A Little Africa in China

I think am going to go back to Uganda to apply for a new visa. I don't know what Chinese immigration is up to. We are students but we are treated like shit for real. At the police station at the moment in detention coz my visa card expired for 5 days coz I didn't get the documents to apply for a new visa on time. Now at the police station they are telling me I have to contact a friend or family to buy a ticket back home to apply for a new visa and come back, so I was asking them how about my classes. Am I going to throw all that away and go home instead of paying a fine for the days that passed? Was detained today morning. Still making calls.

In March, just nine months after I met Ivan Manivoo, he sent me the above message via WeChat. Ivan, a Ugandan student who had been living in China for four years and planned to spend the next several pursuing his dream of becoming an entrepreneur in China, was about to be deported. He had opened up his life to me and co-director Dorian Carli-Jones for China Remix, our documentary about African hip-hop artists living and working in China’s southeastern city of Guangzhou.

Two years ago, I decided to go to Guangzhou to find out what life was like on the ground in “Little Africa,” also known as “Chocolate City,” labels coined by the Chinese media in Guangzhou to describe the city’s African hubs, Xiaobei and Sanyuanli, where wholesale traders have been congregating since the decline of financial centers in Southeast Asia during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. After spending the previous three years researching China’s historical relationship with the African continent, first as a graduate student and then as a freelance writer, I had decided that I would pursue my next set of questions through the medium of documentary. I hoped this would allow for a more complex and personal presentation of Africans’ lives in China’s wholesale capital.

In the meantime, China had become Africa’s largest bilateral investor and trading partner. It had also, in 2012, clamped down on immigration through a new Exit-Entry Administration Law, which imposed stringent penalties for visa overstays and illegal labor. Through my work, I wanted to better understand the implications of China’s rapidly growing economic investment in Africa and its reaction to the global migration trends that followed this engagement.

That was the story that I set out to tell. When Dorian and I arrived in Guangzhou in June 2014, we had $500 and ten days to accomplish the task. As one may have guessed, we quickly discovered that there is no one story in Guangzhou. It is unclear precisely how many Africans live in the city (local registration authorities often fail to produce official statistics on permanent foreign residents), but authoritative sources have cited numbers anywhere from 16,000 all the way up to 200,000. Among those inhabitants are short-term and long-term traders, students, and a swarm of others from east and west Africa who have traveled to China to supply those groups with services that range from hair styling to cooking to entertainment. Guangzhou’s African community is just that: a community.

Luckily for us, Ivan told many stories at once. A computer science and technology major at Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, as well as chair of the school’s foreign students union, Ivan was a veritable poster boy for contemporary China-Africa relations. His story, which began with an acceptance to university and a student visa, sounded like those touted at China’s Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summits, during which African and Chinese leaders broadcast increased educational exchanges between the two regions. Guangzhou’s media, which vilify “foreign” (often used as an aphorism for “African”) local gangs, drug mules, and visa overstayers in the city, do not incorporate Ivan’s experience, whose words, “I’ve got many chances around here, China” cap our thirty-minute film about the ambitions of several people involved in the African entertainment industry in Guangzhou. 

Indeed, we chose Ivan as a candidate for our film because he was an exemplar of what Roberto Castillo, lecturer at Hong Kong University and longtime researcher of Africans in China, describes as “semi-settled” Africans who are “on the move” in Guangzhou: “economic explorers seeking opportunities, anticipating trends, mediating deals, and sometimes buying directly from the Chinese to resell to other Africans.” Ivan was not only a student, he was also a sometimes trader (buying small-scale commodities for friends and relatives in Uganda), entertainer, and liaison between African celebrities at home and Guangzhou’s burgeoning African entertainment industry.

And yet, despite his various roles, Ivan’s freedom of movement – both translocal and transnational – came with a set of social limitations. Before that fateful evening in March when I received Ivan’s text announcing his detention, right before his phone was confiscated and fourteen days before his release and deportation to Uganda – I picked up on his anxieties about living in a city full of migrants, domestic and international, who live in a state of liminality even as they fuel an economy dependent on their labor and trade.

‘Kind of Racist’

“Around China, some Chinese, the way they look at blacks, it’s like they don’t know them…Sometimes they touch their noses, like, ‘Oh, he might be smelly or something’ just because of the color,”  Ivan told us during one interview.

That same day, Ivan’s friend Sunny, a Chinese college student majoring in business English at a nearby university, frankly acknowledged that, “We, Chinese, to be honest, are kind of racist. The stereotypes are that the Africans are dirty, they rob, and they do really bad things.” That conversation ended in a burst of laughter from Ivan after Sunny asked a question that I have heard before from Chinese friends, acquaintances, and strangers: “Africans have a lot of AIDS, right?”

