Global China at 20: Why, How and So What? Ching Kwan Lee*

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Global China at 20: Why, How and So What?

Ching Kwan Lee*

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* Department of Sociology, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA. Email: cklee@soc.ucla.edu.

1 Taylor 2006; Alden 2007; Bräutigam 2009.

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The recent two-decade-long march of “global China” – manifested as outward flows

of investment, loans, infrastructure, migrants, media, cultural programmes and international and civil society engagement – has left sweeping but variegated footprints in

many parts of the world. From “going out,” officially announced in the year 2000,

to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025, and from the developing world to advanced industrialized democracies, state-endorsed campaigns are

but tips of a much more momentous iceberg. Numerous Chinese citizens and private

corporations have also participated in a global search for employment, business,

investment and educational and emigration opportunities. International reactions

to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of China and the Chinese people in almost

every corner of the world have evolved from a mixture of anxiety and hope to a

more explicitly critical backlash. Terms such as “sharp power,” “debt-trap diplomacy” and the “new Cold War” bespeak the West’s dominant perception today

of China as a threat to be contained.

Despite its significance for global and Chinese developments, many scholars

have not considered “global China” a bona fide China studies topic. This is perhaps because the phenomenon defies the territorial definition of our field, namely

that China studies is about what happens or happened in China, a geographical

and jurisdictional entity. No wonder that the first wave of global China research

came mostly out of international relations and policy studies,1 rather than the

more popular disciplines of political science, sociology, anthropology and history. In 2007, a senior academic in Europe even made an offhand remark to

me at a conference that no leading China scholar was interested in global

China. He was dismissive of the topic, but his observation was correct.

Fortunately, a young generation of scholars has emerged as the intellectual force

advancing our understanding of China beyond the Chinese borders. This special section showcases some of their cutting-edge work, marked by grounded and in-depth

research, contextualized in broad historical and theoretical analyses, and with a strong

comparative sensibility to boot. These scholarly qualities set them apart from the burgeoning genre of non-fiction, mass-market books on global China, some of which are

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