The Africans of Guangzhou: How They Do Business, How They Live | "Low-End Globalization" ①

We'll use four articles to show you another side of Guangzhou.

Xiaobei, three kilometers from Guangzhou Railway Station, is "cut apart" by the Guangzhou–Shenzhen railway line, elevated roads, and pedestrian overpasses. Outside its Turkish restaurants, Muslim grocery stores, and hotels, most of the faces are African and Middle Eastern. This is the largest African enclave in Asia. The nickname "Chocolate City" is said to have started with Guangzhou's taxi drivers.

At the foot of Baiyun Mountain, the urban village called Dengfeng is the first stop for many Africans beginning their Guangzhou gold-rush dream. They rent 10-square-meter subdivided flats in "handshake buildings" — tenements packed so close that neighbors can shake hands window to window — drop their luggage, and head straight for the office buildings a few hundred meters away.

There are several such buildings near Xiaobei, their lower floors packed with tiny stalls, every one of them a wholesale business: wigs, women's handbags, soccer jerseys, tablecloths, electric fans, satellite TVs. This is the "classroom" for beginners starting from nothing. The Chinese shopkeepers tap away at their calculators, and both sides speak the simplest English — "this money, and this money." Many people place their first order here, with a delivery address in Africa.

The buildings also hold countrymen who arrived in Guangzhou a few years earlier, renting offices large and small and setting up trading companies or freight-forwarding agencies. Newcomers come looking for experience and to build their own networks fast: where to find a full range of women's leather shoes, who can point them to a reliable supplier, which countryman can be trusted as a middleman. Or they come for a "guide to avoiding scams" — because when Chinese goods cross the ocean to Africa, fakes and defective products pile up in the landfills there too. Plenty of people warn newcomers to watch every step, and not to wait until the goods reach Africa to open the boxes. By the time you find out the shipment doesn't match the order, crying about it is too late.

There are also "migratory bird" traders, who hold regular jobs at home and take one or two months a year to come to Guangzhou and trade on their own. Their orders are small — tablecloths, accessories, nothing more. In Guangzhou, a big order ships several containers at a time, and a dozen small ones can quickly fill a container of their own.

The traders' day starts at noon and runs into the small hours. Baohan Straight Street, south of Dengfeng village, has a busy nightlife.

Five years ago, when Gordon Mathews, an anthropology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, arrived, this street still had its night market. On the pedestrian overpass nearby, street photographers from Chaoshan took "tourist photos" for people — not against Guangzhou's landmark Canton Tower, but against Xiaobei's flyovers and office towers, so traders could mail them home as proof: this is Guangzhou, and this is where we live.

From the underpass at Xiaobei the night market spread on and on: Xinjiang barbecue stalls going full blast, unlicensed hawkers from Hubei and Hunan selling shirts at 15 yuan apiece.

Guangzhou then, Mathews thought, looked something like New York in the late 19th century — adventurers from every country gathered to scrape out a living and find their place.

"These traders brought globalization, though this kind of 'globalization' is a long way from the one people know — the global production of iPhones or Volkswagens," Mathews says. Unlike multinationals with deep pockets and huge payrolls, this is "low-end globalization" — it needs only a little capital, and one person can do it alone.

At the heart of "low-end globalization" is a crowd of small-time traders from the developing countries of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, hauling every kind of cheap good out of this world's factory and back home. These African traders became the subject of study for Mathews and his students Lin Dan and Yang Yang, who spent several years moving through every corner of Guangzhou and interviewing hundreds of them, trying to work out how they do business and how they live.

The work continues Mathews's earlier research on Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions. His 2011 book Chungking Mansions, subtitled Ghetto at the Center of the World, is about the South Asians and Africans there. Built in the 1960s, Chungking Mansions took on an eerie cast in Wong Kar-wai's films — a jumble of cheap guesthouses, currency exchanges, restaurants, and shops. It sits in Tsim Sha Tsui, yet its rents have stayed low for years. A Hong Kong police officer once told Mathews that the crime rate there was no higher than in the rest of the city, but the building still reads as a "ghetto." Many South Asian and African merchants rarely leave it, or even leave their own stalls, running their businesses on personal connections alone.

"If Chungking Mansions is a pond, Guangzhou might be an ocean," an African man who had lived in Chungking Mansions for years once told Mathews — since China is the world's factory, why not go straight there and find more goods? Around 2000, Guangzhou replaced Hong Kong as the new destination for African traders.

Guangzhou holds a great deal of room for opportunity, and in Mathews's eyes that is the "wonderful" part of the city.

