Andrea Pollio, Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital, University of California Press: Los Angeles, 238 pp., 9780520413085

Amid the new rounds of imperial war against Iran, I can clearly sense the circulation of a certain Sinophilia among many of my US and European leftist friends—it seems as if we had almost suddenly arrived at a moment when people began to realize that everything might already be too late. For one example: “Yet people still continued to build the discursive scaffolding that has allowed this to happen. Democrats, liberals, feminists, leftists, anarchists, diasporic crusaders, anti-campists…the list of enablers sutured to the positionality of the genocidal West is long. … Thirty-six million people demonstrated against the war in Iraq in 2003, yet the war happened anyway. We should have started organizing against this long ago.”¹ What follows such laments is a desperate recourse to “China” as “the last force of reason standing in the way of collective annihilation”—or, more precisely, the writer continues, “China” is “the last defense of a global village grounded not only in morality and public law, but also in an openness to the temporality of the future, rather than one founded on Nazism, colonialism, and the temporality of the tomb.”

This is not the first time Euro-Americans  have projected their hopes onto an elsewhere in moments of crisis, and we should hardly be surprised that the yearning for “a temporality of the future” becomes so thoroughly entangled with nostalgia—for the myth of the “Global Village,” and for a supposedly more benign form (in China) of neoliberal capitalism that it once seemed to promise. Yet beyond this familiar gesture of displacement, what deserves closer attention is the extent to which this discourse rehearses the not-so-new grammar of so-called “Sinofuturism”: above all, in its imaginary investment in a “neo-China arriving from the future,” and in the belief that China might embody a kind of “Modernity 2.0” capable of transcending the current impasse of “the West,” or America. Nevertheless, the fantasy of Sinofuturism—as many critics have already noted—is deeply problematic, insofar as it reproduces the  temporal structure of Orientalism, with its uneven distribution of time across geographic space.² Such a structure deliberately produces a condition of non-contemporaneity between Europe/ America and their imagined “elsewhere”—a condition that, I would insist, must itself be undone.

It may be helpful to situate Andrea Pollio’s recently published book Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital both within and against this backdrop, as he intervenes in the recent debates and controversies—within and beyond academia—on “Global China,” Afro-Asian connections, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the widely perceived specter of Chinese “neocolonialism.” He traces in close detail “the encounter of an African city with Chinese ideas, experts, enterprises, start-ups, investors, platforms, business models and electrical equipment” (4). No doubt, Pollio writes with a certain enthusiasm for locating in digital Global China and its presence in Africa the possibility of “alternative futures for homegrown technologies” beyond what he terms “Silicon Valley techno-imperialism.” Yet, written as an ethnography of Chinese techno-capital in Nairobi, the book can also be read—so I would argue—not simply as a contribution to narratives about competing techno-futurities, but as a guide to the very situatedness of digital Global China and its techno-capitals in a postcolonial city, one that above all destabilizes the fragile ground of a falsely rendered geographical non-contemporaneity.

By situatedness, I mean to call attention to how Global China’s “experiments” with techno-diversity in Nairobi, and the “new” regimes of accumulation they facilitate, are grafted onto both the colonial legacy—from the violence of colonial urban planning to the sedimented racial formations of the British Empire—and the neocolonial–neoliberal institutions and enterprises, together with their local networks of operation, appropriating, mimicking, modifying and competing with them. Here, Global China should be understood beyond popular geopolitical narratives of China’s presence in Africa, and instead as designating a global political-economic and (post)colonial-imperial formation in which “only by understanding global capitalism can one understand China” and “only by understanding China can one understand global capitalism” (9). Pollio’s book directs our attention to the messy underside of these processes with its focus on the “capillary infrastructures” of Global China and its regimes of accumulation, where the distinctions between the “new” and the “old,” the future and the past, are increasingly blurred.

Pollio opens the first chapter by revisiting the concept of state capitalism, contending that earlier critiques of techno-capitalism have often failed to account for the role of the state in sustaining the plural modes of accumulation that underpin techno-capital. While heinvokes Yuk Hui’s notion of “techno-diversity” in the introduction—for whom the concept is framed in terms of “different moral and cosmological registers” of technicity—Pollio nevertheless avoids lapsing into a facile culturalism, as heis acutely aware that different modes of technological existence, or “technicity,” can never be disentangled from the divergent strategies of accumulation adopted by techno-capitals across regions, in which state power is exercised at multiple and varying levels. If the Silicon Valley version of techno-capitalism is driven, as critics have long observed, by the notorious “Californian Ideology,” —a fusion of techno-utopianism and libertarian political doctrine—the Silicon Savannah of Kenya, drawing inspiration from rising East Asian economies such as Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and China, invents a contrasting techno-optimistic myth of development. Here, intervention by what Pollio terms the “investor state” is deemed indispensable, and long-term planning, developmentalist policy implementation, and “an impassioned coalition of private sector representatives, civil society groups, academics, and government technocrats” (28) are celebrated as the preconditions for a new digital economy.

