On
a trip to Lusaka, Zambia, last year, I kept chasing an energetic and jittery
Chinese man, the only staff member of a Chinese mining company willing to talk
to me after his firm had been involved in several scandals in which both
Chinese and Zambian employees were either killed or injured on the job. Zambia,
with its abundant copper ore deposits, is one of the most important investment
destinations for China. His English was excellent, and he liked to talk — and
talk. After telling me about how much he loved the country and its people, he
sometimes went into a rant about how Zambian miners liked drinking and money
too much, and did not like to work hard. It was that mentality, he continued,
that had caused his company all its troubles (not the workplace-safety and
low-pay grievances of which it was accused). But even though the Zambian
government had repossessed his company’s mines, this man wasn’t leaving. He was
now working as an interpreter for the government.
I
wondered about his family back home, and what they thought of this young man
forging his life thousands of miles away. In his extraordinary new book
“China’s Second Continent,” Howard W. French delves into the lives of some of
the one million-plus Chinese migrants he says are now building careers in
Africa. For all the debate about China’s intentions (imperialist or not?) and
business practices (corrupt or not?) on the continent, the key piece of the
discussion, French argues, has been ignored: the actual lives of those Chinese
who have uprooted themselves to settle and work in Africa. Even as China has
become the world’s fastest-growing large economy, 10 of the 20 fastest-growing
economies between 2013 and 2017 are projected to be in Africa. As French
writes, “Bit by bit, these facts have become closely intertwined.” The recent
Chinese immigrants are the glue holding them together. And the stories French
tells are fascinating.
French’s
characters range from the mundane to the outrageous. In Mozambique he spends
time with Hao Shengli, a brash agricultural entrepreneur from Henan province
whom he calls the Chinese version of the “ugly American.” French, a former New
York Times foreign chief in Africa and China, speaks Chinese, pleasantly
surprising his subjects with his fluency, and they often allowed him into their
homes, businesses and even wedding celebrations.
Hao,
for instance, is startlingly blunt. The skin of the Mozambicans was so “black”
that it made him uncomfortable at first. He tells French: “I didn’t think they
were so clever, not so intelligent, and I was looking for an opportunity based
on my own capabilities. Can you imagine if I had gone to America or Germany
first? The people in those . . . places are too smart.” He went on, “So we had
to find backward countries, poor countries that we can lead, places where we
can do business, where we can manage things successfully.”
Still,
Hao is not a stand-in for his countrymen across the continent; his story is
unique. He distrusts other Chinese businessmen in Mozambique, and so he camped
out alone in the countryside, where he bought a swath of land from a local
government (angering native residents) to grow lucrative crops, and schemed to
hold on to his budding wealth. Hao’s grand plan is to marry off his sons to
local women and then put his land in the women’s names for safekeeping from
government seizure, creating a miniature Chinese-Mozambican economic dynasty.
He moved his two sons from China, and the older one has acquired a live-in
girlfriend who cooks and cleans for the men. Hao is one of a number of Chinese
farmers targeting empty expanses on the continent; Africa may hold up to 60
percent of the world’s uncultivated arable land.
Like
several of the book’s subjects, Hao subscribes to the idea of chi ku, a
Cultural Revolution-era expression that translates to “eat bitter,” or endure
hardship. From trailers in the deserts of Mali to outposts on the
Namibia-Angola border, Africa’s Chinese frontiersmen and women are setting up
homes. They are unafraid of loneliness, boredom, power blackouts and other
inconveniences as they try to make their fortunes — with an encouraging push
from the Chinese government, which is happy to help with financing. All of
those hardships are better, they say, than the rigidity, stiff competition and
corruption back home.
In
Senegal’s seaside capital, Dakar, French finds a 26-year-old businesswoman who
ended up in West Africa probably as a prostitute (he never asks outright), yet
worked her way up into owning a karaoke bar and massage parlor. “Dakar in those
early days was really boring. Pretty much everything was lacking here, and I
thought even a county seat somewhere in China must be more interesting,” she
says. “But when I got back home, there wasn’t much for me to do, so I changed
my mind.” When characters like these tell their stories in their own words,
“China’s Second Continent” shines. The book’s pace can drag at times, but
French is a clear, thoughtful storyteller.
China
is now Africa’s largest trading partner, and it offers loans, grants and
development deals without the anticorruption strings favoured by the United
States and Europe. Yet in most of the countries French travels to, Africans
complain about inferior Chinese goods and shoddy infrastructure, like the new
roads the Chinese have built. I recently hired a Senegalese carpenter to change
the lock of an apartment I was renting in Dakar. He explained the different
kinds of locks available at the hardware store. “There are Chinese locks,” he
told me. “But I think you should pay more for the best ones.”
In
later chapters, Africans — from government, civil society and ancestral
communities — speak about how public officials, engaged in what French calls
“gangster capitalism,” are failing to hold Chinese investors accountable. A
pervasive lack of transparency has allowed businessmen to export valuable
resources like timber illegally, and to bring in an uncapped number of Chinese
immigrants (“There are too many of them in their own country, and they are
doing this to decongest China,” a Zambian politician complains). Meanwhile,
investors are seizing land at bargain prices and extracting minerals. China
says its relationship with Africa is “win-win.” The problem is, most African
leaders, more interested in profiting from their countries’ resources, haven’t
committed to letting their people win, too.
When
I was in Zambia, the government was passing legislation to tax the earnings of
its foreign mining investors more efficiently. Whether current officials will
be more responsible with that revenue than their predecessors, some of whom
allegedly accepted kickbacks worth millions of dollars from Chinese investors,
remains to be seen.
French
concludes that Chinese migration to the continent falls within a wider
tradition of foreign powers establishing spheres of economic influence in
Africa, and he doesn’t doubt that China’s political demands on Africa will
grow. This is probably true. But if Africa fails to capitalize on its wealth to
the benefit of future generations, it won’t be entirely China’s fault.
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