For a time the Guangzhou government left Xiaobei, where the African traders gathered, largely alone — certainly up to around 2013. For years there wasn't even a reliable count of how many Africans lived in the city. "Some people once claimed there were 150,000 to 200,000 Africans here. That's ridiculous!"

The first figures that look reliable appeared after the 2014 Ebola outbreak. According to data released at a Guangzhou Ebola prevention and control meeting that October, Africans entered and left Guangzhou 438,000 times between January and October; about 15,570 Africans actually lived in the city, roughly 4,096 of them as permanent residents. In 2016 the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau published new figures, putting the number of Africans actually in Guangzhou at about 11,000.

Most African traders had no idea what anthropology was, but once they had established that Mathews was not with the CIA, they were happy to talk business and daily life with this white-bearded professor from Hong Kong.

"When people talk about globalization they think of multinational brands, but very few understand how the people who actually make globalization happen live in this Chocolate City."

Late last year Mathews published The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China's Global Market. What we saw and heard, together with Mathews's own account of the people he studies, makes up the first installment of our series "Guangzhou: City of Low-End Globalization."

Piracy and Knock-Offs: The Bestsellers of Low-End Globalization

Many African traders made their first money on fake Nikes and Adidas. More than a decade on, these pirated goods — "copies" — carrying famous logos are still the best sellers in African markets. To get past customs inspections, traders have their tricks: some ship the logos separately from the products, the logos by air and the goods by sea, then "assemble" them back home. But that costs too much; the more common unwritten rule is to bribe the customs officers.

As the crackdown on piracy inside China has tightened, the safer option has become the knock-off — a well-known design copied with small changes and a different label: Qlay, Nobla, Applies, or no label at all. "Nobody confiscates knock-offs, unless the maker of one gets sued by the brand it copied."

Mathews once traveled back to Africa with some traders. The capital of many an African country has a shop selling genuine iPhones and Samsungs. "These shops look the same, display the products the same way, as the ones in New York, Paris, or Seoul — and of course the prices are the same too, which most people can't afford." Not far from the shops selling the real thing there is usually a place selling knock-offs.

Are knock-offs defensible? People answer differently. Mainstream opinion faults "Made in China" for its lack of original design, for how cheap it is to "borrow," for how hard it is for the real designers to fight the fakes. The traders never agonize over any of it.

Mathews likes to arrange "encounters" that throw together people who might as well live in different worlds, each talking past the other. Once he brought a Somali logistics trader to an academic conference, facing twenty American business school professors. The Somali described how he shipped knock-off phones back to Africa, and the professors pushed back: "Do you know what you're doing is illegal? Do you know how much multinationals spend every year fighting piracy?"

"But designers in developed countries don't care about the African market — or rather, very little design pays attention to what poor people need," says Mathews, who calls this a "moral superiority belonging to white Americans." "A pirated Louis Vuitton bag may not be anything to be proud of, but I don't see what's immoral about a knock-off phone. In a way these knock-offs 'patch up' a world that keeps splitting further apart."

After the meeting the Somali was puzzled. His company was attached to an American logistics firm; one of his American colleagues drank heavily, another kept a mistress. He asked Mathews: "I have faith, I don't drink, and I'm faithful to my marriage. So who is the immoral one here — them, or me, shipping knock-offs?"

In Xiaobei I met Abdinasir, a 29-year-old Kenyan, who said "morality" is a language game, and the rules of that game also include taxes, rent, intellectual property. "Accept them and I have no opportunities left." One of Abdinasir's older brothers has settled in the United States, where he drives a taxi.

An East African who once lived in Canada told Mathews that doing business there was too hard. "You want to be a shoeshiner, you pay for training. You want to open a corner shop, you need training for that too. The bureaucracy is far too complicated!" He later went to Eastleigh in Kenya, a mixed, spontaneously grown trading district much like Guangzhou. "Here, as long as what you're selling is good enough to bring in customers, that's it. It's that simple!"

"In a so-called mature market like the United States, the bar set by taxes, rent, and intellectual property is too high. If you come from an American middle-class family that may not be a problem, but if you belong to an African minority — and many Africans in Guangzhou have relatives who have lived in Europe or America for years — the usual job is taxi driver, or with a bit more education, lawyer or accountant. Starting a small business there is just too hard."

These rules, Mathews says, work against new immigrants and even against low-income white people. That world belongs to big capital.

