On the north shore of Victoria Harbour, in Hong Kong’s tumultuous Tsim Tsa Tsui district, lies a rambling — if fairly nondescript — tower block, which jostles for space in the walls of a man-made canyon of buildings. This is Chungking Mansions. Standing across the road to take it in, the diffracted light of LED strips plays off the metal lettering above the entrance. The intersection leads directly onto the steps, which lead onto a bazaar, stretching back interminably. Many people cross in front of the doorway, temporarily framed in passing from one place to another. It seems an unlikely place to begin a story about the experiences of Africans; while much has been written of the African diasporas of the West, little is written about their journeys east.
Chungking is ‘perhaps the most globalized building on earth’ (Mathews & Yang 2012:106). It exemplifies a ‘trans-locality’ (Appadurai 2003) which is implicated in personal and material connections which stretch far from the Pearl River Delta. Having followed the increasing China-to-Africa flow of consumer goods backwards, many African entrepreneurs find themselves here, at this crossroads of the world. This is the ‘low-end’ of globalization (Mathews 2011) which sees global trade playing out on smaller and more informal, personal scales. Under strip lights, mazes of wholesalers, traders and guesthouses cram into these vertical bazaars; as Lingala and Urdu can be heard along with English and Cantonese. Chungking exists in the economic and social ‘hinterland’ (Tarrius 1995); a marginalized space largely separate from the host society, yet once inside, the world is reversed; what felt at first like the edge begins to feel like its centre.
Our story focuses on the trans-local Africans who ‘recur’ here, situating their mobility in cycles of origin and destination, or indeed, somewhere in between, what we might call ‘a liminal space’. Yet it is on the continent of Africa which their stories inevitably begin. Growth has come to Africa, but in messy and informal ways (Dolan & Rajak 2016). Stuck in precarious and informal work, ‘waiting’ for their economic and social lives to begin, many young Africans, especially young men, are looking for ways out. Following the ‘value-chain’ (Lyons et al 2012:872) backwards to the source — the manufacturing hubs of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, with their entrepôte in Hong Kong — becomes one strategy for bringing the promises of globalization home (Bodomo 2010).
Utilizing the networks laid down by more established entrepreneurs, the young men arriving at Africa’s trade frontiers are increasingly savvy, youthful, yet precarious (Castillo 2014:240). These ‘sojourners’ draw on their own wits, the support and guidance of transnational networks and locally-embedded contacts, navigating this land of both opportunities and risks. Indeed, the density and diversity of people from around the world found in ‘clusters’ like Chungking and the Tian Xu Building in Xiaobelu, Guangzhou are no accident. They’re a strategy, for negotiating life on a bubble.
Uncertain notions of fixed-ness and freedom recur in places like these. These ‘global’ buildings of South China are places of recurrence but not rootedness, uncertain futures and conflicting realities. Africans in South China challenge classical notions of mobility and diaspora and takes such ideas to new places. They demonstrate temporary, hybrid formations increasingly disembedded from notions of ‘here’ or ‘there’, existing somewhere in between. Such places could, perhaps, only have sprung up in an increasingly transnational, globalized world, and they speak to the new ways that global forces and (trans)local lives interact.
I / AFRICA: ‘Stuckness’, ‘Waithood’ and Finding a Place in the World
By beginning this story in Africa, we root a story of mobility and movement in its place of origin. This is not a matter of ‘push’ or ‘pull’, it is important to identify both larger, structural influences, and more personal ones that all influence someone’s descision to move. The opening up of African economies and their increasing integration into global markets is well-documented (Campbell & Loxley 2000); Lall 1995), and it is hardly radical to question whether such policies have suceeded. Development has come isomorphically and unevenly (Konadu-Agyemang 2000) and despite the ‘considerable economic growth,’ Africa has experienced, argues Honwana, ‘this has not translated into job creation and greater equity’ (2013:2428). The consequences of such have shaped the lives of Africa’s young people.
