A Somali "Arbiter" and His Office, the Somali Community Center of Guangzhou | "Low-End Globalization" ③

"Low-end globalization" is trade across borders that, unlike the multinationals with deep pockets and long payrolls, takes only a little money — sometimes only one person.

The office of Ali Mohamed Ali, a Somali, sits in the Yidong Building in Xiaobei, Guangzhou: one sitting room, one inner room, no more than 20 square meters in all. The floor tiles date from 1999, when the building went up. Apart from a few appliances and two Chinese-style sofas in teak brown, there is no decoration at all.

"Sorry, it's such a mess in here, like a warehouse," Ali said, waving me into the inner room. He shoved aside a 28-inch suitcase at his feet. It looked heavy — a box of goods a client had left with him for a while.

Ali moved his freight-forwarding business from Hong Kong to Guangzhou in 2013. This is his sixth year in this office.

It is April, one of the busiest stretches in Guangzhou's trading year. Along with the European and Middle Eastern faces that fill the spring Canton Fair, African traders pour into the city in large numbers. They have to get their goods home before Ramadan begins in mid-May, so that when the fast ends in June everything is in place for the swell of buying that follows.

Ali reckons several hundred Somalis came through Guangzhou this March and April. Most stay only 14 days or a month, and make the trip four or five times a year. The buyers place orders with Chinese factories; Ali picks the shipping route, books the containers and chases the freight.

The competition is fierce. Small trading companies and freight agents like his fill the Yidong Building — rooms of 20 or 30 square meters, two or three employees each, moving every imaginable kind of cargo.

What sets Ali apart in Guangzhou's Somali community is his standing. His business has reached a certain size, and he rarely works as a middleman anymore, except when he goes into the markets to put in a word with a supplier for a friend. Because of his reputation, his days run well past his own business: settling delivery disputes, advising newcomers, vouching for people — or doing nothing at all, letting the sitting room serve as the Somalis' daily meeting place, where the talk ranges from home to favors owed and lawsuits pending.

Most Africans have no idea what the weather in Guangzhou is like until they step off the plane. One man arrived in China with Kenyan shillings in his pocket, assuming he could change them easily. "The first lesson they have to learn is that outside Kenya, the Kenyan shilling is nothing."

Someone like Ali passes on the basic rules of the trade by word of mouth — never pay in full up front, always pay in installments, watch the quality closely, and don't bargain as hard as you can out of habit, or the Chinese factory will cut the quality by just as much. He also supplies the lubricant that this kind of business runs on.

"Lubricant" is Gordon Mathews's word. A professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he studies the African traders you find in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Dubai. They carry cheap goods back to Africa and globalize in their own way, but unlike Apple or Nike they have no decisions handed down from above, no supply chain laid out across continents, no legal department and no team of lawyers. Mathews calls this "low-end globalization."

Freight agents like Ali, Mathews says, are also "cultural brokers": they clear up trouble and lower risk, and they act as a bridge, teaching Chinese and Africans each other's commercial logic and rules of conduct.

Ali's sitting room

A Teochew man walked into the office looking for Ali. He had shipped his goods, but his Somali customer — also a client of Ali's freight business — had missed the agreed payment date and could not be reached. He "had to come to Ali, and could only come to Ali," the man said, because the customer was Ali's friend.

Half an hour later Ali got the friend on the phone. He was back in Kenya; his cash had got stuck somewhere and he needed a few more days. Ali told him to name a firm date, and said that until the money landed he would hold the shipment in his own warehouse.

The Teochew man said "mafan" — a hassle — but he was satisfied with the way Ali had handled it, and left.

"Mafan" is one of the few Chinese words many African traders know. Ali says there is nothing offensive in it: sorting out hassles large and small is what their working day consists of.

Late payment is one hassle, and Chinese factories have to keep asking when the money is coming. At the other end, African traders keep finding defects in what arrives.

On the office sofa, a Somali complained to me about a deal that had lost him money a few years earlier. It was a batch of tablecloths; only when they reached Kenya did he find they were not the size he had ordered and fit no Somali family's dining table. When he pressed the factory, they told him the warehouse had sent the wrong goods, and that if he shipped them back they would send a replacement.

"How could that possibly work?!" He was still angry telling it. "You Chinese are so good at cheating people!"

At five in the afternoon the Somali traders had more or less finished their half-day rounds. Some had placed orders; some had just come out of the wholesale markets after doing their homework. One by one, they came into Ali's sitting room.

