Overview
The idea to put together this African Studies Review Forum was sparked more than two years ago when a group of interdisciplinary researchers prepared double panel sessions for the fifty-second Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in 2009. The panels brought together a broad spectrum of regional and topical issues that fall under the larger umbrella of China–Africa relations. Although the articles that form this issue have changed substantially since that ASA meeting, our primary intention has not. Our aim is to provide a close-up and dynamic look—particularly from historical and ethnographic perspectives—at the various forces that constitute interrelations between Chinese and Africans. In this respect, our analytical approach differs from that of the existing published literature. Rather than focusing our lens at the national level, we hope to sharpen the view of China–Africa relations by moving our analysis to the community and individual levels. The contributors to this volume have therefore looked at interactions that take place in marketplaces; in the social spaces of work; in households affected by power outages; in Pentacostal African congregations in southern China; and among Chinese of different generations in South Africa.
This project has raised a number of critical questions regarding the state of the field of “China–Africa” studies, and indeed queries whether this area of research has yet emerged as a legitimate field in its own right. In this introduction we therefore begin by taking a look at the historical context of research on China–Africa relations, considering differences in focus and approach from earlier scholarship to more recent research. We then examine the connections between China–Africa research and area studies, arguing that research on the interrelationships between Chinese and Africans has the potential to build on the empirical strengths of area studies scholarship while contributing insight to contemporary questions of engagement and pressing issues of globalization. Third, we wish to emphasize the fundamental importance of both fine-grained, empirical research into the dynamic interactions between people and communities that constitute China–Africa relations, and also the critical function of disciplinary theory in analyzing this data. Fourth, this introduction highlights the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration in research, writing, publishing, and application. And finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of the diverse research methods and collaborative partnerships that are emerging in China–Africa studies.
“China–Africa” Studies, African Studies, and Area Studies
At the outset of this discussion, the use of the terms “China–Africa” and “China–Africa relations,” especially the way these phrases have come to designate a field of scholarly inquiry, demands analytical attention. Of course we are not the first to take up this question, but as Africanist scholars presenting this material in an African studies journal, we feel that several important issues warrant reflection. One of the most critical questions for this journal may be the relationship between area studies and China–Africa studies: in what ways does an area studies approach constitute a particular kind of intervention into the study of relationships across regional boundaries, in this case boundaries that straddle “East” and “South”? And in turn, how might the study of Africa’s engagement with China offer new vantage points for scholarship in African studies, in Asian studies, and in area studies more generally?
Debates over area studies are not new, but they continue to be reformulated as global contexts reshape the boundaries and categories of human engagement. In compiling this collection of articles we have benefited from the long and deep reflection among scholars about what constitutes area studies today, as well as the contribution that these interdisciplinary fields may offer to global studies (see Bates Reference Bates1997; Karp Reference Karp1997). We believe that the fine-grained and historically grounded articles in this issue reflect the priority that area studies research has placed upon “a long-term commitment to place” that provides “empirical grounding and accountability.” As Jane Guyer has said (2004:501), area studies research requires that we move beyond abstract analysis to understand the diversity of “experiences in the world,” while at the same time insisting that our arguments both cross disciplines and acknowledge their antecedents. If the articles in this issue aspire to “produce nuanced, culturally rich, context-specific studies of times and places that are little known” (Karp Reference Karp1997:284), then we hope they may reflect the best influences of the area studies tradition.
At the same time, these articles show that a transnational focus on Africa and China can provide new opportunities for understanding dynamics within Africa itself, and for rethinking theoretical frameworks. For example, Yoon Park’s work (131–153) on boundaries and identity focuses on Chinese communities in South Africa, but at the same time illuminates new dimensions of South Africa’s history of settlement and belonging more broadly. The article by Stephanie Rupp on energy, agency, and power in Ghana (103–130) underscores the contributions that “China–Africa” research makes to theoretical issues. By seeking to understand Ghanaian people’s perceptions of China and energy, Rupp learned that these perceptions are embedded within a larger matrix of views about power in its many forms.
We are certainly not the first group of scholars to put together a special group of articles on China–Africa relations for an area studies journal. In 2010 Julia Strauss, who has written the concluding comments for this issue (155–170), co-edited a special issue of the China Quarterly with Martha Saavedra, and Yoon Jung Park co-edited a special issue of African and Asian Studies with Tu T. Hunyh. For their special issue Park and Hunyh similarly solicited conference papers that were grounded in ethnographic and fieldwork-based methodologies. They noted three years ago that “most media coverage and scholarly studies continue to focus primarily on the economic and political aspects of Chinese activities in Africa,” while studies of “people-to-people encounters” based on careful empirical research remain scarce (2010:208). Park and Hunyh argued that the lack of reliable field research data has not only resulted in dependency upon a macro-level analysis, but has also contributed to the circulation of rumors and distortions.Footnote 1
In this ASR Forum, we would like to continue the conversation that Park and Huynh started. We are interested in understanding the origins of “China–Africa relations” as a field of study, and the ways in which this field has continued to be framed. For despite a small but increasing number of close-up studies, the field continues to be dominated by a discourse that is oriented toward large-scale economic, political, and strategic concerns. We have attempted to understand this phenomenon by placing it in historical perspective. Further, like others we question whether the study of a nation-state (China) in relationship with a continent (Africa) makes analytical sense, and why.
