Chinese Land-Based Interventions in Senegal

摘要

As Chinese land-based interventions multiply across the African continent, this article focuses on a single Chinese-Senegalese government-run agriculture demonstration centre to provide insight into the daily realities of Chinese-African interactions on African land. Ethnographic methodologies are employed to examine practices and discourses on agricultural governance among Chinese and Senegalese informants. Building on theories of agriculture as performance, I show how distinct repertoires for land management are negotiated and reshaped by different subjects in a kind of improvised dance, where individuals' improvisations lead to unanticipated project outcomes. What emerges is a picture of a Chinese agricultural management regime for African land that is simultaneously fraught with conflict, while also replete with collaboration benefiting some smallholder farmers. This actor-oriented approach provides a critical empirical lens as well as a research framework for engaging more constructively with Chinese in large-scale land acquisitions. I argue that 'land grabbing' must be seen not as a straightforward, linear process of state or corporate takeover of global land, but as a dynamic performance of negotiation among diverse state actors, corporate players and citizens — one that will reshape global development in unanticipated ways.