New China-in-Zambia masters theses in Amsterdam

Sarah Hardus and Roos Apotheker have recently completed masters theses respectively on perceptions of Chinese aid in Zambia and on practices corporate social responsibility in the new Zambian mining landscape. Hardus’ thesis will soon be available as a MqVU working paper, while Apotheker’s can be downloaded here.

Both theses have an ethnographic component, and Hardus was able to speak to a wide range of actors, from ex-presidential candidate Michael Sata to officials at the Chinese embassy, resulting in some fascinating quotes that paint a picture quite different from previous research on Zambia.

Yet another China in Africa book

Oh no… Amsterdam University Press has published yet another China in Africa book, The New Presence of China in Africa. The book is being launched at the International Institute of Social Studies in the Hague at 4 pm on 16 September.

According to the blurb, the book concludes

that China is in Africa for its own interests: selling Chinese products, assuring its supply of oil and other raw materials and enhancing its status as superpower. Interesting enough, most Africans appreciate China’s presence which they consider to be additional and an alternative for their dependency on Europa and the US.

Yeah.

I hope this really is the last book with this kind of title.

China Newsweek cover story on Africans in China

A month after the clash between Nigerians and the police in Canton (see my 17 July post), the cover story of the curent (17 August) China Newsweek (中国新闻周刊, no relation to Newsweek) is entitled “Does China need an immigration bureau?” Of the series of articles, three are about the background of the clash in Canton. Although it notes that Africans are blamed by locals and police for a rise in crime and drug use, the tone of the articles is generally sympathetic or neutral; the authors talk about stereotypes on both sides.

The articles say that Africans increasingly avoid going out in order not to run into police checks. But one case the authors describe of a man who, like the one who died, jumped out of the window to avoid being caught, was not deported, his earnings were not confiscated, and his medical treatment was paid by the police.

The report says that there are officially 20 thousand African residents in Canton, but that many Africans’ visas and even passports have expired. Some African interviewees  say that this is not a crime, and it seems that while the city authorities have since 2005 conducted several campaigns to ferret out and deport such people, they do not treat it as quite serious a crime as their European or American counterparts do. In fact, the protest by African traders in front of the local police precinct had to do with indignation over their lack of legal papers, suggesting that these “illegals” have not been deprived of their voice to the same extent as in Europe.

Researchers and police officials interviewed (in private capacity, as officially police refused to comment on the topic) by the authors offer views that are strikingly similar to those about Chinese traders in Europe: they are illegal, they all look alike, they spread diseases (although AIDS is particularly associated with Africans). But the reporting is less strident than mainstream European media tend to be, and at least partly along the lines of “Chinese people need to learn to live with foreigners.”

The latest on the Baoding Villages

Today at the International Convention of Asia Scholars in Daejeon there was a panel on “Exporting China’s Development.” Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman presented a paper on their fieldwork at the Chambishi copper mine in Zambia, which I had much anticipated. In response to a question, they told me that they thought the Baoding Villages were a total hoax. Yan Hairong has visited Baoding and interviewed Liu Jianjun (the self-styled founder), and he repeated his story, but refused to share any contacts in Africa. In the ten African countries Yan and Sautman visited, no one has heard about Baoding villages.

Li Guangyi, a PhD student at UCLA, came to the same conclusion in his presentation. But he affirmed that the East Africa Trade Development Zone does exist, and Ugandan officials gave a press conference in Peking about it. The 518 square kilometers and the 99-year lease seem to be right, although it is less clear whether the legislative rights, the Chinese policing and judiciary structures will exist, or indeed if the zone has any investors. Liu Jianjun and the other main investors were, apparently, adamant that residents and workers of the zone will have to obey its rules, giving the specific example that three (sic) prayers a day for Muslims will not be allowed as they disrupt production. A flag of the zone has been circulating on the Internet, very similar to Hong Kong, with five red stars at the centre.

Li also discussed the reactions to this on Tianya. According to him, some expressed suspicions that this too was a hoax. Others wrote that China should be more equitable and fair in its dealings with Africa and not repeat Western colonialism and brutality. But most expressed satisfaction about the Chinese “concession,” saying it demonstrated that Chinese civilization has stood up again.