Pollio’s recounting of the Kenyan side of the story begins with the presidency of Mwai Kibaki, which marks the onset of what he calls the country’s “golden age” following decades of economic stagnation. Kibaki, we are told, “championed a non-aligned, state-planned, yet free-market economy” and prioritized “economic development” over redistributive agendas—a political project that became fully legible in his second term with the launch of Kenya Vision 2030. Modeled on Malaysia’s Wawasan 2020, the Kibaki plan revived an earlier techno-optimistic tradition in Kenya that placed faith in the deployment of “tools”—technocratic rule, rapid economic growth, and social engineering—to “lead” the nation onto “the path of modernization” (29).

Echoing this trajectory is the history of digital Global China, which Pollio traces back to the 1990s, when a crisis of overaccumulation pushed Chinese techno-capital to “go global” by first cultivating markets in the Global South and the former socialist world, an expansion that ultimately brought Chinese technology corporations to Nairobi. These two lineages, both strongly shaped by state policy and strategic decision-making, nevertheless cannot be understood apart from the intertwined post-colonial and post-socialist conditions. . On the one hand, Kenya’s developmentalist state and its promises remain deeply entangled with the colonial legacies of divide-and-rule and the extreme inequalities they produced, while the operations of Chinese techno-capital in Kenya and more broadly in Africa have benefited from the aftermath of structural adjustment, which privatized telecommunications and weakened public investment in infrastructure. On the other hand, closer attention to the post-socialist dimension reveals how earlier experiments in African socialism and state planning have been displaced by the investor state and its technocratic futurism, even as the legacies of Third-Worldism and the revolutionary ties once forged between China and African nations are increasingly appropriated by Chinese techno-capital in the service of its “global” projects.

But interestingly, Pollio turns from a discussion of “statecraft” to the everydayness of urban life in Nairobi in the following chapter, where social interactions and relations of exchange are increasingly mediated by cheap handsets from Chinese manufacturers, allowing what he calls “a diffused, capillary infrastructure” to take shape (47). Chinese mobile phones move to the center of focus not only as tangible objects—touched, transported, used and repaired in the everyday lives of Nairobi’s residents, and bearing intensive affective investments that structure their perceptions and imaginations of “Chineseness”—but, more important, they appear as devices that register the very frontiers, or “frontier markets,” of techno-capital’s expansion in Africa. Despite the persistence of a more classical “colonial” economic model, the frontiers of Chinese techno-capital in Africa must also be understood through the logistics of information circulation connecting cities like Nairobi to the headquarters of Chinese technology corporations in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, or Shanghai, through which screens become the medium by which the quotidian lives of local inhabitants are data-fied and monetized. Yet Pollio also cautions against simply translating this discussion of the data-fied market frontier into existing theoretical categories such as “digital colonialism,” which, in his view, overlook the extent to which “Africa is not simply a passive frontier of Global China’s techno-capital,” insofar as “Nairobi’s urban life has shaped the technological affordances of” the digital commodities produced by Chinese technology corporations. (55)

From this perspective, Pollio proposes conceptualizing Nairobi as “a test bed of mutating techno-capital that emerges from trials, negotiations, glitches, and adaptations” (64). What might need to be added here, is that the idea of the African continent as a “testing ground” or “site of experimentation” for new technologies and colonial-imperial sciences has a much longer history, dating back to the early twentieth century under British colonial rule, when strategies of diversification and localization were actively embraced by colonial authorities, always in tandem with an ongoing project of racialization. What would be worth pursuing further, then, is an inquiry into how this older practice is being remobilized in the neoliberal present under the banner of entrepreneurialism, and how existing colonial-imperial techniques are being appropriated and reshaped in the contemporary expansion of Chinese techno-capital in Africa. For, in the end, this isan expansion that does not simply replicate European colonialism, but continues and reinvents it in novel forms, as modes of accumulation shift and technological conditions evolve.

