Mingwei Huang joins Juliet, Keren, and Sisi to talk about the social and racial dimensions of China's increasing engagement with Africa, with a focus on Huang's research in Johannesburg, South Africa. The discussion is inspired by Mingwei's recent book, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024).

Mingwei Huang is assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of race and migration trained in American studies and gender & sexuality studies.

Recommendations:

Mingwei:

• Made in Ethiopia film (2024)

Keren:

• When Life Gives You Tangerines series on Netflix

Juliet:

• Elizabeth Plantan, Wendy Leutert, Austin Strange, Pivoting to Overseas Development: International NGOs' Changing Engagement with China (2025)

Thanks for listening!

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This is Episode 1 of our sub-series "Environmental Issues along the Belt and Road"

The series considers the complexities of Chinese actors' impacts on the environment, extractive activities, and role in driving sustainability solutions from the sands of the Mekong River to lithium mines in Argentina.

China produces 80% of the world's solar panels, over 60% of all wind turbines, and more electric vehicles than the US and the EU combined. In this episode, we ask how China became so dominant in clean energy technology manufacturing, how its products are exported to other countries trying to transition their energy systems, and what impacts the clean energy tech sector is having in places where manufacturing occurs.

We interview 3 experts in related topics:

Anders Hove is Senior Research Fellow at the China Energy Research Programme at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. Previously, he was Project Director for the Sino-German Energy Transition project at GIZ, and a non-resident fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Anders co-hosts the Environment China podcast. Related reading here, here and here.

Dr. Cecilia Springer is a Principal at Global Efficiency Intelligence and Co-director of the Industrial Electrification Center. She has over 10 years of experience conducting technical research on energy policy and industrial decarbonization, with a regional focus on U.S., China, and Southeast Asia. She is a non-resident at the Global China Initiative (formerly the assistant director) at the BU Global Development Policy Center where she led the Energy and Climate research group and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. Related reading here, here and here.

Dr. Nikita Sud is Professor of the Politics of Development at the University of Oxford and Governing Body Fellow of Wolfson College. She is author of the books "Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and The State: A Biography of Gujarat" and "The Making of Land and the Making of India." Her work explores the transition to renewable energy, and the institutional, political and financial mechanisms that underlie this in regions that are geostrategically crucial, while being environmentally highly vulnerable. We discuss her research on Rempang Eco City, a planned Chinese investment of Solar PV manufacturing in Indonesia.

Thanks for listening!

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Justin Haruyama joins Juliet, Erik, and Sisi (welcome to our new team member/producer!) to talk about China-Zambia relations, from the history of Chinese aid in Zambia to the complex people-to-people relations that characterize this bilateral relationship.

Justin Haruyama is an instructor of anthropology at The University of British Columbia whose research explores diverse forms of relationality enabled by Chinese-African encounters, ranging from intimacy and fellowship, to exclusion and xenophobia, to mutual dependence and obligation. He is currently working on a book entitled Mining for Coal and Souls: Modes of Relationality in Emerging Chinese-Zambian Worlds that examines the controversial presence of Chinese migrants and investors in Zambia today.

Articles:

• Justin Haruyama, "'South-South' Capitalist Extractive Patriarchy" in Transforming Anthropology (2025)
• Justin Haruyama, "Jehovah's Witnesses Are Learning Chinese to Evangelize in Zambia" in Anthropology News (2025)
• Justin Haruyama, "Shortcut English: Pidgin Language, Racialization, and Symbolic Economies at a Chinese-Operated Mine in Zambia" in African Studies Review (2023)

Recommendations:

Justin:

• Sapiens Podcast (Justin's episode comes out in May!)
• Mingwei Huang, Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024)
• Di Wu, Affective Ecounters: Everyday Life among Chinese Migrants in Zambia (Routledge, 2021)

Erik:

• The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)
• I'm Still Here (2024)

Sisi:

• Jemima Pierce, The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Juliet:

• Get on BlueSky!
• Northwestern University's 2023 commencement speech by Illinois governor JB Pritzker

Thanks for listening!

Follow us on BlueSky @beltandroadpod.blsk.social