006) since the Chinese came, and both were instigated by workers without the blessing of the unions. The first strike was brief and was caused by discontent about differences in pay among different categories of workers: permanent workers were paid more

in wages and benefits than casuals on contract, and those directly employed by NFCA were paid more than those in the subcontracting company Mining One. One worker said:

Most of us are not happy because why should my friends with similar qualifications and

doing the same job get double my salary? ... After we heard that the management had refused to give in to our demands, we didn't even wait for a report from the union representa tives. We started the strike right away. The corrupt union [Mine Workers' Union of Zambia] was able to convince us to go back to work and I guessed they were just bought off by management.37

The second strike, also initiated by workers without union approval, turned violent and became more frightening to the Chinese management. A branch union representative who participated in the collective bargaining with the Chinese said that "it was this strike that has put fear among the Chinese ... It was illegal but it was necessary because it was the quickest way to achieve our

goal."38

It took place as negotiations were going on between the two unions and the Chinese management. The Chinese had actually agreed to pay workers some back wages but unfortunately some calculation mistakes occurred in the payroll department, and instead of paying workers the back wages, deductions showed

up in their pay slips. When the night shift workers saw the pay slips before

they started work they became furious. They decided to show up at the front gate but refused to go in to start their shift. The day shift workers came

37 Interview with a miner at NFCA, Chambishi township, 28 August 2007. 38 Interview with the union branch secretary at NFCA, Chingola, 4 December 2007.

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Raw Encounters

at 7 a.m. and joined them, and then the 2 p.m. workers also joined. All stopped

working. Workers' wives and children gathered at the main gate too, carrying stones. There was talk about blasting the shaft but the union people talked

workers out of this plan. They assured them that they were going to sit down

with management that night and by the following morning everyone would get what was owed them. But then things turned ugly. A union representative at

the scene recalled:

Upon hearing this they started cheering as a way of congratulating us but the head of security

thought the noise indicated a riotous mob, and that the workers wanted to beat up or manhan

dle the union leaders. They started firing tear gas to disperse the workers ... Workers had stones

in their hands so they reacted and caused lots of damage with the stones.39

Another worker recalled:

Workers burned the trucks loaded with copper, trashing paper documents in the offices, and

even attacked the China house on the edge of Chambishi township. The Zambian police used rubber bullets and one miner was shot in the leg. Workers also blocked the main road

to Chingola and set logs on fire to prevent passage. Twenty-four hours later everyone went

home, and two weeks later, management signed the new agreement.40

In the 2007 collective agreement, NFCA also agreed to a basic pay raise of 23 per cent, with the actual total increment including allowances amounting to a 65 per cent increment. Jobs that were previously on contract became permanent, and

casuals were given contracts of between one and three years, with the promise that these would be changed to permanent in the near future.

"Shedding fish tears"

At Urafiki, low wages and casualization have also been major grievances among the workers. But workers could only accept casual jobs and suffer quietly, like

"shedding fish tears," as one worker put it vividly in Swahili.41 Also, many of

the casual workers the Chinese recruited were relatives and family members

of the permanent workers. Such nepotistic casualization helped assuage some

of the discontent among workers. Still, there have been three strikes since the

Chinese started operation, in 1997, 2002 and 2005. In addition, there were incon

spicuous "cold strikes" or go slows, according to workers in the weaving and

spinning departments. What is remarkable about these strikes is that over time

workers seemed to become more demoralized by the futility of their actions.

The Tanzanian government has staunchly supported the Chinese, and the

union representing the textile sector, the Tanzania Union of Industrial and

Commercial Workers (TUICO), has a penchant for bureaucratic arbitration rather than mobilizing workers for strikes. Demoralized, workers either continue

39 Ibid. 40 Interview with a miner at NFCA, Chambishi township, 4 July 2007. 41 This is a Swahili saying for those who are oppressed but cannot access any help. When fish cries, tears

are washed away by water so no one can notice that it is crying. Interview with a male technician at

Urafiki, 15 October 2007.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

seeking the intervention of the government and the union or simply acquiesce to

deteriorating employment conditions.