Ironically, the news that Africans were passing around the week we were there focused on a “really bad thing” that involved an African: a grisly murder of a Cameroonian man by a group of Chinese revelers.

While in a bar in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, a group of men chased Ambe George, an entertainer also known by his stage name “The One,” out of the bar after he was spotted flirting with a Chinese woman. The chase ended on the street, where George was stabbed to death. Most striking to me at that time was that, despite these types of incidents, Ivan and the other Guangzhou dwellers we spent time with – the Nigerian entertainers Dibaocha Sky and Flame Ramadan, and Kenyan hairstylist Josephine – were decidedly interested in staying in Guangzhou.

Dibaocha Sky was what Castillo terms a “more established” African in Guangzhou, a title reserved for those with “considerable investments in the city, [who] are very well connected with local producers, as well as with authorities and other foreigners.” When we met Dibaocha, he had been in the city for over six years and was married with two children. He had begun his career as a wholesale hair trader and had transitioned to a full-time promoter for up and coming entertainers in the area. His wife Cherrish, a native of the northeast province of Shandong, still ran their hair business out of a stall in one of Sanyuanli’s large trading malls.

Flame Ramadan was a newcomer to China and had been there for under a year when we met him at a crowded café in Xiaobei, where he often traveled from his apartment in Foshan, a city located southwest of Guangzhou, to meet with friends and fellow performers. In the short time he had been in Guangzhou, with the help of a Chinese producer he had recorded and put out an album – aptly titled “Just Give it a Try” – and was on his way to recording his second. His plan was to stay in China for at least another year to continue doing more shows and shoot a music video for a cost much less than the going rate back in Nigeria.

Ramadan fell into Castillo’s third and last category of Africans in China, the “newly arrived,” who, “lured by the ‘new land of opportunities’ discourse, collect funds amongst relatives and friends and sets out on a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’…mission to seek their fortunes in China.”

Josephine, whom we met while she was twisting Ramadan’s hair at her home salon located on the top floor of a building that towered over Xiaobei, was a student, business owner, and newly arrived dreamer all in one. She went to Chinese classes in the morning and braided hair in the afternoon, all the while saving money to bring her daughter, who was completing high school in Nairobi, Kenya, over to China to study for a year before heading to college in the U.S. to study what Josephine hoped would be engineering or a subject equally useful to Kenya’s economy.

Dorian and I ultimately chose the entertainment industry as our focus because it illustrated the staying power of Guangzhou’s African community. As Ivan clearly phrases it in our documentary, Africans who have been living in Guangzhou for nearly a decade “need some entertainment.” Moreover, it didn’t hurt that Dibaocha, Ramadan and Ivan were able to express their experiences in Guangzhou as eloquently on screen as on stage. We also wanted to capture the uncertainties that attended the lifestyles around this industry, but for that we really could have chosen any line of business in Guangzhou.

The Three Illegals

China’s international migration infrastructure has yet to adapt to the country’s new realities. With more than 200 million internal migrants floating between the countryside and the city, fueling China’s intensive labor needs, the government has been loath to encourage immigration from regions outside of the country’s borders. Barring more privileged arrangements, such as China and the United States’ reciprocal ten-year multi-entry visa policy (which was implemented following U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to China in November 2014), individuals seeking new employment opportunities are given visas with severe time limitations. Ramadan, for example, is required to exit the country once every thirty days. When we met him, he had already traveled to Hong Kong, Macao and Malaysia to renew his visa. Although Dibaocha is able to live indefinitely in China through the residency permit he acquired as a result of marrying Cherrish, he does not possess a working permit, as this is not part of the residency package, and so must rely on his wife and Chinese colleagues for the ownership component of his myriad businesses.

It is therefore not surprising that under these circumstances, Africans in China often get caught up in the 2012 Exit-Entry Law and Guangzhou’s local policies, the purpose of which are to combat the illegal entry, stay and labor of foreigners, colloquially termed the “three illegals,” or san fei. While the Exit-Entry Law created a national framework for regulating visas, residence, and work in China, Guangzhou’s local policies, especially the 2011 “Interim Provisions of Guangdong Province on Administration of and Services to Aliens,” established targeting mechanisms for what anthropologist Shanshan Lan calls the “sanfei population.”  These include a reward and penalty principle for Chinese individuals who report illegal activity to the authorities; the expansion of police authority to allow all police units, as opposed to just those formerly designated for foreigners, to scan African areas; and the restriction of foreigners from establishing residences or offices “in certain areas,” which Lan interprets as “an institutional effort to segregate the African community spatially in the Xiaobei area.” Tensions that developed out of these frameworks, specifically protests in 2009 and 2012 over Guangzhou’s aggressive policing, led to the designation of community affairs liaisons, who assist Chinese public security authorities with maintaining peaceful relations in African-dominated areas. However, as Ramadan cheerlessly comments in our film, “You find it so difficult, because the police are everywhere to chase you.”

