Jamie Monson, Tang Xiaoyang, and Liu Shaonan
Abstract: In the last two decades Chinese economic engagement with African countries has increased, and with it new working relationships. Work provides an ideal lens for understanding the China–Africa relationship over time, because it involves both large- and small-scale interactions, and both state and nonstate actors. The outcomes of this engagement are similarly diverse, shaped not only by contemporary circulations of global capitalism, but also by history. There are therefore multiple sites and spaces where Africans and Chinese have come together at work, over a long historical trajectory. Most important, Africans themselves have profoundly influenced the labor situation in Africa, from the very beginnings of Afro-Asian engagement up to the present.
Keywords: China, Africa, work, labor, history, globalization
ASK ANY CASUAL OBSERVER OF Chinese engagement in Africa over the last two decades—whether that observer is in Africa or abroad—and you are likely to hear something about Chinese labor practices. From media broadcasts to statements made by politicians, a global understanding has emerged that there is a “Chinese way of work” in Africa. This way of work can sometimes be phrased positively—for example, when work on Chinese development projects is viewed as uplifting for Africans, who learn new skills and gain needed experience. Frequently, however, the “Chinese way of work” is described negatively, either because Chinese managers are accused of importing their own workers and depriving Africans of job opportunities, or because working conditions in Chinese enterprises are viewed as harsh and exploitative. Some reports go further, accusing Chinese projects of benefitting from prison labor; one scholar found in 2008 that Namibians from all sectors of society believed a rumor that Chinese convicts had chosen to serve out their sentences by working on Chinese construction sites in that African country.
Is there a Chinese way of work in Africa—or are Chinese employers behaving in the same ways as other foreign investors in this era of neoliberal economic reform and globalization? Work provides an ideal lens for understanding the China–Africa relationship over time, because it involves both large- and small-scale interactions, and both state and nonstate actors. The outcomes of this engagement are similarly diverse, shaped not only by contemporary circulations of global capitalism, but also by history. For Chinese and African workers have labored side by side over a long historical arc, from the ports of the eastern Indian Ocean in the twelfth century to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean in the nineteenth to the construction of Africa’s colonial railways in the twentieth. There are therefore multiple sites and spaces where Africans and Chinese have come together at work, over a long historical trajectory. Most important, Africans themselves have profoundly influenced the labor situation in Africa, from the very beginnings of Afro-Asian engagement up to the present.
Labor also forms the background for some of the most powerful stories we tell about the larger China–Africa relationship, and these, too, have historical antecedents. African and Chinese workers are frequently racialized in relationship to one another, in ways that reflect imperial, colonial, and postcolonial ideas about African and Asian working bodies. Images of the “industrious” and hard-working Chinese have been contrasted with the “laziness” of Africans—stereotypes that have stubbornly persisted over time. In more recent accounts, African workers have been described as having little agency in the face of new forms of Chinese economic expansion that seek profit at the expense of workers’ rights and wages.
In what follows, we investigate China–Africa engagement using the prism of work at diverse scales and locations, from the “China shop” in a Ghanaian marketplace to Chinese-owned farms in rural Zambia to leather factories in Ethiopia. Our case studies show that there are diverse experiences throughout the continent and that African responses are similarly varied. Africans are not only employees but also supervisors, managers, and contractors. There are joint ventures and enduring connections with other parts of the world (Dubai is one example), making China–Africa labor engagement truly global. Chinese enterprises on many levels operate within the same global capitalist frameworks as other economic actors. Yet at the same time, there continue to be unique “Chinese characteristics” in the workplace that set the China–Africa labor experience apart. There is, in the end, a “Chinese way of work” in Africa. But what does it really look like?
The earliest workplace encounters between Africans and Chinese probably took place on the southern coast of China in today’s Guangdong Province, when Africans arrived aboard merchant ships from across the Indian Ocean in the seventh to tenth century, and likely much earlier. People of African descent worked in ancient China as soldiers, government officials, traders, artists, and laborers. During the T’ang dynasty (618–906), port cities like Guangzhou became known and valued destinations for global trade. According to the sparse records that remain, there were many foreigners in Guangzhou at that time, including enslaved African maritime workers who arrived aboard Arab trading dhows. Chinese observers marveled at their remarkable ability to swim and dive deeply into the ocean waters—skills they may have honed as enslaved pearl divers in today’s Dubai.