Lastly, we are interested in understanding what may be omitted when China and Africa are lifted out of the context of global historical dynamics as isolated “players:” what specific realities are diminished or made invisible by this move, realities that may be critically important for understanding historical and contemporary phenomena? Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong (2008) argued several years ago, for example, that contemporary China–Africa engagement takes place within a larger context of global capitalist transformation from which it cannot be detached.Footnote 2 It is this last question that we feel our area-studies-inspired, interdisciplinary approach can best address. We will not only argue here, as Sautman and Yan did, that a more comprehensive approach is needed in order to see the “trees” of China and Africa in the “forest” of the world system. We also believe that our close-up, fieldwork-based studies demonstrate that serious work on this topic must be located explicitly within particular methodological, theoretical, and empirical frameworks. China–Africa studies, as an emerging field of study in its own right, will be strengthened by research that engages discipline-specific theory, even as theoretical frameworks stand to benefit from being developed in contexts of engagement between China and Africa.
The studies of China–Africa engagement that are included in this issue will therefore not only broaden the availability of research findings on an empirical level. These articles also demonstrate the importance of locating the experiences of Chinese and Africans within particular analytical frameworks and interdisciplinary debates. We intend for this special issue to have an impact on two fronts. By putting forward these studies, we wish to contribute to existing knowledge about the lived experiences of historical actors in transnational and transregional engagement. At the same time, these studies as a group make a larger analytical claim about the complexity of these experiences—and thus about the necessity of locating them in their larger theoretical “forests.” The study of Chinese migration to Africa, for example, as Yoon Park’s work shows, must be located theoretically within broader understandings of global mobilities, boundaries, and identities. And understanding African worship in Pentecostal churches in southern China, as Heidi Østbø Haugen shows (81–102), requires knowledge of global evangelical social movements, Pentecostalism in Africa, political approaches to religious groups in China, and theories of exclusion and belonging. The contested memories of TAZARA railway workers recounted in Jamie Monson’s work (45–64) are made more meaningful when they are analyzed with reference to the contested memories of other Africans who feel excluded or manipulated by state practices of heroic memorialization. Stephanie Rupp’s work demonstrates how a fine-grained cultural analysis of energy and power in individuals’ everyday lives provides particular insight into how people understand and negotiate the presence of China in the widening terrain of global energy exploitation and utilization. Each of the articles in this volume examines “China–Africa” relations in a particular context using fine-grained historical and ethnographic research methods, and simultaneously uses disciplinary theoretical frameworks to push “China–Africa” relations to new levels of specificity and analytical rigor.
History of Scholarship on Africa–China Relationships
In his 2008 survey of the emerging literature on China–Africa issues, Daniel Large commented on the fact that international relations approaches were dominating the field. Large was especially concerned that historical perspectives had been neglected “amidst a general preoccupation with the present.” The focus on international relations was the result, in his view, of the “cascading media and academic interest” that accompanied China’s resurgence in African affairs following China’s declaration of the Year of Africa in 2006. The third Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC, which also took place in 2006) further demonstrated the seriousness of China’s renewed interest in engaging with African states. As a reaction to the FOCAC initiatives, therefore, the scholarship at that time not only placed its emphasis on China but also framed its (most often critical) analysis in the same terms, as works on “China–Africa” or “Sino–African Relations.”Footnote 3
The scholarly and media studies that proliferated in the late 2000s were in large part a response to China’s renewed and expanding interests and activities in Africa. This explains why the bulk of this literature positioned the issue as “China in Africa” or “China–Africa” rather than the other way around. The primary concern was to understand China’s policies and strategies in Africa, and their significance for international affairs—in particular for the Western powers. Even important early works such as Philip Snow’s The Star Raft: China’s Encounter with Africa (1988),which remains one of the most comprehensive texts, tended to be framed with China as the active partner. Over the last ten to fifteen years there has been a deluge of surveys of the problem of “China–Africa” from a wide range of authors and perspectives, displaying varying levels of rigor.Footnote 4 Although recent scholarship that focuses at the macro-level of analysis continues to emphasize the leading role of China in Africa, the research on which such large-n work is based is continually deepening. For example, a recently published compendium by David Shinn and Joshua Eisenman (2012) provides an exhaustive overview of Chinese involvement in Africa, country by country, from a political economy perspective. Studies that took place in Africa or that took an African perspective on these emerging relationships also tended to focus on China’s reception in Africa and its new—or newly intensified—impacts, again emphasizing the centrality of China as the primary actor and Africa as the recipient.Footnote 5 An important initiative launched by Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks at Fahamu, a social justice network based in Kenya, aims to provide a forum for African perspectives, although it continues to frame the topic as “China in Africa.” New scholarship by Giles Mohan and Ben Lampert (2012), however, has moved this discussion forward by theorizing African agency in China–Africa relationships, using examples from Angola.
Contributors to this volume have moved well beyond the earlier paradigm of China–Africa. Scholarship that is grounded in ethnographic, fieldwork-based methodology demonstrates that the engagements between Africa and China are complex and multisited. It is not only that there are Africans in China and Chinese in Africa. The nuanced studies that are collected in this volume situate real people and their lives in contexts that illuminate their significance as historical actors and contemporary agents.
The Resurgence of the Everyday: Past and Present
The scholars who have contributed to this issue are at the forefront of research that seeks to locate engagements between Africa and China within both historical processes and newly emerging realities. They trace the ways these engagements are negotiated—and their meanings articulated—by multiple actors in diverse geographical and cultural contexts. These contexts are spatially grounded while at the same time reflecting mobility, both material and symbolic. Our work has been critically informed by the small but growing body of work on the “everyday” experiences of Africa–China engagement—past and present—and we turn to that literature as a starting point for evaluating this approach and its potential.