Many African youth under such conditions, continues Honwana, ‘are unable to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place as fully-fledged members of society’. This shows the distinct problematic of a social categorization constructed as being between states in society — of adolescence and adulthood(Durham 2008:954). When the predicate rites of passage vanish, it leaves young people ‘stuck’. Sommers focuses on Rwandan youth who, unable to gain formal employment, and thus build a house and start a family, are unable to progress into full ‘adulthood’ (Sommers 2012:197). Masquelier’s details, further, the frustration of Nigerien graduates who, having found no routes of progression after university, ‘feel excluded from the forward-moving time of modern society’ (2013:486). Such examples represent a disconntect between what we believe about youth’s potential and realities. Young people, especially in Africa, are left ‘unable to outgrow their juvenile status and assume the mantle of responsible adulthood’.
Indeed, Honwana explains that this has not stopped young people, especialy men, from migrating to cities in search of opportunity. Yet she explains, ‘their chances of finding employment and stable livelihoods [there] remain very slim’ (2013:2436). Poverty abides even in the ‘engines of growth’ of the continent; South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya (Dolan & Rajak 2016). Sprawling informal slums, such as Kawangware in Nairobi, are characterized by unsteady work and unstable futures (Sommers 2012:197). These places represent a failure of the ‘historical possibilities of modernity’ (Felski 2000:82) which many young people had hoped would help them find their place in the world(Utas 2003).
While global markets and products have certainly penetrated the continent (Zhang 2008, Wonacott 2011), inclusive development has not followed. ‘Two decades of jobless growth across much of sub-Saharan Africa’ have stifled hopes of secure employment (Dolan & Rajak 2016:516). Surrounded by the ephemera of modernity — embodied in commodities (Utas 2003:44) — and bombarded by its myths of success and freedom, people are left doubly ‘stuck’. Ironically, while things move, their immobility is rendered doubly visible (Melly 2011). For some though, opportunities are not absent, if one knows where to look. Materially implicated within globalization, precocious and resourceful African entrepreneurs are searching for a way to ‘make good’ on its promises (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000:308). This is the terrain where a story begins — in the uncomfortably, ambivalently globalized African city, a place of ‘stuckness’, yet opportunity.
II / IN BETWEEN: Things Move, People Stay (or Do They?)
When the global and the local meet, ‘multiple modernities’ emerge (Arce & Long, 2000:19). Modern consumer capitalism has taken on a more informal, DIY look when it comes to African markets(Escobar 2001:170). Despite being priced out of Western consumer markets, Africans are still fundamentally a part of the global consumption network. What’s more, with a drawn-out decline in manufacturing (Zhang 2008), African markets need goods more than ever, just at lower price points than the West can offer. This means seeking commodities from the ‘semi-periphery’ (Mathews 2007:179; Santos 2004:297). With the rising Chinese political-industrial powerhouse now finding a market for its comparatively cheap products (Alden 2005; Zhang 2008) — ‘disorganized capitalism’ ensues (Lash & Urry 1987).
The presence of Chinese goods within African marketplaces has grown exponentially in the past decades — with China-Africa trade growing from US$10 billion in 2002 to US$200 billion in 2012 (Africa.news.cn 2013). This increase has both been enabled by, and enabled further an increasing presence of Chinese traders on the continent (Brautigam 2011). Both these ‘macroeconomic pushes [and] individual microeconomic efforts’ have made China now Africa’s largest trading partner (Castillo 2014:237).
This increasing penetration of Chinese products and companies, I contend, possesses a diffuse cultural power; it shows these links are there, and begins by their presence, to present opportunities. Abranches’ work (2013) recognizes that it is through ‘things’ that we begin to imagine these other places and lives. Objects and technologies contain within them the sense of something, or somewhere else. Such ‘imaginaries’ spread outwards and through networks, making possible — or at least imaginable — new trajectories and opportunities. I take this notion and invert it from the perspective of the receiving country.
To take the example of mobile phones, it is estimated that 1 in 5 of all handsets owned in Africa — in Kenya it may be 80% (Mathews 2011:106) — at some point passed through Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions. It is through such ‘value chains’ (Lyons et al 2012:8) and distribution systems which a piecemeal knowledge of such distant localities spreads, and this adds to already established diaspora networks. These networks of family, friends and aqquaintances in many ethnic groups’ diasporas represent an informal ‘third tier’ of globalization (Karim 1998:3). In Senegal, which has been described as “culture [or nation] of migration” (Willems 2008 in Melly 2011:368), stories of ‘missing men’ and their transnational voyages are embedded within everyday life, creating a ‘hypervisibility’ of migration within the city of Dakar.