“Buying mines in Africa” and the question of China’s “soft power”

About a year ago, an interesting post “Buying mines in Africa— so that you know how difficult it is for China to obtain overseas resources [非洲买矿记 (让你知道中国海外获取资源何其难！)]” was published on Tianya by a poster named “sheishi sheifei renpingshue 谁是谁非任评说”.

This poster “sheishi” claimed to be an heir of a famous mining family in China. Together with “world famous noble families” in the mining business, his delegation went to an unidentified country in Africa shortly after China’s president Hu Jingtao’s official visit in Africa in early 2007. (Other posters of the thread later suggested that the destination was South Africa). They hoped to be able to purchase an iron ore mine, and to invest in a processing factory to smelt high quality iron, which is a highly desired resource in China.

The purpose of posting this thread on Tianya, according to “sheishi”, was to help people to gain a deeper understanding of how difficult it is for China to exercise its “soft power” at a global scale, to genuinely connect with international trade protocols, and how unrealistic it is for China to purchase natural resources for strategic reserve [zhanlue chubei] with its abundant foreign exchange reserve.

The whole negotiation process of this deal was fascinating. “Sheishi” described how their African partners at first spent a great amount of time and money “entertaining” Chinese investors with banquets, sightseeing, charity activities and the like, to consume some days off their planned negotiation itinerary. (“Sheishi” wrote that Africans were quite savvy with the technique of hospitality [zhaodai] that the Chinese were so familiar with. It was quite a killer technique that even his team could not resist the power and art of reception.) This kind of unplanned delay had certainly added tension and anxiety in the later days of negotiation as the team had to rush through hundreds of pages of legal documents and contracts written in English.

As “Sheishi” and his team began to pay full attention to the details of contracts and conditions, they realised with great astonishment that what they originally thought to be a winning deal turned out to be a ‘trap’ that could cost them millions of dollars.

First, there is a “trap” in the contracts:

The iron ore mine was unbelievably cheap, but the cost of the proposed processing factory was unreasonably high. This was a puzzle that the Chinese delegation could not understand. After a careful examination of the iron ore sample that the Africans provided, the Chinese soon discovered that this iron ore mine was in fact a titanium-iron ore mine. Titanium is expensive in the international market, but this is not what China desires (China has abundant titanium reserve but not iron). The Chinese then realised that the processing factory would be used to extract titanium for the Africans rather than to smelt iron for the Chinese (hence the added cost). After the extraction of titanium, iron ore would be transported to China as ‘waste’ (therefore cheap). But this would become a sensitive issue: under this particular context, because iron ore would enter China as “waste”, the China Customs would not allow “imported trash” [yang laji] to enter the Chinese border. Eventually Chinese investors would be the ones to suffer serious consequences: if they would not be able to transport the iron ore into China, they had to shoulder additional costs to refill these “waste” back into the mine for environmental purposes. This cost would be hefty and if the local authorities find the effort unsatisfactory, they wouldn’t be able to obtain another permit in mining.

Second, there is a lack of knowledge in the legal procedures:

When “Sheishi” and his team consulted African local lawyers who practiced mining laws (whose hourly rate varied from $2,000 to $10,000), it occurred to them that Africa had already established quite a sophisticated legal system since the colonial era concerning the mining industry. In comparison, the mining law in China lagged far behind and all the legal consultants in the Chinese delegation lacked sufficient professional literacy in understanding all the legal frameworks regarding the mining law, lest finding any potential pitfalls that might put Chinese investors in a disadvantageous position.

Prior to the negotiation, the Chinese legal consultants prepared seven contracts that contained a few dozen pages of relevant documents. They soon realised that this kind of contract was far too simplistic and porous. In Africa, the mining law concerns not only the property rights of the mines, but also the right of land use, the right to use the underground areas of the mine, the right to use adjacent land (e.g. to obtain consent issued by users/owners of adjacent land), and strict environmental conditions (e.g. pollution control, underground water protection, waste management, etc). The seemingly sufficient legal documents in the Chinese mining industry turned out to be completely vulnerable or even useless in the African context.

