Rethinking the Peripheral: A Study of Chinese Migrants in Lesotho

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A Study of Chinese Migrants in Lesotho

对‘边缘’ 的再思考——中国人在莱索托

Naa bohole bo etsa phapang?: Balakolako ba kojoana li mahetleng ba Machaena matsoatlareng a Lesotho.

Rethinking the Peripheral:

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Statement

Acknowledgements

Cover Image: A Chinese-‐owned food wholesaler in Maseru. Source: Author’s Own, 2010.

This is my own unaided work and does not exceed 20,000 words.

I am grateful to Wolfson College for their financial contribution to my research costs. I would like to thank Mr. Lin for his invaluable assistance during my fieldwork and for helping me to overcome many of the practical difficulties involved in my research. A final thanks to Dr. Xiang Biao for his input and warm encouragement at all stages of the development of this thesis.

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Contents

List of Figures.....................................................................................................................4

Clarification of Terms and Acronyms..................................................................................4

Preface ..............................................................................................................................5

Chapter 1. Introduction......................................................................................................8

1.1 Rethinking the Peripheral...........................................................................................8

1.2 The Research Site ....................................................................................................12

Chapter 2. A Review of Literature on China’s Engagement with Africa..............................17

Chapter 3. Methodology ..................................................................................................29

3.1 The Ethnographic Approach .....................................................................................29

3.2 The Fieldwork ..........................................................................................................30

3.3 Gaining Access.........................................................................................................31

3.4 The Interviews .........................................................................................................33

Chapter 4. Findings and Discussion...................................................................................38

4.1 Lesotho’s Established Chinese Communities.............................................................38

4.2 From Fujian to Lesotho: Periphery-‐to-‐Periphery Migration .......................................47

4.3 Understanding Fujianese Modes of Mobility.............................................................54

4.4 Making the Periphery Profitable...............................................................................57

4.5 Sino-‐African Relations at the Periphery ....................................................................66

4.6 New Directions? ......................................................................................................70

Chapter 5. Conclusions.....................................................................................................73

Bibliography.....................................................................................................................79

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Map of Lesotho ....................................................................................................... 13

Clarification of terms and acronyms

Basotho Plural demonym for the South Sotho people (sing. Mosotho). The Basotho live chiefly in Lesotho.

ALAFA Apparel Lesotho Alliance to Fight AIDS BCP Basutoland Congress Party EDF European Development Fund FSB Fujian Statistics Bureau GDP Gross Domestic Product PRC People’s Republic of China ROC Republic of China (Taiwan)

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Preface

The reforms initiated in China in 1978 have had a monumental impact on the

mobility of Chinese people, both nationally and internationally. According to

Murphy, the over 100 million itinerant labourers and traders who have left their

native homes in search of work in China’s cities represent ‘the largest peacetime

movement of people in history’ (Murphy, 2002, p. 1). In addition to paving the way

for internal migration, the reforms have created unprecedented opportunities for

outmigration from the Chinese mainland, allowing a new generation of Chinese

migrants to seek their fortunes overseas.

Even in this new era of frenzied interest in China, studies of the overseas

Chinese have focused on the older and better-‐known Chinese migrant communities

of North America, more recently Europe (see: Avenarius, 2007; Beck, 2007; Pieke et

al., 2004, p.2; Pieke & Xiang, 2009; Skeldon, 2000; Thunø et al., 2005). In general,

writings on Chinese transnational migration have tended to assume that the United

States and the wealthy countries of Western Europe are every migrant’s

destinations of choice. Other destinations are imagined to be second best, or

stepping stones on longer trajectories of mobility (ibid., p. 3).

This focus on migration to the centres of the global economy ignores the fact

that most transnational movements of persons, including Chinese migration take

people to places ‘that seem, at first glance, curiously nonobvious’ (Pieke et al., 2004,

p. 3). For instance, studies of Chinese migration have almost entirely overlooked the

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fact that in the past decade, more than a million Chinese people, from chefs to

engineers, are thought to have moved to work in Africa (Rice, 2011). Far from being

limited to Africa’s urban centres, the effects of Chinese migration have been felt

even in the most remote corners of the continent. This investigation seeks to

redress the imbalance in the scholarship around this issue by focusing on migration

between different sites in the global periphery.

Throughout my analysis, I use the term ‘periphery’ to refer to those real

places that are outside the flows of goods, capital and persons that converge on

global centres such as New York, London and Tokyo. These out-‐of-‐the-‐way places

constitute sites of exclusion in the global economic system and have traditionally

been assumed to offer little in the way of opportunities for accumulation and capital

generation. Lesotho’s highland villages are a textbook example of this kind of

periphery, and yet they have become a popular destination for a particular class of

merchants from Fujian province. These traders have succeeded in establishing a

retail stronghold in Lesotho, penetrating corners of the country previously

unreached by foreign businesses.

This paper is premised on a desire to discover how and why Lesotho’s

Fujianese migrant communities become established at these marginalised sites. I

was keen to discover the aspirations of Fujianese migrants in coming to Lesotho and

to identify the specific factors that influenced their decision to migrate.

