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Chinas second continent how a million migrants are building a new empire in Africa by French, Howard

Book’s Introduction

When China launched its historic opening toward the end of the 1970s, the country and its people not only became the fortunate beneficiaries of astute new policies, but also—crucially—of magnificent timing. The next few years, as they unfolded, would take shape as an era of unprecedented globalization, and no country would profit more from the coming tidal wave of economic change.

 In little more than a decade, China went from being a poor society with an economy that produced few goods for export and imported little, to positioning itself to become the so-called factory of the world, as we recognize it today.

As great as this era of change proved to be for China and for the Chinese, though, globalization was essentially being carried out on other people’s terms, namely those of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

The economic powerhouses of the rich world sought new outlets for their surplus capital, as well as low-wage labor for their enterprises, allowing them to ply eager Western consumers with ever-cheaper goods. And for both of these purposes, China fit the bill better than anyplace else on earth.

Modern globalization’s first great wave has now crested, and is being overtaken by a newer and potentially even more consequential tide.

In this new phase, China has gone from being a vessel to becoming an increasingly transformative actor in its own right. Indeed, it is rapidly emerging as the mo t agent of economic change in broad swaths of the world.

CHINAS SECOND CONTINENT HOW A MILLION MIGRANTS ARE BUILDING A NEW EMPIRE IN AFRICA

Chinese banks, construction companies, and other enterprises in ever growing variety conspicuously roam the planet nowadays in search of outlets for their money and goods, for business and markets, and for the raw materials needed to sustain China’s rapid growth.

As they do so, China is increasingly writing its own rules, and reinventing globalization in its own image, gradually jettisoning many of the norms and conventions used by the United States and Europe throughout their long and hitherto largely unchallenged tutelage of the Third World.

Beijing has achieved this, in part, by engineering a kind of modern-day barter system in which developing countries pay for new railroads, highways, and airports through the guaranteed, long- term supply of hydrocarbons or minerals, thus helping Chinese companies win massive new contracts.

In hundreds of other deals, China’s Export-Import Bank and other big, state-controlled “policy bank” counterparts have teamed up to offer attractive project financing that is usually tied to the use of Chinese companies, Chinese materials, and Chinese workers.

Africa, more than any other place, has been the great stage for these innovations, and the focus of extraordinary Chinese energy as a rising great power casts its gaze far and wide for opportunity, like never before in its history. Sensing that Africa had been cast aside by the West in the wake of the Cold War, Beijing saw the continent as a perfect proving ground for some Chinese companies to cut their teeth in international business.

 It certainly did not hurt that Africa was also the repository of an immense share of global resources— raw materials that were vital both for China’s extraordinary ongoing industrial expansion and for its across-the-board push for national reconstruction.

As a result, Africa has risen high on Beijing’s agenda.

 Indeed, China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, visited the continent in his very first overseas trip as president, and not a year goes by without multiple visits to the continent by several of the country’s top leaders, marking a stark and I believe deliberate contrast with the United States, for which a presidential or even secretary of state’s visit to Africa is an infrequent event. For China, this kind of attention—

what African leaders have called “servicing the relationship”— combined with Beijing’s official largesse, is paying off handsomely.

China’s trade with Africa zoomed to an estimated $200 billion in 2012, a more than twenty-fold increase since the turn of the century, placing it well ahead of the United States or any European country. For a key Chinese industry like construction, meanwhile, African contracts by some estimates now account for nearly a third of its total revenues abroad.

In recent years, developments like these have engendered a lively if often sterile debate about whether China’s growing engagement will fundamentally help rebuild Africa, placing it on a path to prosperity, or will result instead in a rapacious recolonization in all but name.

In most of these debates the conclusions seem largely predetermined, like so many plodding legal briefs:

 in reflexive defense of China, or equally automatic skepticism toward the country and its intentions—cheering for the West and celebrating its values, or full-throated schadenfreude over its every comeuppance.

One of the most important and unpredictable factors in China’s relationship with Africa, however, has been oddly omitted from most of these discussions:

 China’s export, in effect, of large numbers of its own people who are settling in as migrants and long-term residents in far-flung and hitherto unfamiliar parts of the continent.

By common estimate, Africa has received a million or so of these Chinese newcomers in the space of a mere decade, during which time they have rapidly penetrated every conceivable walk of life:

farmers, entrepreneurs building small and medium-sized factories, and practitioners of the full range of trades, doctors, teachers, smugglers, prostitutes.

It is recent immigrants like these to sub- Saharan Africa who serve as the main focus of this book.

I have spent time with them in fifteen countries, large and small, spread widely throughout the continent, and it is above all through their experiences that I have sought to understand China’s burgeoning ties with Africa.