It is perhaps telling that the earliest foundational studies in the field of Africa–China engagement were also situated in empirically rich field research and in broader theoretical debates. A good example is the work of Deborah Bräutigam, who has become most widely recognized for her recent book The Dragon’s Gift (2010). In that text Bräutigam seeks to challenge the rumors and distortions that have continued to circulate in studies of China’s activities in Africa. Few readers are as familiar with Bräutigam’s first monograph (1998) on China’s “green revolution” in Africa, which was compiled using field-based case studies from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Gambia.Footnote 6 This work was based on Bräutigam’s experience researching rural development projects, agricultural modernization strategies, and technology transfer in West Africa. Some of her insights from earlier years of in-depth fieldwork shed particular light on the issues of cross-cultural communication between Africans and Chinese as they work together toward the development of opportunities for their families, communities, and larger nations. Describing her fieldwork in Mauritius in the 1980s, Bräutigam recalled the unstinting work ethic of Chinese farmers in rice paddies, who regularly returned to work in the paddy fields after sunset, planting delicate rice shoots by the light of flashlights. Mauritian villagers, watching in amazement and anxiety, wondered whether it was the Chinese farmers themselves who were planting after nightfall, or if the Chinese farmers had sent embodied spirits to work on their behalf. The latter, anxious explanation provided a rationale for the Chinese farmers’ success that acted as a leveling device, casting doubt on the economic accomplishments of Chinese farmers themselves, suggesting the intervention of occult forces, and simultaneously absolving Mauritian farmers from responsibility for their relatively lower agricultural output (Deborah Bräutigam, personal communication, 2008). This ethnographic example of engagement between particular African and Chinese farmers in a particular setting is significant, for it provides a textured context for analyzing perceptions of “China” and “Africa” that too often dominate public discourse—and scholarly publishing—as if the stereotypes have a reality in and of themselves.
Another important and even earlier pioneer in the field of Africa–China engagement is George Yu, who researched and wrote about the relationship between China and Africa, with a focus on Tanzania, during the decades of the 1960s and ’70s. While Yu’s work was located within the discipline of foreign relations, it was historically grounded and based on an extensive knowledge of archival materials, in particular Chinese sources. In its sensitivity to the nuances of historical contexts, Yu’s work continues to be highly useful to scholars, and he has remained active as a scholar as well (see Yu Reference Yu1968, Reference Yu1970, Reference Yu1975; Yu & Dittmer Reference Yu and Dittmer2012).
The historian Li Anshan of Peking University has also contributed significantly to scholarship on relations between China and Africa. Having originally conducted research on the social history of Ghana, Li published an overview of the history of Chinese in Africa in 2000. That monograph, based primarily on written sources, was the first comprehensive survey of this material and formed a significant contribution from a historical perspective. An English language translation just become available last year (Li Anshan 2012). Li has also published on overseas Chinese in the Caribbean (2004), and more recently on Chinese medical assistance in Africa (2011).
By 2006 there were enough scholars beginning to produce comprehensive, field-based scholarship for Chris Alden of SOAS and his then-students, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares de Oliviera, to organize a conference at Cambridge University and a subsequent edited volume (Alden, Large, & Soares de Oliveira 2008). That project brought together several researchers who had been working in the field to form what was probably the first major collective engagement with the topic. The participants in that conference represented diverse fields of study including medical anthropology (Elisabeth Hsu working on Chinese medicine in Tanzania), Chinese entrepreneurs in Namibia and Cape Verde (Georg Dobler and Heidi Haugen), and labor history (Jamie Monson on TAZARA railway workers). The conference itself, and the later publication of papers, established the existence of a multidisciplinary, global network of scholars.
Such examples of research on everyday interactions between Chinese and African actors allow us to see “China–Africa” not as a binary partnership premised on political and economic (im)balances that are often viewed as geopolitical complementarities. Instead, such historically grounded and ethnographically specific research allows us to analyze engagement between China(s) and Africa(s) as a flexible and emerging process that links two areas of the globe—including their people, businesses, governments, ideas, networks—in ways that are both fundamentally rooted in historical processes and unfolding before our eyes. The meanings, impacts, and values of such engagements are being contested and articulated by many actors in many different African and Chinese contexts, simultaneously. Looking at African and Chinese contexts—and their intersections—from historically situated and ethnographically grounded perspectives opens up numerous opportunities for new methodological approaches, new analytical lenses, and new theoretical insights. This integrative research also presents many challenges for scholars, as we discuss in the final section of this introduction.
China–Africa Studies: State of the Field
This section aims to identify some of the central variables that constitute China–Africa engagements, and to highlight current research that analyzes the dynamic qualities of these issues. Given the extensive interdisciplinary literature on “China–Africa,” it is evident that as a community of observers, we have generated a broad and deep understanding of many of elements in the “China–Africa ” dynamic. We discern the emergence of patterns of several clustering components, for example: communities and social networks; language, ethnicity, and racialized identities; and China–Africa relations as they are expressed dynamically through contemporary arts. “China–Africa ” research is already sorting itself into subthemes focused on particular observable dynamics that need to be situated in specific theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches. Analyses that attend to the multiple angles, issues, and values inherent in “China–Africa” relations also contribute to the development of new theoretical frameworks. For example, when scholars examine social networks and kinship strategies of Africans in China and Chinese in Africa, they not only highlight the diversity and complexity of “China” and “Africa,” but they also illustrate the ways that new social networks, communities, and trajectories of kinship are being formed in novel social and economic spaces, thus stretching and strengthening our theoretical analyses of social networks and processes of kinship. Despite the expanding body of literature that examines contexts of China–Africa engagement in historical context, ethnographic detail, and theoretical complexity, plentiful perspectives remain un- or understudied, posing significant challenges for researchers working to analyze the intricate, shifting perspectives of China–Africa engagement.