Indeed, such discourses are readily available, and present, within the lived experience of many African populations, mobile or otherwise. These mobile stories mix with realities of immobility; Janson’s ethnography of Gambian youth identifies similar groups in waithood to those of Masquelier. One informant, Ahmed, meets daily with other young men to drink tea, dream about a future life in ‘Babylon’ (a term derived from reggae music, referring to the West) and in the meantime wait for things to happen” (Janson 2016:3). While these young people look North, it suffices to say that migration is a discourse which affects as much those who stay as the few who leave.
While a strategy often for a privileged few, information and knowledge of other places; how to get there, who to talk to, what the best way to attain a visa and so on, circulates even amongst those who do not move, firing imaginations (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007:98). As such, the continents’ growing informal cities represent places of ‘mobility productions, specialized in finding new entry points and inventing alternative travel modes” (Schapedonk and Steel 2014:268). Such places as Dakar, Senegal are therefore part of the trajectories which link Africa and China, preparing imaginative mobilities, as well as providing entry points into economic and informational networks that facilitate it.
However, to flesh out more than an simple imaginative link between ‘here’ and ‘there’, a more specific focus, an object of investigation, is needed. Indeed, it’s materiality, in the form of consumer products that forms one of the primary China-Africa linkages, and it is this which we follow. As Gille & Ó’Riain noted of the new complexities of global ethnography, ‘the methodological imperative of being there is replaced by that of chasing things around” (2002:286). Following the goods backwards therefore becomes a strategy for making sense of a spread out and complex trans-local field, as much as it represents a strategy of those we study (Bertoncelo and Bredeloup 2007). It is back to the value-chain that we now turn.
Value Chains and ‘Low-End’ Globalization — the Sino-African flow.
In beginning a journey back along the ‘value chain’ of various producers, distributors and intermediaries, you see flows in both directions and thus mutually implicated places. Links between China and Africa have stretched back millennia, with admiral Zheng He voyaging to the Swahili Coast as far back as the Ming Dynasty (Wei 2014). Nevertheless, the density and diversity of such linkages have exponentially increased in the past 20 years. Herein the concept of global ‘flows’ (Lash & Urry 1994) does not mark out fixed beginnings, or endings. However, while we may conceptualize of the flow as constant, the actors and forces involved are constantly evolving.
This flow of cheap mobile handsets to Africa has largely pre-existed the (relative) increase of African traders in the opposite direction, with Chinese-made shanzhai 山寨 — ‘knock offs’ — finding a lucrative market in African consumers (see Lin 2011:21; Bodomo 2010). Phones and other consumer electronics from Shenzen, along with garments from Guangzhou, cross the Indian Ocean or fly above the continents via Dubai. These enter African markets through networks expanding out from the ports such as Lome or Lagos (see above). Indeed, many of the traders now travelling to South China began retailing Chinese goods in their respective countries, though until recently their wares remained more mobile than them (Abranches 2013).
However more recently many have attempted to turn this one-way flow of goods in from China into an opportunity on their part; cutting out the middleman (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007:94). These traders’ interventions in the supply chain reveal that it is not simply multinational enterprises who globalize the world. When thinking of economic and social ‘flows’, it is important to regard such processes as having ‘their feet on the ground…rooted in the meaningful practices of people, great and small’ (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992:33).
A macro-economic process — the opening up of Chinese production at a time of increasing African consumption — demonstrably plays out on a personal, human scale. I believe this also reflects the economic and social realities of emergent African markets; wherein the informal and innovative ways people do buisness (Dolan & Rajak 2016) have produced distinctive (trans)local interactions with global flows. In effect the DIY, ‘hustle’ economy which characterizes African markets has articulated creatively with the processes of globalization.
This is what Mathews refers to as ‘low-end globalization’ (2011:19–20), which broadly refers to ‘transnational flow of people and goods involving relatively small amounts of capital and informal, sometimes semi-legal or illegal transactions’ (Mathews & Yang 2012:97). Low-end globalization runs alongside or subverts altogether larger commercial flows of goods and capital, diffusing these instead through capillary-like social and economic networks.