According to a worker who was part of the 2002 strike:

Workers made 14 demands, including back pay of 10,000 shillings per worker for ten years, and

reducing working hours from 12 to eight. But the Chinese refused. Workers called in the

Minister for Industry, and when he failed to resolve the issue, workers chased after him

and the police had to come and rescue him. Then the workers went to the Prime Minister, Mr Sumaye, who also came but he said to us, "those who want to work keep working, those

who do not want to work, off you go." The Prime Minister is backing the Chinese so they dare to ignore us because they know the government is supporting them. The Chinese finally

agreed to give us a paltry 2,000 shillings raise. The government supports the Chinese

because the two governments are in good relations, and the Chinese government gives aid to

the Tanzanian government, but they do no good to the ordinary Tanzanians. No party dares to declare itself anti-Chinese because they are big investors.42

The following account of the second strike in 2005, given by the current branch union secretary at Urafiki, also illustrates how workers were demobilized by their own unions:

In 2005, two weeks before the strike, the TUICO regional office called together all the workers in the social hall and discussed the issues. Workers voted to strike by a three-quarters majority.

They demanded that the entire Tanzanian management team step down, because they were all

supporting the Chinese. They wanted a new management who would give them the raise. The District Commissioner came here on the second day of the strike and cheated the people, urging them to go home, promising he would talk to the President about their demands. The strike lasted for five days and he never returned. A rumour circulated that workers would all be fired if they did not return to work. Workers were scared and went back to work. But later

they realized that it was the union leaders who spread the rumour. Angry workers later voted out the TUICO branch leaders. But the strike did not bring any result. The Chinese did not fire anyone, but deducted four days' wages from all workers.43

When 725 casual workers were summarily dismissed in November 2007, the branch union secretary persuaded the worker representatives not to strike or insti

gate violence, but to file a complaint with the Commission of Mediation, char

ging that the Chinese illegally denied them formal contracts which are required under the 2004 Labour Law. These workers had been at Urafiki for at least one year and some even for five years. The retrenched workers managed to

pull off a little protest on the day when they were told to return to the factory to collect their last paycheck, but intervention by a member of parliament and

wide reports in the local media resulted in no change in the Chinese decision. The workers were dismissed.

In short, the Chinese made significant concessions to Zambian miners' strikes but not the Tanzanian textile workers'. The notable difference in the effectiveness of the strikes is that Zambian workers were able to leverage a boom in the world

copper market. Workers' bargaining power was also bolstered by a palpable "resource nationalism" in Zambian public discourse which has been forcefully articulated by opposition politicians. There is no equivalent windfall in the textile

42 Interview with a worker at Urafiki, Dar es Salaam, 10 December 2007. 43 Interview with a union branch secretary at Urafiki, 10 December 2007.

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Raw Encounters

industry to increase workers' bargaining power with the Chinese. While the boom

and bust of the product markets are not predictable, the difference in workers'

political sensibility - the spontaneity and autonomy of rank-and-file workers

-

between the two cases is also partly rooted in their respective working-class history.

Organized labour in Tanzania has been politically weak but rank-and-file

workers have also been relatively acquiescent, except for a brief strike in the

early 1970s instigated by the Marxist-Leninist faction of the ruling party TANU. The Tanzanian government has obtained industrial peace not just by

restricting the right to strike and the right to engage in collective bargaining, but also through a system of state paternalism. It gave workers minimum wage

protection, and average earnings in parastatals were 1.4 to 1.7 times higher than the whole economy between 1967 and 1977. Moreover, workers obtained

"new substantive rights, ranging from greater financial and tenurial security to

industrial democracy and workers' education."44

In sharp contrast to parastatal workers in Tanzania, an enduring feature on the

Zambian Copperbelt is grassroots militancy. The widespread scepticism and dis

trust among the rank-and-file miners towards their union leaders that came up in

almost all the miner interviews I conducted has a long pedigree in the working class history of that region. From Michael Burawoy's study in the late 1960s to

Miles Larmer's more recent research in the 2000s, disunity within and among the

unions, and schisms between miners and their union officials are consistent

themes. The clashes between miners and their unions caused spontaneous and

periodic outbursts of worker militancy that are not susceptible to control by the unions, political parties or arbitration committees. To the Copperbelt miners, an iron law of oligarchy has jinxed the unions for decades. Throughout the 1970s

and 1980s, short localized strikes continued to arise from grievances about food

subsidies, racial hierarchy in wages45 fees for medical services and pension schemes, championed by miners and their branch representatives who tended to respond to increasing repression and declining terms of service and livelihood

with more confrontational strikes 46 Their targets were not just the government and the companies but also the union bureaucracy, as this miner explained:

When they [union leaders] negotiate with management, usually they fail to reach an agreement.