Communities and Social Networks
Social networks, kinship, and language constitute one set of interrelated elements that people discuss, debate, and actively shape in contexts of Africa–China engagement. Individual people shape the dynamic qualities of kinship ties and the sentiments of sociality through their friendships and networks; the collective patterns of these social engagements then also provide contours for how individuals interact in broader communities that include Africans and Chinese. In the literature on social dimensions of contact between Chinese people and African people, kinship and social networks emerge as relevant factors in both African and Chinese geographical settings.
And yet kinship and other forms of social networking do not work in predictable ways, whether in Africa or in China. For example, research by Adams Bodomo indicates that in Guangzhou, a commercial trading city in southern China, social networks among traders from a variety of African nations have emerged as an essential web of support in both formal and informal ways. Individual African traders in Guangzhou who are well established commercially in the context of Chinese business, and who are at the same time well established socially among African traders, are most likely to emerge as central players. These community leaders serve as de facto diplomatic representatives for African traders in Guangzhou, while at the same time functioning informally as central distribution points for relevant information, such as strategies for juggling visas and other paperwork in an increasingly unstable context of African migration to China (see Bodomo Reference Bodomo2012; also see Bodomo Reference Bodomo2010; Bodoma & da Silva 2012). In the context of Guangzhou, then, African traders operating in China form social networks that link individuals to the broader community of Africans from across the continent.
In contrast, Chinese traders in Namibia are surprisingly disintegrated in their social networking relationships. Gregor Dobler’s work in Oshikanga (2005, 2009), a trading outpost on the border between Namibia and Angola, demonstrates that stratification underscores and maintains social distance between Chinese traders. The traders in this relatively remote trading town hail from a wide variety of geographical locations, socioeconomic backgrounds, and linguistic and cultural communities in China; in general they lack any common “home” element that might unite them. In addition, each individual trader strives to cultivate privileged relations with the Namibian authorities who control immigration and customs processes, as well as the flows of people and goods that are crucial to the business success of traders and their families. Whereas forming and sustaining a close-knit community of individuals who share a national or ethnic origin is common among diasporic communities generally, in Oshikango Chinese traders have remained aloof from one another. This lack of a common background, combined with the competitive secrecy that shrouds each trader’s commercial relationships and strategies, effectively erects barriers to the formation of a solid social network. Chinese traders in Oshikango do form casual social ties because of the contiguity of their shops. But rather than forging partnerships or networks, these trading families are competitors, and distinct cultural and commercial barriers prevent the consolidation of a common sense of social solidarity as “Chinese” traders in this Namibian outpost. Dobler’s work demonstrates, therefore, that while social networks are present among Chinese traders in African contexts, the social significance of such networks is not uniform.
In Oshikango, the core of the Chinese traders’ business and social relationships is formed not by links of ethnicity but rather by links of kinship. Dobler discusses the significance of chain migration, in which opportunities to migrate and become integrated into trading networks pass from one family member to another. Kinship practices can also be used to make linkages between Chinese and African partners, however. In a forthcoming book, Howard French describes the ways that some Chinese agricultural entrepreneurs have married into local Mozambican families with the explicit goal of forging long-lasting partnerships with the people and connections to the land (personal communication, March 2012). Similarly, in the ethnographic documentary film When China Met Africa (Francis & Francis 2012), the protagonist, a Chinese farmer whose extended family settled in Zambia, anticipates the marriages of his children to children of local villagers, solidifying his legal title to land through customary ties to land forged through kinship. In Chinese contexts, scholars report marriages between Chinese women and African men who are either students or traders; these relationships ease the increasingly difficult immigration requirements for Africans to remain in China on a long-term basis.
Furthermore, the experiences of both Chinese traders in Africa and African traders in China highlight the significance of extended family members in their countries of origin, relatives who serve as crucial, trustworthy links in their supply and distribution chains. For Chinese traders in African contexts, relatives in China often provide strategic connections to producers of particular commodities, enabling the family to procure products at especially good prices for their family member’s business in Africa. For African traders in Chinese contexts, relatives serve as strategic nodes in distribution chains, overseeing the passage of containers of goods through customs, their transit from port to market, and their unloading, organization, and sale in African markets. In such cases, the structure of transnational business ties between China and Africa is premised on the extended family; kinship serves as the basis of China–Africa trade in commodities. Again, the role of a particular social element—in this case, kinship—is shared in various contexts of “China–Africa ” relations; but the role and significance of kinship vary contextually.
Language, Ethnicity, and Racialized Identities
Language, ethnicity, and racialized identities are other social variables that emerge as significant elements in China–Africa relations, but that are expressed and experienced in shifting and inconsistent ways across both time and place. As discussed by Yoon Park (2008) in the context of Chinese in South Africa, communication in a particular dialect serves as a strategic, shared social substrate that binds together members of an ethnic subgroup. Park traces the histories of migration, settlement, and integration of Chinese in South Africa over the course of more than a century. As her work shows, the periodicity of Chinese migration has been marked by the arrival of people from distinct Chinese language groups: Cantonese speakers followed by Hakka speakers (Moiyeanese), then Taiwanese Hokkien speakers, and finally the more recent wave of immigrants who use Mandarin as their main language of communication. In addition, different generations of Chinese immigrants to South Africa hold onto their Chinese dialect and cultural identity with varying degrees of commitment. The older generations of Chinese immigrants perceive internal language differences as significant enough to pose barriers to marriage between these distinct Chinese communities. In contrast, current generations of Chinese young people orient their linguistic and cultural identities primarily toward English and Afrikaans, entirely abandoning their Chinese language identities and the affective ties inscribed by language.
