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Abstract
In recent years, Chinese spatial markers in Johannesburg have expanded in unpredictable and manifold ways, leaving a more or less visible ‘ethnic’ imprint on the city. Often perceived as different (implicit for ‘oriental’) and enclaved, while underpinned by economic ambitions, these spaces of Chinese capital have none the less become active (yet accidental) participants in the making and shaping of a multifaceted urbanity. In a context that is torn between real development challenges and world-class city ambitions, the recent spatial unfolding of Chinese capital in Johannesburg points towards broader questions about the nature and direction of urban economies, in particular the dynamic interplay between local and global, and between formal and informal. As such, the study of specific Chinese cases – from shopping malls and a Chinatown to a project for a newly built city – offers alternative, differentiated ways to reflect on centrality, modernity and socio-economic development in a stubbornly segregated urban environment.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on research carried out on various Chinese spaces in Johannesburg since 2010. Particular thanks are due to Allan Cochrane, Tanya Zack, Lyn Schumaker, Debby Potts, Ben Lampert, Margot Rubin, Solange Guo Chatelard, Philip Harrison and three anonymous readers, for valuable comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
* This article has been updated slightly since initial publication online. For more information, see Corrigendum 10.1080/03057070.2017.1370306.
1 G. Myers, African Cities (London and New York, Zed Books, 2011), p. 7.
2 See, for instance, S. Croese, ‘1 Million Houses?: Angola’s National Reconstruction and Chinese and Brazilian Engagement’, Strengthening the Civil Society Perspective – Series II: China and Other Emerging Powers in Africa (Cape Town, Emerging Powers in Africa Initiative – Fahamu, 2011), pp. 7–29; D. Bénazéraf, ‘The Construction by Chinese Players of Roads and Housing in Nairobi’, translated by Will Thornely, China Perspectives, 1 (2014), available at http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/6392, retrieved 8 May 2017; Z. Huang and X. Chen, ‘Is China Building Africa?’, European Financial Review (June 2016), available at http://www.europeanfinancialreview.com/?p=6110, retrieved 8 March 2017; C. Gastrow, ‘Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in Luanda, Angola’, Antipode, 49, 2 (2017), pp. 377–96.
3 Among others, see H. Haugen and J. Carling, ‘On the Edge of the Chinese Diaspora: The Surge of Baihuo Business in an African City’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28, 4 (2005), pp. 639–62; P. Harrison, K. Moyo and Y. Yang, ‘Strategy and Tactics: Chinese Immigrants and Diasporic Spaces in Johannesburg, South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 38, 4 (2012), pp. 899–925; B. Lampert and G. Mohan, ‘Sino-African Encounters in Ghana and Nigeria: From Conflict to Conviviality and Mutual Benefit’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 43, 1 (2014), pp. 9–39; L. Marfaing and A. Thiel, ‘Demystifying Chinese Business Strength in Urban Senegal and Ghana: Structural Change and the Performativity of Rumors’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 48, 1 (2014), pp. 405–23.
4 J. Robinson, ‘Postcolonialising Geography: Tactics and Pitfalls’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24, 3 (2003) pp. 273–89; J. Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London and New York, Routledge, 2006); A. Roy, ‘The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory’, Regional Studies, 43, 6 (2009), pp. 819–30; A. Roy and A. Ong (eds), Worlding Cities – Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Malden, Oxford and Chichester, Wiley–Blackwell, 2011).
5 A. Giddens and C. Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998).
6 A. Ong, ‘Introduction – Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global’, in Roy and Ong (eds), Worlding Cities, p. 23.
7 A. Chun, ‘Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity’, Boundary 2, 23, 2 (1996), pp. 111–38.
8 H-F. Hung, ‘Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East–West Differences from 1600 to 1900’, Sociological Theory, 21, 3 (2003), pp. 254–80.
9 In this article, the use of ‘Chinese spaces’ and ‘capital’ is hybrid, referring not only to the factual substance but also to the imagined sphere. As a result, I decided to put ‘Chinese’ in quotation marks in the title to highlight the dual meaning, but refrained from applying it throughout the piece in the interest of readability and flow.
