In the upsurge of interest in Africans in China, media and academic approaches are at odds. Media sources may report on the African presence in China because editors and journalists sense that its growth may impinge on Africa–China relations, but exoticism also is a factor. Some sources seem to adopt the Chinese aphorism “he shui bu fan jing shui” (river water and well water do not mix) and posit Africans and Chinese as peoples of incommensurable, if not incompatible, cultures, with the US media especially tending to portray the African experience in China as uniformly negative.
Scholars from a variety of countries and disciplines have produced recent essays on the African presence in China (see, for example, several essays in Li Peilin and Laurence Roulleau-Berger [eds.], China's Internal and International Migration, Routledge, 2012). They have adopted a more nuanced approach than the media and none more so than Adams Bodomo in this pioneering, full-length treatment. He had already published important journal articles on Africans in China, but his book significantly expands on his previous work and is now essential reading for scholars in the field. At the same time, it may go some way toward changing media and popular perspectives, at least among those willing to learn from it.
The great merit of Bodomo's work is that it uses survey research and interviews to look at Africans in China holistically, in order to convey to readers what it is like to be African in China. He emphasizes, however, the highly variegated nature of the African presence. Chapters delineate differences among communities in a half-dozen locales and discuss the spectrum of occupations, educational backgrounds, places of origin, linguistic practices, food cultures and self-identifications among Africans in China. He also uniquely compares African communities in China to several others in Asia and finds key differences.
The book's overarching theme is that Africans in China are an economic bridge between target community, source community and host community, as well as being an incipient cultural bridge through music, food, art and other attractions. That happens, in large measure, because many Africans in China are well educated and enterprising. Yet, Bodomo interestingly shows how non-uniform the African experience has been. What should especially give pause to fashioners of the media representations mentioned above are his chapters on Africans in Guangzhou and Yiwu, the one a huge metropolis and the other a much smaller international trading centre in Zhejiang province.
Guangzhou police and immigration officers have made life difficult for the large, mostly sub-Saharan, African population. In contrast, Yiwu authorities have sought input from the city's smaller, but still substantial, community of business people who mainly originate from North Africa and the Horn of Africa. The result is a relative absence of harassment and the awarding of longer-term visas. The author deduces reasons for this divergence, notably differences in the size and composition of the two cities' African populations. Other factors, on the official Chinese side, may also be at work. The police in Guangzhou, much more so than in Yiwu, have experience of heavy-handed treatment of migrant Chinese workers that they may be transferring to Africans, but not to most other foreigners. Guangzhou is also near Hong Kong and is an entrepot to the mainland for many foreigners from developed countries – it may be for their putative benefit that the local authorities act to suppress the supposedly “chaotic” African influx.
It is likely that one question that specialist readers will raise is the estimates of the size of the African population in China. Bodomo pegs it at 400,000–500,000. Others may produce much lower figures, both as to the major community in Guangzhou, which he thinks has about 100,000, and the grand total. It should be noted, however, that widely disparate population estimates also bedevil students of the Chinese presence in Africa. For example, those knowledgeable about the largest such community, that of South Africa, “guesstimate” it as having from 200,000 to 500,000 more or less long-term residents.
Among Chinese in Africa and Africans in China, high rates of transiency problematize demography and also socio-cultural analysis, as economic sojourners are in a very different position from residents. In South Africa, the vast majority of “new Chinese migrants” aver that they are sojourners, but as the sociologist Yoon Park has noted, not a few years have now passed and those sojourners show no sign of repatriating. Adams Bodomo has observed something of the same phenomenon among Africans: there are now some with decades of experience of living in China and even a few with shorter tenures have become successful. If they are ever allowed to do so, they might well become African Chinese. Some of their stories, as well as those of short-termers, are told and add a dimension that should help draw the book a larger audience, particularly if adopted for teaching.
