Yoon Jung Park - Presentation Notes
Lingnan Symposium – CA/AC Conference
Hong Kong, 15-16 May 2025
(Revised August 2025)
Modest beginnings
Having carried out research on different periods of Chinese in South Africa, Tu Huynh and I, both based at the University of Johannesburg at the time, wanted to find ways to counter and complicate the “China as predator in Africa” narrative and bring greater attention to the people-centered, grassroots, and everyday aspects of engagement between Africa and China. With a bit of funding and support from our home institution we invited a handful of researchers to South Africa to speak to a public seminar in downtown Johannesburg. We invited scholars who had started work on or expressed interest in these human-centered issues (including Barry Sautman and YAN Hairong, Daniel Large, and Paula Cristina Roque) as well as local Chinese South African community leaders and media analysts. The Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and the South African Mail & Guardian weekly paper hosted the public seminar, which took place in July 2007. Panelists examined China’s growing interests in Southern Africa and their impacts and spoke to issues affecting the existing Chinese South African community and new Chinese migrants to the region. This event led to the creation of a small research working group focused on the people and other non-state actors of Africa-China engagement. With research funds raised from UJ and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), the group members embarked on several independent but related research projects to learn more about the “new” Chinese migrants in several African countries as well as the growing number of Africans in China.
A second grant from the NRF allowed us to organize a conference at UJ in August 2009. This gathering brought together about 30 scholars who had already begun research on Chinese people and businesses in Africa and others who were examining the growing numbers of Africans in China. Researchers presented preliminary work on Chinese in Angola, Cape Verde, Mali, Senegal, Mozambique, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Mauritius, Sudan, South Africa, and Zambia. Gordon Mathews and Adams Bodomo, two of the pioneering scholars of Africans in China (specifically in Hong Kong and Guangzhou) were also part of this groundbreaking conference. These scholars – from China and Hong Kong; the US and England; France, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland in Europe; and Mauritius, Mozambique, and South Africa on the African continent became the very first members of a group that eventually became the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China Research Network.
Since then, the Network has experienced continued and steady growth, solely by word of mouth. The early days were completely a labor of love: no funding, little experience in organizing or academic networking, and no marketing. We, collectively, simply wanted to create a community of colleagues with whom we could share information, discuss challenges encountered during field research, figure out when (and how) we might meet up again (Mauritius becoming the destination of many of our dreams), discuss where we might present and publish our research, and sometimes, just commiserate about the difficulties of working across disciplines and between regions.
The Network by numbers
Over the years, we’ve organized six Network conferences:
• The first, as mentioned, was held in August 2009 in Johannesburg, about two years after the first public seminar and closed-door strategy session.
• Then in 2012 Monash University/South Africa hosted our second conference, with support from Monash University/Australia and the American Council of Learned Societies.
• Jinan University in Guangzhou hosted our first China-based conference in 2014.
• In 2016 we returned to Africa, to Nairobi, Kenya, for a conference hosted by The Graduate School of Media and Communications at the Aga Khan University.
• In 2018, Solange Guo Chatelard with colleagues at Université Libre de Bruxelles (or ULB) organized an amazing (and by far our largest) conference in Brussels.
• Plans for a 2020 conference, to be hosted by Lingnan University in Hong Kong, disintegrated with the global pandemic; however, over the course of 2020-2021, Roberto Castillo and the original organizing committee hosted a webinar series in its place.
• Finally, in 2025, we managed to make it to Lingnan University for our most recent conference which was run alongside a graduate seminar run by colleague and partner, Padmore Adusei Amoah.
Membership in the network grew from around 30 in 2009, to over 100 in 2010. By 2013, this number had grown to over 300. Today, our listserv members number over 1,000 and our We Chat group has just under 500 members.
Over the years, in part due to growing numbers and in part because of external funding, the Network has gradually formalized and institutionalized its structure
As the email list continued to grow from the original 30 to over 100, Tu and I created a Google group listserv in 2010; at the time, she was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University, and I had moved back to the US (where I eventually found a home at Georgetown University). That same year, wanting to share the responsibility of this growing body with others, we invited several of the original conference group and others who were doing similar work to join an informal steering committee.
In 2013 we partnered with the Social Science Research Council (or the SSRC) in New York and with some seed funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, we were able to start our first website which helped us gain greater visibility for our work and share resources more broadly. When the original Luce grant expired, we moved the administrative work of the Network to the African Studies Center (ASC) at Michigan State University at the invitation of our then Executive Board Chair, Jamie Monson.
