Pushed to Africa: emigration and social change in China

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the dynamics of recent labour migration from China to Africa through the prism of migrant narratives. Drawing on field research in Ethiopia and China the author links migrants’ motives for, and experiences of, migration to social transformation in China: most notably a shift away from the flurry of optimism and idealism to a mood of careful conformism fuelled by a prevailing yearning for a sense of security and a fear of ‘missing out’ in a competition for resources. Migrants expressed being ‘pushed’ to Africa. Their attitudes stand in relief to the dreams about ‘making it’ that have propelled many Chinese to the West. By examining how these migrants imagine time and space, displacement and emplacement, the author sheds light on the distinct characteristics of Chinese migration to Africa, as well as on the relationship between emigration and social change.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• migration
• social change
• displacement
• security

Acknowledgements

I presented a first draft of this essay at the conference ‘Labor, Capital, and South-South Development: Emergent Polycentrism in the Global Economy’, held at the ILR School at Cornell University on 9 and 10 October 2015. I am grateful to the conference organisers Sarosh Kuruvilla, Ching Kwan Lee and Eli Friedman as well as the audience for their thoughtful engagement. I also want to thank Catherine Hardie for her keen insights, the two anonymous reviewers of JEMS, and Xiang Biao, who has been a dedicated and inspiring mentor to me over the past years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ethiopia is one of the major African recipients of Chinese investment in the infrastructure sector (following Angola, Sudan and Nigeria). The majority of Chinese infrastructure projects in Ethiopia and other African countries have been carried out by large SOEs. These companies, and their smaller state-owned and private subcontractors, have been at the forefront of the new wave of Chinese migration to Africa that took off in the early 2000s; accompanied by a flow of individual migrant entrepreneurs. At the time of research, skilled and semiskilled workers from China involved in infrastructure construction made up the largest Chinese immigrant group in Ethiopia. Their number is estimated to lie between 5000 and 10,000 (Gebre in Adem 2012, 147). The flow of Chinese to Ethiopia, and Africa in general, has however diversified in the past few years, in terms of migrants' socio-economic and educational background as well as the occupations and the activities they pursue in Africa. Narratives of Chinese migrants who have received substantial higher education, foster entrepreneurial ambitions, or have moved to Africa out of curiosity or interest are very different from the workers I discuss in this paper. Their move to Africa is an ‘active’ rather than a ‘passive’ one.

2. The concept of ‘moderately prosperous (or affluent) society’ (xiaokang shehui) was first mentioned by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s as a target for national economic growth and development.