Third, there is a lack of institutional care and support:

One overseas Chinese [huaqiao] told “sheishi” and the team that this particular African city was a dangerous place for the Chinese, because apparently the Chinese were the darlings of kidnappers. Chinese were known for their habit of bringing large amount of cash; they did not carry guns; and more importantly, the Chinese government / embassy wouldn’t intervene if the Chinese were robbed or kidnapped. (Local Africans were poor men and there was little to gain by robbing them; kidnapping white men would be unwise because it usually escalated into serious cases—international pressure would be placed on the local authorities, and extra forces would be used to rescue the victim, therefore the stakes were to high to kidnap a white man.) The local overseas Chinese claimed that if a Chinese were to be kidnapped or even murdered, the embassy would hardly exert any effort to issue even a diplomatic note.

Facing these three significant challenges, “sheishi” and his team cancelled their original plan and returned to China. In reflection, he commented on the kind of dilemma that Chinese private (or state-owned) enterprises are facing in relation to obtaining resources overseas.

The first dilemma is the lack of support. “Sheishi” claimed that Africa is the ‘playground for adventurers’ [maoxianjia de leyuan]; but without the security support of the state, even these adventurers would not dare to play in this foreign land. It is common to see the U.S. putting international pressure on other countries just for one citizen, and its army announcing wars overseas for their citizens…

But what do their citizens do? They are developing and exploiting  resources in foreign countries. The state is hiding outside in the whole process and everything seems to flow smoothly under the term of market exchange. Whereas in China, a private enterprise like ours can not dream to be protected by the state army.

If we are a state-owned enterprise, that’s a different issue—the state and the army will intervene but then it has become a political issue altogether; that’s why in Africa people talk about China’s neo-colonialism now. What we need is private enterprise doing business following the local rules and regulations: just like the Americans, the Europeans. They are private companies, and we are private companies as well. We are all part of the market economy and therefore the anti-Chinese forces can not point fingers at the Chinese state. What we need is ‘fair play’, but this ‘fair play’ has to be supported by the state from behind.

The Chinese state is not helpful not only in terms of the lack of security support, but also in terms of the restrictive foreign exchange control scheme [waihui guanzhi]. Because of this scheme, it is extremely difficult for private Chinese business to invest in foreign countries. Although buying mines falls under the investment scheme that the state supports, there still are strict evaluation and verification processes—unless the investors are state-owned enterprises. Without any affiliation with the state, or a foreign identity, investment has to be done in the form of trade or some other ways. “Sheishi” expressed his frustration and said that sometimes it seems that the Chinese government wants to push everybody out of the country!

The second dilemma is the lack of knowledge. When “Sheishi” returned to China, he could not find even one expert in African mining law. He said:

According to the (African) local rules, if you ask the lawyer a question, by law he has to answer this question truthfully—he will be fully responsible if he gives inaccurate answers or information. But if you do not ask, he does not have the obligation to remind you of such information. Now the problem is we can not even ask any questions, how can we begin to talk about doing projects? China knows so little of the outside world. We do not have our own expert. How can we not be cheated? It takes many years of education to make an expert and we don’t even know how to educate people. Therefore it is truly difficult for China to expand its “soft power” in the world.

“Sheishi” pointed out that the fundamental challenge that China faces now is truly the lack of soft power. His idea of what constitutes soft power is a bit different from Joseph Nye’s original notion. He claimed that:

Over the years our country has increased  its foreign exchange reserve significantly. But with the rapid economic development, we are facing a severe challenge: resource shortage. To invest elsewhere for resources has now become a popular voice in China, as if with money one can buy anything possible. But with my experience in Africa, my deepest realisation is China’s lack of soft power overseas. One can not rely simply on money to solve problems. Without any expertise in foreign laws, or the thorough understanding of the international mining industry regulation and rules, our money will be only cheated; without the state military power as a firm buttress, one’s personal and business security will not be guaranteed—how can one dare to buy anything without certain security support? Money is easy to accumulate, but the kind of soft power that enables profitable business overseas is difficult to attain. That is why China now owns so much foreign exchange reserve, but little has been spent to purchase resources or raw materials outside of China—we are still paying a high price to import the processed products. Until now, China has only been successful in takeovers of small mines or tailings, but not large-scale mining sites.

