Small and Medium-sized Chinese Businesses in Mali and Senegal

Abstract

The two cases studies presented and compared allow for a better understanding of the development of Chinese small and medium sized businesses in Africa. Through the analysis of the Chinese businessmen's life stories, the article stresses the diversity of situation in explaining the Chinese presence, giving importance to the national context.

Lateral vision: Juxtaposition as a method

“…It was some 15 years later, when Chinese migration to Africa began attracting first media and then scholarly attention, that what I had found in Hungary began looking less like a historical curiosity and more like an early instance of a worldwide conjuncture, in which migrants from mainland China emerge as indispensable actors in a global transformation of consumption and labour practices, linking an expanding Chinese economy to post-structural adjustment markets and decaying welfare regimes. Economic and social practices, family lives or media consumption of newly arrived Chinese businessmen and -women who opened shops across Cape Verde (Østbø Haugen and Carling, 2005), Namibia (Dobler, 2009), Mali (Bourdarias, 2010) or Senegal (Kernen, 2010), but also Peru (Lausent-Herrera, 2009) or Suriname (Tjon Sie Fat, 2010), exhibit a number of similarities to the patterns I had observed in Hungary. (In fact, some Chinese entrepreneurs in Hungary were among the pioneers of garment imports to Africa and South America, as they discovered that unsold stocks from the northern hemisphere summer can be sold there.…”

(Un)writing “Chinese Space” in Urban Africa

“…If ethnographic studies have offered detailed accounts on various themes such as migrant strategies, work relations, social interactions, and everyday lives (e.g. Haugen and Carling 2005;Kernen 2009;Park 2010;Mohan et al 2014;Huang 2015;Liu 2017), space and the urban context tend to be reduced to blind spots or pre-configured containers on top of which these complex and layered interactions unfold. Secondly, as much as "Chinese capital [is] singled out and problematised [while being] widely perceived as unnatural in a neoliberal world order that otherwise naturalises the market" (Lee 2017: 1), similar comments can be made about spatial aspects.…”

Worlding Developmentalism: China's Economic Zones Within and Beyond its Border

“…Yet they are by no means the only actors that envision and construct Chinese development spaces at transnational scales. Burgeoning field‐based studies and journalist reports have recognised even more diverse groups, including but not limited to medium and small size private businesses (Kernen, ), family‐based entrepreneurs (Bräutigam, ) and networked or individual job‐seeking migrants (French, ). Their situated practices necessitate renewed framework to capture the dynamics of Chinese developmentalism in the global era.…”