"Coffee or tea?" Ada asked them. The office keeps a Kenyan black tea on hand all year, offers free Wi-Fi, and has satellite television for football and Somali news.

Ada is Chinese and works for Ali. Her desk sits at the entrance; besides handling freight paperwork as his assistant, she doubles as the greeter.

For Ali, and for other Somali traders, customer and friend are not separable ideas — only friends do business together. He once thought about moving into a newer office tower a street away, where the rooms are bigger and the fittings and lighting more modern.

"I wanted to be a bit more elegant, but my friends told me that if I moved there, nobody would come. It's too far from the metro." Ali's "too far" is a 15-minute walk from the station exit; his customers would rather give up comfort than convenience.

Yanyo, a Somali employee, reminded Ada that once Ramadan started she could no longer ask people what they wanted to drink. In 2018 Ramadan began on May 17 and ended on June 16. Visits to the office drop sharply during that month.

The Somalis were glad to talk about what they had found. One man had bought a batch of dirac, the traditional Somali wedding dress. Another, a newcomer who lives in Finland and is also Somali, was on his third day in Guangzhou; he was after motorcycle parts, and had come to this sitting room for advice from men who had been at it longer.

The old hands, who know Guangzhou's big wholesale markets inside out, told him where the suppliers cluster, and warned him he had better bring someone he trusted.

A Kenyan who has been coming to Guangzhou since 2014 told me that before his first trip he thought every Chinese person could fly through the air, the way they do in Jackie Chan's kung fu films. Plenty of his countrymen still believe Chinese people eat nothing but dog meat.

"A lot of Somalis don't know anything about China — that's part of why they say Chinese people are cheats." Then Ali put a question to me: "And how much do Chinese people know about Somalia? Besides the pirates?"

Somalia, India, Hong Kong, Guangzhou: the wandering life of "Chinese citizen" Ali

By the standards of the Africans who reached Guangzhou before him, Ali came late. He went to Hong Kong first.

His identity papers also carry a Chinese name, Mu Yali. He once posted a photo on WeChat Moments of a sheet of paper filled with those three characters — the only three he can write.

He got Hong Kong permanent residency in 2009. His nationality became Chinese, and he now crosses between Hong Kong and the mainland on a Home Return Permit. At every checkpoint the officers still look puzzled: they study the document, then look up again at this dark-skinned "Chinese citizen."

Everyone in this sitting room is from Somalia — though "from," Ali added at once, is not quite right. Most were born in Somalia, but after the civil war broke out in 1991 Somalis scattered. Ask the men in the room for their passports and no two covers would match. Most are Kenyan; some have emigrated to Europe or America.

For a while, the "Kenyans" trading in Guangzhou were all Somali émigrés. A few years ago an actual Kenyan came to the city, and when he told Chinese traders where he was from they took him for a liar, because the Kenyans they knew "don't look like that."

Ali's passport was issued by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. He still remembers going to the Somali embassy in Beijing in 2009 for his papers, and being told he was the first Somali in the world to become a Chinese citizen.

Ali was born in Mogadishu in 1968, into a middle-class family; his father was an ear doctor. Somalia was still a "normal" African country then — a military dictatorship with no free speech, but with free health care and free schooling.

The family ran a fishing business for a time, exporting Somali lobster to Dubai. Then the climate shifted with El Niño, the catch fell year after year, and the pirates arrived. The fishing business stopped paying.

Ali went to Delhi to study insurance at university. He graduated and came home in 1991, the year the civil war began; the whole family moved to the United Arab Emirates and turned to trading. Ali found a job with a trading company in Hong Kong, far away.

He lived in Chungking Mansions for five years, receiving Somalis from all over the world. "Somalis have a head for business," he says. Some of his countrymen who had settled in Kenya were the first into the trade, shipping goods from Hong Kong back to Nairobi and Mombasa.

Mathews met Ali while doing his Chungking Mansions research.

Compared with the brothers who went to Europe, Ali had little trouble getting Hong Kong permanent residency: seven years of residence and a steady job. His wife was a neighbor from childhood whose family had emigrated to Canada years earlier.

Now she and their two children have moved to Malaysia, closer to him; Kuala Lumpur also offers more international schools than Guangzhou at lower fees. Every month Ali flies down to see them, and the only gift he needs to bring is Chinese green tea.

