Frontiers: China beyond China

Yasmin Cho presents; Ching Kwan Lee responds.

Abstract

The presence of Buddhism in Africa has sparked discussions about the influence of Chinese cultural or ‘soft’ power on the continent. These discussions however tend to be subsumed into supplementary accounts that support the heated debates regarding the more visible, expansive, and thus controversial economic presence of China in Africa. A conceptual problem that arises from this is that references to China in this economic sense, or alternatively, China as a form of ‘hard power’, inevitably conceive of China as a nation-state with clear geographical boundaries.

The introduction of Chinese Buddhism to Africa seems to defy this framework. It has uniquely brought together Chinese people, Chinese wealth, and Chinese networks that extend far beyond the People’s Republic of China. Buddhism has become a source for drawing on ‘Chinese capital’ from around the world, which includes not only the PRC but also Taiwan, diasporic communities in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. Several key questions arise from this observation:

What do we mean by ‘Chinese capital’? What role does Buddhism play in this context? Is it a spiritual reservoir, or does it serve another function? Ultimately, how should we understand ‘China’? Is it a state, a force, a wave, or a concept?

This paper argues that ‘Buddhism in Africa’ should not be seen as an ancillary story to the economic narratives of China in Africa; instead, it is a novel avenue in and of itself for reexamining the existing discussions of China’s imperialistic desires, Chinese diasporic identity politics, and eventually the concept of ‘global China’. This paper is based on in-depth ethnographic data from extensive fieldwork at a Taiwanese Buddhist NGO in Namibia, as well as in Chinese diasporic communities in southeast Asia who support this NGO’s charity work in southern Africa

About the speakers

Yasmin Cho is an Earl S Johnson Lecturer in Anthropology at MAPSS at the University of Chicago.

Her work is dedicated to understanding, from an anthropological perspective, the role of materiality (including technology and infrastructure) in religious movements, with a special focus on gender politics and the formation of political subjectivity in ethnic minority groups. Her first book, Politics of Tranquility: The Material and Mundane Lives of Buddhist Nuns in Post-Mao Tibet (Cornell University Press 2025), explores the intersections of material practices, gender, and religious revivalism through the lives of Tibetan Buddhist nuns in post-Mao China and reveals the unexpected political outcomes of the nuns’ lives and practices within a restrictive political context.

Since 2021, Yasmin has been focusing on a Chinese-supported Buddhist NGO and its school-building and missionary activities in sub-Saharan African countries and recently completed two and a half years of field research in Namibia (including a few months in Madagascar).

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology whose work focuses on globalisation and the development of the global South, with a focus on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

She has published three monographs on China, forming a trilogy of Chinese capitalism through the lens of labor and working class experiences. “Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women” (1998) documents the organisation of gender and work in factory regimes in Hong Kong and Shenzhen when South China first emerged as the workshop of the world. “Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt” (2007) chronicles the unmaking and making of the Chinese working class in two regional economies experiencing the death of socialism and the rise of capitalism. “The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa” (2017) examines Chinese state investors in Zambia and compares their relation with the African state and labor to other global private investors.

Her most recent co-edited volumes are “Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement “(2019) and “The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View” (2019).

About Frontiers of Faith

Frontiers of Faith is a multidisciplinary academic network (hosted by CRASSH) for scholars working on religion in the China-Africa space. Economic and political dynamics in this field have been central in scholarly and popular debates, but the complex cultural side of China-Africa encounters has been conspicuously absent. If factories, construction sites and mines have been the paradigmatic sites of China-Africa engagement, what can we learn from the small but increasing number of churches, monasteries and mosques on the complex and multifaceted ‘frontiers’ between Africa and China?

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