Infrastructure, Land, Labour and Finance: Introduction

In the last two decades, there has been a profound increase in the interactions and engagements between Africa and China. Many scholars have noted how Africa and China benefit mutually through economic cooperation because of the 'infrastructure-for-resource loans' perspectives (Alves 2013: 207). In this narrative, China extends loans, technical expertise and infrastructure financing for infrastructure construction in exchange for energy and non-fuel minerals (Lee 2015; Alves 2013). However, as Brautigam (2009) and Monson (2009) remind us, China's interests and cooperation are not new – these engagements span over a half-century – and African governments have benefited as much from Chinese investments as have the Chinese themselves. Others have noted that large infrastructure projects typically employ large numbers of Chinese workers and local workers (Lee 2009; Mohan and Tan-Mullins 2009; Mohan and Lampert 2013). Wedged within this narrative is a popular discourse in which the interactions between China and Africa can be thought of as neocolonial and as part of the 'new scramble for Africa' (Lee 2006; Lee 2009; Moyo et al. 2012).

In this part issue, we build on existing scholarship to situate Africa–China engagements within a different set of discourses on how development projects are the product of complex arrangements of local, state and transnational interests, with various effects and consequences (Escobar 2011). The significance of this part issue to the Africa–China debate can be characterized in three ways. First, it examines the responses and effects of infrastructure financing, foreign direct investment and other neoliberal economic and political practices by both state and non-state actors and institutions. This melding of infrastructural development and resource extraction shapes the practices of a growing network of largely Chinese transnational capital contesting for participation in the spaces of development in Africa. While there has been a great deal of research on how economic liberalization has attracted investors interested in oil, farming and other forms of land-grab practices (see, for example, Southall and Melber 2009; Ovadia 2016; Odoom 2017; Rupp 2013; Ferguson 2006), there is comparatively little research on how infrastructure and resource accumulation are becoming prominent modes of cultural and political communication about and contestation against such changes in different African contexts.

Second, this part issue ties historical and contemporary development infrastructures in understudied ways. The articles demonstrate how emerging discourses and practices of Africa–China development affect local economies, environmental politics and cultural production (see, for example, Monson 2009). These discourses and practices are linked to site-specific local politics and realities of uneven development that (re)produce gender, class and ethnic disparities in many countries in Africa. The articles also link the emergence of new political rhetoric to development infrastructures that aim to replace ageing colonial-era infrastructures as a way to 'modernize' the traditional African state. These discourses draw on Western tropes that position Africans as 'underdeveloped' and in need of industrialization. In practice, these forces of industrialization work to displace and dispossess communities from their lands and resources.

Third, the part issue explores how the contemporary responses and effects of neoliberal practices are intimately linked to historical land-use practices and thus become entangled to create new forms of contestation. These articles engage direct analyses of the ways in which the vestiges of colonialism and post-colonial practices coupled with new infrastructural partnerships and investments enact violence in sovereign and frontier spaces. The building of physical infrastructure sites as free trade zones belies the complex social and political relations between local people and the state that have taken place in those sites. Development infrastructures can thus serve to erase local people's histories and can result in violent contestations.

Collectively, these three aspects move us beyond prevailing framings of Africa– China relationships as a 'win–win', 'Africa is rising' or 'Africa is losing' narrative (see, for example, Brautigam 2009; 2011; French 2014; Obeng-Odoom 2015). The articles in this part issue engage with ethnographic field research using interdisciplinary methods of analysis in ways that are different from existing discourses on Africa–China relations. While the emphasis on such relations will likely remain a focus area...