Somalis in Hong Kong who, like Ali, are on a company payroll or hold permanent residency are very few. Most are refugees who fled terrorism at home — Al-Shabaab among others — and made their way to Hong Kong to claim asylum. Chungking Mansions became a hiding place for many of them.

Outside his job, Ali began interpreting for refugees, telling their stories to the Hong Kong government's immigration officials. Standing between refugees and the local authorities then, standing between Chinese suppliers and Somali traders now — to Ali there is no great difference. Both are translation between two groups who are strangers to each other.

He once met an Igbo Nigerian who had overstayed his visa. The man had no legal status, yet carried real authority with both Chinese suppliers and the Igbo community; people believed this arbiter — Mathews calls him a "peace-keeper" in his book — would settle their everyday quarrels without favoring either side.

But Guangzhou's Somali community, Ali says, is small next to the Nigerian Igbo. Before 2013, Somali traders were doing well and visas were relatively easy, and Somalis came to Guangzhou for the money in a rush — plenty of middle-aged men with no business experience quit their jobs and set off for a place they knew nothing about. Today only a few dozen live here.

Which is to say, there are not that many mafan for Ali the arbiter to resolve.

Ali's sitting room, when the talk is not about business

Of everything in daily life that gets discussed in the sitting room, death matters most.

When someone dies far from home, his countrymen have to fly the body back to Somalia. Islam does not permit cremation, so Ali and the others raise the money, obtain the death certificate and the exit papers, and organize the prayers. In 2016 and 2017 they sent home a businesswoman who had died of illness and a child who had died young.

Disease is another subject. The Ebola outbreak did not touch Ali and his countrymen — the virus came from West Africa, they point out, and they are East Africans. But there are everyday injuries and illnesses to handle. Recently a young man was hurt in a football match, and because he had arrived too recently to save anything, the others had to raise the money for his operation.

By eight in the evening Ali's sitting room is full: the long sofa, the folding chairs, the footstools. Some have just come back from the Canton Fair in suits and dress shirts; others are in traditional robes. A few are curious about my Chinese face; others say hello in English and then, after "how are you," switch straight back into Somali to talk with friends.

More of them sit quietly with their phones. A young Somali with a Kenyan passport showed me a picture: an ancient Chinese man with a long beard, captioned "Lao Tuz" — presumably a misspelling of Lao Tzu — over an English quotation:

"If you are depressed, you are living in the past.

If you are anxious, you are living in the future.

Only when you are at peace are you truly living in the present."

He had posted it on Facebook, where the likes passed 100 within no time. He uses WeChat too, and his Moments feed is full of the same kind of inspirational picture — the silhouette of a runner in the sunlight, say: "People know the me of yesterday; everything I do today decides the me they will see tomorrow."

The young men who don't want to become Ali

Ali's life in Guangzhou is extraordinarily plain. He lives in Taojin, walks 15 minutes to the office each morning, eats at the Turkish restaurants in Xiaobei, and plays his weekend football nearby. Apart from the monthly flight to Kuala Lumpur, he never leaves Xiaobei.

The younger traders want to expand far more than he does.

Abdinasir, 28, used to work for Ali. Two years ago he quit to go out on his own, starting as a one-man broker; now his business has grown into freight forwarding as well. His office is also in the Yidong Building, but he has moved out of Xiaobei to Zhujiang New Town, at the other end of the city. Anyone who can afford to live in Zhujiang New Town, Ali jokes, must be doing quite well.

Zhujiang New Town looks like Xiaobei's opposite. Where Xiaobei's streets are dense with people, Zhujiang New Town is dense with new towers. "It's a bit like Lujiazui," says Abdinasir, who has been to Shanghai — the high-rises, the plazas, the wide roads and the occasional developed-world face passing by all told him this was a modern city. The district was an urban village not long ago, redeveloped into the Tianhe CBD.

"I had no choice, I had to get out of Xiaobei," he says of the move. He had lived there for years. "It's too lively. You can't even get a proper night's sleep." Work ends after eleven, someone organizes a football match, the game finishes at one or two in the morning, and back at the flat his young roommates are still watching the Champions League.

He moved to Zhujiang New Town last year, renting an apartment at 6,800 yuan a month.

To grow the business, Abdinasir goes almost daily to the wholesale markets near Guangzhou Railway Station to look at goods. I met him at the door of Ali's office; the next day, in the Liuhua market, he showed me how sharp his ears are.