The capture, reorganization, and extraction of urban life under the digital platform become, in this sense, an effective means of monetizing and capitalizing the very precariousness of survival in a postcolonial African city. It is in this manner that the recognized political and infrastructural “failures” in Nairobi are reappropriated by Chinese techno-capital and transformed into key sites of accumulation. In the third  chapter, Pollio observes a shared pattern of accumulation across three businesses launched by a circle of Chinese entrepreneurs in Nairobi. This is —a pattern he calls “algorithmic suturing,” according to which digital platforms become the extractive apparatuses through which “many self-organized, informal, popular and private modes of service provision,” on which local Black communities in African cities have long relied amid the “physical and economic fragmentation” of Nairobi, are enrolled and reorganized (68). The “failures” of public service infrastructure in Nairobi clearly reproduce a geographic demarcation that attests to the uneven distribution of risk, precarity and development along the racial lines that continue to structure the city. Strategies of financing through failure bear the recognizable imprint of the Silicon Valley–Wall Street nexus, as Arjun Appadurai and Neta Alexander have argued, functioning as a mechanism that articulates techno-capital with finance capital and inaugurates a new regime of accumulation under which the condition of “failure” becomes permanent and indeed, habitual.³ Yet these strategies of accumulation are reshaped as they travel to Africa via China: not only are they directed toward informal social and economic formations as an “exteriority” awaiting platformization, but they also demand a redefinition of the very category of “failure” under a technocratic ethos characteristic of Chinese tech start-ups in Africa, where infrastructural breakdown is framed as a technical problem to be solved through the importation of digital platforms. In this sense, the narrative of technological solutionism reactivates, once again, the unfulfilled “promise” of development that accompanied earlier rounds of structural adjustment under IMF compulsion.

Yet such narratives obscure the deeper significance of these “failures” as registers of the persistence of coloniality in Nairobi and other post-colonial African cities, and of the indebtedness of Chinese techno-capital to the longue durée of European imperial–colonialism in Africa, which created the very conditions under the strategies of accumulation deployed by China operate. Pollio argues near the end of chapter three that, “on the one hand, it is easy to recognize these data-fied processes … enrolling … ‘vital platforms of techno-social reproductivity,’” while they at the same time are “experimenting [with] the pluralization of concerns … that shapes the making of techno-capital in Nairobi” (91). What I would add, here is that the dialectic he identifies between sameness—the logics of “reproducibility”—and pluralization must itself be situated within both a contemporary and a deeply historicized  form of inter-imperiality: contemporary, in the migration of strategies for techno-capitalist speculating on “failures” from Silicon Valley to Chinese start-ups in Shanghai and Beijing, and then to Nairobi; and historicized , in the reappropriation by Chinese techno-capital of “failure” as the sedimented legacy of earlier imperial-colonial formations.

Pollio goes on to  examine Chinese finance technology (fintech) start-ups that take Nairobi, as a “site of experiments” for investments in new modes of cross-border payment designed to bypass the sanctions and constraints of the “old” protocols of the neoliberal world of finance, such as SWIFT, thereby revealing a dialectical tension between emergent Chinese venture capital and existing neocolonial and neoliberal transnational institutions that complicates prevailing geopolitical narratives of an emerging “tech cold war” (94). Not unlike other forms of Chinese techno-capital operating in Nairobi, these fintech corporations target the informal networks of exchange and underregulated flows of money—often beginning with the Chinese diasporic community in the city—in order to compete with their Euro-American counterparts while, nevertheless, appropriating many of the latter’s repertoires of strategies of accumulation. Pollio theorizes this competition-in-mimicry in the term “micro-innovation.” Micro-innovation does not operate independently of pre-existing universal protocols but rather inflects and bends them, outlining what might be understood as a practical disposition—a method,—with implications that extend well beyond the mere production of duplicates. Such a process, therefore, does not constitute a rupture with neoliberalism and its project of world-making, rather, it actualizes its most radical promise: a mode of accumulation defined by plasticity. In this sense, Chinese fintech corporations in Nairobi push global capitalism further toward a point of deterritorialization, revealing once again that the expansion of capitalism’s frontiers toward an unconquered “outside” is consistently accompanied by the release of capital mobility from established institutional constraints.

The data-fication and monetization of the everyday lives of Nairobi’s residents, as Pollio observes, is was fuels this micro-innovation and creates linkages among what C.K. Lee has called “varieties of capital.” What emerges from this intricate map of interlocking forms of capital should force us to elaborate a new conceptual schema for understanding China’s expansion in Africa in relation to earlier European colonialism and neocolonialism, as well as in relation to neoliberalization and the imposition of structural adjustment. China’s expansion thus appears not as a rupture, but as a continuation, forming a new totality in which plural regimes of accumulation overlap and producing an overdetermination not only in space but also in time.The past sediments into the present while the “future” repeats the past, modifying its legacy to meet the shifting demands of worldwide accumulation as the gravitational center of capitalism moves toward East Asia.

