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LRB, Vol. 37 No. 6 · 19 March 2015
The Suitors
by Stephen W. Smith
China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New
Empire in Africa by Howard French
Knopf, 285 pp, £22.50, June 2014, ISBN 978 0 307 95698 9
In 1969, three years into the Cultural Revolution, China was not only
poorer than most African countries but suffering from a massive famine.
Mao Zedong and his colleagues decided to import vast quantities of wheat
as a way to address the food crisis and, more radically, to change the
staple of their 800 million countrymen: wheat has a higher nutritional
value than rice. That year, a 25-year-old French grain trader, Jean-Yves
Ollivier, travelled to Hong Kong and crossed the Sham Chun River, the
natural border with mainland China, to enter the town of Shenzhen, then
hardly more than a fishing village. The far bank was dotted with red
flags, portraits of Mao and banners of Chinese ideograms luffing in the
wind. In those days the passage over the river was the only way for a
Westerner to enter the Communist Middle Kingdom other than by plane.
In Shenzhen, Ollivier found only one set of traffic lights, with the
signals ideologically reversed: green for stop and red – the colour of
progress – for go. He made good money there and went on to earn a
fortune in Africa, a success story he recounts in his 2014 memoir, Ni vu
ni connu – a mischievous way of saying ‘I got away with it.’* Ten
years after his visit, Shenzhen was proclaimed China’s first Special
Economic Zone, an experimental enclave for dirigiste capitalism. Today,
it’s a megacity of 12 million people with an ultramodern skyline. It
offers a clue to the present-day Chinese adventure in Africa, not so
much a ‘new empire’ as a Special Economic Zone of continental
proportions for a more ambitious dirigiste experiment in global expansion.
In the 1980s, Shenzhen became a testing ground for Deng Xiaoping’s new
policy – ‘reform and open up’ – and once the success of the model was
clear, it was replicated elsewhere. But towards the end of the decade,
the Chinese leadership began to realise that an archipelago of
capitalist islands in China would never be able to generate enough
wealth and employment to lift the Chinese – already 1.1 billion – out of
poverty. As state capitalism became the modus operandi throughout the
mainland, the party cast around for an overseas ‘enclave’ that could
measure up to the challenges they faced. What they needed was an
abundant source of raw materials for China’s industrialisation, a
sizeable market for mass-produced goods (neither too competitive nor too
sophisticated), a large host space for outward migration from China and
a great deal of land to put under the plough: with one fifth of the
world’s population, China has less than 10 per cent of the planet’s
arable land, and a looming food security problem.
Africa was the obvious target: a continent of one billion mostly young
inhabitants – two billion by 2050 – and 60 per cent of the earth’s
uncultivated land, plus one third of its mineral riches. The aftermath
of the Cold War allowed Beijing to come in with a low bid for Africa. In
the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of
bipolar politics, the West withdrew from the continent. Washington,
London and even Paris, once a thriving postcolonial metropolis, turned
to more lucrative opportunities in the Persian Gulf and Eastern Europe.
They scarcely noticed when, in 1996, Beijing issued a new watchword: zou
chuqu, ‘go out!’ Abroad, nobody seems to have grasped at the time that
Africa was the destination. In China, however, provincial party leaders
immediately understood that success in Africa had become the sine qua
non for a promising career at the highest echelons in Beijing. In a
country where ‘the emperor is far away,’ ambitious cadres from the
regions were more than happy to scramble for Africa and the prospect of
promotion.
South of the Sahara the starting signal was a state visit in 1996 to six
African countries by the Chinese paramount leader, Jiang Zemin, who
proposed the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation. Five
FOCAC summit meetings have since been held, and Beijing has pledged $10
billion in low-cost loans for the China-Africa Development Fund. In
parallel, with the amortised equipment that had worked wonders at home
(beginning with Shenzhen), China has been busy building infrastructure
all over Africa – roads, hospitals, stadiums, convention centres – on a
scale and at a bargain-basement cost that no Western donors and
contractors could have matched. Lengthy bureaucratic procedures were
circumvented and rapid builds went ahead without ‘feasibility studies’,
possibly to the detriment of the environment but also at the expense of
the well-heeled international consultants who sometimes hijack and
hamper development projects.