We successfully won our first grant from the Ford Foundation in April 2022. MSU continued to serve as our administrative home, with Jamie Monson, then Director of the ASC serving as the MSU lead for the grant, while I ran the day-to-day activities and communications of the Network as Executive Director. When Jamie retired, the incoming Director of MSU’s ASC, Leo Zulu, stepped in; this transition was made seamless by the dedicated ASC staff and student volunteers. Our two-year grant was extended by an additional year and with a no-cost extension, will run through December 2025. And the new website was finally launched, after many delays, in April 2025.
The core work of the CA/AC Research Network
The CA/AC Research Network’s mission is to share and disseminate information and research relevant to our members. Via the listserv and WeChat group, we send out information about upcoming events, calls for papers, professional opportunities, and new publications. If you are a member, you probably look forward to the twice-weekly Round-Up from Caitlin Barker or WeChat posts from Winslow Robertson; both are members of the Executive Board serving on the media and communications subcommittee; Caitlin wears a second hat as our part-time website and communications coordinator. In addition, we help to disseminate new research by organizing conference panels at international association conferences, hosting our own CA/AC conferences, and supporting academic publications.
In the past several years, we’ve added a critical element to our mission – capacity building and competency strengthening activities to support our members to write and publish their research through both academic journals and media platforms. We’ve done this formally through our annual early career scholars’ and writing-for-impact workshops, but much of this work takes place informally as more senior scholars mentor and advise early career scholars, sometimes serving as official dissertation committee members or co-authoring papers and helping with networking and providing guidance.
In addition to our workshops, we began to provide seed funding to local network chapters (LNCs), selected through a competitive proposal, review, and selection process. Currently we have nine LNCs based in Cameroon, Shanghai, the UK, Taiwan, Italy, Malawi, Uganda, Nigeria, and Hong Kong/Macau. We hope to raise further funds to support more of these. Each of the LNCs is independently managed and each focus on topics and activities that fit the needs of their respective target audiences and communities. The LNCs provide valuable leadership experience for the teams running them and address the need for more regional events and activities (especially valued in the current climate of limited travel funding). Preliminary feedback has been extremely positive.
General Impacts
The Network has experienced continued growth as more graduate students find their passions in different “China-Africa” and “Africa-China” research topics, but also as people from other, non-academic sectors (media professionals, filmmakers, government officials, development professionals, and others) join. Simultaneously, I would argue that existing members of the community have nurtured the growth of the community through their scholarship and teaching. In other words, it’s been co-constitutive: the Network membership has grown because of growing interest in “China-Africa” but at the same time, the members have spurred this growing interest through their research, publications, and teaching.
Early China-Africa research was mostly broad and descriptive. A couple decades on, we now find a much greater specificity, including more country and case studies and comparative work. Much of the newer research provides greater nuance, pays more attention to the granular and well as connections to wider theoretical framings, and carefully incorporates historical continuities and ruptures; there is also, as would be expected, greater contestation within the field.
Finally, while the CA/AC Research Network can’t take all the credit, our members have edited and/or contributed to a number of special journal issues and edited volumes, including a 2010 special issue of the China Quarterly co-edited by Julia Strauss and Martha Saavedra; a 2010 special issue of African and Asian Studies, co-edited by Tu Huynh and me; no fewer than five special issues of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs; and a number of edited volumes, including China Returns to Africa: A Rising Power and a Continent Embrace, edited by Chris Alden, Ricardo Soares de Oliveria, and Daniel Large (2008), New Directions in Africa–China Studies edited by Chris Alden and Daniel Large in 2018, and Chinese and African Entrepreneurs edited by Karsten Giese and Laurence Marfaing, also published in 2018. Again, these are just some of the many special issues and edited volumes put out by Network members.
Various “turns” in China-Africa research
In their introductory essay in a special issue of the African Studies Review published in 2013, Jamie Monson and Stephanie Rupp raised some important questions examining the field of “China-Africa” studies, including whether it has yet to emerge as a legitimate field. They:
• examined the historical context of the emergence of “China-Africa” studies;
• questioned whether it challenges or brings greater nuance to existing area studies;
• argued for the importance of fine-grained empirical research and theorization of the data;
• highlighted the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration in research, writing, publishing, and application; and
• discussed emerging challenges and opportunities of the diverse research methods and collaborative partnerships.