"There's a '90s Breeze Blowing Through Your Office"

Abdinasir's logistics company is in Yidong Building, on the north side of Huanshi Middle Road. Unlike the multinational headquarters put up by star architects, his office is 20 square meters. A dehumidifier, an air conditioner, a sofa, and Wi-Fi are the standard kit for a company this size, along with a year-round supply of Kenyan black tea and a TV playing the news from Kenya. Every afternoon this cramped little room is crowded.

Yidong Building was finished in 1999. A kilometer away, "Taojin," the Garden Hotel, and the Friendship Store were Guangzhou's central business district in the 1980s and '90s. By the time Abdinasir came to Guangzhou in 2012, the building was in poor shape. Floors one through three are stalls, and the escalator has been broken ever since. He still remembers the air-conditioning repairman saying something poetic, if not quite scientific: "There's a '90s breeze blowing through your office."

Nobody denies how convenient the place is. Exit D of Xiaobei metro station opens onto Yidong Building, and the traders have set aside a space among the stalls for prayer. What matters most, of course, is the network: a good many Kenyan traders have gathered in this building.

"Only friends can do business together." Most of Abdinasir's clients are fellow Kenyans, and from afternoon until late at night they pass the time in this 20-square-meter office, swapping business news and news from home, or putting together a soccer match — the traders' games start after the working day ends and finish at 2:30 in the morning.

African traders do business only with their own countrymen, and they can be dismissive of Africans from anywhere else. "Chinese people always say 'Africa' in this sweeping way, but there is no unified Africa, politically or culturally. The difference between some countries is bigger than the difference between Japan and Pakistan."

In Xiaobei, Tianxiu Building is the Francophone zone, more or less West African territory. East African traders cluster in Yidong Building instead. "To most Chinese we're all just Black, but Africans from different regions have different skin tones," Abdinasir said, with some regret. "When you don't understand something, you draw the line in a vague way — 'fine, that's another kind of person' — the way Chinese people, when they say 'international friend,' put the weight on 'international' rather than on 'friend.'"

Like Abdinasir, many people keep their countrymen's "loyalty" in much the same way.

Mathews once invited an East African trader named Adnan and a Japanese accountant named Suzuki, also based in Guangzhou, to dinner together. Suzuki worked at a well-known accounting firm; he had to play golf with clients, or help them with visa problems. Adnan ran a logistics company with four employees, and he too had to take clients to the hospital when they fell ill, or help them open bank accounts.

Suzuki would take clients from any country. His job, he explained, was to help them reduce their taxes within the law, as long as they could produce valid identification. For Adnan, moving through a legal gray zone was routine — his business often involved pirated goods and knock-offs.

Some overstayers don't even need legal status. As long as they know countrymen well enough, they can still do business.

In high-end globalization the contract is the universal rule, with powerful lawyers handling the legal work and strict standards from drafting to signing. A West African trader who had lived in Britain for several years complained to Mathews that in China a contract is toilet paper. He also complained that here, unlike in the West, the lawns are for looking at, not for walking on.

Ali, a Somali trader, showed me a "letter of authorization" in his office: a countryman had asked him to pay a final balance of 20,000 yuan, divided among the factory, the freight company, and a middleman. On the plain sheet of paper, apart from a few handwritten names and numbers, there was nothing else. Ali photographed it with his phone and sent it to the client back in Somalia. "This is how we trade. Most of our 'contracts' look like this."

More than contracts, people rely on personal reputation. Nobody can remember the countless trading companies and shipping agents in these office towers; what you remember is the person. A Nigerian logistics trader explained to Mathews why reputation matters so much: "If I cheat someone, they won't go to court. They'll go home and tell my father and my brothers, and tell everyone they know: you know that Nigerian guy in China? He's a cheat, never do business with him!"

The Peacekeeper

In a society where the contract counts for nothing and everything rests on personal reputation, how do you settle a conflict?

Mathews's students Lin Dan and Yang Yang worked with him. Lin Dan's doctoral thesis is about Chinese-African interaction in the city of Guangzhou. "The phrase 'Chinese-African interaction' is a little misleading — it sounds like China-Africa relations at the level of states, and it isn't nearly that macro. I look at the everyday: how Chinese people and Africans deal with each other."

In 2010, Yang Yang came upon a conflict in progress at a wholesale market on Guangyuan Xi Road. Two Nigerians were involved: one a trader in Guangzhou to buy goods, the other a shopkeeper with a stall in the market. The trader had found a batch of his own stolen goods in the shopkeeper's store.

