Feeling at home in the “Chocolate City”: an exploration of place-making practices and structures of belonging amongst Africans in Guangzhou

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the shifts brought about by the emergence of Asia as a key player in global capitalism have led to countless Africans opting for Asian destinations as part of their trade and migration strategies. The implications of the constant ebb and flow of African entrepreneurs in Southern China and the transnational trajectories, connections, and practices they enable have been relatively understudied. This article focuses on place-making practices and structures of belonging surrounding those Africans living in (and circulating through) Guangzhou. Drawing on my fieldwork, I locate possibilities for place-making and belonging within transnational multiethnic microcommunities and highlight practices that have emerged from the assembling of transnational and translocal flows in residential clusters, community organisations, and religious congregations. I contend that the presence and intermingling of diverse transient subjects (both African and Chinese) nurtures “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.

Keywords:

• “Africans in Guangzhou”
• “place-making”
• belonging
• transnational
• migration

Notes

1. Mostly phones, motorcycles, garments, steel products and machinery carried out predominantly by individual exporters.

2. Time and again I have been asked about what kind of low-paid labour are Africans undertaking in China. There seems to be a lingering assumption about Africans attempting to become blue-collar or farm workers. In a conference last year, a Korean academic of migration was adamant in suggesting that Africans were working in the fields of China, growing food, and displacing Chinese from low-paid jobs. This is far from reality. In all my years in China, I have never meet one single African looking for a job growing vegetables. Actually, one of my Sudanese contacts here once told me: “the future is in the Chinese economy, we Africans all come to do business here, and we bring a lot of money and expertise in trading. Americans my age, on the other hand, come to China to teach English to children. Who do you think will profit more from China's rise?”

3. Although these “subeconomies” often have strong ethnic affiliations, I do not define them as strictly “ethnic economies” as I conceptualise them as operating within multiethnic assemblages on translocal and transnational scales—and not only within one ethnic identity registry.

4. African students demonstrated in the streets of Beijing in mid-1986 against what they saw as an “oppressive environment” and “unfriendly people” (Snow 1989).

Additional information

Author's biography

Roberto Castillo is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Roberto is originally from Mexico but has been living, working and researching in the Asian region since 2006. Besides Cultural Studies, his training is in Journalism, International Relations, Political Science and History. Since 2009, when he was working as an editor for Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, he became highly interested in the increasing presence of foreigners in China and their transnational connections. In 2010, while on a Master's degree in The University of Sydney, Roberto started doing cultural research about Africans in Guangzhou. He also administers a website dedicated to the wider field of Africans in China at www.africansinchina.net.