Stephanie and Jamie wrote about the “China-in-Africa” or “China-Africa” literature: which tends toward a macro focus on Chinese policies, international affairs, and development impacts, often with a Western lens. They argued that more ethnographic, fieldwork-based methodologies differ from the macro in that researchers favoring these methods tend to see engagements between Africa and China as more complex and nuanced, highlighting the people-centered research of the Chinese in Africa and Africans in China network. They also noted a greater number of works incorporating the history of relations between China and different African countries.
In addition to what they wrote about, I have identified a few more. One of the ongoing “turns” in the research, exemplified in several papers presented one Day One of the 2025 Lingnan Conference, could be described as the “Africa-China” turn or the focus on African agency. While Adama Gaye, Barry Sautman and YAN Hairong, Sanusha Naidu and others wrote about African perspectives on China in Africa much earlier, the focus on the agency of African actors has been a popular topic since Lucy Corkin wrote about Angola, Folashade Soule-Kohndou started focusing on ”Africa plus one summits,” and Obert Hodzi analyzed the role of African elites. We’ve also seen a critical mass of research focused on Africa-China engagement in media and communications, with colleagues Bob Wekesa, Dani Madrid-Morales, Herman Wasserman, LI Hangwei, and Ignatius Gagliardone taking the lead. Roberto Castillo, my own work with Tu Huynh, and several others turned the focus on ethnicity and race, racism, and racialization; we saw an additional flurry of articles addressing these issues in the aftermath of China’s response to Africans in Guangzhou in the early days of the Covid pandemic. Finally, one of the more recent turns in our field and one, which in my view brings greater richness and texture to the field, we’ve seen more research has been the focus on Africa-China engagements in the arts and cultural engagements, and in literature featuring both senior scholars like Ruth Simbao, mid-career scholars like Duncan Yoon and Vivian Lu, and emerging scholars like Ignatius Suglo leading the way.
I would argue that these various “turns” remain unfinished; in other words, there is a great deal more research to be carried out, many more issues to be unpacked, and much more textured, nuanced, granular work to be done. The recent focus on digital technologies, digital engagements, and impacts of AI, surveillance technology, and smart cities is exemplified in the topic of this year’s Lingnan graduate symposium and the focus of the Georgetown Africa-China Initiative’s first Research Working Group (2024-2025). In my view, the CA/AC Research Network has been and will continue to be at the center of this growth because of the supportive nurturing community that we, together, have created.
Conclusion
At the December African Studies Association conference held in Chicago, the Network, again, organized several panels. Amongst these was a “Book Salon” featuring new books (all out in the past 2-3 years) published by Anita Plummer, Jay Schutte, Mingwei Huang, and Duncan Yoon. I must admit that while I have copies of three of the four books, I haven’t finished reading any of them yet; however, having hosted Anita, Mingwei, and Duncan for book events at Georgetown, I’ve skimmed them and read Intros and Conclusions. Perhaps not surprising, I have known (or known of) all four scholars since they were still working on their PhDs. From the smattering that I’ve read of these four books, but also based on their talks, all of them bring a critical lens, fresh voices, unique perspectives, and deep, insightful theoretical analyses to their work. To me, these scholars and their work mark a new stage in the field of Africa-China research. The most recent Early Career Scholars’ workshop in Rabat this past January, the Writing-for-Impact workshop in Nairobi last month, and the research presented at this conference are further evidence of how far we’ve come as a field and how impactful the Network has been in getting us here.
A final note
At a recent transregional studies workshop at MSU, one of the panelists spoke about “Ubuntu” as method. At first, I must admit, I was somewhat skeptical. It sounded a bit too touchy-feely and “woo-woo” even for me; how can an African philosophy be a “method”? But as Upenyu Majee (Institute for Ubuntu Thought and Practice, Michigan State University) spoke, I kept thinking of the core values that set our CA/AC Network community apart from others and make us unique in the academic world. One could, in fact, describe our operating values with this word, and our principals as both feminist and grounded in Ubuntu. As we approach the 20-year mark of the formation of the CA/AC Research Network, I hope we can continue to work in community, maintaining these core values of collegiality, respect, and mutual support even as we carry out ground-breaking research.