They don't have that zeal and courage ... all the strikes we have staged have been started by the

workers themselves and not the unions. They are cowards ... Since it is not possible for us to

speak to management at the same time, it pays to belong to a union But in terms of forcing management to raise our pay, it's the workers themselves who do that. A strike is most effective, but the union is always against it. In most cases, the unions will agree to terms which we don't

like and usually force things they have agreed with management on us.47

44 Dudley Jackson, "The disappearance of strikes in Tanzania: income policies and industrial democracy," Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1979), p. 251.

45 By 1980, expatriates represented only 4.7% of the workforce, down from 16% in 1964. Zambians earned between half and two-thirds of the wages of expatriates doing the same job, the latter also receiving additional benefits. Larmer, Mineworkers in Zambia, pp. 107-08.

46 Ibid. chs. 4 and 5. 47 Interview with a miner at NFCA, Chambishi township, 28 August 2007.

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664 The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

Corruption is the perennial problem that plagues the national offices of the two

miners' unions.48 Under the Chinese, free trips to China for union leaders invite

the most suspicion among miners:

Corruption is very serious in the current NUMAW. We have heard that many of the union offi

cials are being sent to China not to work but for leisure. The big question is what work did they do to deserve this? Small things like this make us question the credibility of our union represen tatives. Those trips are usually done in secret with the knowledge of union members. Why? So to

me it simply shows that there are bigger things happening behind our backs which we don't know and probably will never know.49

Miners have been aided by the Zambian presidential election in 2006 in which

Chinese labour practices became a political issue. A year earlier, a tragic indus

trial accident enraged the local community and lent enormous moral legitimacy to miners' arguments that the Chinese are truly exploitative of Zambian casual

workers. In April 2005, the single most deadly disaster in 35 years happened at

the Chinese-owned Beijing General Research Institute of Mining and

Metallurgy in Chambishi. All the 52 people who died in the incident were

Zambian casual workers who were paid only $15 to $30 a month for working in such a hazardous environment. A national day of mourning was observed

to mark the mass funeral of the deceased. Popular outrage was directed at

both the Chinese and the government for not imposing adequate safety standards

in foreign-invested mines. Anger continued to simmer after compensation of

about $10,000 per killed employee was paid. Chinese President Hu Jintao's

planned visit to Chambishi to lay the cornerstone for a new $220 million copper smelter in February 2007 was called off after threats of mass protests.50

In 2006, Michael Sata of the opposition party Patriotic Front, who was

President Levy Mwanawasa's main challenger, made China's presence in

Zambia's copper mining and trading sectors a campaign issue. "They ill treat

our people and that is unacceptable. We are not going to condone exploitative investors. This country belongs to Zambians," Sata said of Chinese investors.

Mwanawasa defended the Chinese when Sata first made the threat to review

state contracts should he come to power. Later, Mwanawasa agreed with the gen eral complaint about the quality of investment, saying he would order the arrest

and prosecution of investors in the copper mines that broke labour laws. Sata's

populist "Zambia for Zambians" campaign did not make him president but he

won the majority vote in Lusaka, where Chinese traders have employed many

locals, and the Copperbelt.51 His "resource nationalism" has parallels in other

parts of the developing world, spoken of by political leaders in countries with

48 Challenging the close ties between MUZ and the government, a new rival National Union of Miners

and Allied Workers (NUMAW) was registered in 2004, representing miners who are new recruits in

the privatized mining houses. At NFCA, NUMAW represented all but the 50-plus permanent employ ees staying on after privatization.

49 Interview with a miner at NFCA, Chambishi, 28 August 2007. 50 Yaroslav Trofimov, "In Africa: China's expansion begins to stir resentment," Wall Street Journal,

2 February 2007, p. Al. 51 Isabel Chimangeni, "Chinese presence met with resistance," 18 July 2006, http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?

idnews=35152; see also Joseph A. Schatz "Zambian hopeful takes a swing at China," The

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Raw Encounters

reserves of oil, natural gas and mineral resources from Russia and Iran to Bolivia

and Venezuela. It is founded on widening income inequality amid soaring world

commodity prices and demands by disenfranchised citizens for a larger share of

the profits from their natural resources.52

Conclusion Much has been said and criticized about China's intentions in Africa.53 The

rhetoric of Chinese colonialism (such as China's "scramble for Africa," "con

quest of Africa," "the new Sinosphere") underscores the angst of Western powers about the rise of a formidable rival, but reveals little about the varied capacities, interests and constraints of the foot-soldiers of Chinese projects on the ground.