Landlocked Chad got an oil refinery which the World Bank had judged
‘unprofitable’; post-conflict Mozambique got a $60 million football
stadium; Congo-Brazzaville, the former French colony and the smaller of
the two Congos (the Democratic Republic of Congo is the former Belgian
colony), got a new national highway between Brazzaville and Pointe Noire
in record time, ‘after ten years of waiting for our Western partners to
get off the ground’, as President Sassou N’Guesso still complains. In
Mali, the scheme of irrigating 1.2 million hectares – a target set long
ago by the French coloniser – no longer seems a mirage; in 2011, Ghana
obtained $3 billion, the first tranche of a $13 billion loan package
that itself surpassed the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation
disbursements that year to all of sub-Saharan Africa ($2.2 billion).
China’s ability to underbid competitors was sometimes accompanied by
overpricing and kickbacks: in Namibia, for instance, airport scanners
were billed at $55 million instead of the $40 million they should have
cost by a Chinese company, Nuctech, whose CEO happened to be the son of
the then Chinese president, Hu Jintao.
China’s state banks offered massive concessional loans and, when
necessary, Beijing made long-term barter agreements trading public works
for raw materials, chiefly oil (today, Africa meets one third of China’s
petroleum needs). Since 2000, regular China-Africa summit meetings,
interspersed with high-level bilateral visits, have aided the
Sino-African relationship at the political level. In parallel, a network
of about 35 Confucius Institutes – unlike the British Council, the
Institut Français or the Goethe Institut, they operate within
established universities and secondary schools, raising concerns about
academic freedom – has enhanced China’s soft power in Africa. Since the
continent’s independence, France is the only Western power to have
pursued a comparable policy in Africa during its postcolonial trente
glorieuses, from 1960 until the early 1990s. But France is no longer a
serious suitor for a continent whose population has soared from fewer
than 300 million in 1960 to almost 1.2 billion today.
Since the mid-1990s, la Françafrique has fallen apart while for la
Chinafrique – the term coined by Serge Michel and Michel Beuret in a
book translated in 2009 as China Safari – things have fallen nicely into
place. A quarter-century ago, China was Africa’s 83rd largest trading
partner; today, it is number one. Over the same period, a million,
perhaps even two million Chinese have established themselves south of
the Sahara. Yet Africa’s insertion into the world economy has not
changed fundamentally: Chinafrique replicates the elite connivance, the
unequal exchange and the corruption of Franco-African commensalism, only
on a much larger scale; at the same time, it is an arrangement with no
colonial echoes and no ‘civilising mission’.
Howard French has witnessed ‘the higgledy-piggledy cobbling together of
a new Chinese realm of interest’ in Africa and describes the result as
‘a haphazard empire’. A former New York Times correspondent with two
stints in Africa and one in Beijing, fluent in French and Mandarin, he
has followed the emergence of ‘China’s second continent’ at close
quarters. Starting in 2002, he noticed the increasing frequency of
visits by African heads of state to Beijing – their motorcades drove
past his office. In 2006, he went back to Africa, where he had started
his career as a journalist in the 1980s, to write a series on China’s
prodigious rise on the continent, taking Ethiopia, Chad and Malawi as
examples; his reports appeared as Sino-African trade lifted off – in
2005 China overtook the UK as a trading partner with Africa, in 2006 it
overtook France and in 2009 the US.
French, who left the Times in 2008 to teach journalism at Columbia
University, is fascinated by the human geography, not simply the
geopolitics, of the Chinese presence in Africa. Each chapter of his book
offers sharp-eyed reportage of his encounters with the new pioneers in
each of the 15 countries he visited south of the Sahara. Some Chinese
came to Africa as employees of a state company, and then stayed behind,
but most made the move on their own. Impoverished masses in their own
country, they discerned a faraway frontier and the prospect of a rapid
rise to the top, taking their chances, often with next to no seed money,
minimal knowledge of their future host countries and, in particular, no
command of the languages spoken there. Despite this, they set up shop,
opened restaurants and hotels, or bought land and managed farms.
Not much research has been conducted on the new Chinese in Africa. Even
the estimate of their overall number is of totemic rather than
statistical value. The push and pull factors for these migrants, their
educational background, their selection criteria for African countries,
their compliance with visa and residence requirements and their career
paths remain hazy. But a few landmarks stick out: incentives by the
Chinese government are almost unheard of at the individual level or for
small enterprises; the state has not produced an official narrative
about its citizens’ forays into Africa; air fares between China and
Africa are not subsidised; mostly family-based chain migration prevails,
with certain provinces – Guangdong (the former Canton), Hunan, Sichuan,
Fujian, roughly in that order – providing the trailblazers. A study by
the US-based Migration Policy Institute distinguishes two categories of
mainland Chinese in post-apartheid South Africa: a group of ‘individuals
with professional qualifications, business or political connections,
overseas experience and perhaps even some capital’ who arrived before
the turn of the century; and, since then, a wave of generally less
qualified migrants, many from Fujian or ‘other regions of China not
typically described as sending regions’. With an increasing number of
Chinese entering South Africa, or staying on illegally, the total may
now be more than 500,000.