It is easy for Chinese scholars to give suggestion on how China should spend foreign exchange reserve on resources, but in reality this is a tremendous undertaking that China is not yet fully equipped to carry out. Many are flushed with optimism of China’s ‘rise’, or the expansion of China’s ‘soft power’ in terms of economic and cultural influences; few actually realise the weaknesses within China’s development plans and its international ambitions.

Nigerians clash with police in Canton

On this blog we tend to write about the link between Chinese migration and development projects, but there is also migration from poorer countries to China: brides from North Korea, Vietnam, and Burma, entertainers and businessmen from Central Asia, and traders from Africa. This is an underresearched subject, but there are at least two ongoing research projects on the African trading community in China: by Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong in Hong Kong, and by Michal Lyons and Alison Brown in England.

A few days ago, Chinese media reported that about 300 Africans clashed with police at a police station in Canton. They were protesting the restrictions police sweeps on foreigners ahead of the 1 October anniversary celebrations of the 60s anniversary of the founding of the PRC, which combined with visa restrictions introduced ahead of the Olympics (resulting in African citizens being unable to get PRC visas in Hong Kong) meant that many traders became not only illegal migrants but also subject to deportation. In particular, the demonstrators were incensed about the death of a Nigerian, described as an illegal money changer, who fell from a building while trying to escape a police raid. According to the report, authorities in Canton are concerned because the man was a Muslim, and his death came just after the clashes between Uyghurs and Hans in Urumqi (also reportedly triggered by the death of two Uyghur Muslims in a fight in Guangdong).

There are several remarkable aspects about this report. First, the fact that it was allowed to appear: this probably reflects growing government confidence that readers would side with the police against ethnic groups they see as troublemakers (Tibetans, Uyghurs, Africans).

Second, even though the tightening of checks on foreigners ahead of the celebrations seems appeared to target political dissenters (say, human rights of Falungong activists), it was in fact used for an entirely different purpose, one that was much more in line with the practices of Western states. The report alleged that although officially Canton has 20 thousand African (mostly Nigerian, Ghanaian, Cameroonian and Liberian) residents, unofficial estimates are as high as 200 thousand, the population grows by 30-40% every year, and the two trading centers where Africans concentrated have been identified by police as areas of drug dealing. Such reports associating Africans with crime and illegal immigration are very similar to the portrayal of Chinese traders in Eastern European and African media, and having to hide from police sweeps is a familiar experience for businesspeople in Eastern Europe’s Chinese markets. In other words, what first appeared to be a party-state crackdown on dissent turned out to be more a “security” measure that victimizes economically or culturally undesirable foreigners from poor countries and makes China look more, rather than less, like the West.

Third, the fear that the conflict may escalate because the victim was Muslim is again similar to paranoid reactions of Western governments, but also shows sensitivity to the possible repercussions of the incident for China in Muslim countries. Indeed, as our Jakarta correspondent Johanes Herlijanto reports, while China has gone a long way bolstering its image as a source of Islam-friendly modernization in Indonesia, demonstrations were planned in front of the Chinese embassy today to protest the government’s treatment of Uyghurs. (They were cancelled after the firebombing of the Ritz-Carlton and the Marriott this morning.)

Clashes with Africans are not an entirely new phenomenon in China. In 1989, Chinese students in Nanjing demonstrated in protest against Africans students’ alleged harassment of Chinese girls in an incident that, according to some, was one of the triggers of the protests that later went down in history as the democracy movement.

Exporting China’s Development: panel at ICAS

Several of this blog’s contributors are involved in the panel “Exporting China’s Development to Africa and Southeast Asia: Aid, Investment, Migration” at the upcoming International Convention of Asia Scholars in Daejeon, Korea, on 6 August. The aim of the panel is to bring together people who have done grounded research on the subject in these two regions.

The preliminary programme of the conference is now available here. Scroll down to find the panel.