Preliminary findings from this comparative research on the labour politics of

Chinese capitalism in southern Africa challenge the mistaken notion, prevalent in current debates and reports, that there is a singular "Chinese" interest always

capable of imposing itself on a singular and vulnerable Africa which does not

have any political leverage in encounters with the Chinese. Instead of imposition, this article highlights interactions, and the many forces from African states and

societies which shape the terms of those interactions with uneven effectiveness.

Specifically, the comparison generates several working hypotheses. Different

investors have varying capacities and interests, and they encounter the local

labour force with varied collective histories and power. The Chinese at

Chambishi and Urafiki resort to casualization as a means to cut costs, but

Chambishi's interest in securing long-term, territorially specific development has hamstrung its relentless pursuit of casualization, forcing it to yield to pressure

generated by grassroots militancy that rode on the wave of resource nationalism

at a time of a global hike in copper prices. Chinese investment in the competitive textile sector, in contrast, has a shorter time frame, less political burden and thin ner profit margin. Smaller and less embedded investors may ironically turn out to

be more formidable adversaries for workers. A fruitful line of inquiry is to

re-evaluate the different logics and impacts of, for instance, extractive, industrial

and merchant capitals from China which are all active in today's Africa.

footnote continued

Washington Post, 25 September 2006, AI6; Miles Larmer and Alastair Fr?ser, "Of cabbages and King Cobra: populist politics and Zambia's 2006 election," African Affairs, No. 106 (2007), pp. 611-37.

52 The Economist Intelligence Unit, "Latin American politics: resource nationalism revived," 6 April 2007,

http://www.viewswire.com/index; Joshua Kurlantzick, "The coming resource war, crude awakening," The New Republic, 2 October 2006.

53 For historical and contemporary analysis of Chinese state interests in Africa, see Chris Alden, China in

Africa (London: Zed Books, 2007); Philip Snow, The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). An overview of China's new south-south policy as the larger context of China-Africa relations is Alex Fernandez Jilberto and Barbara Hogenboom, "Developing regions facing China in a neo-liberalized world," Journal of Developing Societies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2007), pp. 305-39.

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The China Quarterly, 199, September 2009, pp. 647-666

Another theoretical issue is whether or not Chinese capital behaves differently from capital of other nations. The presence of a number of multinationals originat

ing from different countries on the Copperbelt provides a natural experiment to

study if class relation takes different forms under different national management. For a start, miners constantly make comparisons among the mining houses and

realize that they all share an interest in making profits from their native resources

and labour. For instance, all major international mining houses are found to

employ casual labour and some of them subcontract more of their core activities

to other companies than the Chinese. Wildcat strikes protesting against low

wages and casualization have occurred in the past few years at mines owned by Indian investors. Yet the Chinese became the sole target of resource nationalism.

Whatever the reasons for this bias, the vigilant international spotlight, cast more

on the Chinese than at capital from other countries (such as India), may itself

generate real effects on Chinese capital behaviour on the ground.

Finally, Africa is diverse and changing. African workers and governments bring with them different histories and evolving capacities in encountering Chinese inves tors. Zambian miners boast a long tradition of grassroots resistance and the

Zambian government is becoming more assertive, thanks in part to the increasing assertiveness of civil society groups which demand more national share of the prof its from copper. The recent imposition of the Windfall Profit Tax, though later

rescinded in light of the global economic downturn in late 2008, signalled the

potential form of resource nationalism.54 Countries where export and foreign investment are less politicized, and civil society is more dependent on the ruling party, like Tanzania, may lack such leverage.

As this article goes to the press, the Copperbelt is reeling from a sharp down

turn in copper prices triggered by the global financial crisis and recession. Prices

have fallen from a high of $8,900 a ton in July 2008 to $4,900 a ton in mid-April 2009. Amidst public anxiety over mass layoffs on the Copperbelt and while some

foreign companies actually dismissed workers or were on the verge of shutting down part of their production, the Chinese NFCA made a public announcement

that everyone in the company would stay on the payroll. The Chinese have also

bought the Luanshya mine shut down by a Swiss-Israeli joint venture company,

vowing to retain and expand the local workforce. To many Zambians, the latest

financial crisis only proves once again the exhaustion of the Western model of

development. They are looking ever more eagerly to China as the key to the

future of the African continent. As Chinese capitalism in Africa is poised to

become a major story shaping the global economy, the spirit of Bandung, rather

than the trite rhetoric of "colonialism," may provide a more relevant, productive and critical lens for observing development in the 21st century.

54 John Lungu, "Copper mining in Zambia: renegotiation or law reform?" Review of African Political

Economy, No. 117 (2008), pp. 41-53.

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