amazing how the phenomena and reaction are similar anywhere
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New Power in Africa
Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa
Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times
A Malawian and a Chinese man working in a Chinese restaurant in Lilongwe, Malawi.
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Published: August 18, 2007
LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left
home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian
Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better
living overseas.
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Benedicte Kurzen for The New York Times
Workers gathering bricks to expand Malawi’s largest ice cream factory, which is Chinese-owned.
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The New York Times
Chinese businesses thrive in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital.
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What set him apart was his
destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the
United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the
hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in
southern Africa.
“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25,
“I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream
would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and
friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s
capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped
his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.
Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five
years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the
continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had
been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at
least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on
the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China
and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with
less than $10 million a generation earlier.
Even when Mr. Yang
arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering
another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in
the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of
Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small
factories to health care clinics and trading companies.
During
the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s,
an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity,
European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the
continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence
felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built
stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor
by hand.
Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese
emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage
parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines
can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily
dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working
international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in
heavily guarded enclaves.
At first, this new Chinese exodus was
driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news
back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many
economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer
countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await
builders and investors.
Conditions like these often deter Western
investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s
emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and
accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African
customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them
more affordable than their Western counterparts.
Chinese Expansion
You
Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China,
this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup
company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I
come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My
brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact,
they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move
to Africa, too.”
Mr. You said he had considered other African
countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I
didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been
frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.
His
new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible
gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an
affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity
supplies are erratic and prices high.
Mr. You’s partner here, Mei
Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built
textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he
has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without
seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era
now. There’s a flight to China every day.”
The pickup in air
traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese
companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and
big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.
Much of
that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral
resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese
companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors
as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is
building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in
Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost
everywhere.
One of the largest road builders, China Road and
Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an
earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese
government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.
On
a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming
with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other
companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and
debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in
places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.
Africans view the influx
of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in
Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are
bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and
investors.
“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese
in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s
Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the
economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring
their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”
In
Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several
years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said
that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as
investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for
already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and
T-shirts.
“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but
they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff
Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in
Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap
prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid
paying tax.”
Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped
in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed
separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the
continent has produced few serious incidents.
Misunderstandings
are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many
countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are
either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to
have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university
student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the
Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own
people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”
Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.
In
Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies,
the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a
communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and
receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.
“After a day
off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,”
said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in
Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several
years of work here.
African Ambivalence
Sometimes,
the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African
workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared
as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed
at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was
set to begin.
“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are
doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch
of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are
unbelievable.”
When the salesman finally left the room, members
of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their
disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us
again,” one said.
After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang
Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his
workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did
you sleep last night?”
One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.
“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”
Howard
W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and
Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
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