Aspirational Mandarin, Operational English: Language, Power and Infrastructure in a Chinese-operated Power Plant in Ghana

This article examines how linguistic value is organised within a Chinese-operated gas-fired power plant in Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2024, including extended participant observation in 2023, it analyses how Mandarin, English and local Ghanaian languages acquire different forms of significance within the plant’s organisational life. It argues that the workplace sustains an asymmetric linguistic order in which Mandarin is promoted through language classes and managerial discourse as a desirable resource associated with cultural understanding, organisational belonging and imagined future mobility, while English remains the indispensable medium of technical coordination, documentation, evaluation and internal advancement. Local languages such as Twi and Ghanaian Pidgin English persist as important resources for peer interaction, commentary and interpretation among Ghanaian workers. The article further shows that these linguistic differences are materially and spatially mediated. Manuals, machine interfaces, bilingual document practices, classrooms, workshops, offices and crisis-time diagnostic routines all shape which linguistic resources become valuable, to whom, and for what purposes. In doing so, the article shows how language becomes a mechanism through which postcolonial hierarchies, workplace authority and future-oriented aspiration are negotiated within contemporary China–Africa infrastructure projects.