In later centuries African and Chinese workers came together on the colonized “sugar islands” of the Indian Ocean (Mauritius and Réunion) and in the Caribbean. Following slavery’s abolition in the nineteenth century, the ensuing labor crisis led to the importation of large numbers of indentured Asian workers from China and from India. From Réunion to Cuba to Louisiana, workers of African and Chinese origins began to work the same sugar plantations. And they responded in similar ways to their working conditions: using petitions, rebellion, desertion, and other strategies to contest coercive labor practices.
In colonized Africa starting in the late nineteenth century, Chinese laborers were again recruited to travel to Africa on contract to participate in colonial projects that ranged from mining (South Africa) to railway building (Congo and German East Africa). Colonial ideas about race and hierarchy also spread widely at this time, so that Africans and Chinese found themselves not only in the same working sites but also in an emerging imperial narrative about work that racialized worker characteristics. Chinese and African laborers encountered one another not only in the gold mines but also in the imaginations of the European colonizers. British colonial officials testified in parliament about Chinese qualities of “industriousness”—a theme that is echoed today in the concept of an Asian “model minority.” This purported proclivity for hard work was contrasted in imperial reports with African “laziness.” Then as now, this racialized hierarchy of labor was appropriated, contested, and used strategically not only by Europeans but also by Chinese workers and African intellectuals.
Following the Second World War, China turned toward communism just as African countries were decolonizing and moving toward independence. During this period a new narrative of work developed as China supported revolutionary movements while promoting a new model of independent modernization through “self-reliance.” China promoted its own example of overcoming historical backwardness through state-led projects and through everyday “hard work.” In the mid–twentieth century, therefore, the narrative of Chinese industriousness shifted, as the qualities of “eating bitterness”—perseverance and endurance for collective prosperity—were held up as a model for African people to adopt. Practices of hard work, discipline, and self-reliance were key components of labor models in Chinese assistance programs to Africa through the 1970s. These ideals meshed well with those of many African leaders as they fashioned independent states, economies, and new citizens.
The decade of the 1980s brought shifts once again into the China–Africa relationship that transformed the experience of work. Following the death of Mao in 1976, China began the era of “opening up and reform” under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. During this same time period, African economies were under pressure to undergo similar economic reforms as international monetary bodies required market liberalization and structural adjustment policies. Currencies were devalued, markets were deregulated, and government bureaucracies were scaled back across Africa in response to externally imposed conditions. China’s widening engagement with Africa starting in the 1980s took place within this larger global context of economic restructuring. By the 1990s, Chinese enterprises were actively investing in Africa, first by taking over many of the older socialist-era Chinese donor projects, and later by initiating new projects in sectors that met China’s own development needs.
Has a new “Chinese way of work” in Africa developed over the last two decades as a result of these economic reforms and China’s adoption of “going out” policies? In what ways is this way of work similar to, or different from, that of other foreign investors? Some scholars, like C.K. Lee, provide evidence that it is the economic logic behind a firm that matters most for African workers, rather than the firm’s national or cultural identity. In her case study of Zambian copper mines, Lee found that Chinese state-owned companies were more likely to agree to worker concessions than private companies of any nationality, because they sought to stabilize their labor force for the long term. Thus it was not the firm’s “Chinese-ness” but its profit logic that determined outcomes.
In a study of the Chinese-built Mulungushi textile factory in Zambia, on the other hand, Andrew Brooks found that when a private Chinese company took over the socialist-era project and eliminated salaried positions, it used a distinctively Chinese management style. Managers were more likely than other investors in Zambia to eliminate salaried positions and replace them with casual or “day” labor—even when they were restructuring politically symbolic ex-socialist projects like Mulungushi. It seemed to many that postsocialist China had learned the harsh lessons of neoliberal capitalism all too well, and was now exporting these lessons to Africa.
