African Transnational Mobility in China

Africans on the Move

Roberto Castillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367482268
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000338133
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Considering the African presence in China from an ethnographic and cultural studies perspective, this book offers a new way to theorise contemporary and future forms of transnational mobilities while expanding our understandings around the transformations happening in both China and Africa. The author develops an original argument and new theoretical insights about the significance of the African presence in Guangzhou, and presents an invaluable case study for understanding particular modes of transnational mobility. More broadly, it challenges forms of (re)presenting and producing knowledge about subjects on the move; and it transforms existing theorisations and critical understandings of mobility and its shaping power. Through an ethnographic approach, the book brings us closer to a number of practices, features and objects that, while characterising the lives of Africans in Guangzhou, are also evidence of the interplay between individual aspirations, and the structural constraints embedded in contemporary regimes of transnational mobility. Raising critical questions about ways of (un)belonging in the precarious settings of neoliberal modernity and the future of African mobilities, this book will be of interest to scholars of transnational, African and Chinese Studies.

1 The emergence of the ‘Chocolate City’

Multiethnic spaces, catering networks, and articulated subeconomies

Looking for the ‘Chocolate City’

In late 2011, without the aid of Google Maps or a smartphone, I conducted a short pre-fieldwork trip to Guangzhou. It was a two-day flyby during which I hoped to establish that the Africans that I had been reading about for the past year and a half were still in the city. Things in China, then and now, change with astonishing speed.

As such, my first objective was to locate what some researchers had called the ‘Chocolate City’ (巧克力城) (Zhang, 2008; Bodomo, 2010). Zhang (2008), along with Li et al. (2008), had conceptualised this ‘city’ as an ‘ethnic enclave’ where scores of Africans lived, according to the Chinese researchers, in relatively high levels of isolation. The only other prominent researcher at that time described the emergence of an ‘African community’ in the area (Bodomo, 2010). Influenced by this research, and by my place-based imagination, I assumed that the ‘Chocolate City’ would be like a ‘Chinatown of Africans’ – maybe a ‘Nigeriatown’, as Osnos (2009) had called it. I also (mistakenly) assumed that it would be easy to find. Guangzhou’s geography is immense and intricate, and in the pre-GPS life from where I started my research, some places were difficult to find. The ‘Chocolate City’ was one of those places.

From my pre-fieldwork investigations, I knew that there were at least two locations with significant African presence in the city: a building in Xiaobei, and a commercial area in Sanyuanli. Lured by the idea of finding the ‘Chocolate City’, I decided to go first to Sanyuanli (after all, a ‘City’ could not be inside a building, I thought). I took Line 2 on the metro to Sanyuanli Station and exited into the bustle of Baiyun District. After asking for directions and walking for a few minutes, I found myself in front of an ornate paifang – traditional village gate. Written from right to left under the awning were the characters 三元里村 – Sanyuanli Village. I’ve made it, I thought. I’m finally here in the place where Africa meets China. This is the place I’ve read all about.

For the next two hours, I walked through the streets of the ‘village’ (which looked more like a run-down neighbourhood) without spotting a single other foreigner. I began spiralling into fears about the possible exodus or disappearance of the ‘African enclave’. My years in China had taught me that the speed of contemporary social, economic, and urban transformations renders all forms of appearances and disappearances possible. And, at that point, it seemed plausible that the ‘African community’ could have left or been dispersed. Maybe it’s too early in the day, or maybe they’ve moved to another neighbourhood, or city, I mused, trying to calm down, before asking several street vendors and restaurant owners about the fate of the Africans who used to live there. Their answers worried me. Time and again, I was told: ‘No Africans here. No Africans have ever lived in Sanyuanli’. Maybe the visa restrictions were tightened and it became impossible for Africans to live here, I thought, descending into a cold sweat about the prospect of having lost my ‘case study’ before even finding it. Bewildered and anxious, I set off in the vague direction of where I imagined my hotel to be.

Before long, I realised I was lost. I bought a map and a bottle of water from a newsstand and searched for the closest metro station, which happened to be Guangzhou Railway Station. Some 40 minutes after buying the map, I had walked halfway there. As I passed through what looked like a dilapidated industrial area, I spotted an African couple. Curiosity got the better of me, and I began following them at just enough of a distance to not draw attention to myself. Not long after that, I found myself at a busy intersection bustling with pedestrians. Hundreds of people were crossing the street and about half of them were African. There were some Middle Eastern- and Indian-looking people (like me), and the rest were Chinese. Suddenly, I had a flashback to the video of the demonstration that I had covered in 2009 while working as a news editor for China.org. I was standing right on the spot where Nigerians had demonstrated against police harassment and racial profiling. As I turned around, I saw the Kuangquan Police Station – the target of the demonstrations. As the streetlights turned green and I got caught up in the moving mass, I could not help but to think that I had finally arrived at one of the main contemporary intersections between African and Chinese civilisations. A shiver ran through my body. The ‘Chocolate City’ could not be far away. I asked a young man standing next to me for the name of the road: ‘this is Guangyuan West Road’, he replied in Mandarin.

