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How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
Knopf
May 2014
On Sale: May 20, 2014
305 pages ISBN: 0307956989 EAN: 9780307956989 Kindle: B00GVZVB9W Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
An exciting, hugely revealing account of China’s burgeoning
presence in Africa—a developing empire already shaping, and
reshaping, the future of millions of people.
A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New
York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and
Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell
the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous
on-the-ground reporting—conducted in Mandarin, French, and
Portuguese, among other languages—French crafts a layered
investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages
not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also
with the ordinary men and women navigating the
street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice,
corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic
geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy,
French reveals the human face of China’s economic,
political, and human presence across the African
continent—and in doing so reveals what is at stake for
everyone involved.
We meet a broad spectrum of China’s dogged emigrant
population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African
infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made
tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a
timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of
Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to those just barely
scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite
total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner–cum–brothel madam),
still convinced that Africa affords them better
opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an
equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’
backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese
construction project (a tower complex to be built over a
beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to
overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian
political candidate who, having protested China’s
intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now
turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an
industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly
condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety
precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant
counterparts’. French’s nuanced portraits reveal
the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the
all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition—exploitation of
resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects;
dubious treaties—to new frontiers of cultural and economic
exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust,
assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are
in dynamic flux.
Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part
industrial and political exposé, French’s keenly observed
account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most
pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why
China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its
cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the
equation is, and just what the ramifications for both
parties—and the watching world—will be in the foreseeable
future.
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