He speaks Somali, English, French and some basic Arabic. In elevators, at the prayer corners on the market stairwell landings, among the packed rows of shops, Abdinasir waits for a potential customer. From language and accent he can usually place an African face. If it is an East African he doesn't know, he sometimes offers free advice — where the right goods might be, which restaurants are decent.

He still remembers getting lost in the metro on his second day in Guangzhou, five years ago. He asked a stranger how to get from Guangzhou Railway Station back to Xiaobei; the man spoke no English. "I could tell he was slowing down as much as he could, but it was still Chinese! However slowly he said it, I couldn't understand." The man walked him into the station, and he rode the wrong way anyway, spending a full hour and a half underground.

"Now I think I'd make a pretty good taxi driver. I can find my way to most places in Guangzhou."

Young men like him have already moved beyond the city, widening their own trading map. In March he went to Wuzhen and placed an order at an enormous garment factory. Last year he sourced a small kitchen machine in Shandong for a Somali friend in Norway, one that makes a traditional Muslim fried pastry.

"People in Shandong keep their word better than anyone," Abdinasir says, comparing the suppliers he has dealt with province by province. He found the Shandong man on Alibaba and has never met him, but the man answered a long list of questions about the machine in exact detail. When it arrived in Norway, his friend said it was the best machine he had ever bought.

The city and "freedom"

Close to ten at night, the sitting room turns to what the city costs. Ali gives a figure: "If you can't make 300,000 yuan a year, you may as well go home." Someone adds that it used to be easy money, and that the last couple of years have got harder and harder.

A container now takes only 16 days to travel from Guangzhou to Mombasa. But visas keep getting tighter, and Chinese manufacturing is no longer cheap. "For young people with no experience in business, I'd tell them not to come to Guangzhou on a whim."

Some of the traders approaching middle age complain that their children, once they have a university degree, would rather take work that looks more professional: doctor, lawyer, professor.

"They don't want to do this low-end globalization business — haggling, watching the clock. It all looks too fiddly, too much hassle to them," one middle-aged Somali told me. Last year he brought a nephew over from home to learn the trade under him, step by step.

"People praise Guangzhou for being such a free city. I don't quite agree — it depends who you're comparing it with."

"Someone from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran will find Guangzhou very free indeed. To them freedom means alcohol, nightclubs, being able to queue for something; by that measure Guangzhou is completely free next to where they came from. Some Africans feel that coming to Guangzhou lets them escape hunger, and that's a kind of freedom too."

In this office, Ali and his countrymen try to keep an orthodox Muslim life. Alcohol never appears here; Ali once made a point of telling Mathews not to bring any in. Doing fieldwork in Guangzhou, Mathews would sometimes have a drink after hours, which also helped him meet more African traders and pick up more interesting material.

"But not in my place," Ali says. The rule is strict, like the rule about the television in the sitting room, which shows only sport and news — Somali-language news, or the BBC and CNN. "Only news. No entertainment."

Hong Kong feels more like home to Ali. He remembers registering his company there in 2010: the paperwork took half an hour. "That would be unimaginable in London," where his two older brothers live and work as security guards.

His Hong Kong neighbors used to remind him when it was time to pray at the Kowloon Mosque, and joke: "Can I ask your God to make my business prosper?"

In Guangzhou he can enter mosques freely too; he once took Mathews to see the Xianxian Mosque. Still, something is different. He can feel the zones he isn't supposed to enter. Religion is not a fit subject for discussion; the community may be discussed only if you stress that it is "informal."

Ali's freedom rests on his Hong Kong travel document. In the sitting room, a middle-aged man who had not said a word all evening broke into our conversation: "Everyone wants a passport with more privileges, don't they? It only makes life easier. Deep down we are still Somali."

Then he explained what makes a person Somali — the same language, the same faith and culture, marrying only other Somalis — and said he could not really understand the Africans in Guangzhou who had married Chinese wives. "West Africans do that; we don't. A family should be built on a shared culture."

What worries Ali is his children. He wants to go back to Somalia when he retires, or move to one of Hong Kong's outlying islands and live quietly as a fisherman, but his children show no interest at all in a homeland they don't know.

They are 13 and 11, and they were already unhappy about leaving Canada for Malaysia. "They'd probably rather be Canadian than Malaysian or Chinese. For us, Guangzhou is a place to earn money, not a place to live."

"Of course, in Guangzhou you escape Hong Kong's housing prices. That counts as a kind of freedom too — for now, at least."

(Cover image: a still from Guangzhou Dream Factory; long cover image by the photographer Li Dong)