China and Namibia, 1990 to 2015: emerging trends and structures
Gregor Dobler
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Freiburg University
Existing scholarly literature on Chinese-African relations largely falls into one of two categories: broad overviews discussing China’s new role in specific domains or countries on the one hand, empiric case studies on the other. We are largely lacking empirically informed analytical accounts of developments over time. Ten years after the first comprehensive reports drew attention to China’s new role in Africa, I would like to use the conference to develop a more analytical approach of societal changes linked to the new Chinese presence. The paper builds on ten years of scholarly engagement with and interest in China’s role in Namibia to identify significant changes in Namibia’s society initiated by the presence of Chinese actors. It synthesizes results of around 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Namibia and Windhoek since 2004, of interviews and informal conversations with Chinese and Namibian economic and political actors and of a wide range of published and unpublished primary and secondary sources.
The paper argues that in order to understand how new South-South relations change Southern African societies, we have to be wary of a Eurocentric perspective that identifies their novelty in Europe’s declining influence, and we have to be cautious not to isolate ‘Chinese actors’ from their host society. I will concentrate the empirical analysis on three domains in which Chinese and Namibian actors have become linked through institutions, societal formations and social networks: Chinese traders, the construction industry and Chinese cultural diplomacy. In all three domains, the presence of Chinese actors does not simply change Namibia’s relations to Europe and the world. By adding resources and providing new avenues of external integration, China’s presence influences the distribution of economic, social and cultural capital within Namibia and makes shifts in the internal balance of power possible. New South-South relations do not only change external power dynamics; they have important repercussions on a society’s internal organisation.