10 As mentioned in the introduction, this article focuses only on the fairly recent, significantly expanded waves of migration. For a complete picture of the diversity and complexity of the Chinese presence in South Africa, see T. Huynh, Y.J. Park and A.Y. Chen, ‘Faces of China: New Chinese Migrants in South Africa, 1980s to Present’, African and Asian Studies, 9, 3 (2010), pp. 286–306. For the earlier migration waves (including spatial patterns), see Y.J. Park, A Matter of Honour: Being Chinese in South Africa (Johannesburg, Jacana Media, 2008) for a more specific focus on the South African-born Chinese, and G. Hart, Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002) with respect to the arrival of Taiwanese industrialists and investments during the apartheid regime.
11 J. Robinson, ‘Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies’, Progress in Human Geography, 40, 1 (2016), p. 12.
12 Huynh, Park and Chen, ‘Faces of China’.
13 R. Dittgen, ‘Of Other Spaces? Hybrid Forms of Chinese Engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 44, 1 (2015), pp. 43–73.
14 This refers to South African-born Chinese, Taiwanese as well as most of the mainland Chinese having arrived up to the early 1990s.
15 D. Accone, ‘Chinatown Chronicles’, in N. Brodie (ed.), The Joburg Book (Johannesburg, Pan Macmillan, 2008), pp. 118–20; Harrison, Moyo and Yang, ‘Strategy and Tactics’.
16 M.P. Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Cambridge, Blackwell, 2001).
17 Zendai Group, ‘Conceptual City Planning and Urban Design for Modderfontein Johannesburg’, master plan, 2014.
18 Roy, ‘The 21st-Century Metropolis’, p. 827.
19 M.J. Murray, City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2011), p. xiii.
20 Ong, ‘Introduction – Worlding Cities’, p. 19.
21 A. Simone, ‘On the Worlding of African Cities’, African Studies Review, 44, 2 (2001), pp. 18, 22.
22 J. Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2006), p. 47.
23 Myers, African Cities, p. 92.
24 Dittgen, ‘Of Other Spaces?’, pp. 58–9.
25 M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 27; cited in Ong, ‘Introduction – Worlding Cities’, pp. 10–11.
26 This, at least, has been a predominant insight from my own research on Chinese wholesalers in Johannesburg (structured around a survey completed by 70 migrant entrepreneurs in 2010, and a number of in-depth interviews over the years). All interviews for this article, unless otherwise stated, were conducted by the author.
27 D. Seamon and J. Sowers, ‘Place and Placelessness, Edward Relph’, in P. Hubbard, R. Kitchen and G. Vallentine (eds), Key Texts in Human Geography (London, Sage, 2008), p. 49.
28 In a context of both real and perceived insecurity, a vehicle that once belonged to a private security company was, in one instance, repurposed into a disguised minibus taxi to facilitate the daily commutes of Chinese workers to the Chinese malls without raising awareness – see M. Huang, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Everyday Aesthetics and Capital in Chinese Johannesburg’, paper presented at a Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities (WISH), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 5 October 2015, pp. 11–12
29 Collective interview (conducted by the author, Philip Harrison and Yan Yang) with Mr Wu, June 2015; individual interview with one of Mr Wu’s associates, September 2012.
30 J. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meaning of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999), pp. 234–54.
31 Ong, ‘Introduction – Worlding Cities’, p. 12.
32 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London, Blackwell, 1991 [1974]), cited in N. Brenner and N. Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”’, Antipode, 34, 3 (2002), p. 354.
33 ‘Development at Sandton is constrained. In the long-term, new space will be needed in other locations’. This point featured on a slide [no. 279] during a PowerPoint presentation by Zendai Atkins to City officials at a final workshop in July 2015.
34 ‘Development Creates Opportunities’, promotional video by Zendai Atkins City Building, available at http://www.heartland.co.za/5_news_atkinscb.php, retrieved 2 August 2015.