Africans also perceive the Chinese language in its written form in contrasting ways. As detailed by Stacey Langwick (Reference Langwick2010), in the context of Chinese traditional medicine in clinics in Tanzania, the inclusion of Chinese characters on the packaging of medicines is an important marketing device. Although most Tanzanian customers cannot read the characters, their presence validates the authenticity and heralds the efficacy of the medication; the absence of Chinese characters raises suspicions among African consumers. In contrast, recent discord between Angola and China flashed when locomotives provided by China for a newly constructed railroad turned out to be unreliable; Angolan officials reacted with irritation that the labels, manuals, and guidelines for operating the locomotive were available only in Chinese. While in the case of Chinese medicines in Dar es Salaam the presence of (illegible) Chinese characters is desirable, in rural Angola the presence of (illegible) Chinese characters is a source of intense frustration and national humiliation, making viscerally clear the country’s continued reliance on China for intellectual and technical capacity.
This recent example of Angolan frustration with Chinese railroad technology contrasts with the experience of railway workers during the construction of the TAZARA railway in Tanzania and Zambia in the 1970s. During the TAZARA project, curriculum materials for training the African workers were translated into English, and operations manuals for many of the machines and tools were also provided in English language versions. Yet Chinese characters were still omnipresent during construction, with the result that those African workers who learned to read and speak Chinese—including those who had studied in China—were at an advantage and were likely to be promoted. During construction itself, workers used a combination of simple Chinese, Swahili, and English to communicate verbally. More commonly, according to the now-retired railway workers, they used “body language” to communicate in the workplace (see Monson Reference Monson2009).
In the spatial context of Chinese cities where African migrants have established businesses, language has also emerged as a salient social variable. Scholars have noted the linguistic geography of Guangzhou and Yiwu, for example, highlighting the clustering of Africans based on their fluency in the colonial language embraced by their home nation. Anglophone Africans in Guangzhou tend to cluster their businesses around the central train station, while Francophone (and some Lusophone) African traders focus their business, social, and religions lives in Yuexiu District. Some Lusophone Africans, drawing on their shared linguistic heritage with formerly Portuguese-ruled Macao, have recently begun a trend of avoiding both Hong Kong and mainland China entirely, investing instead in Macao because of their comparative linguistic advantage (see Bodomo & da Silva 2012). And an important new study by Huamei Han (Reference Han2013) shows that both African and Chinese migrants to Guangzhou have developed a kind of “grassroots multilingualism.” Using ethnographic and linguistic methods, Han’s fieldwork investigates the ways that African traders and Chinese business owners meeting in China innovate new linguistic repertoires to facilitate transnational and translocal connections. And of course there are now many more Africans who study Chinese, and Chinese learning African languages (see King Reference King2010; Nordtveit Reference Nordtveit2011). In South Africa, by contrast, Tu Huynh found that Chinese migrants were not interested in learning African languages, choosing instead to learn English as a common language for their everyday transactions (personal communication, Tu Huynh, 2012).
Viewing “China–Africa relations” through such empirically nuanced examples also allows us to appreciate the dynamic quality of social boundaries, as both Chinese and Africans strategically embrace or reject identities according to the social, political, and economic contexts of their engagements. For example, in contexts that bring “China” and “Africa” together, people mark boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through metaphors of ethnicity in significant but inconsistent ways. Ethnic distinctions may be significant in one context and irrelevant in an immediately contiguous context of “China–Africa ” relations. For example, being ethnically Ibo—one of the main trading communities in Nigeria—plays a significant role in enabling young Ibo men to enter into China–Africa trade as apprentices to experienced Ibo traders in Hong Kong.Footnote 7 But as these young traders strike up commercial relationships with suppliers in China and navigate the complexities of daily life in China, their ethnic affiliation is eclipsed by their racial designation, by Chinese with whom they interact, simply as “African.” Thus what it means to be “Ibo”—or to belong to any other ethnic community—and what it means to be “African” is contextually contingent. Similarly, as we saw in the example of the diminishing importance of Chinese dialects among South African Chinese, ethnic affiliations are renegotiated among Chinese in Africa over time.
Racial identities are also a crucial element of social negotiation in China–Africa relations at levels that extend from intimate, individual experiences to global representations and discourses. Despite the manifold ethnic and cultural diversity among “African” and “Chinese” communities, stereotyped racial traits tend to represent a sharp cutting edge in China–Africa relations. Contact between “African” and “Chinese” individuals who are otherwise social strangers tends to be mediated by racialized expectations. In Chinese contexts, the dark phenotype expected of Africans emerges as a mask that stands in for—and renders irrelevant—cultural distinctions and social attributes of particular individuals.Footnote 8 For example, in the midst of posters of African wildlife and landscapes adorning the main streets of Beijing during the 2006 meeting of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation hung a massive poster of a man from Papua New Guinea. It appeared as if the “blackness” of the Papua New Guinean was sufficient to represent African people in the popular Chinese imagination. Racial stereotyping of African migrants, traders, and visitors in cities such as Guangzhou continued to be a thorny issue as recently as the summer of 2012, as a result of tightening of immigration policies allowing African traders to remain in China for a limited period of time and the attempt by a significant proportion of traders to remain in China to carry out their business even after their visas have expired. Xenophobic discourses that targeted African students during the late 1980s have swelled again—especially in online communities where contributors can peddle vitriolic and racist remarks in anonymous security—in response to the current presence of African students, traders, and visitors in China (see Sautman Reference Sautman1994; Chen Reference Chen2011). At the same time, in national ideologies of anticolonial solidarity and nonalignment, African nations and African individuals continue to be celebrated—also stereotypically—as partners in resistance to colonial rule, as time-honored political allies and ideological equals.Footnote 9
In settings in Africa, racial stereotypes also powerfully shape social expectations of the Chinese “other,” even as racial identities are negotiated and shaped over time. Individual Chinese tend to be perceived through racialized expectations by Africans who do not know them personally. Even as early as the mid-1990s individuals of Asian heritage—regardless of nationality—were likely to be perceived as Chinese and to be associated with stereotypical traits such as physical strength (related to martial arts) and cunning (related to expectations of Asians’ business acumen).Footnote 10 According to Yoon Park’s (2008) research among Chinese living in South Africa, racial identities are actively shaped and managed. In recent work, Jamie Monson (2008) also explores the interrelationship of racial identities in China–Africa relations, emphasizing that rather than reinscribing simple binary oppositions between “China” and “Africa,” racial identities are in constant negotiation and flux, and involve the racialized triangulation of African, Asian, and Euro-American categories. Current literature and ongoing research in China–Africa studies highlight the contingent qualities of ethnic and racial identities, as people respond to stereotyped expectations even as they build personally meaningful relationships and socially expressive identities. The paradoxes of identity are palpable in China–Africa relations, as people must contend with the rigid and often cutting edges of racial stereotypes even as they negotiate the inherently fluid significances of identities.