Furthemore, while things move and people stay under classical conditions of economic globalization (Abranches 2013), low-end globalization requires someone actualy being there. If this means flying halfway round the world on a tourist visa to stuff one’s case full of knock-off mobile phones, then so be it, there is money to be made.
It is a precarious, messy way to do business; operating at the tight end of profit margins (Lyons et al 2012:881) and margins of the formal economy (and legality). There are legal and financial piftalls aplenty, yet for those coming from an equally unforgiving economic landscape in Africa’s informal economies, ‘low-end’ globalization may represent the only modality at hand (Mathews & Yang 2012). African traders use the options available to them to try and tap into a much larger flow of manufactured goods (Lyons et al 2012:873), and by extension, make good on the promises of the globalized free market (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000:308). ‘Modernity’, after all ‘is what comes from overseas’ (Utas 2003:44) in the minds of many ambitious Africans, and while the West continues to predominate such imaginaries (see Janson 2016; Melly 2011), knowledge of new gaps and emergent opportunities hint eastwards. While Hong Kong has remained until now implicated at a distance, within the imaginary, it is now to there physically, and beyond, that our voyage begins.
III / HONG KONG: Chungking - From the Edge of the World, to its Centre.
It is 11pm on Hong Kong’s Nathan Road, though the onset of night has done little to diminish the city’s buzz. The hum of traffic mixes with the chiming of the crossing signal and the chatter in Cantonese that drifts across the intersection. Slightly back off the pavement, on the steps of Chungking Mansions, a Yoruba man sidles back and forth on the phone, talking animatedly, while a young Pakistani porter leans against the handrail, his eyes scanning the street. All around, the world is moving, only in standing still does it become apparent how you too have been swept along, as if stepping out of the flow of the stream. Out here in the street, we exist still in this ‘invisible global space’ (Huang 2000:395); only in crossing the threshold of Chungking do we enter where such forces ‘sit’ (Escobar 2001).
This ramshackle tower block is a cultural and economic hub; a place to find guesthouses, good egusi or cheap international SIMs. However, it also represents a ‘way in’ to the manufacturing market north in Shenzhen and Guangzhou — either physically or materially via the Pakistani and Mainland Chinese wholesalers in the building (Mathews & Yang 2012). Such spaces ‘anchor’ myriad globally situated networks and provide relatively familiar and accessible fixed points within migrant trajectories (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007; Schapendonk & Steel 2014). As such, they are a surprisingly ‘localized’ point where traders from all over Africa may tap into the global value chains of goods and capital. Given Hong Kong’s visa-free entry — 14 to 90 day visitor visas are issued on arrival — and a nearby and relatively porous border with South China — it represents a perfect ‘entrepôte’. Once here, the (in)famous Chungking Mansions beckons. It offers proximity both of services — guesthouses (which double as visa offices), restaurants and convenience stores — and of business — phone wholesalers, fixers and shippers. This means that a trader arriving off a plane from Dar Es Salaam may be within Chungking and conducting business the day of arrival. Indeed, he may not leave the building during the course of his trip (Mathews & Yang 2012).
The specific spatial configuration of Chungking therefore adds a new way of looking at the concept of transnational connections. Diasporic and inter-personal connections have been widely seen to represent a third tier of inter-regional connections’ (Karim 1998:3) after ‘world organizations, nations’, and I would add, multinational corporations. Such connections are facilitated by globalized communication technologies such as WhatsApp and (relatively) cheap air travel (Mathews & Yang 2012:116), creating mobilities of people and information. However, what makes Chungking unique is the fact that it can be referenced almost exclusively as a point of access not only to Hong Kong, but also into a globalized supply chain.
This clustering of complementary services and business opportunities, in a (relatively) receptive environment facilitates the circulation of transnational traders on a recurrent basis. These conditions thus allow a large floating population of ‘visitors’ — transient traders who circulate high regularly between Hong Kong and their home countries (Mathews & Yang 2012:103). Technologically and socially enabled, this transient mobility associated with ‘low-end’ globalization is ‘distinctly temporary’ (Mathews & Yang 2012:116). This challenges the ‘sedentarist meta-physics’ (Malkki 1992) which assume that mobility is simply the liminal phase between points of settlement or fixed-ness(Schapedonk & Steel 2014). This ‘transmigration’ represents an attempt not to settle in this place, only pass through. The mobile Africans coming to rest here can stand still in the stream for only so long.