Chinese investors enter into labor markets in Africa on many of the same terms as other foreign enterprises, and thus global factors such as neoliberalism, as well as the size and profit logic of the individual company, are critical to understanding relationships with workers. Any approach that seeks to identify a uniquely Chinese “way of work” in Africa will therefore fail to grasp the diversity of factors that shape workplace interactions over time, as well as their larger global context. Most important, such a narrow focus risks missing the critical ways that Africans themselves are profoundly shaping the labor situation in Africa, as they have done from the very beginnings of Afro-Asian engagement. Just as workers played a critical role in Africa’s imperial, colonial, and decolonization eras, they continue today to shape their workplaces, their local and regional economies, and the global stage.
One major difference among Chinese enterprises is their ownership model, and whether it is largely public or private. The Chinese state-owned firms that bid on big construction projects do so through bilateral contracts that are made between the Chinese government and individual African governments. Competition for these contracts can be fierce, resulting in the driving down of costs, including wages. Private Chinese companies can also be quite large in scale—for example, the Huawei telecommunications giant. But the majority of private Chinese companies operating in Africa are small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs). These firms may receive some financial and other support from the Chinese government, including China’s regional provincial governments, but in practice they have much more autonomy.
Chinese state-owned companies are important players in agriculture. In Zambia, there were six registered farms in 2009 owned by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), along with about a dozen owned by private individuals. The state-owned farms could be large in scale, up to twenty-six hundred hectares in size, though they were not among the largest commercial farms in Zambia. They followed a farm-management structure that was contract based—the same system used in rural China since the mid-1980s economic reforms. The Zambia-based farm managers worked under contracts to export profits back to their board of directors in China. Management–worker relations differed greatly, not only among the SOE farms but also among the private farms.
Chinese firms are subject not only to their own regulations but also to the labor laws governing employment in the countries where they operate. These are of course quite variable in their structure and implementation. During construction of the Bui Dam in Ghana, local labor law allowed workers for the hydroelectric company Sinohydro to organize through a trade union to negotiate their wages and working conditions. But Chinese firms have generally discouraged trade unions at their work sites. In African countries with strong political institutions and deep histories of union activity, African workers have been able to negotiate better terms. In cases like the Angolan oil and construction sectors, however, where there has been less historical stability and no strong trade-union tradition, workers are less likely to set the terms for their work.
While the large-scale, state-owned Chinese enterprises in Africa may still be the most visible, SMEs have increasingly shaped the work encounter. In these workplaces researchers find more conviviality and connection across class and ethnic lines, especially as joint ventures, African management, and even African ownership of firms hiring Chinese employees are emerging. Chinese firms are staying longer in Africa and making investments in training for their African staff, and these experienced workers are now rising through the management structure. In Kano, Nigeria, a small Chinese firm has employed three Nigerian college graduates for over ten years, and these employees have taken senior positions. Near Accra, a Chinese factory that has operated for more than thirty years has a Ghanaian manager who also oversees Chinese staff.
Tang Xiaoyang spent time in Ethiopia researching the experience of African workers in two different Chinese firms in the same sector—leather working. Ethiopia is an important leather producer, and the Chinese firms came to Ethiopia to develop factories where leather could be processed on-site into marketable products, rather than exported as a raw commodity. This was a priority for the Ethiopian government, which had passed legislation in 2011 to restrict the export of raw leather through tariff policies. The Chinese factories were therefore responding to the policy and needs of the Ethiopian government in addition to their own profit motives.
What Tang discovered is that the two firms he studied—both Chinese, both in the same African country, and both in the same industry—had set up very different conditions for workers. This in-depth story gives us a good example of how there may be something “Chinese” about work in these factories even though their employees had strikingly different experiences. The Friendship leather tannery and the China-Africa Overseas tannery were both established outside Addis Ababa in 2011. Of the two factories, the China-Africa Overseas factory was the largest, and its management invested heavily in fixed assets from the beginning. The company boasted that it had developed the best effluent treatment system in Ethiopia and could produce more varieties of leather than any other enterprise. The total investment made by the China-Africa Overseas tannery was 300 million Chinese yuan (US$48 million), of which 200 million yuan (US$36 million) was spent on fixed assets.
The Friendship leather tannery, on the other hand, set up a much more modest initial operation at around the same time. The Friendship factory built several rows of simple warehouses and brought only a small number of machines from China that could meet their immediate processing demand. The company’s owner did not plan to build a factory following ISO standards for product quality, or to introduce advanced technology; his goal was to do basic leather treatment to meet the Ethiopian government’s minimum export requirements. The Friendship factory followed a business model that we might call “Chinese,” in the way that it initially started up the business with a low level of investment and did not wait for all of the buildings and other factory structures to be completed before beginning to train workers and start operations. This approach, sometimes known as “three simultaneous,” aims to accelerate production by carrying out construction, training, and operations all at the same time.