Figure 1.1Left: the intersection of Guangyuan West Road and Yaotai West Street (瑶台西街). Right: Kuangquan Police Station on the northwest side of the intersection (photos by author)

That day, I walked through several of the wholesale markets in the vicinity of that intersection. Clothes, shoes, cosmetics, and electronics were pervasive and traded in countless stores. Some of the wholesale markets were run almost entirely by Chinese; some appeared to be mainly African; and a couple were composite spaces in which both Chinese and Africans appeared to own stores. Interestingly, in these composite markets, Chinese occupied the more accessible spaces near the front of the markets, while Africans were generally located in the basements, upper storeys, and rear side spaces.

I spent a couple of hours in one market where most of the shopkeepers were Nigerian. I was offered all manner of tight shirts and jeans, but even after deciding to invest in a couple of shirts, my inquiries about the African presence in the market were met with suspicion. ‘I’ve been here for four years man, but business is not good now’, one clerk told me, somewhat dismissively, after I insisted a few times. There were only a handful of buyers that day, and most shopkeepers seemed anxious.

Eventually, I found myself drinking a cup of awful coffee in the only restaurant in that market: a McDonalds. As I sat by the window, sipped my coffee, and watched the many African men dodging the traffic, I spotted the famous Canaan Market (迦南外贸服装城) on the other side of the road. According to Li et al. (2012), in the early 2000s, Canaan became one of the first wholesale markets catering for African buyers and the site where many pioneering Ghanaians and Nigerians opened their first shops. I could not help thinking about the coincidence (or irony) of that market being called Canaan Market (‘Canaan’ means ‘the promised land’ in the Judeo-Christian tradition), and Africans thinking of China as the ‘new land of opportunities’.

Later that afternoon, I decided to walk down Guangyuan West Road on the way back to my hotel. This made me realise that the whole area was a commercial space – a microcosm of the several transnational trading chains that converge in the city. As I walked, I saw: numerous Africans looking for garments, consumer goods, and mobile digital gadgets; Russians and Eastern Europeans surveying jewellery and shoe markets; Middle Easterners and South Asians looking for domestic appliances, and so forth. Specific types of merchandise (e.g. electronics or garments) were concentrated in each trading cluster, which seemed to cater to the particular needs of traders from different places. Indeed, as I learnt later, the whole commercial-scape of Guangzhou is organised into clusters of trading malls that specialise in meeting market demands originating in multifarious places the world over (Mathews et al. (2017) describe some of these dynamics in their book about foreigners in Guangzhou).

When I finally got back to my hotel room that evening, I was overwhelmed. Not only was I surprised by the countless numbers of foreigners that I had seen, but also by the intensity of the commercial activities. It was clear to me that I had only witnessed a minute sample of what happens in Guangzhou on an everyday basis, but I was awed by the size, multiplicity, and complexity of the transnational connections in the city. Certainly, I knew that there were thousands of foreigners in China (I had learnt that from my years living in the country), and I was familiar with tropes like Guangzhou being the world’s factory, but this was no ‘factory’ at all. It seemed more like a Mecca for transnational and translocal trade – a place of economic pilgrimage where businesspeople, entrepreneurs, producers, and consumers could find everything that they had ever wished for.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: A fleeting encounter
• Introduction: Foreigners in China
• Chapter 1: The emergence of the ‘Chocolate City’: Multiethnic spaces, catering networks, and articulated subeconomies
• Chapter 2: The materialities of transnational movement: Food, hair, fashion, movies, and other ‘things’
• Chapter 3: Placemaking in Guangzhou: Emplacement, transiency, and the ‘politics’ of solidarity
• Chapter 4: Making it on the move: Landscapes of aspiration in Guangzhou’s African music scene
• Chapter 5: Transnational flows: Gendered and racialised imaginaries of Africans in Guangzhou
• Chapter 6: Embedded transnationality: Problematic transnational mobilities, the burden of methodological nationalism
• Postscript: African transnational mobility in post-COVID-19 pandemic Guangzhou
• Appendix: Interviews
• Index