Chinese Investment in Africa: Its Variegated and Contradictory Character in Relation to Land, Agriculture, Mining and Infrastructure

Freedom Mazwi is with the University of Cape Town, Department of African Studies and Linguistics. He holds a PhD in Development Studies obtained from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His most recent co-edited books are: Capital Penetration and the Peasantry in Southern and Eastern Africa: Neoliberal Restructuring and Farming and Working under Contract: Peasants and Workers in Global Agricultural Value Systems (both published in 2022). He also single authored the book The Political Economy of Contract Farming in Zimbabwe (2022). Dr. Mazwi has been researcher at the Sam Moyo African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare and a Visiting Scholar at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) at Stellenbosch University.

George T. Mudimu is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development Sciences at Marondera University Of Agricultural Sciences and Technology in Zimbabwe. His current research is on counter-agrarian reform, capitalism, food systems, and land (and rural) politics. From 2020 to 2023, he undertook a post-doctoral fellowship at PLAAS at the University of Western Cape, South Africa, under the SARCHL Chair on Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. He also had an internship with the Sam Moyo African Institute of Agrarian Studies in 2018 and was a Research Fellow for the International Poverty Reduction Centre in China (in Beijing) in 2017 and 2018. He is also a book review co-editor for The Journal of Peasant Studies, a senior editor for Cogent Social Sciences and a member of the Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS).

Kirk Helliker is an Emeritus Research Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rhodes University in South Africa, where he heads the Unit of Zimbabwean Studies, which he founded. The Unit was formed in 2015 and seeks to contribute to the development of emerging, early-career and mid-career Zimbabwean (and other) scholars. Professor Helliker publishes widely on Zimbabwean history, politics and society and has supervised a significant number of PhD and MA students. His most recent co-edited books, all published in 2023, are: Tonga Livelihoods in Rural Zimbabwe; Lived Experiences of Borderland Communities in Zimbabwe: Livelihoods, Conservation, War and Covid-19; and Making Politics in Zimbabwe’s Second Republic The Formative Project by Emmerson Mnangagwa.