Yoon Jung Park, an adjunct associate professor in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University, presented “Chinese labor migrants in Africa, past and present,” a talk about the history of Chinese migration to Africa and the African response to the new Chinese migrants.
The presentation, which happened on April 7, was co-hosted by the African Students Association and the Hopkins Inter-Asian Council (IAC).
Park started by describing the historical relations of China and Africa and the incomplete Western narratives of African-Chinese relations.
“I wanted to focus on that since there’s the sense of ‘Oh, China and Africa, that’s totally new, there are no Chinese in Africa or there haven’t been Chinese in Africa,’ when in fact, there’s a long history of relations,” she said.
Park argued that countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France worry that China is aiming to dominate Africa as a neocolonial power.
Frequent themes of the discourse include concerns that China is draining Africa of its natural resources, promoting authoritarian dictators or violating labor laws.
“There are clearly some elements of truth to some of these concerns, but in terms of the Western narrative, all of that has been overblown,” she said. “All of this stems from the fear of being overtaken as the most dominant player in Africa. A lot of it stems from fear of this new player stomping on their former colonial turf.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, when African colonies were starting to fight for independence, China established friendly ties in support of African independence movements.
“That’s when China begins the next chapter of their narrative of Africa-China relations, this solidarity between comrades, that Africa and China, together with other third world nations, have to bind themselves together to combat Western imperialism. It’s all about friendship,” she said.
Today approximately one million Chinese people live in Africa. Of this population, a large portion were brought to Africa by Chinese state-owned enterprises and private companies to work in construction, mining and natural resource extraction.
The majority of the companies are national state-owned enterprises, but there are increasing numbers of provincial-owned enterprises and private companies.
Park described how African governments have been receptive to the influx of Chinese labor.
“They appreciate the fact that China doesn’t have this baggage and that China doesn’t try to tell Africans what to do or enter negotiations saying ‘We have to help these poor brown brothers and sisters.’ It’s not out of pity, they want to do business,” she said. “There’s been a lot of appreciation for that different tone.”
IAC Vice President, sophomore Evelyn Yeh, said that Park was asked to give this talk because of her specialized knowledge as a researcher of Chinese-African relations.
“I’ve never had the opportunity to learn more about the relations of any history of China or the relations of China with other countries, in the present day especially,” she said.
Yeh also commented on the low turnout for the event.
“Since there wasn’t food, it was hard to get people to come to informative events like this. Usually people go to fun events like TASA Night Market,” she said. “Stuff like that is more cultural, [what] you would expect from our Asian community, since we don’t focus a lot on our activism and our history...They like eating our food, and that’s all they know about us.”
Freshman IAC member Julia See noted how China’s relationship with Africa is not particularly well known.
“It never came up to me, so I wanted to learn more about Chinese people in Africa, because you just don’t think of it. When I think of Chinese immigrants, I think about the United States or North America, you never think of them going to a third world country or somewhere like Africa,” she said.
She was also interested by Park’s descriptions of the discrimination that Chinese immigrants sometimes face in Africa.
“Just as in America there’s racial profiling of African Americans, in Africa, they racially profile Chinese people,” she said. “I thought that was interesting, to see the flip, to see how much racism against Chinese people there is, because I don’t experience much here.”
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