CRG Seminar: “The China Girls”: Development Dreams, Labor Struggle and Global Entanglements in Ethiopia’s Special Economic Zones

A central claim in debates on Africa’s shifting global relations is that South–South cooperation, particularly through large-scale infrastructural projects can drive technology and skills transfer. I revisit this assumption in the context of recent global and local shocks and their uneven consequences on the ground. Drawing on ethnographic research in Ethiopia’s Hawassa Special Economic Zone (HSEZ), the study analyzes how multipolar power dynamics, particularly among China, the United States, and Ethiopian state actors are experienced and reinterpreted by local industrial workers. Moving beyond macro-level analyses, it examines how shifting trade regimes have reshaped working and living conditions of workers. It argues that the material and symbolic dimensions of development interventions, shaped by global capital, elite-driven imaginaries, and geopolitical shifts, intersect in the everyday lives of workers in ways that both reproduce and reconfigure inequality. As a result, HSEZ emerges not merely as a production site connecting Africa to the global economy, but also shapes how global power is perceived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life.

This seminar is given by Robel Mulat Asmammaw and organised by the Collaborative Research Group Africa in the world.