Shifting gravity

African diaspora has become integral part of the economic landscape in Guangzhou

Michael is one of the many Africans I know through my research in Guangzhou who has stopped dreaming of a life in Europe. He lived in Belgium and the Netherlands for years, but set his eyes on China after he was forced to return to his native Tanzania. "I worked without papers and had no rights. Here I am a businessman," he says to sum up the difference between being an immigrant in Europe and China.

Media reports from Guangzhou's African communities have often highlighted everyday racism and discrimination. A commonly quoted example is Chinese taxi drivers who refuse to stop for African customers. Michael responds to such incidents with a shrug - they have become too familiar to elicit surprise and anger. Yet he emphasizes that he feels at ease in China, not least because the country granted him a visa and the opportunity to extend it. "It's not like in Europe or America where you are not welcome," he claims. However, members of the large African trading diaspora in China no longer take the country's openness toward foreign travelers for granted.

Like most of the African businesspeople I met in Guangzhou, Michael manages a diverse and flexible portfolio of activities. He buys shoes and clothes for resale back home. He runs a logistics office. During election campaigns in Tanzania, he helps candidates order promotional T-shirts and scarves from Chinese factories. And he serves as a guide for fellow Tanzanians who come to China on short trading trips.

The enterprises operated by traders and brokers like Michael may be small, but their collective contribution to the fast-growing trade between China and Africa has been massive. They helped China overtake the United States as Africa's biggest trading partner in 2009. Last year, exports officially valued at $100 billion found their way from Chinese factory floors to African consumers. The African entrepreneurs in Guangzhou have contributed to shifting the point of gravity in the world economy southwards and eastwards. An increasing amount of global value chains never touches ground in Europe or North America.

These developments present a challenge to researchers who study the global economy. The information we need cannot be gained from the CEOs of large multinational enterprises or in official trade statistics. Formal regulations tell us little about how economic transactions between tens of thousands of small Chinese and African entrepreneurs are governed on the ground.

My focus is therefore on the people behind China-Africa trade. The entrepreneurs have the connections and knowledge needed to navigate between formal and informal systems. By being present while business transactions take place, I learn how they carve out new opportunities in the interstices of the global economy. The research is time-consuming and occasionally frustrating, but also enormously fascinating.

From a bird's eye perspective, the story of China and Africa is one of increasing economic and political integration. However, concern is mounting among the people in Guangzhou whose livelihoods depend on exports to Africa. Many Africans find it increasingly difficult to obtain visas for China. The implications of this on a market highly dependent on trust and face-to-face interaction can hardly be overestimated.

For brokers like Michael, each African client who cancels a trip to China due to visa problems incurs a loss of income from the brokering of deals between traders and Chinese factories. The factories, in turn, lose orders. In a market that is slow due to the global economic downturn and declining demand from customers in Europe and North America, small manufacturers are pushed further toward the edge of bankruptcy.

I am often asked whether China, with its rising production costs, still is an attractive destination for Africans. Some traders have indeed chosen to move elsewhere, for example to Hanoi in Vietnam. Visa policies often weigh more heavily in the migration decisions of African traders than the costs of production and living. Furthermore, there are Africans who initially came to China in search of economic opportunities, but found a home. Through Chinese language skills, friends, spouses and children their ties to the country have become permanent. For them, onward migration is out of the question.

China is known and admired across the world - not least in Africa - for finding its own path towards development through indigenously designed policies. However, Chinese immigration policies have become progressively similar to those of Western countries, especially with last year's reform of the PRC Immigration Administration Law. In Guangzhou, where economic opportunities are intimately linked to visits by foreigners, African traders as well as Chinese manufacturers are among the first to notice the economic effects of an increasingly restrictive immigration regime.

The author is a postdoctoral researcher for the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.

(China Daily Africa Weekly 07/19/2013 page9)