Call for papers: Chinese in Africa/Africans in China, Johannesburg, 26-29 August 2009

Shortly after the International Convention of Asia Scholars in Taejon in early August, at which some of us will host a panel on ethnographic approaches to China’s development export, the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China International Research Working Group will organise its second mini-conference. Here is an excerpt from the call for papers:

Chinese people have become targets of increasing anti-Chinese sentiment, especially led by opposition political parties and civil society groups for different ends. In South Africa, perceptions that those who look Chinese carry on them large sums of cash appear to have resulted in a sort of racial profiling by South Africa’s criminal element as well as state patrols, exposing these individuals to robbery, blackmail, and personal violence. In spite of events and statistics being disclosed by researchers in the field, newspapers in Namibia, Zambia, and South Africa continue to under-report such political and social tensions while they remain critical of China’s seemingly unequal engagement with African nations and over-report the numbers of Chinese in these countries.

Simultaneously, African traders and other entrepreneurial business people have been making their way to China in increasing numbers over the last few years.  They are bypassing Chinese traders acting as middlemen in Africa and going directly to wholesalers as well as producers/manufacturers in China.  Over the years, some of these Africans have settled in Guangdong and other coastal provinces, and their numbers continue to grow. However, very little is also known about these transient and settler communities that are bridging the continents through exchange of goods and money, but also through dispersal of cultural knowledge.  

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 June 2009. Full papers must be received by 31 July 2009. Abstracts and queries should be directed to Yoon Jung Park at yoon@tiscali.co.za or +27 83 348 9241.

Madagascar coup worries Chinese investor

The Canton-based Yangcheng Wanbao 羊城晚报 reports that Hui Chi Ming 许智明, chairman of the board and shareholder of Sunpec, is concerned concerned about stability in Madagascar, where there has been a military coup this week. Sunpec is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, and according to the website, it is mainly active in distributing petrochemical products. Hui, who was born on the mainland, is also, according to the company website, a member of the

National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, [...] standing member of All China Federation of Industry & Commerce, honorable [i.e. honorary] president of Beijing Federation of Industry & Commerce, president of Hong Kong Association of International Investment [etc]. He has been awarded the Humanity & Peace Promotion Award (推動人類和平進步獎) by the United Nations and accredited as Top Ten Poverty Alleviation Contributor (全國十大扶貧狀元) by the government of the PRC. In honor of Dr. Hui’s contributions to humanity, the International Minor Planet Nomenclature Committee permanently named the minor planet no. 5390 the “Hui, Chi-Ming Planet”.

Sunpec’s board members, including Hui, appear to have lots of Russian connections (honorary doctorates and medals, including from the Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Moscow, an outfit I am familiar with).

Sunpec owns four oilfields in Madagascar, which, according to the article, makes Hui is the first Chinese national to hold a 100% stake in an overseas oilfield.  He is also the controlling shareholder of Madagascar’s second-largest bank, the Madagascar Industry and Trade Bank (this is a translation of the Chinese 马达加斯加工商银行), and Madagascar’s honorary consul in Hong Kong. In the article, Hui describes himself as a friend of both the deposed president, Marc Ravalomanana, and the opposition leader, Andry Rajoelina, and says he had tried to mediate between the two parties (Ravalomanana told him that “his bottom line was the presidential palace”). Although the Antananarivo office of Sunpec’s local venture, Madagascar Energy International, has been looted during the protests, Hui reassured readers that his bank’s headquarters were being guarded by twenty military police.

Sunpec’s fields have not yet started production. Chinese investment in Madagascar has grown rapidly under Ravalomanana’s pro-business presidency. The article notes that Chinese aid to Madagascar has totaled 500 million yuan, most of it since 2006.