Transnational entrepreneurship is ‘the driver for the existence of an African diaspora rather than its by-product” (Lyons et al 2012:872). However, in Chungking at least, it calls into question what we mean when we refer to a ‘diaspora’. Many argue it would be more appropriate to refer to it as a ‘trading post’ (Bredeloup 2012), or ‘trading colonies’ in the style of ancient Greek emporiums (Tarrius 1995). African merchants, who arrive on tourist visas recurrently, conduct their business within a few days and leave back to their home country, leaving a relatively small footprint on Hong Kong due to their predominant circulation within or around Chunking. As such, it is easy to emphasize transience and ‘nomadism’ (Schapedonk & Steel 2014) in such a context. This is a place to do business, while affective notions of home remain firmly rooted in transmigrants’ countries of origin (Zhang 2008); Chungking is no place to make a home in itself, but rather one where the prerequisites to do so may be attained. One trader asserts ‘‘I don’t like it [but] didn’t come here to enjoy myself… Je travaille ici pour revenir chez moi’. (Lyons et al. 2012:883). There is always a pull elsewhere.
Re-entering the street from inside Chungking is a hectic experience. The low rumble of the traffic increases until one reaches the lobby. From within the relative calm and hum of the mansions, the torrent of people and traffic is bracing. Back at the edge of the stream, there is only so long we may stand still until we must step back in. Chungking for a time has represented a relatively stable entrepote to the mainland. However, as Guandong’s Special Economic Zones have grown explosively (Prybyla 1996), more Mainland merchants have appeared in the building (Mathews & Yang 2012:103), undercutting wholesalers and traders alike by moving down the value chain. Diversification, both of one’s products — garments, electronic or mobiles (Zhang 2008) — and position in the value chain, moving from distributor, to trader, fixer or so on, is essential (Lyons et al 2012). It is impossible to sit still at the low end of globalization, and many Africans now have gone north.
IV / GUANGZHOU: The Dragon and the Dream Factory.
The new bullet train speeds through southern Guangdong province. Taking in the landscape of damp pastures and low-rise houses flashing past, it seems strange that only 40 minutes ago was the vertical city of Kowloon. It’s possible to feel almost agoraphobic, leaving the intense but reassuring density of Hong Kong, and a small bit of trepidation, to be now venturing into the mainland proper; about which stories aplenty abide. China has been described by some informants as the ‘wild west’ (Mathews & Yang 2012) of Asia, due in part to the dual economic opportunities and risks present (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007). New arrivals to Guangzhou now follow in the footsteps of their compatriots who came before. Just as in Hong Kong, the growth of the diaspora may be traced in its earliest form to the presence of some ‘big fish’ or ‘anchors’ (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007). It was these merchants who undertook the ‘collective, but perhaps unintended, task of opening trading routes, opportunities, and imaginations for the next generation of African entrepreneurs.’ (Castillo 2014:238).
Not only have these businessmen established an African presence on the mainland, but there they may operate as guides and intermediaries, offering guidance as to where to buy and offer services to ship goods back for less-established traders (Mathews & Yang 2012:111). Without a formal presence, such ‘enclaves’ build up effectively on top of one another, making the diaspora highly relational, and fragile. While Africans may be present here, there is little or no option to formally settle or integrate into the workforce. As such, clusters such as Xiaboleu ‘serve as shelters for new migrants in the host society’ (Zhang 2008:385). Within these, even more ‘low-end’, precarious transnationalisms proliferate.
The petty traders and itinerants arriving in Guangzhou present distinct subjects to those who came here previously. While for the ‘anchors’ — more established businessmen — such trajectories were simply a continuation of their existing transnational economic activity, for an increasing number of young ‘touts’ (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007:100) who have followed since, these transnational voyages represent ‘transformative processes and opportunities for new beginnings’ (Castillo 2014:242). These young men are university-educated, having either completed formal studies in Africa, or potentially dropped out in China, having obtained a student visa (Bertoncelo & Bredeloup 2007:98).
