Date: Tuesday, February 20, 3:00 – 4:30PM

Venue: LIB 1119

Speaker: Hang Zhou, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the TransOcean Project in Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway

Abstract:

China’s Distant Water Fishing (DWF) activities has attracted growing attention from both academia and the wider policy world. The majority of the existing literature has been devoted to exploring their scale and ecological implications for host countries and coastal communities. This talk, instead, proposes focusing on the human dimension of China’s DWF, that is, the Chinese distant-water fishers without whose labour the capitalist expansion of China’s DWF across the globe would not be possible. More specifically, by zeroing on Guinea-Bissau – one of the very first countries that host Chinese DWF fleets since 1985, and a Chinese central state-owned DWF enterprise operating there, I make an empirically grounded attempt to explore the biography of Chinese distant-water fishers. Drawing on 5-month fieldwork in Guinea Bissau between April 2022 and January 2023, this paper seeks to explore who these Chinese distant-water fishers are, why they decided to migrate to work as distant-water fishers, and why they decided to stay with this profession despite its oft-claimed dangerous and arduous labour conditions. In response to these questions, this talk pays particular attention to how my all-male informants’ decision to take up and stay with the profession of DWF is influenced by and tied to notions of masculinity back in China.

Speaker’s Bio:

Hang (Ayo) Zhou is a post-doctoral researcher at the TransOcean project in Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. He obtained his PhD in politics & international studies at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His PhD thesis was shortlisted for the 2022 Audrey Richards Best Doctoral Thesis Prize of the UK African Studies Association. His works have appeared in African Affairs, Marine Policy, Revue international des études du développement, Africana Studia, and African Study Monographs among others. His main research interests include South-South relations, global China, politics of development, everyday states in Africa, and maritime anthropology.