Furthermore, I wanted to understand how they perceive the ‘remoteness’ and

‘peripherality’ of Lesotho’s mountainous hinterland and to discern the strategies

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and practices that allow them to turn the periphery into a productive space. In

carrying out this research, I hoped to be able to redress the relative paucity of

ethnographic research on the Chinese diaspora in Africa, particularly in small,

resource-‐poor nations such as Lesotho.

In the first chapter, I seek to unpack the construction of ‘marginality’ in the

context of different theories of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ emerging from international

political economy. I suggest that Fujianese migrants, who are themselves a

peripheral group in the world system, may perceive the periphery in distinct ways .

This chapter also provides an overview of Lesotho’s economic situation and its

particular history as a peripheral enclave surrounded by South Africa. In the second

chapter, I provide a critique of the existing literature on Sino-‐African relations,

arguing that most writings on Chinese activity in Africa have provided top-‐down

accounts of Beijing’s dealings, ignoring the important but complex role played by the

Chinese diaspora in transforming the continent. Chapter three provides an account

of the research methods and mode of analysis adopted for this investigation. The

findings of my investigation are discussed in chapter four and summarised in chapter

five.

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Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 Rethinking the Periphery

The notion of ‘periphery’ provides us with a structural orientation for

understanding spatialised patterns of inequality and exclusion. Although peripheral

places are geographically diverse, they share a number of common characteristics

that set them diametrically apart from those places at the ‘centre’ of global systems.

These places often enjoy limited access to flows of goods, capitals and persons and

are subsequently placed outside major transnational networks of trade and

migration.

Indeed, many scholarly narratives of migration are underpinned, explicitly or

implicitly, by an assumption about a divide between ‘traditional peripheries’ and

‘modern centres’. Being located outside global trade and knowledge networks,

peripheral regions are typically unable to develop the kinds of industry and capital

base required to achieve economic takeoff and ‘modernisation’. By contrast, regions

at the core concentrate transnational flows and typically allow for rapid rates of

capital accumulation and technical innovation.

Modernisation theorists have long posited that migration from periphery to

core and return flows from core to periphery play a vital role in making ‘traditional’

societies more ‘modern’, thus ‘developing’ the periphery (Goldscheider, 1987, pp.

677-‐80). By contrast, structuralist theories have argued that migration cannot

improve the situation of the periphery because it consolidates an unequal

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relationship of dependence with the core. Instead, structuralist studies have

suggested that migration has a negative impact on peripheral regions, locking

traditional communities into poverty and cementing traditional power structures

(Colton, 1993, pp. 870-‐82).

Dependency theory proposes a very different understanding of the

relationship between the core and the periphery, but nevertheless it holds the core-‐

periphery divide to be a central feature of the world society. Dependency theorists

have posited that societies are inextricably linked, within a global system, through

relationships of dependence. They reject the idea that developing countries lag

behind the developing world, arguing instead that both developed and developing

countries are at the same historical stage. They suggest that the developed world is

at the core of the world system and the developing world is at the periphery. Core

and periphery thus constitute two sides of the same coin, with the poverty of the

latter being a prerequisite for the prosperity of the former (Frank, 1967; Dos Santos,

1971; Amin, 1976).

World systems theory has proposed a similar but more nuanced model of

‘dependency’ or ‘reliance’ between the core and the periphery. Whereas

‘dependency’ in Dependency theory is unidirectional, ‘reliance’ in World systems

theory is bidirectional, operating within a three-‐tier framework. This framework

posits the existence of a third category: semi-‐peripheral places, which exist between

the core and the periphery proper. This sliding model differs significantly from the

binary conception of core dependency on the periphery in that it suggests that a

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circulation of powers is an unavoidable outcome of the system. In other words, a

semi-‐peripheral region may displace a core region in decline, thus moving from the

periphery to the core (Wallerstein, 1976).

In any case, regardless of which notion of peripherality one subscribes to, it is

clear that both the core and the periphery are increasingly linked by the processes

of globalisation. I use this term to refer not to a unidirectional tendency, but rather

to a multitude of processes ‘that transcend and redefine regional and national

boundaries’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 9). These processes produce a world that is

increasingly interconnected, rearranging spaces of flows and challenging established

notions of marginality and periphery. In doing this, globalisation produces a ‘new

reality’, creating new social forms and inflecting existing social forms ‘such as the

nation-‐state, the family, class, race, or ethnicity’ (ibid.).

Crucially, the scope of globalisation extends ‘beyond the traditional centres

of the capitalist system’ (Pieke et al. 2004, p. 10). That is to say, globalisation

reconfigures spaces within and beyond the established centres of the world

economy. In facilitating new flows of capital, technology and migration, globalisation

creates contingent and dynamic relationships between ‘multiple centres and

peripheries’ (ibid.). Of particular interest for this investigation is the way in which

globalisation creates connections between places previously considered to be on the

fringes of hegemonic geographies of flows.

