The Safe Zone: Infrastructure, Contracts, and Everyday Negotiations in a Chinese Construction Compound, Rwanda

This dissertation explores the contractual dynamics between a Chinese construction company, China Hydraulic Construction Group, and its Rwandan counterpart, Rwanda’s Water and Sanitation Corporation, through a focus on a water pipeline project in Rusizi District, southwestern Rwanda. It examines how infrastructure contracts for this pipeline system were designed, negotiated, implemented, and manipulated by both parties during the construction phase of the project. While the contract agreed to by both sides apparently defined the responsibilities and obligations of each party in transparent terms and through detailed clauses, phrases, and stipulations, both parties nevertheless interpreted those terms and stipulations from their own perspective in order to turn the documents to their own purposes and interests. My ethnographic study shows that while documents certainly possess considerable coercive power to influence human transactions, at the same time they are comprised of open, mutable, manipulable words and signifiers that are subject to diverse interpretations and capable of bearing different meanings. On the one hand, the practical implementation and use of contracts and documents sometimes produces consequences that go against their original objectives. On the other hand, the implementation of documents in practical situations can produce multi-directional and indeterminate effects that generate unforeseen outcomes. Throughout this project, Rwandan clients actively utilized their knowledge, power, and social networks to impact, renegotiate, and sometimes even overturn decisions made by the Chinese company. This case study suggests that in their infrastructure collaborations with Chinese firms, these African agents are anything but passive. Here, Rwandan engineers and project managers routinely devised strategies to get their way and feed local interests in their interactions with Chinese companies. My dissertation reveals the multifaceted dynamics characterizing China-Africa infrastructure collaborations, providing a unique perspective on the complex and strategic interactions that define current China-Africa relations.