States are in the business of making plans, and it is no different with China in Africa. Official lending from Beijing and big projects completed by big, government-owned companies dominates the

headlines about the advancing Chinese agenda in Africa. But history teaches us that very often reality is more meaningfully shaped by the deeds of countless smaller actors, most of them for all intents and purposes anonymous.

 In this vein, each of China’s new immigrants to Africa is an architect helping to shape this momentous new relationship.

They accomplish this, in part, by helping build networks that loop back to the home country, channeling goods and products and capital via informal circuits that very often escape official control or even accounting.

The historic movement of Chinese to Africa is itself largely driven by word of mouth, by news passed back and forth about a continent that many ordinary Chinese people, even those who reside deep in the hinterland of their country, nowadays speak of in near awe as a place of almost unlimited opportunity.

 Each newcomer to Africa thus has the potential to become a powerful link in a phenomenon of chain migration that draws relatives, acquaintances, girlfriends, and spouses in their wake.

In time, the behavior of these newcomers, the relationships they form with Africans, the way they conduct their business, their respect or lack thereof for the law, for local customs, for the environment, and, above all, for people, will do more to determine China’s image, and perhaps even China’s broad relationship to the continent, than any carefully planned actions by the Beijing government to build state power and reinforce national prestige.

As a journalist, I observed China’s rise from close-up and with fascination, just as I previously witnessed Africa’s evolution. China, as almost everyone knows, is the world’s fastest-growing large economy.

It has tallied 10.2 percent average annual growth over the last two decades, during which time it accounted for 40 percent of global growth. More recently and much less widely appreciated, Africa had also embarked on a phase of stirring growth.

According to the International Monetary Fund, of the twenty countries projected to grow the fastest between 2013 and 2017, ten are located in sub-Saharan Africa. Bit by bit, these facts have become closely intertwined.

In Africa of late, I was struck far more than before by the presence of Chinese migrants nearly everywhere I went:

speaking at length with ordinary street vendors in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, poultry farmers and merchants in Lusaka, Zambia, and wildcat copper miners in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and getting to know them well, has powerfully shaped my sense of China.

In their new lands of adoption, Chinese people frequently spoke to me with unaccustomed openness about their hopes for their country and about its problems and failings. I was struck by how Africa, to so many of them, by contrast, seemed remarkably free, and brimming with opportunity unlike home, which they often described as cramped, grudging, and hypercompetitive. For many of them, Africa also seemed relatively lacking in corruption.

Africa is at a critical juncture of its history. This is an era when a combination of demographics, education, and communication technologies have begun to open up possibilities for a number of African countries to break with their poverty and underdevelopment and rise into the ranks of middle-income countries.

Already, in the last decade, overall growth in Africa has nearly matched that of Asia and based on current trends, it is soon expected to take over the global lead.

Africa’s population is set to double from one billion to two by the middle of this century, placing most of the continent squarely in a zone known as the “demographic dividend,” in which young, working-age people predominate, far outnumbering unproductive dependents, whether young or old.

By the century’s end, demographers predict that Africa’s population could reach a staggering 3.5 billion, making it larger than China and India combined.

Growth and development, of course, are not at all the same thing, and it is a safe bet that only the best-governed countries—in all likelihood mostly emerging democracies—will manage to leverage natural resource wealth and strong population growth in ways that permit a leap to new levels of prosperity.

In many other countries around the continent, greedy and shortsighted political elites will enjoy windfalls from the rising demand for their natural resources, only to squander them; instead of investing sensibly in the training

and employment of their own populations, they will spend heavily on dubious prestige projects like new showcase capitals and gaudy palaces, consuming conspicuously and funnelling money into foreign bank accounts.

As the population of countries like these soars, their cities will become nightmarishly crowded and instability and even state failure will become chronic among many of them, while their underground wealth is being thoroughly depleted and their environments destroyed.

Mid-century will stand out as a sort of twin horizon for Africa when population growth peaks and when known oil and mineral reserves are exhausted in many countries.

Thus, for some of Africa, the continent’s “rediscovery” by China will mirror the lucky timing of China itself a generation ago, when it began its historic opening. Strong new demand and plentiful investment from this big and hungry new partner will fuel growth and dramatically expand opportunities.

 For the less fortunate, though, China and its voracious appetites will merely hasten an already foreseeable demise.

As Ed Brown, a Ghanaian senior executive at one of his country’s leading independent think tanks told me, “This [relationship] is going to determine Africa’s future for the next fifty years. The big question is whether African countries are dynamic enough to take advantage, or whether they’ll end up being the appendage of somebody else all over again.”

My hope here is to shed some understanding on a world being remade through China’s important new relationships with the world’s least developed continue to lift, however modestly, the veil on the future.