Africa In China — The Guangzhou Story

The China-Africa story has been extensively written about, but almost always exclusively focuses on the Chinese in Africa, and rarely the other way round. 

One recent report estimates that from January to August 2014, Guangzhou, a city of some 13-14 million people, hosted 3.05 million inbound or outbound foreigners, with 86,000 foreigners having registered residence in the city. Another website estimates that about 500,000 foreigners are in Guangzhou at any given time. There are 34,000 permanent resident foreigners, according to one website, 47,000 according to another, and 120,000, according to a third.

A fair proportion of these foreigners are African, though exact figures are difficult to come by. What is most interesting about the type of globalization found in Guangzhou is what the article describes as low-end globalization. Unlike other metropolitan cities that are globalizing, the main attraction to foreigners in Guangzhou is trade in a small number of goods rather than the multinational corporations in other global cities. 

Guangzhou is the central metropolis in the world where the goods of low-end globalization are bought and sold.

It is interesting to understand how people from diverse backgrounds converge and conduct business together in a place where contracts and laws are not what guide business, but rather reputation and interpersonal trust. 

The experience and views of foreigners in Guangzhou depend on where the person has come from. For some, it is a place to be revered – a marvel of technological innovation, progress etc. For others, it is a chaotic place where only the toughest survive. 

It is however difficult not to marvel at Guangzhou's place in the world. 

All of this reflects China’s place in the world as both a developing country less than six decades past starvation for tens of millions of its people, to being the world’s second largest economy today, a superpower that competes with the United States for world supremacy on many fronts.