China–African Engagements as Expressed through Contemporary Arts
One particular area of engagement that addresses—indeed embraces—the paradoxes and contradictions that are part and parcel of contemporary China–Africa engagements is the contemporary arts, including visual arts such as sculpture, film, and videography; musical arts such as recorded sound installations and some contemporary music; and performing arts such as dance and installation-performance art. The research and writing of only one scholar (thus far), Ruth Simbao (Reference Simbao2012) at Rhodes University, explores this cutting edge of China–Africa ties, where contemporary senses—voices, eyes, and ears—are open to the juxtapositions and fascinating entanglements of engagement. As she explains,
contemporary arts and media offer a meaningful space for ongoing conversations and negotiations about what relations between “China” and “Africa” signify. The arts provide a channel for people to begin to “talk back” to the popular press, to political commentaries, and against stereotypes, expressing their individual experiences with China–Africa, full of contradictions and complications. (Simbao Reference Simbao2012:7)
Simbao’s publications offer rich descriptions and insightful analysis of contemporary works of Chinese and African art that portray, investigate, and analyze the frontiers of “China–Africa ” engagements; in this brief overview, we provide only the barest glimpse into this fascinating area of research.
The visual arts—primarily moving media such as film and video—offer a trove of contemporary representations of China–Africa relations in their dynamic, cutting flow. Several documentary and ethnographic films attempt to unravel particular contexts of China–Africa engagements. When China Met Africa (2011) (by Nick Francis and Mark Francis with the anthropologist Solange Chatelard), and King Cobra and the Dragon (2012) (by Solange Chatelard and the filmmaker Scott Corben) both focus their lenses on Zambia. Both films highlight the depth of relations and seriousness of intention among many Chinese to remain in Zambia for the long term. King Cobra and the Dragon emphasizes important aspects of everyday life of Chinese migrants, focusing on issues of gender, generations, and kinship relationships. These perspectives, delivered through powerful cinematography and evocative first-hand interviews, defy the widespread popular accounts of short-term, strategic interests of Chinese people and businesses in which Chinese entrepreneurs displace Zambian workers, commodities, and markets in search of their own profits.
Simbao’s research highlights other cinematographic analyses of China–Africa relations, including short, artistic films that analyze experiences of Africans in China. A trilogy of films—Sino (2010), Metro (2011), and Cosmo (forthcoming) by the South African filmmaker Lebogang Rasethaba—portrays experiences of Africans living in China. Importantly, Rasethaba’s contributions underscore the varied experiences and perspectives of Africans in China and highlight the tensions in relations among Africans as they discover differences and disagreements in their views of Chinese and China. The film Sun by Hu Xiangqian (2008), also discussed by Simbao, also addresses issues of race and identity in southern China. The film depicts a Chinese man who, in solidarity with a new network of African friends in Guangzhou, sunbathes intensively to darken his skin and analyzes Chinese reactions to his dark-complexioned identity. Other films abound and will undoubtedly continue to emerge as Chinese and African directors, producers, and actors use their medium to address the deepening ties among individuals, communities, and nations.Footnote 11
Other media—still photography, installation and performance art, music and sound performances—offer creative canvasses on which artists work out their experiences and expressions of relations between China and Africa. Of the many artistic works that Simbao highlights, several examples showcase the diversity of artists’ views and approaches. The South African photographer Michael MacGarry composed a scene of layered costumes, masks, and identities entitled “The Master,” inviting viewers to question the interconnected interests, identities, and voices among figures as seemingly discrete as an African gardener, the façade of Chinese leadership, and the camouflage of the American military. The Chinese performance artist Hua Jiming performed “Walking into Africa in a Chinese Way” in the central business district of Cape Town. As described by Simbao, Hua walked through the commercial zone wearing a suit that he fashioned out of newspapers from Beijing and Cape Town, calling attention to the “costuming” of China–Africa relations by media portrayals. In a provocative expression of migration patterns throughout the world, the South African sound performer James Webb records the calls of birds endemic in one region of the world and “performs” the recordings in other regions that are outside of the birds’ natural ranges. His recordings depict through sound a foreigner that migrates far from its native environment, carves out territory, and attracts mates by means of its calls. In his sound installation in Johannesburg, “There’s No Place Like Home,” Webb “plays with South Africans’ fears that have grown out of stereotypes about Nigerians and Chinese[,]...playing on the fact that Chinese and Nigerian people are today notorious for moving with global flows” (Simbao Reference Simbao2012:5). While many of these artists produce, present, and perform their work independently, arts exchanges between African and Chinese artists are also emerging. For example, through the Chenshia Art Foundation founded by the art collector Chen Dabing, South African and Chinese artists have traveled to each other’s workshops, galleries, and communities, bringing China–Africa engagement into new directions and dimensions.
