Heidi Østbø Haugen

Chinese Exports to Africa: Competition, Complementarity and Cooperation between Micro-Level Actors

Chinas trade relations with Africa have displayed a striking dynamism in the past decade. The spatial distribution of these trade flows is highly uneven: Chinese imports are mainly sourced from a few resource-rich nations, while Chinese exports penetrate most African markets. Small-scale business enterprises have been crucial to the recent surge in the export of Chinese manufactured goods to Africa. The scholarship on the micro-level processes through which these commodities enter Africa has so far focused on the role of Chinese entrepreneurs. This article contributes to the existing literature by addressing the ways in which both African and Chinese actors play a part in strengthening Sino–African trade relations. Based on multi-sited fieldwork with semi-structured interviews and participant observation, it explores relationships of competition, complementarity and cooperation between Chinese and African traders. The macro-level trends in Sino–African trade are described using information extracted from the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database. Given the economic and social significance of the exports from China to Africa, it is important to build a better understanding of the central role played by small-scale businesses and to recognize the role of Africans in shaping Sino–African links.

China's recruitment of African university students: policy efficacy and unintended outcomes

This article explores how Sino-African relations are affected by the growing number of Africans who pursue higher education in China. China actively recruits African university students in order to increase soft power and generate income from the export of education services. Semi-structured interviews with African university students suggest that China fails to reach these policy objectives because the students are disappointed with the quality of the education they receive. However, the students engage in trade and contribute to the fast-growing export of Chinese products to African markets, thereby reinforcing the ties between China and Africa in unintended ways.

African Pentecostal Migrants in China: Marginalization and the Alternative Geography of a Mission Theology

Abstract: The city of Guangzhou, China, hosts a diverse and growing population of foreign Christians. The religious needs of investors and professionals have been accommodated through government approval of a nondenominational church for foreigners. By contrast, African Pentecostal churches operate out of anonymous buildings under informal and fragile agreements with law-enforcement officers. The marginality of the churches is mirrored by the daily lives of the church-goers: Many are undocumented immigrants who restrain their movements to avoid police interception. In contrast to these experiences, the churches present alternative geographies where the migrants take center stage. First, Africans are given responsibility for evangelizing the Gospel, as Europeans are seen to have abandoned their mission. Second, China is presented as a pivotal battlefield for Christianity. And finally, Guangzhou is heralded for its potential to deliver divine promises of prosperity. This geographical imagery assigns meaning to the migration experience, but also reinforces ethnic isolation. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews, participant observation, and video recordings of sermons in a Pentecostal church in Guangzhou with a predominately Nigerian congregation. Résumé: La ville de Guangzhou, en Chine, est le site d’une population grandissante de chrétiens étrangers, dont beaucoup continuent de pratiquer leur religion en devenant membres d’une église non confessionnelle pour étrangers approuvée par le gouvernement. Les églises africaines pentecôtistes, en revanche, opèrent dans des bâtiments anonymes sous des accords informels et fragiles avec les représentants de la loi. Bien des membres de la congrégation sont eux-mêmes des immigrants sans papiers dont les vies sont contraintes par la nécessité d’échapper aux contrôles de police, et la marginalité sociale et institutionnelle de ces églises reflètent ainsi leurs expériences au quotidien. Au sein de ces églises, ces immigrants ont cependant une place centrale et font quasiment l’expérience d’une « géographie alternative ». Dans cet article, la Chine est présentée comme un champs de bataille crucial pour la chrétienté, les Africains y ayant remplacé les Européens au front de la mission d’évangélisation. Pour les Africains eux-mêmes, Guangzhou présente un potentiel pour délivrer ses promesses divines de prospérité. Cet article soutient que l’imagerie géographique pentecôtiste, tout en donnant un sens et une signification à l’expérience des immigrants, renforce cependant une isolation ethnique. L’analyse se base sur des entretiens approfondis, des observations sur le terrain, et des enregistrements vidéo de sermons dans une église pentecôtiste à Guangzhou avec une congrégation principalement nigérienne.

Time and space in Beijing's Olympic bid

This article examines how Beijing presented an Olympic bid that not only won the city the right to host the Olympic Games, but also served to increase the legitimacy of the IOC. Through discourse analysis, it is shown how Beijing was depicted as a natural choice for the next Olympic host city. Certain notions of time and space were fundamental in this presentation. The meanings of concepts related to time and space were determined by their oppositions – ‘modernity’ was defined in relation to ‘underdevelopment’, ‘the new’ was described in relation to ‘the old’, and ‘the West’ was opposed to ‘the Orient’. Beijing was constructed as an Olympic city within the context of two strongly modernist ideologies of the Chinese government and the Olympic Movement. ‘Olympism’ was portrayed as the driving force behind modernity and associated with universalism, the new and the Western world.

