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Paper short abstract

This paper draws upon my anthropological fieldwork in road infrastructure projects contracted by Chinese construction companies in Kenya to examine how ‘ethical investment’ is constructed, practised, and contested within the context of South-South cooperation.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws upon my anthropological fieldwork in road infrastructure projects contracted by Chinese construction companies in Kenya to examine how ‘ethical investment’ is constructed, practised, and contested within the context of South-South cooperation.

Chinese enterprises and their managers frequently employ moral discourses such as ‘development,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘endurance,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘mutual benefit,’ and " China-Africa cooperation‘ to frame infrastructure development as a ’moralised economic practice" distinct from Western capitalist and colonial models, positioning themselves as builders imbued with a spirit of sacrifice and historical mission.

Through detailed ethnographic analysis of construction sites, company camps, offices, and their peripheral social relations, this paper examines how Chinese and Kenyan employees understand, incorporate, and react to such moral discourses. Simultaneously, it analyses how this moralised investment narrative coexists without contradiction with persistent racialised and gendered divisions of labour, disciplinarian management, and unequal value distribution within the labour sphere.

I contend that Chinese-funded infrastructure projects constitute a field of moral negotiation: I observe how participants in the construction—including Kenyan and Chinese grassroots workers, Kenyan middle management, and Chinese senior management —engage in imagining non-Western development and decolonised capitalism, while actively integrating such ethical practices into their lived realities. These endeavours continually clash with the experiences of exhaustion, disillusionment, and resistance among grassroots workers.

This paper does not seek to judge whether these investments are “truly ethical”, but rather treats “ethical investment” as a social practice and power process, analysing how virtue, profit, and power are jointly produced and negotiated within infrastructure projects.