China–Africa Exports: Governance Through Mobility and Sojourning

Abstract

A centre for Asian and intercontinental immigration and export-oriented production, the city of Guangzhou is at the forefront of China's extroversion. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines informal governance mechanisms that coordinate the circulation of goods and capital between China and Africa. The question to be addressed is: What roles do mobility and sojourning play in governing trade relations? The analysis is informed by research from three fields: economics scholarship on the trade-migration nexus, ethnographic studies of informal transborder trade, and historical accounts of long-distance trade in precolonial and colonial eras. These traditions point to different interlinkages between the mobility of people and goods. China's exports to Africa have increased in tandem with the number of visitations by African itinerant traders. The empirical discussion demonstrates that the emergence of intercontinental movements of goods and people between Mainland China and Africa was predicated on the brokering role played by African sojourners in Guangzhou. Of particular importance was informal hospitality and logistics infrastructure set up byAfricans in the late 1990s, which has subsequently evolved and adapted to new circumstances. This infrastructure has facilitated the mobility of people and goods and increased the pace at which trading capital circulates.

Bridging through “women’s work”: African women and men chasing the rise of China

“…Haugen (2019, 301) estimates that there were 16,000 in 2014 and 10,344 in 2017. In all of these estimates, traders are said to constitute the majority (Bodomo 2010(Bodomo , 2018Castillo 2015;Haugen 2019).…”

Adverse articulation: Third countries in China–Australia student migration during COVID-19

“…Human geographers have been particularly concerned with how various mobilities interconnect. For example, studies of just-in-time production analyze the logistics of assembling parts sourced from hundreds of places (Sadler, 1994), and trade research documents the interdependencies between migration and commercial flows (Haugen, 2019). In these cases, different mobilities mutually reinforce each other.…”

The Political Economy of Border Checkpoints in Shadow Exchanges

“…On the other, trading activities can be formal and informal, as well as legal and illegal, at the same time, making bipolar categories problematic (Galemba 2008). As Haugen (2019) shows in her article on intercontinental trade between China and Africa, traders in southern China's Guangzhou have mixed ways of moving goods to Africa by making use of formal channels including container shipments, air cargo, courier service, groupage (where people/companies consolidate their goods for shipment to reduce costs) and informal arrangements such as suitcase carriage, as well as grey practices such as buying and selling of luggage allowances via logistic brokers. Such transnational trade thus transcends the formal/informal category.…”

“…From the outset, different types of mobility are interlinked. As Haugen (2019) argues in this issue, the settlement of some African sojourners in China enables the mobility of others (particularly the itinerant traders), by serving as go-betweens to bridge the domestic and the transnational trading networks. Equally intriguing is that itinerant traders also circulate capital and goods when they commute between China and Africa.…”

“…Shadow exchanges adapt to particularistic governance mechanisms and proliferate under collaborative schemes. The cases studied span shadow exchanges across internal borders in southern China (Hung and Ngo 2019) to exchanges along the Cambodia-Vietnam frontier (Mahanty 2019), Thailand-Laos checkpoints (Elsing 2019) and the China-Pakistan border (Rippa 2019), to transregional exchanges in Central Asia (Karrar 2019) and to transcontinental exchanges between China and Africa (Haugen 2019).…”