Of the two private Chinese leather factories in Ethiopia, it was the smaller factory, Friendship, that paid higher wages to its workers. The Friendship management needed a strong and reliable workforce to keep production steady through the initial period of establishing the factory foundations and completing the infrastructure. Thus workers were paid nearly 1,000 birr (US$59) per month if they had no experience and were unskilled, while skilled and managerial staff were paid up to ten times more. The high wage level attracted quite a few employees from other tanneries in the country. Thus one “Chinese” way of setting up an enterprise—starting with a low level of investment and carrying out construction, training, and operations simultaneously—resulted in relatively high wages that were set to ensure the recruitment of a strong and loyal labor force.
In contrast, the high initial investment and the foundational technology assets at the China-Africa Overseas tannery were much more impressive than at Friendship. For workers, however, the low profit margins meant a lower wage scale than at Friendship. As a result, many workers did not stay long with the company. These examples from the leather industry demonstrate that there was not a single “Chinese” approach to work. Although the Friendship factory’s gradual approach to plant construction was a variant of a typical Chinese practice, this business model was by no means confined to Chinese investors.
A perusal of the competitive bidding practices of Chinese enterprises seeking to invest in Africa suggests ways that Chinese investment can lead to outcomes for worker wages, and especially for worker training, that are in fact unique to the Chinese global context. Chinese companies—both state owned and private—are under intense pressure to win bids for projects in Africa by trying to underbid their competition. Even when company investments receive some government subsidies in the form of state-private cooperation, the bidding environment can be fiercely competitive. These low bids leave companies little room for bargaining with workers to meet their demands for higher wages. As a result, many companies working at low margins follow a strategy of hiring inexperienced, unskilled workers and then training them on the job. These trained workers, in turn, are most likely to leave their jobs when more promising positions open up elsewhere.
In Ethiopia, Tang Xiaoyang learned that the Huajian shoe factory had this experience. They initially recruited eighty-six local employees and sent them to China for a three-month training course. Once they returned to Ethiopia, however, more than 80 percent of the newly trained workers left the Huajian company. African workers at several enterprises interviewed by Tang Xiaoyang cited the low wages paid by Chinese companies as a main reason for their high turnover rate. Pinched by intense bidding competition on the one hand and by worker demands on the other, Chinese companies are searching for new solutions for employment and training in their African projects.
Our question—Is there a Chinese way of work in Africa?—is implicitly a question about work culture. Culture can be a slippery concept to deal with, because there are so many different definitions of what culture is and how it relates to work globally. And there is no single Chinese “culture” any more than there is a single African culture or language. It would be impossible to generalize based on a single understanding of “Chinese-ness” or “African-ness.” Yet, cultural differences and language barriers have definitely played a role in employment relations when Chinese enterprises set up shop in African countries.
The Chinese-owned retail shops, or “China shops,” that are springing up in African cities and small towns provide a useful example of ways that culture and language affect the work experience. We don’t often think about the Chinese shopkeeper in Africa as an employer—yet many of the most up-close and everyday work relationships between Chinese and Africans take place in the small-scale commercial sector. Chinese and Africans encounter one another in markets and shops not only as buyer and seller, but also as employer and employee. Karsten Giese and Alena Thiel investigated the dynamics of these personal interactions in Ghana and found complex cultural realities and mutual misunderstandings on both the Chinese and the African sides. The Ghanaian employees expected their Chinese bosses not only to be employers, but also to play the role of respectable elders by showing a caring attitude toward junior employees. Ghanaians also expected their bosses to provide gifts and to promise future rewards in the form of job security or promotions. But the Chinese traders expected their African employees to behave more like casual wage laborers. They preferred to keep their distance through a wage-based relationship rather than to take on the more intimate relationship of elder patron. These different expectations of the employer-employee relationship led to a lack of mutual understanding between Chinese employers and Ghanaian employees, resulting ultimately in labor conflicts that reinforced cultural stereotypes.
