“Whose side are you actually on?” Morten Axel Pedersen asked Mikkel Bunkenborg in one of the several heated arguments they held during their field research in Mongolia. The question in the epigraph of Collaborative Damage captures the contentious collaboration between the anthropologist of Mongolia and the anthropologist of China, and their colleague, Morten Nielsen, who works on Mozambique. Over the course of their collaborative research they discover how attachments to their own interlocutors colour their interpretations of cross-societal interactions and lead to epistemological, ethical and political disagreements.

Collaborative Damage tells the story not just of global China and its manifestations in Mongolia and Mozambique, but also of a methodological experiment. Anthropologists seldom collaborate. Bunkenborg, Nielsen and Pedersen, however, chose to defy this common position. Their joint effort resulted in this stimulating book. Although they were initially troubled by their disagreements among themselves, the authors began to see that they reflected the social interactions they set out to study. Their own setbacks, frustrations and confrontations mirrored those of Chinese entrepreneurs and their Mongolian and Mozambican counterparts. The book's original title, then, refers as much to the confrontational relationship between the three Danish anthropologists as to that between their interlocutors.

Following various different Chinese individuals and their daily interactions, the book takes us from the headquarters of Mr Jia, a restless Chinese agricultural entrepreneur, in the city of Choibalsan to Sinopec's oil fields in Mongolia (chapters one to three), and from the Catembe Peninsula across Maputo Bay, which is given shape by Chinese urban planners, to the forests of inland Mozambique, where Chinese timber merchants are quietly reshaping logging practices (chapters four to six). Each chapter highlights a distinctive aspect of what the authors identify as the “intimate distances” that characterize Chinese-Mongolian and Chinese-Mozambican encounters and grow out of awkward interactions infused by feelings of attraction and repulsion, desire and suspicion. With wit and an eye for detail, the authors describe a situation in which both sides engage with one another in their attempt to establish a working relationship by maintaining “optimal distances.” The aggregate of these intimately distant relations and the material infrastructures to which they give birth, the authors suggest, define Chinese globalization processes as well as an empire in the making.

One aspect of this intimate distance is the crafting of optimal distances using material forms such as walled compounds. Rather than being a cultural disposition that they transport overseas, Chinese enclaves develop over time in response to tensions arising between them and members of local communities and the desire of both to create a distance from each other. Another way that these protagonists produce intimate distance is by eradicating the presence of the other using strategies of unseeing. In chapter four, for instance, the authors discuss the contested future of the Catembe Peninsula. While the Chinese urban planners, to the dismay of the Mozambican administrators, turned a blind eye to the illegal occupants and informal infrastructures on the peninsula, the residents of Catembe, in turn, bypassed the authority of the Chinese designers and turned to the administrators for compensation for their impending eviction. This deliberate disengagement between Chinese and locals alike is primarily practical. It neutralizes inherently awkward and potentially harmful engagements. While both sides deplored the fact that relations had grown more distant over time, they saw it as inevitable.

Intimate distance also arises from misunderstandings, or rather, misunderstandings of misunderstandings. Even if gestures are well-meant, their outcomes can be disastrous. In his efforts to befriend Mongolian employees and business partners, for instance, Mr Jia only succeeded in creating enemies. While he stressed the affective dimension of his relationships, his counterparts viewed them as purely instrumental. As a result, this ambitious agricultural entrepreneur ended up in various altercations, one of which culminated in a libel suit. The Chinese tried hard, perhaps too hard, to be accepted. Many of their efforts backfired, as Bunkenborg, Nielsen, and Pedersen illustrate in their lively ethnographic vignettes.

The book's main contribution lies in the innovative methodology and rigorous reflexivity it uses. By taking the disagreements between themselves as part of the object of study and using their own positionality as a research tool, these anthropologists offer unique insights in field research as a process. The book provides a rare look behind the scenes, revealing the occasional ignorance, stubbornness and frustrations of researchers. This makes it a daring account. If it lacks the empirical and theoretical depth of recent explorations of intimacy, distance and empire in the context of China's global ambitions by anthropologists like Di Wu, Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz and Derek Sheridan, the book adds an important comparative dimension to the growing body of literature on China in the world.

Engaging, candid, and at times amusing, Collaborative Damage makes an insightful as well as a delightful read. It would be a nice contribution to syllabi in anthropology and qualitative research methods and, as a witness to local manifestations of global China, to contemporary Chinese studies.