This article examines the relationship between the economic activities of Chinese migrants in the wholesale and retail sector in Lesotho, and the larger structural framework. More specifically, it investigates this relationship with reference to the general debate on Chinese migrants in Africa. These themes locate Chinese migrants at the margins of the economy, assume some Chinese exceptionalism, and imply a kind of neocolonialism. The article demonstrates that Chinese migrants are, in fact, not operating at the margins of the economy, but have become a vital element of Lesotho's wholesale and retail sector. The analysis of the structural framework indicates that the economic activities of Chinese migrants are a reflection of existing structural constraints and opportunities rather than Chinese exceptionalism or neocolonialism. This in turn implies that future research would benefit from placing the interplay of Chinese migrants and the larger structural framework in respective African countries at the centre of analysis.

Traversing from the rapidly urbanising county-level city of Fuqing to the remote mountainous kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, Searching for Sweetness is one of the first and most extensive ethnographies linking rural-to-urban migration in China with Chinese migration to Africa. Against the backdrop of China’s national struggle for modernity and globalisation, Sarah Hanisch examines Chinese migrant women’s complex and ever-shifting struggles for upward social mobility across different generations and localities in China and Lesotho. Embedding the women’s individual portraits into larger historical contexts, Hanisch illustrates how these women interpret and narrate their migratory and everyday experiences through and beyond powerful state meta-narratives on ‘sweetness’ and ‘bitterness’. In her exploration of migratory identities and projects which have been overlooked by previous studies, Hanisch brings uniquely gendered, multi-sited, and intergenerational perspectives to existing scholarship on Chinese internal and international migration.

Chapter 3 expands the focus on internal Chinese migration by investigating the link between individual and family projects, between social mobility and rural-to-urban migration within Fuqing, a county-level city. County-level cities are an administrative invention of the post-Mao era and an overlooked site for migration. My informants referred to their experiences in the city as struggle (fendou). Despite constantly struggling against multiple obstacles, they found personal joy because they all came to understand what they really wanted to achieve.

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