Mingwei Huang’s recent monograph provides a critical intervention into the field of Africa-China studies by updating one of the most central concepts for academic and even popular discourse of the past decade or more: racial capitalism. By examining racial capitalism as it manifests in exchanges between Chinese (primarily Fujianan) and Southern African (Zimbabwean and Malawian) economic migrants in South Africa, Huang’s ethnography demonstrates how the China Malls of Johannesburg function as palimpsests, laying over and overlapping with the histories of gold mining, apartheid, and settler colonialism. She theorizes key terms such as “adjacency” and “sojourner colonialism” to articulate how the dynamic is spatially inextricable from these histories, while simultaneously putting into relief their variations from the perspective of the “Chinese Century.” Not only does her argument update racial capitalism, but it also updates the ethnography of Chinese migrants in South Africa, a key aspect of what has been popularized as “global China.” Moreover, Huang’s primary optics for her ethnography are race and gender, still a rare methodological approach for Africa and China relations. The work exemplifies the interdisciplinarity of the recent qualitative turn within the field, reflecting how the topic has matured during what might be characterized as a new generation of scholarship.

The book is split into three parts with seven chapters, an introduction, and epilogue. Part One, “Layered Histories,” explores the book’s key concepts. Huang begins historically, examining how the city of Johannesburg functions as a “palimpsest of production and consumption,” juxtaposing the construction of the China Malls on top of old gold mines, what Huang calls the “Sinification of the mining belt” (52, 49). Chapter Two explores her term “sojourner colonialism,” examining how Chinese traders exploit the “asymmetry” of global and local power dynamics; varying levels of precarity influence the “unevenness” of exchanges (91). Chapter Three breaks new ground by turning to the concept of “adjacency,” analyzing the ways in which the figure of the “Asiatic” trader has transformed through a comparison of Indian and Chinese proximities, pulling upon the history of “coolie” labor. A powerful moment in this chapter occurs when Huang demonstrates how Chinese traders use the term “kuli” to describe their Black employees. Chapter Four provides an in-depth ethnography of the labor relations in the China Malls, capturing how the interactions between Chinese and their employees embody “global racial capital in a world made by colonialism” (153). Part Two, “Racial Formations,” turns explicitly to how Chinese and African racialize each other in the China Malls; individuals problematically pull from and thereby deepen stereotypes. Chapter Five turns to the challenging topic of how and why employees steal from their employers, arguing that the Chinese occupy an “unmarked dominant racial position” that contextualizes labor exploitation and the response to it (175). Chapter Six turns to gender and sexuality by using the optic of intimacy to broach topics such as interracial sexual encounters (actual, invented, or represented) as well as the “public intimacies” of working closely in the shop (212).

The monograph is at its strongest when it tackles the thorny question of how contemporary interactions between Africans and Chinese produce new dynamics, even as they are always, to use her word, “imbricated” with the history of settler colonialism in South Africa (130). In Chapter Seven, “Follow the Surplus,” one of the most arresting claims is how Chinese traders exploited loopholes in the South African legal framework to send money back to the PRC from 2000 and 2010. Wholesalers would convince Black South Africans to “trade usage of their discretionary allowances for a few hundred rand … South Africans sold their annual allotments to Chinese clients” (232). These wholesalers would then use the South African IDs to convert rand to yuan, sending it back to their Chinese bank accounts.

Such a practice is a kind of extractivism that exploits the financial precarity of one population to enrich another; it is an action that is reminiscent of certain aspects of neocolonialism. And yet the dynamic reflects the informality of economic channels and actors that must avoid the scrutiny of government agencies—as opposed to the classic paradigm of neocolonialism as defined by Frantz Fanon, in which the former colonial power ensures similar modes of resource or monetary extraction by explicitly manipulating government elites, or the “national bourgeoisie.” While Huang does touch upon the ways in which Chinese traders benefit from the PRC’s official relations with South Africa—Chinese nationals are not deported at the same rate as their Malawian or Zimbabwean counterparts—her ethnography captures the footloose, even hustling aspect to the dynamic that blurs the boundary between legal and extralegal, between formal and informal. All of these aspects characterizes what Huang convincingly argues is central to “Chinese racial capitalism.”