A review of China Returns to Africa

In the last three years, I reckon there have been at least half a dozen publications with titles like this. Still, China Returns to Africa (Chris Alden, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, eds.; Columbia University Press, 2008) somehow marks a new stage in the academic preoccupation with the topic: it has been published by a major university press and its chapters are of a more even quality than those of previous similar collections (Chris Alden’s small but very well written singly authored book China in Africa is another matter). This book focuses on analysis, not on uncovering yet more empirical evidence of China’s presence in Africa. At the same time, it continues to reflect a relative paucity of ethnographic studies to date: of the 19 chapters, only four can be said to be ethnographic, those on Chinese shopkeepers in Namibia (by Gregor Dobler) and Cape Verde (by Joergen Carling and Heidi Oestboe Haugen), Chinese doctors in Tanzania (by Elizabeth Hsu) and on Tanzanian workers’ memories of building the Tazara railway in the ’70s (by Jamie Monson).  Although these chapters are based on earlier research,  the follow-up is interesting: in Cape Verde, locals are still enthusiastic about the Chinese, whom more consider to be contributing to development than Europeans; but in Namibia, where Dobler earlier reported positive attitudes, anti-Chinese sentiments are on the rise despite (or perhaps because) restrictive immigration measures. It is noteworthy, too, that none of these ethnographies concern today’s large infrastructure and agriculture projects.

The editors note that since the “China in Africa” craze began a couple of years ago, China’s Africa policy has already shifted:

It moved beyond its primary focus on resource acquisition into areas like financial services and an expansion of acticity related to agriculture. It attempted to build islands of Chinese investment in the form of Economic Cooperation Zones in selected African countries; and it modified its conventional investment packages to include greater emphasis on social and community outreach (22).

Inevitably considering the length of the production process, this book does not yet reflect these shifts, which clearly present an even greater need for ethnography.

I found several of the chapters on politics interesting, for example the one by Ana Cristina Alves on China’s use of Macau and its membership in an organisation of Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) countries to further its diplomacy in Africa or Roland Marchal’s on the French view of Chinese-African relations. But I think the book’s most important achievement is that it drives home forcefully the kind of nuanced perspective that its editors have represented. Soares de Oliveira argues, for example, that the appearance of Chinese oil industry is likely to have detrimental effects for Africa, but that this is because of the track record of oil industry in Africa rather than because of China’s specificity. Christopher Clapham, too, cautions against exaggerating the exceptionalism of China, pointing out that many African leaders are so happy to welcome Chinese investment not because of a new model it provides, but precisely because “it fits so neatly into the familiar patterns of rentier statehood,”  in the same way as support from European patrons did in the recent past.

Chris Alden’s and Cristopher Clapham’s concluding, conceptual chapters are among the strongest in the book. Alden discusses the “possibility of Chinese imperialism” and concludes that this might arise if, in the future, Chinese involvement moves “away from seeking … spheres of influence based essentially on trade to the need to capture markets … by gaining territorial control,” as evidenced by the planned five Special Economic Zones (of which the one in Zambia has been completed and the ones in Mauritius and Benin are due to open soon). However, he  points out that in the case of Western imperialism, “one of the overriding arguments for territorial control” has been the presence of “salvation merchants’”, an impulse that is lacking from China today (as JJ argued in the previous post). I think that Alden may be underestimating the discursive power of the Chinese civilizing mission, as well as the popularity (on the Chinese Internet, at least) of calls to copy current or former Western practices such as backing the presence of state enterprises by a military presence. Alden’s chapter, “Africa without Europeans,” concludes with the perhaps premature but gripping observation  that the ascent of the “Pacific century” can be best seen in the Asia–Africa relationship, where

a ‘brave new world’ is emerging in which Europe and the United States are merely bystanders. This impotence is felt perhaps most acutely by Western NGOs, in some ways the contemporary version of imperialism’s salvation merchants, for whom the loss of influence over African lives is deeply troubling.

Unfortunately, the “Chinese” contribution to the volume, by He Wenping of the CASS Institute for African and West Asian Studies, remains in the time-honoured position of “the native informant,” presenting as it does “the Chinese perspective”. Nonetheless, if one is to believe those who claim that her institute plays a growing if modest role in the formulation of government policy, it is noteworthy that she calls for the promulgation of a Law on Overseas Investment with appropriate social and environmental guidelines. This would fit into the current trend, though whether it will actually make a difference is not certain. He also argues for a greater involvement of private Chinese enterprises in aid projects.