By ALEXIS OKEOWOJULY 10, 2014
At an oil-drilling site in Sudan in 2008, a Chinese employee teaches Sudanese workers to read Chinese characters for “Hello China, we are friends.” Credit Hu Qingming/Imaginechina, via Corbis
On a trip to Lusaka, Zambia, last year, I kept chasing an energetic and jittery Chinese man, the only staff member of a Chinese mining company willing to talk to me after his firm had been involved in several scandals in which both Chinese and Zambian employees were either killed or injured on the job. Zambia, with its abundant copper ore deposits, is one of the most important investment destinations for China. His English was excellent, and he liked to talk — and talk. After telling me about how much he loved the country and its people, he sometimes went into a rant about how Zambian miners liked drinking and money too much, and did not like to work hard. It was that mentality, he continued, that had caused his company all its troubles (not the workplace-safety and low-pay grievances of which it was accused). But even though the Zambian government had repossessed his company’s mines, this man wasn’t leaving. He was now working as an interpreter for the government.
I wondered about his family back home, and what they thought of this young man forging his life thousands of miles away. In his extraordinary new book “China’s Second Continent,” Howard W. French delves into the lives of some of the one million-plus Chinese migrants he says are now building careers in Africa. For all the debate about China’s intentions (imperialist or not?) and business practices (corrupt or not?) on the continent, the key piece of the discussion, French argues, has been ignored: the actual lives of those Chinese who have uprooted themselves to settle and work in Africa. Even as China has become the world’s fastest-growing large economy, 10 of the 20 fastest-growing economies between 2013 and 2017 are projected to be in Africa. As French writes, “Bit by bit, these facts have become closely intertwined.” The recent Chinese immigrants are the glue holding them together. And the stories French tells are fascinating.