China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa - Softcover

French, Howard W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307946657 ISBN 13: 9780307946652

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Notable Book 

Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable future.


One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign Affairs

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Howard W. French wrote from Africa for The Washington Post and The New York Times. At the Times, he was bureau chief in Latin America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan, and China. He is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club awards and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. The author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa and co-author of Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone, among other national publications. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

After days of coordinating with me over patchy cell phone connections, Hao Shengli arrived in Mozambique's capital city of Maputo. He'd come to load up on supplies and to collect me for the long ride back to the farmland he owned in a remote southern part of the country.

            When his white Toyota pickup stopped in front of my hotel, Hao was barking into his phone. He was in a hurry, and he was angry. There was a brisk handshake, followed by a lot more shouting in salty Chinese as he struggled to make himself understood by a countryman from whom, I could grasp, he wanted to buy goods.

            "China is a big fucking mess with all of its “fucking dialects,” Hao said to me in English after hanging up.

            As' I stood there, already sweating in the midmorning heat, Hao began to train his abuse on John, his tall and sinewy Mozambican driver, who had been coolly smoking a cigarette while rearranging the supplies on the Toyota's flatbed to make room for my bags.

            "You, cabeça não bom, motherfucker," he said. The final curse came in Chinese: he'd employed three languages in one short and brutal sentence.

            Having overheard me speaking Spanish to the driver and assumed it to be Portuguese, he pleaded with me to help him translate. "Could you please explain to this motherfucker where we need to go? We've got to get out of here. We need to be on the road."
 
            For more than a decade, the Chinese government has invested hugely in Africa. The foundation for this partnership was laid in 1996, when President Jiang Zemin proposed the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in a speech at the Organization of African Unity headquarters in Addis Ababa. Four years later, FOCAC convened triumphantly for the first time, gathering leaders from forty-four African countries in Beijing. China pledged, among other things, to double assistant to the continent, create a $5 billion African development fund, cancel outstanding debt, build new facilities to house the OAU (later replaced by the African Union), create "trade and. economic zones" around the continent, build thirty hospitals and a hundred rural schools, and train 15,000 African professionals. Fitch Ratings estimated that China's Export-Import Bank extended $67.2 billion in loans to sub-Saharan African countries between 2001 and 2010-$12.5 billion more than the World Bank.

            Although there are no official figures, evidence suggests that at least a million private Chinese citizens have arrived on African soil since 2001, many entirely of their own initiative, not by way of any state plan. This "human factor" has done as much as any government action to shape China's image in Africa and condition its tics to the continent. By the time I met Hao, in early 2011, merchants in Malawi, Namibia, Senegal, and Tanzania were protesting the influx of Chinese traders. In the gold-producing regions of southern Ghana, government officials were expelling Chinese wildcat miners. And in Zambia, where recent Chinese arrivals had established themselves in almost every lucrative sector of the economy, their presence had become a contentious issue in national elections.
 
            As we left the capital, we passed the new national stadium, nearing completion by Chinese work crews at the edge of town. Built to support the country's bid to host the 2013 continent-wide Africa Cup of Nations, it was a showcase gift from the Chinese government, intended as a statement of generosity and solidarity. China has become an avid practitioner of this kind of prestige-project diplomacy. I asked Hao whether a $65 million stadium was the best sort of gift for Mozambique, one of the ten poorest countries in the world.

            "Chinese government projects in Mozambique have all failed," he said. "That's because the Chinese ganbu [bureaucrats] don't know how to communicate on the same level with the blacks." He shook .his head and wagged a stubby index finger excitedly.

            I asked him about his early days in the country. A prior attempt to do business overseas, in Dubai, had gone bad. Chinese agricultural experts there who had been on African aid missions planted a very powerful idea in his mind: Go to Africa, where you can acquire good land cheaply. He had flown to Maputo alone, and no one had greeted him at the airport. "I didn't understand a fucking word that was being said to me." On his own, he made his way into town and found a flophouse. Making little headway-he spoke neither Portuguese nor English- he soon gave in to the temptation to call up some fellow Chinese he had found online while still in China.
           
"I thought if I met a few people I could distract myself a bit, learn about the situation from them, and then figure out how to get some land. But I quickly discovered that not all Chinese people are your friends. The Chinese folks here, or at least a portion of them, a big portion of them, are really bad characters. They arc looking for a way to get hold of your money. Yeah, they'll do any thing for you, but they won't do anything for free. It’s all about money."
         
  Hao had naively loaned money to various Chinese people he met who seemed to have fallen on hard times and offered to help guide him. A few months later, having been burned by several such encounters, he left for the countryside, following the very route we were taking northward.
           
When he reached the southern part of Inhambane province, he said, he contacted the provincial government about acquiring land, and they directed him to local officials. He found some who were receptive, and he set about ingratiating himself by helping on road and bridge-repair projects.
           
"I took charge of the work all by myself," he said proudly. ''In the end, 1 was able to secure a piece of land."
           
Hao had scored big, but before long there were other things to worry about. He hadn't thought much about the people who lived on the land or controlled it before he came along, or even who his neighbors were. After a period of warm enough hospitality, people from nearby villages began to ask him how he had gotten the land and to demand compensation, with some of them, claiming the area was an ancestral holding.
           
"The local people are really not friendly. They arc peasants, and they resent the idea that the government took their land and gave it to us. They have no land for themselves. They're not comfortable. They are working for us, and they arc not comfortable with it. In fact, the Mozambique government has given us land, but it's not forever. After a few years, once we've put the land to good use, perhaps they will take another tack and try to reclaim it from us. But we've got our own ideas. We're also making plans."
           
The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307946657
• ISBN 13: 9780307946652
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland