The Centre for Asian Studies in Africa (CASA), a hub for research in the field of Asian studies and for studies of Afro-Asian connections at the Faculty of Humanities, has appointed Prof Ching Kwan Lee, one of the world’s most prominent academics in the field of China studies and a globally recognized expert on China-Africa relations, as extraordinary professor.

“I’m extremely pleased to be able to welcome as formidable a scholar as Prof Lee to CASA,” says the Centre’s director, Prof Alf Gunvald Nilsen. “CASA looks forward to working closely with Prof Lee in the years to come to build cutting-edge research capacity on China-Africa connections at the University of Pretoria.”

Prof Lee is professor of sociology at the University of California Los Angeles. Her work focuses on global and comparative issues centred on work and labour, political sociology, the development of the global South, comparative ethnography, decolonization, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa. Across her career, Prof Lee has authored multiple award-winning monographs, including Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor and Foreign Investment in Africa. Between them, these three books constitute a pathbreaking trilogy of Chinese capitalism through the lens of labor and working-class experiences.

More recently, Prof Lee’s work has focused on Hong Kong studies, and her most recent books are the co-edited volume Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement and Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier. Her forthcoming book, to be published by Harvard University Press, is a critical historical ethnography of Hong Kong’s decades-long mass mobilization against British and Chinese colonization, with the 2019 mass uprising as its latest episode. The book is tentatively titled Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Struggle for Decolonization.

At CASA, Prof Lee, who has pioneered the study of China’s political economy in a global perspective and through global ethnographic methods, will be collaborating with Prof Nilsen and other academics in initiatives that seek to deepen our understanding of ever-evolving and ever-deepening connections between China and the African continent, in the context of a rapidly changing world-system.  

“It is vital that scholars based in institutions in the developed world can forge meaningful and enduring intellectual ties with colleagues in Africa if we were to understand the continent’s historical complexity and contemporary dynamics. I am thrilled to see the establishment of CASA as an incubator for such collaboration, and excited to be a part of this exciting venture. China-Africa relations remain one of the most consequential developments for the world, and more than ever we need a transnational academic space like CASA to produce impactful research and train the next generation of engaged and cosmopolitan scholars.” 

“For CASA, it’s imperative to be at the forefront of critical inquiry into new configurations of economic, political, and cultural connections between China and Africa, and between Asia and Africa more generally,” Prof Nilsen adds. “The appointment of Prof Lee as extraordinary professor at our Centre is a tremendous asset in this regard, and we are extremely excited about the prospects of the collaborative work that we are about to embark on.”