Research Methods and Challenges
The authors who have contributed to this issue have engaged in ethnographic research in order to understand relationships between Africa and China from a close-up perspective that takes into account both lived experience and historical context. Our contributors have utilized familiar ethnographic methods—for example, fieldwork-based oral in-depth interviews, qualitative questionnaires, and participant observation. For many, this work required multiple visits to sites of research on at least two continents: for example, Haugen did research in Guangzhou and Lagos; Monson visited Tanzania, Zambia, and China; and Park carried out her study in three different southern African countries. This form of qualitative research takes time and resources, and requires facility in more than one linguistic and cultural context. Many of our contributors have spent several years working in the same research sites (Sylvanus, Haugen, and Monson), or have built their current projects upon the foundations of previous scholarly work (Park), allowing for the examination of change over time.
Our contributors have also made use of digital primary sources in their ethnographic investigations, in particular materials such as video (Haugen); online blogs and chatrooms (Rupp); and a broad range of internet Web sites (Park, Sylvanus, Rupp). This form of digital ethnographic research is not the same thing as the more superficial “desktop” surveys that often inform policy documents from think tanks, consultants, and government analysts. Rather, the digitally based research work presented here constitutes a longer-term immersion—even participation—in the diverse global on-line communities that are actively negotiating Africa–China relationships. This combination of site-based field study and digital scholarship allows our work to begin to sharpen the “blunt instrument” of research methodology wielded by scholars who wish to comprehend the dizzying array of what Strauss (this issue, 158) calls the “rapidly deepening, quickly moving relationships” between Chinese and Africans.
In this section of our introduction, we would like to turn our attention not only to the value that ethnographic research has to offer the field of Africa–China studies, but also to the challenges and limitations of this research. We will address the problems related to sources and their interpretation, as well as the sometimes heated debates that come up regarding methodology itself. For there is of course not one “ethnographic method,” but many diverse approaches to research carried out at the level of everyday experiences of individuals and communities. As Haugen shows, a method that may work very well in one situation (oral interviews, for example) may not work so well in another. She found that participant observation was better suited to understanding the experiences of members of African churches in Guangzhou, where direct interviews would have been too sensitive. Not surprisingly, methodological questions have already become a contentious issue among scholars in this growing field.
One of the most well-known examples of this contentiousness is the recent debate over the role of Chinese management in the mines of the Zambian copperbelt; we discuss it here at length to highlight the complex ongoing debates about methods—and their potential implications for scholarship, politics, and representations of “China” and “Africa.” A widely circulated report compiled by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in November 2011 documented labor abuses in Chinese state-owned copper mines in Zambia. The primary methodology used by the HRW research team was in-depth individual interviews, during three field research visits, with miners in four of the Chinese enterprises. This report was criticized heavily by Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, who argued in an essay in Pambazuka News (2011) that the HRW methodology was flawed because it did not provide a broader basis for comparison with working conditions at other mines in Zambia. Singling out the Chinese state-owned mines in order to draw conclusions about “China’s broader role in Africa,” they argued, decontextualized both the history and the present state of violent confrontation in southern African mine labor relations more generally. The core of Sautman and Yan’s critique of the HRW report had to do with the focus of its methodology: by soliciting the views of miners in Chinese state-owned mines but not in mines owned by others, the HRW researchers had painted an inaccurate picture of labor abuses that “perpetuated Western racist stereotypes about China’s ‘neo-colonialist’ expansion in Africa.”
Deborah Bräutigam—who had consulted with the HRW research team on a draft of their report—also weighed in on her blog about this controversy (2011). Her view was that the HRW researcher, Matt Wells, who did the bulk of the Zambian fieldwork, was diligent and careful: “this was not a quick and dirty job.” At the same time, she suggested that both more comparative material and more context would be helpful in a debate which had by then had moved its focus to the question of which global players were the worst in African mine management and away from the specific experiences of the Zambian mine workers. At the heart of this debate were questions about methods: at what level of comparison should in-depth, qualitative ethnographic research be conducted? In what ways should the historical context in a sector like southern African mining be brought into the analysis?Footnote 12 And against which standards should “Chinese” actors in African enterprises be analyzed—by those of a specific industry in the same country, for example, or against the behavior of “Chinese” investors elsewhere, or by some more abstract global criteria?Footnote 13
In our view, the question of scale lies at the heart of the challenge to researchers in this field. There is growing diversity among the multiplicity of actors engaged in deepening relationships among Chinese and Africans, from the level of the individual to the community and the nation-state. Furthermore, the many actors at multiple levels are also becoming increasingly entangled. Thus shoes sold in a Chinese-owned wholesale shop in Dakar may be resold at a Senegalese-operated retail stall along an adjacent sidewalk of the same thoroughfare (Scheld Reference Scheld2003; Giese & Thiel Reference Giese and Thiel2012). The most successful scholarship, as Bräutigam argues, conceptualizes the ways that these diverse levels of human engagement both overlap and interact.
We can therefore consider the scale of China–Africa relations from different levels of observation, levels at which particular social variables come into analytical focus. Thus, if the scale of analysis is at its most narrow, it will highlight relationships among neighbors, friends, spouses, and partners. At the level of the group or community, social variables that come into play include extended kin networks, language, ethnic affiliations, regional loyalties, and religion. At a scale of analysis that allows us to view institutions, salient elements might include social clubs or associations, Confucius Institutes, educational institutions, companies or commercial networks, and professional organizations or unions. National-level perspectives bring into focus civic engagement or ostracism, citizenship and immigration, colonial and postcolonial alliances or tensions, and bilateral relations between nations. And at international or global scales of analysis, relevant variables in China–Africa relations include shifting global frameworks: notions of the “Third World,” developing, or nonaligned nations; the momentum of “rising powers” or “BRIC” nations; and relations that involve blocs such as “South–South,” “East–South,” “Euro-American” and “Afro-Asian” nations.