French’s anecdotal evidence adds precious insights. After working as a
translator for a state-owned Chinese company in Madagascar, Zhang Yun, a
member of the lower middle class back home, stayed on selling goods on a
margin as a middleman for other Chinese businesspeople. He accumulated
the start-up capital for an electronics shop, which eventually became
‘one of the biggest sellers of TVs, computers, mobile phones and the
like’ on the island. Already affluent, Zhang then studied for an MBA at
a French business school. A chance encounter with a Senegalese, who
talked up the business opportunities in his country, prompted him to
open a restaurant in Dakar in 2007, followed by ‘a business importing
cheap goods from China, and then a retail shop’. By the time French met
him, four years later, Zhang also owned a metallurgy plant and a
construction company working on one of former President Wade’s pharaonic
projects, a 32-storey tower on Dakar’s seafront (a contract worth €200
million).
‘It seemed clear that lots of money was spread around,’ French observes,
‘though Zhang wouldn’t confirm it.’ He preferred to talk about ‘trust’
and mutual aid among expatriate Chinese – which he believed were in
short supply among Africans. Fellow Chinese in Madagascar had helped him
in his ascent from petty trade to big wealth and he in turn had favoured
other Chinese, while ‘partnerships with locals rarely went beyond
influence trafficking by well-connected local elites’. Many people like
Zhang were making their way from poky shops to executive offices because
they had learned at home to work hard, to close ranks and to suffer –
chi ku, ‘to eat bitter’, as they say time and again.
The expression dates back to the Cultural Revolution, when schools were
closed and millions of young people were ‘sent down’ – up-country – to
work alongside peasants and swallow their pride. Hao Shengli, now in his
late fifties, was one of them. French travelled in his company to a
remote part of south-central Mozambique where Hao has bought five
thousand acres from the Mozambican government for a pittance. The
fertile land had been part of an abandoned, colonial-era Portuguese
plantation. Hao hopes to grow stevia, a tropical shrub whose leaves
contain a natural sweetener – 150 times more potent than sugar – that
has been widely used in Japan for some time and was approved by the EU
in 2011 (usage is still restricted in the US). But local villagers
accuse the government of having sold their communal land, and want it
back. Hao has contrived a way to parry the threat: he will take his sons
and daughters out of school in China, bring them over and marry them to
Mozambicans. ‘Do you get it? This means that because the children will
be Mozambicans they can’t treat us as foreigners. If need be we can even
put the property in their name, protectively, but it will remain ours.’
In the old days, the Portuguese, no less wily, called this ‘libidinous
colonisation’.
Along the way, French debunks a range of stereotypes, making short
shrift of the notion of the ‘ugly Chinese’ who never leaves his
fenced-in compound and takes no interest in his new surroundings –
that’s if he isn’t an outright racist. Instead we meet a variety of
migrants, some of them married to Africans, some deeply prejudiced but
no better or worse than other ‘comprador communities’ in Africa, such as
the Indians or the Lebanese. Some of French’s interlocutors praise
Africa as a place of liberty, or an unpolluted open space, by comparison
to home. But few of them see it as a promised land or intend to stay
indefinitely; most plan to return to China or move on to Europe or
America. For the moment Africa simply offers them the best competitive
advantage. ‘Do you know why Chinese are out here doing this kind of
work?’ Gao Yi, an employee in a sugar refinery project in Mali, asks
French. ‘It’s because we have no choice. Of course we would like to live
like Westerners. Of course we would like to take vacations and go home
frequently, but we can’t. The Americans are smart. They take jobs that
win them big profits. But we are a poor society and we’re struggling to
rise higher. We’re stuck with work that doesn’t make much money.’
French reports anti-Chinese sentiments among Africans but doesn’t dwell
on them. In one instance, the Collum coalmine in Zambia, he has failed
to update his material, mentioning only a shooting incident in October
2010, when 13 local workers were wounded, two of them seriously, but not
the clash in August 2012, when 1200 Zambians – not all of them miners –
stormed the premises, killing one Chinese supervisor and injuring two
others. However, the picture French paints is broadly in line with what
surveys tell us. In 2010, a study in twenty African countries found that
‘favourable views outnumber critical judgments by two to one, or more,
in nearly every country surveyed.’ In 2013, a Pew survey corroborated
this largely positive assessment for Kenya (78 per cent), Senegal (77
per cent) and Nigeria (76 per cent). Only a poll conducted in February
2014 by the Ethics Institute of South Africa struck a more critical
note, with 43 per cent negative versus 35 per cent positive opinions.
