Abstract
This dissertation contests the dominant scholarly registers through which Chinese infrastructure abroad has been studied. Macroeconomic accounts of debt and finance, geopolitical analyses of soft power, and outcome-evaluative assessments of completed projects have together overlooked the frontline, everyday, and materialized processes through which infrastructure is actually delivered. This dissertation reorients the inquiry by examining the Chinese contractor-compound, the walled, prefabricated, expatriate-housing enclave from which Chinese state-owned enterprises organize, govern, and sustain the workforces that build the Global South's emerging infrastructure landscape.
Designed to be temporal, industrial, and mobile, the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) contractors' overseas construction compound has in practice become something more. It absorbs the functions of living-at-work integration, representational and diplomatic display, internal managerial governance, and migrant social reproduction. Standardized across firms, sectors, and geographies yet produced by no central design authority, compounds present an empirical puzzle: standardization without design, convergence without command.
This dissertation aims to dissect the compound puzzle and further correlate it with broader myths about the globalizing Chinese capital, infrastructure, and urbanism in the Global South. The dissertation pursues a scaling-up logic, moving from the bodies and labor regimes of dispatched workers, to the typology and genealogy of compound form, to institutional landscapes like enterprises, industry associations, supply chains, and transinstitutional networks that reproduce it across contexts. Methodologically, it combines ethnographic compound residence, spatial typological analysis, participatory organizational SOE case studies, institutional network mapping, and quantitative survey work. The empirical foundation rests on two years of fieldwork in Kenya: residence in twelve compounds plus dozens of compound visits, three in-depth SOE case studies (CRBC, AVIC, WUYI), the complete archives of coordinating bodies like China International Contractors Association (CHINCA) and Kenya-China Economic and Trade Association (KCETA), and a 473-respondent survey of Chinese expatriate workers across 47 countries, the largest known independent dataset on Chinese overseas construction labor.
The dissertation proposes danwei abroad (haiwai danwei) as a new typology, simultaneously a spatial form and a governance technology. As typology, it is defined by three constitutive conditions: the integration of production and social reproduction within a bounded perimeter, comprehensive institutional provision producing structured worker dependence, and organizational authority extending from production into reproduction. Together, these conditions convert the socialist danwei's comprehensive dependency into voluntary bundled dependency, retaining the spatial grammar while abandoning its ideological content. As governance technology, the compound materializes what the dissertation theorizes as coordinated decentralization: a heterarchical mode in which industry-association soft guidance, territorial coordination platforms, prefab supply chains, state regulatory bottom lines, host-country graduated sovereignty, and expatriate economies intersect to produce convergence through structural coupling rather than central command.
By treating space as both evidence and analytical instrument, the dissertation projects from the microscopic compound onto the abstract terrain of global China, BRI delivery, and overseas state capitalism. It demonstrates that what reads at the macro scale as Chinese state capitalism's overseas expansion is, on the ground, a set of spatial practices organized through institutional networks that can be empirically documented, analytically dissected, and theoretically generalized. Materially, these spaces are ephemeral. What they reveal is not.