35 Brenner and Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”’, p. 355.
36 Roy, ‘The 21st-Century Metropolis’, p. 824.
37 This point was made very clear during several conversations with senior planning officials (series of engagements between mid 2015 and mid 2016).
38 M. Dutton, Streetlife China (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3.
39 J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 34; cited in Robinson, Ordinary Cities, p. 88.
40 Myers, African Cities, p. 165.
41 Dittgen, ‘Of Other Spaces?’.
42 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, p. 90.
43 A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1 (1992), p. 11.
44 Accone, ‘Chinatown Chronicles’, p. 119.
45 From a series of interviews with Chinese businessmen in Cyrildene, on various dates in 2013–2015.
46 City of Johannesburg, ‘Cyrildene Precinct Plan’, City Transformation and Spatial Planning, Johannesburg, (2015).
47 Interview with a senior official from the City of Johannesburg municipality, June 2015.
48 ‘Gauteng state of the province address’, available at http://www.gautengonline.gov.za/Documents/SOPA%202015%20Speech%20booklet.pdf, retrieved 12 June 2015.
49 Z. Shabalala, ‘“New York of Africa” coming soon’, Business News, 6 November 2013, available at http://www.iol.co.za/business/news/new-york-of-africa-coming-soon-1602659, retrieved 3 March 2015; Chinafrica, ‘Investing in Africa’s Future’ (January 2014), pp. 42–4.
50 Zendai Group, ‘Conceptual City Planning and Urban Design for Modderfontein’, p. 3.
51 Ibid.
52 Ong, ‘Introduction – Worlding Cities’, p. 22.
53 A. Roy, ‘Conclusion – Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria, Mass Dreams’, in Roy and Ong (eds), Worlding Cities, p. 322.
54 One of ‘the core objective[s] of the SDF [Spatial Development Framework] 2040 is to “create a spatially just world class African City”’,City of Johannesburg, ‘Spatial Development Framework 2016/17’, City Transformation and Spatial Planning (2016), p. 11.
55 These concerns surrounding Modderfontein allow parallels to be drawn with other examples across southern Africa, not least the Chinese Kilamba City project, located outside Luanda, Angola; they also question ‘the viability of the new urban private sector-driven model’. See A. Cain, ‘African Urban Fantasies: Past Lessons and Emerging Realities’, Environment and Urbanization, 26, 1 (2014), pp. 1–7, for further details.
56 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large – Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 3.
57 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, p. 84.
58 P. Geschiere, B. Meyer and P. Pels (eds), Readings in Modernity in Africa (Woodbridge and Bloomington, James Currey and Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 4.
59 A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001), p. 242.
60 Harrison, Moyo and Yang, ‘Strategy and Tactics’.
61 Chun, ‘Fuck Chineseness’, p. 111.
62 V. Preston and L. Lo, ‘“Asian Theme” Malls in Suburban Toronto: Land Use Conflict in Richmond Hill’, Canadian Geographer, 44, 2 (2000), p. 184.
63 L. Lo, ‘Changing Geography of Toronto’s Chinese Ethnic Economy’, in D.H. Kaplan and W. Li (eds), Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy (Plymouth, Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 89–90.
64 Ong, ‘Introduction – Worlding Cities’, p. 15.
65 Hung, ‘Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories’, p. 274.
66 Economic Freedom Fighters, ‘EFF calls on the competition commission to decline the selling of 1,600 hectares of Gauteng land by AECI to Shanghai Zendai’ (6 November 2013), available at https://www.facebook.com/economicfreedomstruggle/posts/331602293647576, retrieved 25 December 2015.
67 Dittgen, ‘Of Other Spaces?’.
68 Dutton, Streetlife China, p. 8.
69 According to a number of influential Chinese businessmen (interviewed at that time), this event has been interpreted as the culmination of the long-term effort by Chinese associations to gain official acknowledgment of the Chinese presence in South Africa, and, more specifically, in Johannesburg.
70 E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies – The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York, Verso, 1989), p. 80.