Petty commodities, serious business: the governance of fashion jewellery chains between China and Ghana

In many parts of the world, people access consumer goods mainly via informal economic networks. In this article, I analyse the governance of petty commodity chains through a case study of Chinese fashion jewellery produced for the Ghanaian market. ‘Petty commodity chains’ denotes a particular type of global value chain, where production, trade, and distribution are carried out by small, unregistered businesses, between which personalized relationships and informal infrastructure enable transactions. These chains are neither controlled by lead firms at the production or distribution ends, nor made up of pure market linkages. Weak formal institutions and an intensely competitive commercial environment encourage business actors to establish enduring relationships. Credit relations run through long stretches of the chain and create mutual dependencies. The concept of ‘beholden value chains’ is introduced to describe the co-dependency between business actors and the coordination of activities in petty commodity chains.

China–Africa Exports: Governance Through Mobility and Sojourning

ABSTRACT A centre for Asian and intercontinental immigration and export-oriented production, Guangzhou city is at the forefront of China’s global interactions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines informal governance mechanisms that co-ordinate the circulation of goods and capital between China and Africa. The question 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 trans-border trade, and historical accounts of long-distance trade in pre-colonial and colonial eras. These traditions point to different ways in which the mobility of people and goods are interlinked. In the case of China–Africa interactions, the flow of goods has increased in tandem with the number of visits by African itinerant traders. The empirical discussion demonstrates that the emergence of intercontinental movements of goods and people between 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 by Africans in the late 1990s, which subsequently evolved and adapted. This infrastructure has facilitated the mobility of people and goods and increased the pace at which trading capital circulates.

Residence Registration in China’s Immigration Control: Africans in Guangzhou

Rapid economic development has transformed China’s place in the global migration order. To respond to these changes, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security (MPS) drafted the country’s first comprehensive immigration law, which was passed in 2012. The new Exit and Entry Administration Law institutionalized long-standing practices of charging Chinese citizens with enforcing the nation’s outer borders. Penalties for housing and employing undocumented migrants were standardized, and people were required to “duly report” foreigners who illegally enter, reside, or work in China. The law’s inconsistent and vague nature leaves much to be specified through provincial regulations and interpreted by local law enforcement officers. The responsibility for implementing Chinese immigration legislation is largely placed at the subdistrict level, and relies on institutions and instruments that originally were designed to manage internal population movement. Among the most important of these is the residence registration requirement. While aspects of the aforementioned developments are specific to China, they also imply a double displacement of borders that can be observed in many parts of the world: border control is dispersed and shifted away from the nation’s outer edges, and the responsibility for monitoring the border is increasingly placed on non-state actors. The chapter identifies actors who—reluctantly, accidentally, or zealously—perform borders, as well as those who facilitate the circumvention of migration control in China. The performance of borders is examined from the perspective of African subjects of border control in Guangzhou, South China. The analysis is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, during which I was a registered foreign resident of a district in Guangzhou with a majority of African and Asian foreigners. Guangzhou hosts a large population of Africans who have come to China to study, trade, search for work, reunite with family, or a combination of such motives.

The unmaking of a commodity: Intermediation and the entanglement of power cables in Nigeria

Nigerians once trusted power cables to be safe and compliant with international standards. Today, however, the Nigerian market is rife with substandard cables, which may overheat, shoot out sparks, and cause fires. Power cables have been transformed from commodities with stable and precisely defined properties into entangled objects that can only be known through the actors accompanying them. Marketization scholarship has conventionally focused on efforts and investments to disentangle things from their networks of connections, affording less attention to the specifics of how entanglements are produced. This article examines the role of intermediation in creating entanglements and undermining market orders. The analysis first identifies intermediaries that endeavor to translate the market logic into concrete realities in Nigeria. The second and main part of the analysis draws upon data from ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria and China to assess how intermediaries destabilized the commodity of cables by forging new connections between traders and producers and by enabling inferior products to enter the market. The article proposes intermediation as a meso-level concept for connecting concrete and empirically observable events to theories of marketization. The approach moves marketization scholarship forward and away from its oft-vague operationalizations, while also suggesting new avenues for research on intermediation beyond the study of markets.Nigerians once trusted power cables to be safe and compliant with international standards. Today, however, the Nigerian market is rife with substandard cables, which may overheat, shoot out sparks, and cause fires. Power cables have been transformed from commodities with stable and precisely defined properties into entangled objects that can only be known through the actors accompanying them. Marketization scholarship has conventionally focused on efforts and investments to disentangle things from their networks of connections, affording less attention to the specifics of how entanglements are produced. This article examines the role of intermediation in creating entanglements and undermining market orders. The analysis first identifies intermediaries that endeavor to translate the market logic into concrete realities in Nigeria. The second and main part of the analysis draws upon data from ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria and China to assess how intermediaries destabilized the commodity of cables by for...