Liu Shaonan found a very different workplace environment when he visited a Chinese trading enterprise in Lagos, Nigeria. The Chinese manager had a harmonious and intimate relationship with his Nigerian employees. His English was very fluent, and he enjoyed talking with his employees at all levels, including drivers, cleaners, and security workers. His wife even complained that he spent much more time talking to his Nigerian employees than talking to her. Moreover, every time his employees needed help due to family illness, funerals, or weddings, he offered financial support in the form of a gift. Therefore, his employees spoke very highly of him, treating him as a respectable elder who could help them to overcome difficult circumstances.
Cultures of work can differ greatly from one place to another within Africa. In Uganda there were conflicts related to the practice of enjawulo, a concept of reciprocity in which retail workers not only labor on behalf of their bosses but also seek to make personal gains by selling each item at the highest possible price. The Chinese shopkeepers tried to maximize their profits by selling the largest amount of goods possible at lower prices. But the African workers sought to increase their own personal gains by selling items at higher prices even when this resulted in a lower sales volume. Although Ugandan employees complained about the limited opportunities of performing enjawulo in Chinese-owned shops, they also complained about Ugandan shop owners. The conflicts over enjawulo were a part of existing employment relations in Uganda, where the acceptance or rejection of enjawulo, as much as the nationality or cultural background of the shop owner, was the key to mutual understanding between employers and employees.
There is not one single form of Chinese investment in Africa, just as there is no single African worker or work experience. African workers and their relationships with Chinese management vary greatly across the continent. They have deep historical dimensions that include not only work itself but the way it is imagined and narrated. Thus there may not be a single Chinese “way of work” in Africa, just as there is no single African “way of work.” Yet we have found that there are specific Chinese characteristics that make a difference in the way Africans have experienced work in Chinese enterprises. Perhaps foremost among these are the ways that Chinese economic players have themselves responded to the significant and rapid changes of the neoliberal transition. As Chinese state companies combine their interests with those of private capital, these complex structures are also exported abroad. The managers who are asked to bring profits back home—whether from intense bidding competition in the construction sector or through complex contract-management demands in farming—face pressures to minimize outlays abroad, including payments to workers. Still, not all employers are equal: in the leatherworking factories of Ethiopia the smaller-scale investments of the Friendship factory allowed the management to pay workers higher wages and retain them, while the China-Africa Overseas factory paid less but invested more in infrastructure. In the Zambian copper mines the state-owned Chinese company paid better and tried to generate more worker loyalty for the long term, while private capital was less interested in sinking roots, preferring to stay mobile and therefore not worrying so much about retention of workers.
Culture and language also play a role in the workplace—in differing expectations about what it means to be a “boss” and an “employee,” in the definition of assigned tasks, and in who gets to earn what kinds of benefits from the work process. Linguistic differences lead to less communication—or, worse, miscommunication—at all levels.
And Africans from the level of the state to the individual worker definitively shape the work encounter: states do this through wage and union regulations; workers do this through their work culture and expectations; and unions organize to make a difference.
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JAMIE MONSON is a Professor of African History and Director of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. She is a specialist on the history of the TAZARA railway, a development project built in Tanzania and Zambia with Chinese development cooperation in the 1970s. Her book Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania (Indiana University Press, 2009) has been recently published in Chinese (2015). Professor Monson’s new research projects concern technology transfer, gender, and civil diplomacy in China–Africa engagement. She has also published widely on African environmental history and East African colonial history, including the history of the Maji Maji War in Tanzania. She speaks Swahili, German, French, and Chinese.
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SHAONAN LIU is a PhD candidate in African history at Michigan State University. His dissertation research focus is on the history of Chinese migrants in Nigeria from the 1960s to the present. He speaks Chinese, Igbo, and Twi.
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TANG XIAOYANG is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University and a resident scholar at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy. His research interests include political philosophy, China’s engagement in Africa, and modernization processes of the developing countries. He is the author of China-Africa Economic Diplomacy and Its Implication to the Global Value Chain (World Affairs Press, 2014) and has published extensively on Asia–Africa relations. He completed his PhD in the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He earned his MA in philosophy from Freiburg University in Germany and his BA in business management from Fudan University in Shanghai. He also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, USAID, and various research institutes and consulting companies. Before he came to Tsinghua, he worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C.