Chinese Commodity Imports in Ghana and Senegal: Demystifying Chinese Business Strength in Urban West Africa

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, independent entrepreneurial migrants from China have been increasingly flocking to Africa in search of "greener pastures." This paper scrutinizes the empirical foundations of the increasingly hostile discourses of African traders regarding the alleged encroachment of the West African urban market space by Chinese petty entrepreneurs. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, we aim to demystify this common allegation by exploring the diversity of influx channels through which Chinese commodities, said to create unfair and existential competition, come to the African continent. Our analysis of trade trajectories shows that Chinese products were coming to Africa long before the arrival of independent Chinese migrants at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Statistical evidence further supports our stance that Chinese entrepreneurs still represent a minority group in the import of "cheap China goods" into Ghana and Senegal.

Chinese Traders in Ghanaian Markets: A Bag of Threat and Opportunities

“…The activities of the majority of these Chinese have been described as independent of the state (Haugen 2011 These actors, referred to as independent Chinese entrepreneurs by Marfaing and Thiel (2011), constitute the fifth stream of Chinese actors in Africa whose activities, according to Gu (2009) 3 , began after 2005. Marfaing and Thiel (2011:4) summarise this category of Chinese migrants and their activities in Africa as follows:…”

“…These studies have revealed the active participation of both Africans and Chinese in this enterprise (Marfaing and Thiel 2012). Closely linked and emphasised in these works is the purported antagonism that exists between Africans and their Chinese counterparts in the African market space (Giese 2014;McNamee et al 2012;Marfaing and Thiel 2011;Mohan and Tan-Mullin 2014;Haugen 2011;Lampert and Mohan 2014;Dobler 2009;Gadzala 2009). Central to this antagonism is the perceived threat the Chinese importers pose to the African players, which on several occasions have resulted in public protests (see Dittgen 2010;McNamee 2010).…”

The Impact of Chinese Business on Market Entry in Ghana and Senegal

“…Alongside trying to limit the activities of Chinese nationals in their territory, they also denounce their presence as illegal and declare their practices to be illicit competition. As we have argued elsewhere (Marfaing and Thiel 2011), it is not the commonly alleged encroachment on indigenous trade that upsets local merchants, but the realization that the Chinese presence has the potential to undermine and perhaps destroy traditional modes of interaction.…”

Good quality or low price? Competition between Cameroonian and Chinese traders

“…First, traders went to Dubai, because Arab traders were already importing from China to Dubai; then African traders themselves went to Asian countries such as Thailand, Singapore, India, Malaysia, or Hong Kong, from where they purchased local and Chinese trade goods via local intermediaries (Bertoncello, 2007). After the financial crisis in the late 1990s, African traders advanced to get nearer to the source of the cheap trade goods (Le Bail, 2009;Bertoncello and Bredeloup, 2009;Marfaing and Thiel, 2011). The city to go to was Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, which had historically been the starting point of the Silk Road, and in whose hinterland more recently numerous factories had been created.…”