Given the mobility and labor restrictions on this population, one might think that Ivan, Dibaocha, Ramadan, and Josephine would have other destinations on their mind for their future endeavors. Yet, when I received a phone call from Ivan in mid-April after he had landed in the Kampala airport, the first thing he told me was, “I am getting a new visa to get back to China.” He had been misinformed by his school that his documents were ready for renewal and, as a result, had overstayed his visa by five days. Now, back in Uganda, he would need a letter from Interpol before he could reapply for his student visa and return to China to complete his final semester at university.

In May, a year after filming, I was back in Guangzhou to screen the final version of China Remix at several venues throughout the city. While there, I visited Josephine’s salon, and was happy to see that nothing had changed, save the removal of a bed in one of the main rooms. When I asked her about it, she told me that the police had stopped visiting her as often, so she felt comfortable fully transitioning the room back into its original form as a salon space. The first time I had visited her, Chinese domestic workers were bustling around making dinner for Josephine and fellow countrymen who were in Guangzhou to purchase construction materials for projects taking place back home. This time, a barber from Burundi was the sole other person in the house. I found him resting after Chinese class – he was a student at a local university – and one of his five daily prayers. While I waited for Josephine to return from class, he showed me clips of news videos documenting the recent unrest in Burundi, after which he declared, “See? Very bad.”

A day later, I found Cherrish at the hair stall, waiting idly for customers – who had been sparse since August 2013, when 1,300 police officers raided the Sanyuanli area, sweeping up 168 people, the majority of them African, in the process. Although the raid was ostensibly to root out drug dealing, we were told by several contacts that the real point (and end result) was to purge the area of overstayers, who had stuck to Xiaobei following the raid. A bedridden Dibaocha called while I was chatting with Cherrish. “I’m running a new bar right now and it’s making me very ill,” he told me. The late hours were catching up to him, and he was planning on giving up on the business – but not on China, where he had several shows lined up for the summer. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to catch up with Ramadan, who was busy shooting a music video on the outskirts of Guangzhou. 

While there, in addition to missing Ivan as a friend, I was sad that he wasn’t with me to share in the experience of screening the film and fielding questions from mostly Chinese audiences. If Ivan wasn’t a poster boy, he was certainly the most accessible of the individuals we shot in the documentary. Linguistically, he could navigate seamlessly between English, Chinese, Luganda, and Swahili. Experientially, he had both Chinese and African friends, and tended to frequent foreigner-dominated hubs in the city. Although the film gave Ivan a voice, his physical presence would have been a welcome addition to the follow-up conversations that addressed topics that neither of us had been thinking about during the shoot. While I was concerned with China’s legal policies and the solidification of Guangzhou as a community, and Ivan, Dibaocha, Ramadan, and Josephine were preoccupied with the maneuvering required to live their daily lives in a comfortable and productive way, the Chinese audiences who attended the screenings, the majority of them young college students, wanted to know much more.

Speaking in both Chinese and English, the young attendees discussed interracial dating and the stigmas around it, whether Africans in Guangzhou had the diseases they had heard about in the media, and why it was that I, an American filmmaker, would be so concerned with the issue of Africans living in their city. Didn’t the U.S. have big problems with race? Why was I looking at China? When I freely acknowledged that yes, the U.S. has serious problems regarding race, the conversation opened up. When a Chinese anthropologist who had been researching the same topic announced that class-based issues constituted the true core of this topic, the conversation opened up some more. The night of my final screening, I received a comment on my WeChat wall from a young attendee who worked in Guangzhou’s shipping industry. He wrote, “Nice sharing, I think most people are good people, no matter what color they are.”

On July 7, 2015, after three months of waiting, Ivan was notified that his visa had been denied. It is not clear where his story will go from here. He hopes to finish his schooling in Uganda but when I last spoke to him, his mind was still in China, where he had left his possessions, friends, and hopes for his future.  However, I am sure he will be on his feet soon. “I am creative,” he told me the day he heard the news. “I can’t fail.”