But the South African NGO’s sample – 1056 Africans in the 15 countries
where China’s presence is most important – may not be representative for
the continent.
Still, Zambia could be a bellwether. Since the first tax-free zone for
Chinese investments in Africa was set up there in 2008, state and
private companies have poured anywhere between $2.5 and $3 billion into
the country – not only into the Copper Belt but, as French notes, into
‘almost every lucrative sector of the economy, including lowly poultry
traders who compete cheek to jowl with locals in African-style markets’.
This tight imbrication has turned Zambia into a hotbed of anti-Chinese
resentment. As the surveys highlight, the more China imports into an
African country, and the more it implicates itself in the local economy,
the more negative – that’s to say intrusive – its presence is thought to
be. Also, the more Africans care about human rights or good governance,
they more critical they are vis-à-vis Beijing. ‘Chinese money is too
easy, and that facility allows the government to meet its immediate
needs and to avoid sound decisions,’ argues Aziz Diop, the leader of a
group of civil society organisations in Guinea.
Robert Mugabe has used Africa’s Chinese moment as a pretext for
postcolonial nose-thumbing. ‘We have turned east,’ he said in 2005,
‘where the sun rises, and given our back to the west, where the sun
sets.’ Outside the structures of government, Africans tend to assess
China’s presence with more realism than enthusiasm – pretty much the
same attitude that Chinese migrants adopt towards Africa. Overall,
Africans welcome China as an alternative to the West but complain how
narrow the difference is between the two and how minimal the ability of
their governments to play one giant off against the other. ‘We lack
capacity,’ Joseph Rahall, the head of an environmental NGO in Sierra
Leone, complained to French. ‘The government is so weak in policy
formulation. It is so weak in negotiating. It is so weak in monitoring
things. It is just as weak in implementation. It is basically weak at
everything.’
‘Africa,’ French writes, ‘is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences
in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes.’ He
predicts forty more years of unabated demographic growth for the
continent against a background of resource exhaustion. In his view,
‘those who have diversified their economies and invested in their
citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at
prosperity.’ Countries that haven’t ‘stand to become hellish places,
barely viable, if viable at all’. Prudently, French doesn’t list
candidates for either scenario. He knows all too well that, in the past,
the most promising countries in Africa have often turned out badly,
while others with modest prospects have managed well. Only the former
Belgian Congo has held a steady, more or less disastrous course since
the country’s independence.
In the rapidly growing library on China and Africa, China’s Second
Continent deserves pride of place, even if there are points to disagree
with. Why would one or two million Chinese in Africa amount to a
continental takeover, as French implies, while 2.2 million Chinese born
in China but living in the US – among nearly four million
Chinese-Americans – do not? Africa is not yet the continent of
opportunity French describes, with, he claims, a middle class of 300
million – a hugely inflated figure provided by the African Development
Bank and ten times higher than the OECD estimate. China is certainly not
building a ‘new empire’ in Africa; it is simply catching up, as Brazil
or Turkey is doing, on a continent where it was once under-represented.
Beijing still feels there is much to be done: China may be the single
nation with the highest volume of trade in Africa, but as a bloc of
nations the EU remains ahead, despite a population less than half the
size of China’s; Europe and the US combined account for twice China’s
trade with Africa and will remain in the picture for some time to come.
But French is spot-on with his focus on the ‘human factor’. What is
perhaps most interesting about the new Chinese presence in Africa is the
question of identification for Africans. Faced by a white person,
Africans can’t fail to recall the colonial past and the many lessons in
development, human rights, democracy and public health that continue to
rain down on them. By contrast, when Africans encounter a Chinese
person, regardless of the latter’s individual merits or flaws, they are
face to face with a role model, a citizen of a country that used to be
poor but is now on an equal footing with, perhaps superior to, the
Western powers. In other words, they see a bright future for themselves.
Yet as long as Chinese migrate en masse to Africa to carry out low-skill
tasks in place of Africans, as long as they till the land, as long as
Chinese women sell beignets in Kinshasa and Chinese traders peddle
religious trinkets for Sufi brethren in Dakar, or sell single cigarettes
at street intersections in Dar es Salaam, this future will remain out of
reach. If Africa really wants to follow China’s lead, it will need its
own Shenzhen, and it will have to build it by itself.
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