“The book is brilliant in its portrayals, and impossible to put down: both the ethnographic section of the book and the appendix are superlative in their vividness.”

Gordon Mathews, author of The World in Guangzhou

“Lee has produced another pioneering treatise on China. With Zambia as her field site, she contrasts Chinese state investment with competing footloose private capital from other countries, thereby refuting mythologies of Chinese colonialism or world hegemony. Her novel political economy based on ‘varieties of capital’ displaces more conventional theories of ‘varieties of capitalism’ to reveal a startling contingency to global capitalism. Sure to be an unforgettable classic, The Specter of Global China represents the very best of historical and comparative ethnography.”

Michael Burawoy, University of California at Berkeley

“The Specter of Global China engages with substantial theoretical questions at the center of the nature of capitalism as a system. It is not a book exclusively for students of China in Africa; its theoretical and empirical engagement with enduring questions in the social sciences make it an important contribution to all those interested in the theory and practice of development.”

Edward Webster, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Ching Kwan Lee is an excellent ethnographer and the access she obtained to mining companies through her friendship with Zambia’s former acting president is exceptional. For academics studying mining or construction in Zambia, with or without a Chinese focus, this will prove an invaluable text purely for its details. Its core depiction of Chinese State capital is an interesting insight that opens productive space for the ongoing study of both China and other forms of capital.

African Studies Quarterly

“Ching Kwan Lee has written a captivating ethnographic study comparing the behaviour of Chinese state capital and global private capital in Zambia. By looking at the activities of Chinese state capital in both the copper mining and construction sectors, Lee’s field research creates a window at the grassroots level into the China-Zambia relationship. She weaves the worldviews of dozens of Zambians and Chinese into an accessible narrative that helps bridge the divide between different actors’ perspectives. This book is a lesson to all scholars, myself included, on the value of perseverance and chutzpa in academic field research.”

Joshua Eisenman | Pacific Affairs

“Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China is the first book-length attempt to systematically consider the broadertheoretical implications of China-Africa relations. . . . In centering ‘capital’, Lee’s book provides an important starting point.”

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute