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Croft News
November 2, 2015
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Croft Visiting Speaker: The Specter of Global China: Chinese Investment and Labor Practices in the Zambian Copperbelt

Monday, November 2, 2015 - 7 p.m. - The Joseph C. Bancroft Conference Room (Croft 107) - Dr. Ching Kwan Lee

On Monday, November 2, the Croft Institute will host Dr. Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Professor Lee completed her B.A. in Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and earned both her Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from the University of California at Berkley.  She is a former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. Lee is also a recipient of the Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Asia and Asian American Section.

She is currently working on two research projects, a study of Chinese investment and labor practices in Zambia and an ethnographic study of the micro-foundations of durable authoritarianism in China.  Her lecture will focus on her work on Zambia.  Zambia, a major copper producer, is the site of the first of several Chinese-run Special Economic Zones in sub-Saharan Africa.  Prof. Lee’s research focuses on the peculiarity of Chinese state capital and the limits imposed on it by local politics, class, and race relations.  The study involves a double comparison: one between construction and mining and the other between Chinese and non-Chinese investors in Zambia.

All Croft lectures are free and the public is invited to attend.