“A Brief History of African Presence in China” in “African Community in China”
A Brief History of African Presence in China
Although the African community in China seems to be a quite recent phenomenon, African migrants in fact first appeared in southern China in the second half of the sixteenth century, when pioneer Portuguese navigators arrived and settled in Macao (Morais, 2009, 1–19). Africans were assigned as galleys in the trading ships that sailed from Macao to Portugal’s posts in India and Japan; they were also employed in private households or at Jesuit missions in southern China. Some Africans who came to China as slaves served under Chinese forces or became pirates who ravaged Chinese coasts (Show, 1988, 250).
Despite the abolition of slavery in 1878, African migrants from Mozambique, Guinea and Angola continued to arrive in Macao, where they served in the Portuguese colonial army as soldiers guarding the governor’s palace (Morais, 2009, 5). The Portuguese government kept these African troops in Macao until 1975, when the Portuguese colonial system started to collapse. The African soldiers left the territory to return to their newly independent home countries.
Today there are still reminders of the African presence in Macao in the topology of the city and in the collective imagination of its residents. For instance, the famous tourist attraction Mong Ha Fortress is also known as the “Black Ghost” Fortress because it was converted into barracks for one of the African Portuguese garrisons stationed in Macao. Folk legends have maintained a trace of the presence of African migrants. One legend, for example, tells the story of a priest and a number of African slaves defending Macao from a Dutch attack in the seventeenth century. In particular, the legend highlights the story of an African woman who fought fiercely and bravely (Morais, 2009, 8). Finally, one of the popular gastronomic curiosities of Macao—African chicken—is believed to be one of the traces of the African passage in that region.11
The first African migrants to come to Communist China arrived as students. After the Bandung Conference in 1955 and with the subsequent Chinese political influence in Africa, China began to receive African students at different Beijing institutions.12 There were about 120 Africans studying in China in 1961–1962, most of them originating in Somalia (40 percent) and Cameroon (30 percent), with others coming from Zanzibar, Uganda, Ghana, Congo, Kenya, Chad and Sudan. However, almost all of these students returned home within a year or two due to poor educational and living standards,13 constant political indoctrination, and inadequate social life.
In spite of this, Communist China continued to carry out its educational cooperation and exchange with African states. The Chinese government restored its African scholarships (which had disappeared during the Cultural Revolution) in the late 1970s,14 offering an extensive academic and scholarship program for African students and training programs for African professionals. Since then, the flow of African students has been steadily growing. According to Chinese statistics, between 1950 and 2009 over 29 thousand African students, including several political leaders, received Chinese government scholarships to study in China.15 In the past few years, China has begun to receive self-supporting African students as well.16
Most of these students have since gone back to their home countries, but some stayed in China or moved to Hong Kong, where some are now employed by either international or Chinese companies, while others have set up their own, mainly trade-related, businesses. Thus, these former students have become the first generation of an emerging African community in China. With the RPC’s economic and political development, these communities have been joined by new migrants who came to explore the potential of Hong Kong and emerging Chinese mega-cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai.
These new African migrants, many of whom were traders, often came from other Asian countries such as Thailand or Indonesia. They had been following the routes of precious stones and the gold trade between Africa and Asia in the mid-1980s and rapidly created well-organized international trading networks in order to export Asian textiles to Africa and to supply local and regional markets with African wood and fruits (Bertoncello and Bredeloup, 2009, 56). Once established in Bangkok or Jakarta, African entrepreneurs continued to explore the economic and logistic opportunities of Southeast Asia and thus arrived in Hong Kong. From there they gradually moved closer to the primary production sites—Guangzhou and Yiwu.17
Due to low production costs in China, direct imports leading to lower trading margins, and low opportunity costs for the traders themselves, Chinese commodities were more accessible for African customers than many products traded in more conventional chains of supply. This drew even more African migrants to China, generating new businesses and rapidly changing international commodity flows into Africa. African students and pioneer entrepreneurs who had already settled in China assumed the role of intermediaries, providing new migrants with useful information and basic business connections and greatly facilitating their economic activities and interactions with local Chinese producers and administrators. As a result, a more stable community has appeared with a relatively small core of African students, diplomats, and transnational businessmen who have more or less permanent residence in China. The community also has numerous active members who navigate between China, Africa, and other Asian countries, as well as between different Chinese cities and regions. Their number is rapidly increasing due to the continued arrival of new migrants.
11. The standard recipe for African chicken calls for brushing the chicken with a sauce made of garlic, peppers, white wine and vanilla. After the chicken is baked, the juices are mixed with the sauce and drizzled over the chicken, giving it a zesty, sweet taste.
12. In the 1960s, the PRC provided financial support, equipment and training to a variety of liberation and anti-colonial movements, such as FRELIMO in Mozambique or UNITA in Angola, that were inspired by Maoist theories and revolutionary literature.
13. Poor living standards were a product of the disastrous economic and social policy known as the Great Leap Forward. Launched by Mao Zedong in 1958, this policy was intended to develop Chinese industry and modern agriculture through the process of rapid industrialization and mandatory collectivization. The Great Leap Forward ended in catastrophe—one of the greatest famines in Chinese history with millions of people dying of starvation.
14. During the first years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), most Chinese universities and technical institutes were closed, educational materials were destroyed, and many members of teaching staff were imprisoned; as a result, China had no means to continue its scholarship program for foreign students.
15. China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation, Ministry of Commerce People’s Republic of China, 15 February 2011, available at: http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/subject/minister/lanmua/201102/20110207420901.html
16. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education only 1,390 self-funded African students came to study in Chinese universities in 2005, accounting for just 2 percent of the total 141,087 foreign students in China.
17. The migration of African entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia to China was also caused by the general deterioration of the economic conditions in this part of the world (i.e., the 1997 Asian financial crisis) and by the growth of nationalist and xenophobic sentiments in Indonesia, which greatly disturbed all economic activities led by foreigners in this country.
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