Book: China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
Author: Howard French
Review: Trevor Williams, managing editor, Global Atlanta
During a recent trip to Panama, I was struggling to communicate in Spanish my need for a mobile SIM card to a shop owner. Frustrated and desperate, I decided to try out Chinese. Given his ethnicity, I thought it’d be worth a shot. I walked out with exactly what I needed — plus an added boost in confidence knowing that my three years of college Chinese counted for something.
Over and over, in Panama, Brazil, Ghana, Japan and elsewhere, I’ve found this hard-earned skill to be extremely useful. That’s because wherever you go (and wherever there is money to be made) chances are you will find the leading footprints of one of the world’s great entrepreneurial cultures.
That premise undergirds China’s Second Continent, Howard French’s look at how an estimated million Chinese are making their presence felt in Africa. Eschewing the certitudes of an exhaustive research study, French dives into African countries like Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone and others to capture the firsthand flavor that academic papers often lack. Still, in the gripping and personal descriptions of the ambitious Chinese migrants who have uprooted themselves to pursue wealth and opportunity in Africa, French manages to weave in observations that reflect a wealth of reporting connections built through extensive travel and years as a New York Times correspondent both in Shanghai and Central and West Africa.
As a journalist who has taken the same conversational tack with interviewees in many countries, I enjoyed his approach to a complex and polarizing issue I’ve written about only on the surface. It always seems to me that two competing narratives have taken root in what has become a proxy economic battlefield between China and the U.S.: Western countries seek to cast China as new imperialist, extracting Africa’s wealth with no regard for its governance and future. China sees itself as a fellow developing country, partnering for mutual prosperity, employing thousands without pesky strings attached to its trade, investments and loans. The murky truth must lie somewhere in between.
No author or study can hope to fully encapsulate such a historic tug of war, and I believe French does well to contextualize the conversation and let those in the thick of it sound off, offering his own honest thoughts along the way.
In a sweeping series of interviews and profiles featuring a Henanese farmer dreaming of an agricultural empire in Mozambique, a Zambian copper factory owner, Chinese traders in Namibia, along with many African officials, a flood of important lessons emerge, not least of which is the fact that the Chinese settlers can simultaneously be willing to entrench themselves in a local economy, even learning local languages, while maintaining a deep sense of ethnocentrism that manifests as racism against the “blacks” they employ or do business with.
But the central question driving the book is how much bearing China’s political ambitions had on the personal aspirations of those Chinese who have (for the most part) voluntarily moved halfway across the world.
The answer? Some, but this is far from the whole story. This “haphazard empire,” as French ends up calling it, seems fueled by a peculiar combination of Chinese fatalism and African opportunity. The Chinese wear their stories of sacrifice — “eating bitterness” as they say — as badges of honor, but there’s a pervasive sense in many interviews that should their country fix its own glaring problems, there wouldn’t be the same driving need to become a homesick pioneer playing a bit part in the newest drama of African development — even one that can make you rich. Reading this narrative, I was reminded of some of the themes in “Age of Ambition”, another brilliant China book I’d read the earlier in the year, as well as some of my own experiences seeing how Chinese friends deal with the tensions of their society.
China’s Second Continent reads with the descriptive flow of a travel narrative but carries the benefit of hard-nosed reporting. The cast of characters introduced on both sides is almost unbelievable in its diversity and scope. Anyone interested in China’s position in the modern world or Africa’s newfound emergence from “aid to trade” will benefit from this engaging read.
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