Description
In recent years much has been made of China’s rise in the global south and decline of Western hegemony. In Iraq this has played out most clearly in the way that European and US oil multinationals are increasingly being replaced by Chinese majors. However, little empirical work has been undertaken to understand whether Chinese capital behaves differently from the capital of other nations on the ground. In this paper, I draw on extended ethnographic field work in the oil producing regions of Southern Iraq, to show that there is a perception that Chinese firms adopt a more flexible form of capitalism than their Western counterparts and are therefore better equipped to manage the (dis)order of the Iraqi state. I engage with the theory of racial capitalism to argue that this works to enforce racialised binaries about good white capitalism and the unruly capitalism of upstart Chinese companies. In a context of comparative racialisation, racial-economic figurings of “Asianess” render both Chinese capital and labour as inferior and primitive, even though other subordinated non-white groups, such as Iraqi workers, are often materially worse off and engage in similarly flexible practices. Thus, the paper’s findings add nuance to debates about Chinese capitalist practices in the global south and attest to new configurations of race and labour in the world economy.