The Nigerians at the market appointed a peacekeeper, who had to work like a detective — hearing both sides out and taking testimony from other "witnesses" in the market. What he established was this: the trader had bought $5,000 worth of clothes and sent them to a nearby Chinese-run freight company. On the way someone had marked the shipment, stolen part of it, and resold the goods to this Nigerian shopkeeper.

Having found the truth, the peacekeeper still had to deliver a ruling. He made the trader pay the shopkeeper to buy the clothes back, since the trader had chosen the freight company badly and had the bad luck to be marked by thieves. But the buyback price was set below the normal market rate, because the shopkeeper should not have taken in goods of unknown origin.

Peacekeepers matter, above all to Nigerians, who have the largest number of overstayers and have to stay invisible. One Nigerian overstayer told Mathews he felt like a gazelle drinking at a riverbank on the Discovery Channel, always watching for the crocodile. He said he had developed an "instinct" for the exits of any place he entered, so he could get out fast.

Where the law does not work, people have to keep order among themselves and stay out of trouble.

Many African countries have their own chambers of commerce in Guangzhou, and people with standing get pushed into the peacekeeper's role.

In 2014, Mathews's laptop was stolen in the Xiaobei underpass, with weeks of interview recordings and unsorted material on it. He went to a Uyghur vendor in the underpass and offered 2,000 yuan to buy the laptop back. The vendor refused at first, then agreed, and rounded up eight fellow Uyghurs.

"I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I could catch the English word 'computer' coming up again and again." An hour later they found the thief and got the laptop back. "That's what the field taught me. If I'd gone to the police instead, my laptop and everything on it might have disappeared for good — though that's only my guess."

Besides the hometown associations, the other keeper of order is religion. At a Christian church popular with Nigerians, people regularly organize collections to help arrested overstayers pay their fines; only after paying can they be deported. The church has also helped some sex workers change trades, using the money raised as start-up capital for a small order. The pastor told Mathews that many Nigerians in Guangzhou are young, far from their families, and need someone to tell them what to do and what not to touch.

"All Sales Final"

Almost every African trader has been cheated in Guangzhou. In the early years plenty of Chinese merchants treated each deal as a one-shot: they would never meet that African again as long as they lived. Some people told Mathews: "We believe in God, Chinese only believe in gold."

It did not take long for people to notice that Africans expected far more room to haggle. Faced with a phone priced at 800 yuan, Mathews says, an African buyer might push it down to 200. The Chinese seller, who believes you get what you pay for, would agree to everything to close the deal, sign the order, and then cut corners on quality.

One of the rules of low-end globalization is caveat emptor, buyer beware, and it requires traders to watch every step: checking the sample, placing the order, staying in touch with the factory, confirming the goods match the order, and finally the shipping. That takes a long stay. When the visa allows too little time, and renewing it costs too much money and time and involves too much paperwork, many people choose to run the risk and stay on.

Most overstayers are Nigerian, though some people overstay for a simple reason: they forgot to renew. For some, the fine for a single day past the deadline is the same as the fine for being caught after five years, so many, unwilling to deal with the hassle, simply gamble on their luck.

After 2014, Guangzhou changed. The night markets disappeared with the city's "brightening" campaign, and surveillance cameras went up in the lanes. The government capped the number of business visas and cracked down on overstayers, and the time a visa allows in Guangzhou keeps shrinking.

Under the new policy, anyone renewing a visa has to submit a criminal-record certificate, and no African country lets you apply for one online, so traders have to spend $2,000 on a plane ticket home to get it. "But by the time he's collected all the documents, his visa has usually expired."

"Guangzhou is 'beautifying' its streets, and you can't see those roaring barbecue stalls any more. Not only Guangzhou — a lot of Chinese cities are doing this. Personally, of course, I prefer the Guangzhou of before 2014. Anthropologists don't like places with too much settled 'order' and 'rules.' Plenty of people have had things stolen from them in Xiaobei, but for an anthropologist that danger and disorder are exactly what we observe — how the different forces hold each other in balance," Mathews says.

Then he adds: "Of course, if I were from Guangzhou I might prefer the safe environment we have now. And not just people from Guangzhou — several African traders have told me the same."

As labor costs in this world's factory keep rising, "Made in China" keeps getting more expensive. Some Africans have told Mathews they are getting ready to leave this "Chocolate City." The next stop may be Ho Chi Minh City.

"For newcomers this may not be a good place to start from zero any more," Abdinasir told us. "But as long as I can still make money here, I won't go."

Next: A Senegalese Man's History of Moving House

(Cover image: a street in Xiaobei, courtesy of the photographer Li Dong)