African Perspectives on China-Africa Higher Education Cooperation: An Institutional Ethnography of Ghanaian and South African Universities

Zhongyu (Krystal) Wang, University of Oxford

Synopsis

How is China-Africa higher education cooperation experienced by African academics? Their everyday accounts allow this research to move beyond either celebrating this South-South cooperation as an egalitarian alternative or critiquing it as a new form of dependency. It explores if, and how, African academics contribute to (re)shaping the relational power dynamics within China-Africa university partnerships through a transnational institutional ethnography of African universities.In existing scholarship on China-Africa university partnerships, African perspectives remain significantly underrepresented, with academic discourse largely dominated by Chinese and Western authorship. 

While much attention is given to China’s higher education as an instrument of soft power, African university actors are often stereotyped as having limited influence or power. To address this gap, this study draws on Institutional Ethnography methodology and Benabdallah’s conception of Relational Productive Power to develop a contextualized transnational account of how power and knowledge are co-constructed by African academics with their Chinese counterparts.

Foregrounding African academics as the entry point to trace the nuanced network of power relations in China-Africa university partnerships, this study illuminates how African actors seek to reconfigure institutional norms and people-to-people relations, offering critical insights into more equitable and relational models of international higher education cooperation.