Chinese and African Entrepreneurs

Social Impacts of Interpersonal Encounters

Volume Editors: and
This book offers in-depth accounts of encounters between Chinese and African social and economic actors that have been increasing rapidly since the early 2000s. With a clear focus on social changes, be it quotidian behaviour or specific practices, the authors employ multi-disciplinary approaches in analysing the various impacts that the intensifying interaction between Chinese and Africans in their roles as ethnic and cultural others, entrepreneurial migrants, traders, employers, employees etc. have on local developments and transformations within the host societies, be they on the African continent or in China. The dynamics of social change addressed in case studies cover processes of social mobility through migration, adaptation of business practices, changing social norms, consumption patterns, labour relations and mutual perceptions, cultural brokerage, exclusion and inclusion, gendered experiences, and powerful imaginations of China.

Contributors are Karsten Giese, Guive Khan Mohammad, Katy Lam, Ben Lampert, Kelly Si Miao Liang, Laurence Marfaing, Gordon Mathews, Giles Mohan, Amy Niang, Yoon Jung Park, Alena Thiel, Naima Topkiran.

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Karsten Giese, Dr Phil. Modern China Studies (Berlin 1999) is Senior Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies, Hamburg, Germany. Focusing on qualitative research, he has widely published on socio-economic change in China and Chinese spatial mobility, ranging from internal migration to transnational entrepreneurial migration between China and Africa.

Laurence Marfaing, Dr Phil. in History (Hamburg 1990) is a senior researcher at GIGA focusing on mobility, migration, trans-local spaces, sociability, and informal trade in West Africa. She has widely published on Mouride networks and strategies of merchants in West and North Africa since colonial times, and on African traders in China.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors

1 Introduction: From Rejection to Social Change
Karsten Giese, Laurence Marfaing and Alena Thiel

Part 1: Others in Distant Places: Opportunities for Social Mobility


2 Social Mobility of Chinese Migrants in Ghana: The Making of Chinese Entrepreneurs
Katy N. Lam

3 The Impact of Migration of the Chinese Women in Niamey on Gender and Family Relations
Naima Topkiran

4 African Cultural Brokers in South China
Gordon Mathews

5 Early Chinese Migrants in Sub-Saharan Africa: Contract Labourers and Traders
Yoon Jung Park

Part 2: Encounters with the Other, Stimuli for Social Change


6 Grassroots Social Change Triggered by Africa-China Encounters in Urban China
Kelly Si Miao Liang

7 Business Partners and Employers: Chinese Traders as Facilitators of Grassroots Social Innovation in West Africa
Karsten Giese

8 A Transformative Presence? Chinese Migrants as Agents of Change in Ghana and Nigeria
Ben Lampert and Giles Mohan

9 The Chinese Factor in Senegal: Changing Entrepreneurial Dynamics, and Socio-Economic Restructuring
Amy Niang

Part 3: The Products of Others: ‘Made in China’ as Imaginary and Opportunity


10 This “Made in China” that Gets Africa Moving: Chinese Motorcycles and Entrepreneurship in Burkina Faso
Guive Khan-Mohammad

11 “Made in China” and the African “China Dream”: An Alternative to the West?
Laurence Marfaing

12 Cheat Me in the Price, but Not in the Goods: Negotiating Imaginaries of Authenticity in Accra’s China Trade
Alena Thiel

Index
Africa/China scholars; scholars interested in development, migration, trade and consumption, entrepreneurship and globalization; anthropologists, sociologists, geographers; undergraduate and postgraduate students; migration and development practitioners; journalists.
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