Victims and Victimizers: A Microhistory of Chinese Settlers in Africa
Abstract
When it comes to the current Sino-African relationship, the question often asked is
if China is a neo-colonial force in Africa or not. This question elides the complexity
of collaboration, negotiation and exploitation. What I try to achieve in this essay
is to shift the scale from a macro (nation to continent) model to that of a micro
level by analyzing how Chinese laborers (in both state and private sectors) and the
narratives they construct, offer a much more complex interactions between microhistory
and China’s inroad into Africa.
In the first chapter, I borrow Miriam Driessen’s description, tasting bitterness,
or in my words, enduring hardships, to demonstrate the struggles Chinese workers face
in the construction sector where criticism of China’s land-grabbing and resource-gathering
in Ethiopia is most visible.1 Through interviews with managers and workers of RCE,2
a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise (SOE), I observe that the Chinese companies’ exploitive
labor practices in Ethiopia often brought lawsuits to the companies and made the Chinese
laborers endure hardships in Africa.
Building on Chapter One’s theme of enduring hardships, in Chapter Two, I then analyze
four individual actors in agriculture who are independent of the Chinese state’s project
in Africa. The goal is to examine if they share experiences during their stay in Africa
that are similar to Chapter One’s migrant workers in the state sector. I first examine
the migration intentions of individual migrants using Edwin Kangyang Lin’s small pond
migration theory. I then turn to Driessen’s tasting bitterness again to complement
Lin’s analysis of migration intentions and use her concept to shed light on the migrants’
commitment to enduring hardships. Based on the microhistory of Chinese diaspora in
Africa, I argue that the current Chinese migration to Africa is an unintended consequence
of the rise of China in the world system and that these settlers are both victimizers
and victims of this fast-changing circumstance. My project complicates and disrupts
the oft-cited West vs. China dichotomy that obfuscates the everyday struggles and
survivals of the Chinese diaspora in Africa.
Type
Capstone projectDepartment
Graduate Liberal StudiesPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20696Citation
Luk, Shingho (2020). Victims and Victimizers: A Microhistory of Chinese Settlers in Africa. Capstone project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/20696.Collections
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