Meanwhile, the rapid pace of change in these engagements creates a moving target for researchers. Ethnographic fieldwork methods such as participant observation—not to mention the time required for scholarly research to be published—is at odds with the capacity to keep up with and to document this quickly transforming reality. Yet many publications in the field have stood the test of time, precisely because they have understood change over time in some form of what historians call the longue durée. An example of this balance between historical context and contemporary relevance is Yoon Park and Tu Huynh’s research on Chinese in South Africa, which provides historical depth while tracing Chinese experience into the present. Scholars such as Sautman and Yan who have been able to return to the same field sites over a period of years are also able to offer valuable longitudinal perspective. Scholars who published early on in China–Africa studies—for example George Yu, Li Anshan, Deborah Bräutigam, and Jamie Monson—all bring a broader context and historical foundation even when their topics shift.
Even as we go to press with this special ASR Forum, new research areas are emerging that will require sustained and careful analysis. Perhaps most critical are recent media reports of the potential impact on African ecosystems of natural resource concessions acquired by Chinese companies, especially for timber. Trade in protected animals and animal parts, in particular ivory, has increased rapidly over the past decade with Asian markets such as China, the Philippines, and Thailand as documented destinations. Commercial acquisition of land for inedible cash crops such as palm oil and jatropha, or for food crops for export, has propelled the displacement of African subsistence farmers. Other areas of new research interest include piracy off the coast of Somalia and Chinese engagement there (Larik & Weiler Reference Larik, Weiler, Men and Barton2011) and the proliferation in African states of small and light arms, many of which originate in China (Wheeler Reference Wheeler, Men and Barton2011). These emerging areas of China–Africa studies reflect the dynamic, diverse reality of the many layers and issues in both African and Chinese contexts of engagement.
Conclusion
As we conclude this introduction, we would like once again to return to the theme of “China–Africa ” as an organizing concept for scholarly investigation. While acknowledging the limitations of this binary framework for understanding these globally embedded as well as local processes, we have also found it difficult to get away from this overall gloss for thinking about the larger issues that are at stake here. Our most active research network calls itself “Chinese in Africa/Africans in China,” a title that reflects the overlapping actors and locations that orient our scholarly agendas.Footnote 14 Even if the particular details of scholars’ research vary by context, what brings these research agendas together is a shared interest in analyzing relationships between Chinese and African people across space and time.
At the same time, we hope that our contributors have shown that the story of China–Africa is made most meaningful when it is situated in context, informed by the rigorous and grounded methodologies of ethnographic and historical perspectives. In the case of the mining sector investments in southern Africa described above, for example, the past legacy of violence in the mines as well as the history of organized labor movements are part of the context in which the incidents related to Chinese management must be understood. Thus knowledge of the history of southern Africa, not only in the mining sector but also in regard to other historically salient resources such as land, is critical to the analysis. As we embrace China–Africa research we are therefore not arguing for the end of area studies—on the contrary, we believe that the work of our contributors demonstrates that China–Africa engagement is best understood when it is both grounded in and in conversation with area studies knowledge.
How, then, might these studies of Chinese managers in Africa, of African traders in China, and of the ways they find identity and meaning in these transnational engagements contribute to our understanding of Africa? Could it be, as Yan and Sautman have argued, that studies of China–Africa engagements throw broader processes like neoliberalism in Africa into starker relief? The question, therefore, may not be whether “Chinese” actors are better or worse than other actors, but rather how the study of China–Africa entanglements, in all of their complexity and in their multiple, rapidly changing milieus, can lead us to a deeper understanding of the world in which Africans and Chinese currently engage.
For example, African studies scholars have spent a great amount of time recently examining the expansion of Pentecostal churches throughout the continent, seeing these dynamic congregations as sites where multiple forms of power (economic, spiritual, political) coalesce and shift the terrains of collective action and governance. So what happens when this form of worship establishes itself in a large Chinese city like Guangzhou? As Haugen’s work shows us, the church must maintain a significantly diminished public profile in the Chinese context, where the revelation of individual identities can have serious consequences. Yet the church remains an important site of community support and collective identity for its Nigerian congregants. By viewing the Nigerian migrants’ spiritual practice of Pentacostalism in China, Haugen’s work shows that it is transplantable and adaptable, and at the same time accompanied by strategies that affirm connection and belonging. In a global space that is more often depicted as policed through the erection of impenetrable boundaries of surveillance, studies such as this one have revealed strategies of mobility that are characterized by shared moral values.
While each of the contributors to this issue has, like Haugen, taken up a case study of China–Africa engagement and examined it closely, these studies have relevance for our broader understanding of such significant issues as mobility, energy, land, memory, and work. It was Stephanie Rupp’s research on local understandings of energy related to the Jubilee oil fields in Ghana that led her to recognize the complex cultural significance of energy as a form of power, not only in Africa but also in other global settings. Recent research on artistic representation demonstrates the rise of creative works that are not only documenting these existing global interactions but also creating fresh ones as they experiment with new media, unexpected audiences, and creative collaborations. It is our conclusion, therefore, that the nascent and quickly developing field of China–Africa engagement—when it is informed by carefully grounded ethnographic and historical methods—has the potential to enhance our understanding not only of area processes but also of global transformations in Africa, in China, and beyond.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to Julia Strauss, Yoon Jung Park, Heidi Haugen, Tu Huynh, and Solange Chatelard for their thoughtful commentary on earlier versions of this introduction. We would also like to thank Ralph Faulkingham for his gracious invitation to put together this ASR Forum, and to Sean Redding, Mitzi Goheen, and Ella Kusnetz for their assistance at various stages of editing and production.