There is one other underlying dimension of “Global China” and its techno-capital in Nairobi that points to the work of community-building, of care, cautious planning and calculation, or, in other words, to the involvement of reproductive labor. This is thelabor that sustains the regimes of accumulation of Chinese techno-capital in Nairobi while being discounted from the language of value, being both racialized and gendered in the making of the “Silicon Savannah” into an investible site. . The silicon elsewhere is simultaneously about the curation of narratives and imaginations concerning “an alternative relationship … between technology and capital at its purported peripheries” (141). While such narratives undoubtedly replicate and borrow from earlier settler-colonial “tales of belonging,” the sensorium cultivated by female Chinese diasporic investors in Nairobi ) to promote the city’s investibility is also shaped by their lived and embodied experiences of a different reality: their own feelings of precariousness associated with expatriation, border-crossing and the condition of being a “non-native” in Africa. The “alternative” imagination of Global China is thus deeply enmeshed in the everyday social life of a postcolonial city and in its affective landscape—just as xenophobia and anti-Black racism in China, and Sinophobia in parts of Africa, remain materially present, alongside persistent anxieties about surveillance and control by the Chinese party-state over start-ups and private capital. These tensions remind us, to borrow a formulation from Mingwei Huang, to attend to the “longer relational histories of Asian racialization” as part of the very context within and against which the curation of an alternative imagination of Global China takes place.⁴ The allegedly “new” vision of the relationship between technology and capital epitomized by Chinese techno-capital—along with the “collectives” it brings into being—cannot be generated without navigating the sedimented layers of older colonial-racial formations, which function, as we see throughout this book, as the very preconditions for the emergence of new regimes of accumulation when viewed through the opportunistic gaze of Chinese start-ups in Nairobi. It is precisely this entanglement between the old and the new that demands closer scrutiny, rather than being dissolved into the easy rhetoric of techno-optimism.

To be fair to Pollio, we should note that he treats techno-optimism not merely as an “ideology” to be taken as an object of critique. Throughout his writing, as he openly acknowledges, there is always a “compromise between critical distance and critical proximity”—that is, “a compromise made possible by methodological and analytical care, which, through the practice of ethnography, revealed how much my journey was embroiled in the trade of technological optimism itself” (161). As Pollio reminds us, then, the techno-optimism of Global China in Kenya, far from a naïve belief in technological solutionism as a response to all the challenges faced by a postcolonial city, is “nomadic and ephemeral in its appearances.” (155)— It is an unstable assemblage of discourses formed through encounters, negotiations, and on-site improvisations. Drawing inspiration from queer theory, Pollio insists that his reading of Chinese techno-optimism should not be treated as a critical project of “depth” in the conventional sense, but must instead proceed by gliding along a surface—a strategy Pollio adopts in order to break with what he identifies as overdetermined framings such as “the tech cold war,” the “Chinese century,” or “China’s data colonialism in Africa” (164).

But what if Chinese techno-capital and its “new” regimes of accumulation themselves operate precisely at the level of the surface, on which Pollio’s method of ethnography forms not a critique from without but a kind of mimicry from within? By surface, I do not mean a departure toward an almost Heideggerian “other beginning” beyond the neoliberal–neocolonial world order, as if inaugurating a project sui generis. Rather, I am pointing to how these regimes graft themselves onto existing structures and strategies of exploitation, dispossession and extraction, extending into the gaps and loopholes within their fabric by transforming them into new sources of monetization, while simultaneously seeking alliances both with the colonial-imperial legacies of Europe and with the PRC’s state-driven overseas investment policies. Rather than marking a rupture, Global China in Nairobi appears as a manifestation of the ethos of late capitalism par excellence: its style of collage without essence, its fixation on surfaces, its suspicion toward metaphysics, its rhetoric of self-entrepreneurship and empowerment, and its speculative disposition toward risk and opportunity. From this perspective, the question with which Pollio concludes his book—“Could alternatives emerge from the unequal global systems of the digital economy” (165)—should be reframed. The very language of “newness” surrounding Chinese techno-capital risks obscuring the historical inter-imperial dynamics and sedimentations through which US, European and Chinese forms of capital are entangled, , rendering the simple dichotomy between “change” and “mirror” increasingly untenable.

The notion of “Global China,” conceived as a theoretical antidote to Chinese exceptionalism, instead invites us to reread popular narratives about the rise of China within a broader spatio-temporal continuum of world capitalism and its imperial–racial–colonial matrix of power. This is a continuum that remains plastic, uneven and continually evolving. Popular discourses on China’s alleged neocolonialism in Africa often obscure the historical fact that the system named by Kwame Nkrumah much earlier as “neocolonialism” emerged first from the postwar projects of European and American power; yet acknowledging this genealogy does not mean that contemporary Chinese capital is itself not  reproducing analogous forms of domination. The power of Pollio’s work lies precisely in narrating capital in its lived proximity rather than from the safe distance of abstract critique, thereby opening, as he suggests, a space for theoretical renewal. What such an opening ultimately demands, then, is not the celebration of an “alternative future” promised by Chinese techno-capital in Africa but a sustained reckoning with the historical debts that condition that very futurity.

Tianren Luo is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Brown University whose work explores digital and racial capitalism, extractivism(s), and transnational resistance across postcolonial Afro-Asia. They are also an activist and filmmaker.