Research Fellow at LSE
Areas of expertise
International Development
Global Political Economy
Property Rights
Natural Resource Management
Global China, Global South, Africa
My doctoral project concerns property institutions in Africa and their economic effects on Chinese agricultural investment. The project builds on a total of 6 months of fieldwork in Tanzania and Zambia, and 138 qualitative interviews. It is an original documentation of Chinese investors in African agriculture that offers an updated analytical look at African state capacity in governing foreign investment in the land domain.
Publications from the results:
Yang, Y. (2024) Property Institutions and State Capacity: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Agricultural Projects in Zambia. Journal of Development Studies.
This paper focuses on the role of African property institutions and proposes a land tenure regime (LTR) theory as the mechanism through which foreign agricultural projects and African state capacity interact. By process-tracing three Chinese agricultural projects in Zambia as typical cases, I show that Zambian state structures investment strategies of Chinese investors through different configurations of rule of land access, transfer and control in each LTR. Furthermore, Zambian state capacity in enforcing contract and projecting infrastructural power can be reinforced or tested through investing Chinese agricultural projects in different LTRs.
Yang, Y. Under review. Varieties of Chinese capital in African agriculture: An embedded improvisation analysis.
This paper reconceptualizes varieties of globalized Chinese capital and develop a theoretical framework that enables nuanced analysis of the agency of Chinese overseas commercial actors in the structural context of Chinese state capitalism, while paying close attention to the institutional parameters set by the host state and contextual contingencies.
Yang, Y. Submitted. Politics of rural land acquisition in Africa: The evidence from Chinese agricultural investments in Tanzania and Zambia.
This paper contributes to a recent literature that emphasize the important role of domestic institutions in shaping foreign land investment by systematically analyzing how subnational land tenure regimes shape the locational choices of Chinese agricultural investments. The findings reveal nuances in land politics in the process of rural land acquisitions in Africa, which put the land grabs and dispossession narrative in question.
More work in progress:
Yang, Y & Dieterle, C. Land institutions and state strategies in Africa.
Yang, Y, Dieterle, & Zhou, H. Negotiable foreign capitals in Africa: Exploring the responsiveness of Chinese state capital and global private capital in large-scale land acquisitions in Africa.
Yang, Y. Land politics and social integration: The belonging of Chinese immigrant farmers in Africa.
Media outputs:
I talked about Chinese agricultural investment in Africa in the ODI Think Change podcast episode 25: "Africa-China – where is the relationship heading?". Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!
Baxter, T. & Yang, Y. (2024) African governments are shaping the future of the China-Africa relations. Africa@LSE, Blogpost, November 2024.
I entered 2021 3MT@ international competition and my video was the winning contribution at the LSE. Please find the 3-minute video I submitted here.
This project aims to deepen our understanding of the political and social consequences of infrastructural corridors, especially on citizenship reconfigurations via claims to land rights and a place in national development visions. Using a comparative case study approach, this interdisciplinary study will develop and test a theory linking political economy of land rights in infrastructure development and patterns of citizenship forms. The findings will contribute to contemporary debates on African politics and spatial inequality in the context of infrastructure rush.
This project emerged against a new wave of resource scrambles, great power rivalries, and rapid technological change in the renewable energy sector. I won an LSE seed fund to develop its grant proposal for external funding. It compares the politics of critical raw materials (CRMs) governance in Indonesia, Zambia, and Chile against the background of growing competition between Chinese and Western firms in the race for renewable energy transitions. This project conceptualizes critical raw materials and land frontier as a global value chain and investigates the state-firm struggles over surplus values at points of production in the CRM value chain.
In developing this project, I am co-authoring two papers with Dr. Yunxiong Li:
Renewable energy technology and the emergence of geopolitical trade blocs: The search for critical raw materials and international relations.
Varieties of Chinese capital and the production of critical raw materials: The element of materiality and criticality.