Much like the narratives of Europe and the West have begun to flow backwards towards the continent (Melly 2011), the linkages to China now, as I have mentioned, present a tantalizing opportunity. Castillo describes how bachelor men of increasingly modest means ‘collect funds amongst relatives and friends and set out on a “‘once-in-a-lifetime’… mission to seek their fortunes in China’ (Castillo 2014:240). They may arrive in Guangzhou with little or no real capital, perhaps not even enough for their first night’s stay, but hope to begin working their way up to ‘the big fish’, whos help they initially employ (Lyons et al 2012:880). Indeed, it is here, perhaps, that the parallels between the ‘stuckness’ of life back ‘home’ and the emergent African transnationalisms in Mainland China emerge.
Regarding the phenomenon of ‘failed migration’ in Dakar, Melly has argued that even the attempt to migrate grants ‘social visibility as one who had worked hard, taken risks, and experienced life elsewhere’ (2011:370). The risks are great, and the rewards unclear, but even these ‘suicidal’ migrations. As Huagen argues, this represents at attempt to become unstuck. Yet these failures can create yet more immobility (2012), like quicksand. Indeed, while some may keep enough money in reserve to return home, others are not so lucky, overstaying their visa and being unable to leave due to fear of imprisonment and prohibitively expensive fines (Lyons et al 2012:882). Most of these overstayers ‘live hand-to-mouth and subsist on odd jobs provided by successful merchants.’ (Lyons et al. 2012:880), having to dodge police patrols regularly. As such, a strange presence of recurrence — neither fully established nor wholly transient — has emerged.
V / GUANGZHOU: Xiaobei — The Village on a Lilypad.
An open space in front of the New Denfeng Hotel is where the world converges. Throughout the day, African hawkers mingle with Chinese porters as the space transforms, and by the evening the stalls have given way to grills and plastic chairs (2014:236–238). The Tian Xu Building can be seen from the Dengfeng terrace; the hub of this global village. Lacking domestic clientele to populate the new commercial belt, planners created 外贸村 wai mao cheng or ‘foreign trade towns’, redirecting ‘business from local-oriented into alien-oriented’ (Zhang 2008:390). Coupled with cheap housing in nearby former communist work villages, a niche opened for an African population to establish itself.
Since then, ‘strong’ ties of intra-ethnic and religious affiliation have provided many Africans, such as the Igbo community (Haugen 2012:5) or the Senegalese Muslim Brotherhood, to at least feel somewhat ‘at home’ (Castillo 2014). The Dengfeng scene demonstrates this recurrent African presence. While interaction with the Chinese Han majority is almost impossible, Africans co-exist with the various ethnic minorities migrating from the rural interior who have arrived in Guangzhou. Many Hui act as money changers for African traders, while Uyghurs run halal restaurants and pray with the African Muslims from Senegal, Gambia and elsewhere who ‘recur’ here (ibid).
Xiaobelu is thus ‘a neighbourhood where the local, the translocal, and the transnational converge’ (ibid) and something distinct forms out of the various cultural patinas and recurrences which pass through. Indeed, this speaks to ‘‘alternative imaginations’ of self, place, home, and belonging that alter extant notions of national and cultural identity, ethnicity, and race in twenty-first century Asia.’ (Castillo 2014:235). In this, Xiaobelu and Chungking before it represent what Foucault calls a ‘heterotopia’ (1967) — that is, ‘a place outside of all places’, even though it is a space, an ‘absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about,’ (ibid). Xiaobei is not wholly ‘Chinese’, though it is in China, partly African though not in Africa.
It is this liminality, however, that is threatening.
Despite their novel and ingenious attempts to find a place in a global ecnomic order, African entrepreneurs are all too familiar with the playing field they inhabit, Larger structural forces — global commodity markets, Chinese states and African development — may be accomodated, circumvented or avoided at times, yet more recent developments in Guangzhou have revealed the harsh realities of life at the low end of globalization. Most African traders had been able to find work-arounds concerning the semi-legal or illegal nature of their work. Similarly, in Hong Kong, police patrols are conspicuous entering Chungking, with the labyrinthine structure of the buildings allowing buisness to be hastily finished, and overstayers to be tipped off, to evade capture (Mathews & Yang 2012;108).
