Ching Kwan Lee

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She obtained her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Michigan before moving to UCLA. She is the author of Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007) and Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998). Her edited and co-edited books include From the Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers and the State in a Changing China (2011); Reclaiming Chinese Society: New Social Activism (2009), Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (2007) and Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (2007). She is currently working on two research projects - one on the "grassroots state" and class politics in China and the other on Chinese investment and labor practices in Zambia's copper mining and construction industries.

“The 'Labor Question' of Chinese Capitalism in Africa”

This talk examines key elements of an emerging Chinese regime of production in Zambia, Africa's leading copper producer and the site of the first of five Chinese-owned special economic zones to be built on the continent. Drawing on field data on the construction and copper mining sectors, Ching Kwan Lee will discuss the similarities and differences among Chinese and non-Chinese capital in their labor strategies and impact on African developments.

About the Center for Asian Studies

The center is comprised of more than 40 interdisciplinary UCI faculty members who study China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, and Southeast Asia and enhance the study of the many countries and cultures of Asia. The center provides a forum for discussions across geographic and disciplinary boundaries both on campus and within the community.