Cheng Chen

Danwei Abroad: Understanding Chinese Transnational Construction through Its Compounds in East Africa

Cheng’s dissertation studies Chinese contractors’ construction compounds overseas as an archetype to project the mechanisms and impacts in the forming, exporting, and transforming processes of the globalizing Chinese urbanism. His dissertation highlights the processes and dynamics of transnational construction through spatial analyses on the ephemeral and responsive construction sites, to map out a network of transnational capital, material, space, institution, and knowledge exchanges behind.

Africa is experiencing rapid urbanization co-fueled by foreign investments and indigenous construction. Distanced from centuries of western interventions that have been intensively discussed by normative postcolonial studies, the burgeoning Chinese presence in African urbanism within the past two decades, especially its operational structures, spatial products, and social influences, is widely perceived as controversial and left unexplained by existing urban theories. Cheng’s research interrogates the simple application of Western-centric paradigms on studying China’s emerging role in funding and building African infrastructure. Instead, it is arguing that the encounter between China’s own operational patterns in construction, urbanization, modernization (as the original context) and the postcolonial African urbanism (as the displaced context) constitutes the peculiarity of Chinese transnational construction. Therefore, the dissertation firstly theorizes the historic evolution of China’s operational pattern in domestic construction, urbanization, and modernization then investigates the paradigmatic shifts of exporting Chinese construction from the Mao Era to post-reform adjustment to contemporary Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) agenda, and finally evaluates the mutual impacts of implanted Chinese construction projects in East Africa.

Furthermore, Cheng’s research prioritizes the grassroots construction compounds as the entrance to spatialize and theorize broader flows, archetypes, and social engagements of Chinese transnational construction. These Chinese compounds are ephemeral but influential enclaves in East African urban contexts as well as condensed intersections of two urbanism patterns. Borrowing the Chinese concept of the socio-spatial unit danwei, Cheng aims to theorize Chinese contractors’ operating spaces overseas as a novel archetype of danwei abroad and to project the spatiality of Chinese transnational construction from the compound archetype.

Cheng joined the Constructed Environment program in 2019. House in the Department of Architecture, his research primarily focuses on transnational infrastructure development, especially flows from China to East Africa. With the support from a series of fellowships and grants, including the Susan Nelson Fleiss Endowed Travel Scholarship and the Ellen Bayard Weedon Travel Grant, Cheng is planning to conduct his fieldwork in both China and Kenya. He also serves as the research assistant for various research projects, including the Assessment of China’s Belt and Road Initiative at the University of Virginia since 2020. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, Cheng earned a B.A. in Architecture from Southeast University and an M.A. in Architecture from Tsinghua University. Cheng also practiced as a designer at Li Xiaodong Atelier, China and an independent designer for international aid projects in Sri Lanka, during which he developed the interests of this doctoral research.