While similar strategies had worked up to a point for Xiaobelu’s Africans, provided they stayed in their periphery enclave (and kept bringing in income), times have changed in ‘Africa Town’. The recurrent presence of African diasporas, and the proliferation of less and less established itinerants mean that ‘GZ’ had begun to acquire the unsavoury characteristics of a ‘boom town’, at least in the eyes of the authorities (Luedi 2019).
VI / GUANGZHOU: Goodbye Africa Town — The Ambivalence of the Heterotopia.
In July of 2009, an immigration raid lead to the death of a Nigerian man, who jumped from a second story window in an attempt to avoid deportation or imprisonment. The crackdown had begun in late 2007, when preparations for the Beijing Olympics had lead to harsher entry regulations and stricter checks within China, and was targeted disproportionately at Guangzhou’s African diaspora (Lyons et al 2012). Bodomo, a leading ethnographer, recounts a particularly aggressive spot check by police in a restaurant in 2010, where only Africans in the restaurant were questioned (287). Indeed, it might be seen that the legal-economic niche that Africans had spied here in South China was now closing. Legislation introduced in 2011 — the Guangdong Act, which encouraged citizen reporting of ‘illegals’ — and changes to the Entry-Exit Administration Law in 2013 allowed any police officer to demand papers.
In light of the crackdown, as well as decreasing profit margins for traders (Lyons et al 2012), many of the floating diaspora are interrupting, or ceasing, their recurrent presence here. While opportunities here ‘[made] s the risk worth taking’, now ‘the risk is not worth taking anymore’ (Mathews & Yang 2012:113). Luedi estimates that of the recurrent African population — ranging by estimates from 20,000 to 100,000 at its peak — nearly 90% have now left (2019). It is arguable, however, that many already were aware of their contingent nature in Xiaobelu, and knew ‘that their situation could change at any time’ (Castillo 2014:242). Such formations spring up at specific moments and in strange places, in the gaps and on uncertain footing. To say that a moment such as this is the end is to discount the very flows, transformations and trajectories which constituted Xiaobelu in the first place.
While the hyperdiversity and cultural ‘otherness’ of Xiaobei makes it a threatening entity to the Chinese authorities’ vision of a ‘harmonious’ — or rather, homogenous — society (Wang 2014), this is not the end for the Africans who now leave South China. As Zhang notes, ‘the majority of new arrivals, as pragmatic players in the global economy’, thus came not as demand-driven professionals but supply-driven entrepreneurs (2008:384). African traders have thus followed the things once more. Eyes now turn to the expanding ‘market of the world’ in Yiwu, central China, and the increasing economic opportunities, but also a more receptive environment for foreigners emerging there (2010). Another nice, new opportunities. For the time being, Yiwu is managing its new ‘floating’ population quite amicably, though many will be under no illusions that times may change.
AFTERWORD / HONG KONG.
What we see, again and again, is how the strange, unpredictable forces of globalization, far from destroying our world’s complexity and diversity, create new ways of life and opportunities, as well as strange and fleeting ‘places’. These temporal spaces of Chungking and Xiaobei, far from being the threatening, subversive, spaces which dominant political discourses would frame them as, offer something of a hopeful vision for our globalized future.
As our world becomes globalized not just economically, but physically and globally, we will all of us have to operate in such ‘heterotopias’ — places that are innately somewhere, everywhere and nowhere. Mobility is now a fact of our age, and developmental and environmental factors seem certain to further necessitate it. Indeed, in rehabilitating McLuhan’s concept of the global village (1997) in the 21st century, I believe that the world will come to us not in hegemonic forces, but in the varied and human actors of people from all corners of the world, each with their own story, hopes, and fears.
The sun is going down over Victoria Harbour. Cardboard collectors are wheeling their carts back down side alleys, as the slanting rays of the sun illuminate the canyon of Nathan Road. The steps in front of Chungking are empty, no doubt most people have gone inside for an evening meal, or to sleep off their jetlag. A junk is sailing out of the harbour, and I become aware that I have been waiting for some time. Finally, it is time to leave.