Chinese Products, Social Mobility and Material Modernity in Bougouni, a Small but Fast-Growing Administrative Town of Southwest Mali

China–Africa Encounters: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Realities

“…Derogatory attitudes existed, triggering emotions from disdain to cultural inferiority to fears of savagery. How these images became fixated with Africans might have resulted from transatlantic slavery in the ensuing centuries marked also by various forms of European colonialism and global capitalist expansion that staged a global hierarchy of development and backwardness (Chakrabarty 2000, Cohn 1996, Ferguson 2006, Mitchell 2000, Trouillot 2003, Wyatt 2010.…”

Do the Chinese Bring Chitukuko? Rural Malawian Understandings of Chinese Development

“…These works often focus upon the impacts of Chinese development projects and their departure from established international norms (Mohan & Power, ; Brautigam, & Mawdsley, ). There is a small, but expanding, body of work that ethnographically unpacks non‐elite Africans' understandings of the Chinese (Monson, ; Sylvanus, & Chappatte, ). I will contribute to this by exploring how rural Malawians conceptualise the Chinese through a specific, western‐focused development narrative.…”

“…Much of this work has focused on urban Africans, who interact with Chinese enterprises, showing that local evaluations of Chinese traders and commodities incorporate intra‐national circumstances and political histories (Haugen, & Monson & Rupp, ). For instance, Chappatte () claims that for Malians, Chinese commodities are venerated for enabling urban migrants a ‘second‐rate modernity’. However, Rotberg () states that in Zambia, with its own manufacturing industry shrinking, the same goods are sometimes understood as Chinese colonisation.…”

A world of cheapness: Affordability, shoddiness, and second‐best options in Guinea and China

“…For example, residents of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo buy manufactured goods in increasing numbers thanks to the affordability of Chinese imports, but popular perception of these products is such that la chinoiserie has become a pejorative term synonymous with poor quality; Kinshasa residents not only refer to manufactured goods but also to Chinese‐built infrastructure like roads and schools as unreliable chinoiserie (Braun , 311). People in southwest Mali buy Chinese‐made goods to create what they see as a modern, urban way of life, and yet they also criticize these goods as “cheap and short lasting imitations of western products” (Chappatte , 24). Chinese expatriate shop owners in Namibia do brisk business selling Chinese goods, but even so, among the local population, “Chinese goods are increasingly seen as cheap trinkets imported to cheat Namibians out of their scarce and hard‐earned cash” (Dobler , 717–18).…”

“…Low‐end Chinese products that provide what Mathews calls a “taste of the world beyond Africa” effectively offer what André Chappatte () calls “second‐rate modernity”—a lesser imitation of a more expensive and prestigious Western version. Even if cheap Chinese goods do provide a “taste of the world” (often a “flawed” one, at that) to people who would not otherwise have access to it, consumers and traders alike may be perfectly aware that this taste is, in Povinelli's term, “cruddy”—and that better alternatives exist beyond their reach.…”