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Notions of dependency and reliance have laid the foundation for popular

understandings of national and transnational mobility. These interpretations,

emerging from the field of development studies and intended to inform

development policy, have been critiqued by Murphy for being too Manichean and

simplistic for understanding the complexities of change in the global economy

(Murphy, 2002, p. 18). They certainly fall short in terms of explaining the numerous

contingent and context-‐specific factors that may influence an individual’s decision to

migrate. Indeed, macroeconomic models such as these leave little room for an

appreciation of the agency of the individual and an understanding of the

interactions of social and economic pressures, which inflect that agency.

It became clear to me, while reading around this topic, that the changing

nature of Chinese migration required in-‐situ investigation of Chinese communities

outside China. How and why these communities become established in developing

countries are important and relatively unexplored questions within contemporary

social anthropology and migration studies. This is a particularly interesting area of

study given that, contrary to the narratives promulgated in Western media accounts

of international migration, most mobility of people takes place ‘between peripheral

areas rather than from a periphery to a centre’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p.198).

Indeed, Xiang states that, within the destination countries, most Chinese

migrants work in remote areas instead of major cities (Xiang, 2009, p. 421).

According to Pieke and his team, the nature of this mobility cannot be truly

appreciated from the centre, hence the conspicuous lack of writings produced on

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this subject by Western scholars (ibid.). This is because the enduring influence of

the centre-‐periphery dichotomy is part of a paradigm that tends to view migration

and return flows as phenomena that are external to peripheries (Murphy, 2002, p.

17).

Pieke et al. go on to explain that, for Chinese migrants, ‘the map of the world

looks distinctly different from what we ourselves would assume, with centres and

peripheries in some unexpected places’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 3). Indeed, this paper

is premised on a desire to rethink the peripheral and to view the world from the

migrant’s perspective. That is not to say that I assume that migrants do not perceive

‘periphery’ as a real spatial category but rather, that they approach the periphery in

a certain way that allows them to thrive where others have previously struggled.

1.2 The Research Site

Lesotho is one of many African countries that have been entirely neglected

by scholarship on Chinese migration to Africa. With a population of just over two

million people (World Bank, 2009) and a total land-‐area of approximately 30,355

km2 (roughly the size of Belgium or Taiwan), the Mountain Kingdom is completely

surrounded by South Africa, the continent’s most developed country. Lesotho is

classified by the UN as a ‘least developed country’ and, with a GDP per capita of

$764, the kingdom is ranked 156th on the human development index (World Bank,

2009). In short, Lesotho occupies a position within conventional imagined

geographies of development that is undeniably peripheral.

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Figure 1: Map of Lesotho

Source: Mapsget, 2011: http://www.mapsget.com/bigmaps/africa/lesotho_pol90.jpg

Lesotho’s peripherality is, in part, a product of its relative poverty compared

to its wealthier neighbour, South Africa – a country that is increasingly seeking to

assert itself as a regional hub of transnational flows. Turner identifies three

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intermediate causes of poverty in Lesotho. These are unemployment ‘linked to the

heavy retrenchments of Basotho migrant labour from the South African mines over

the last decade’ (Turner, 2005, p. 5), environmental problems such as ‘frosts,

drought and floods’ (ibid.), and HIV/AIDS, which he describes as ‘both a cause and a

symptom of poverty’ (ibid.). Lesotho currently has the third highest adult HIV

prevalence in the world at 23.3% (ALAFA, 2008) and the pandemic continues to be a

source of ‘enormous hardship, and death, for rapidly growing numbers of people’

(Turner, 2005, p. 6).

In addition to these intermediate causes of poverty, Lesotho’s peripheral

position within Southern Africa is perpetuated by its history as a labour reserve for

South Africa, its prevalent gender inequality and its record of inefficient governance

(Turner, 2005 p. 5). Low fiscal incomes and an over-‐bureaucratised state have meant

that poverty-‐reduction initiatives in Lesotho frequently fail in the implementation

stage. The country has long been a recipient of foreign aid but, in the words of one

development analyst, the history of foreign aid projects in Lesotho has been one of

‘almost unremitting failure’ (Murray 1981, pg. 19 in Ferguson 1990, pg. 8).

Lesotho has virtually no natural resources other than water, which it exports

to South Africa. Consequently, the country suffers from a large trade deficit, with

exports representing only a small proportion of total imports. These factors have

cemented Lesotho’s position at the margins of the global economic system. This

economic marginalisation is complemented by cultural marginalisation at the

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international level, with little attention being given to Lesotho by the international

media.

Estimates of the total population of Mainland Chinese currently settled in

Lesotho range from five to twenty thousand. This is a relatively small community

compared to the populations of settled Chinese in the United States or even in other

African countries and, as a result, Lesotho’s Chinese have been entirely neglected by

academic scholarship. My research has shown that the majority of the Chinese living

in Lesotho are low-‐skilled economic migrants from Fujian province, a major site of

Chinese emigration (Pieke et al., 2004).

Early flows of Indian and skilled-‐Chinese migration to Lesotho have, since

1998, been eclipsed by the comparatively vast influx of poorly-‐skilled migrants from

Fujian’s rural interior. This new group of migrants has established a retail hegemony

in Lesotho, penetrating corners of the country previously unreached by either local

or foreign businesses. The present flow of Fujianese migration to Lesotho appears to

have followed in the wake of earlier flows of Taiwanese and Shanghainese migration

to the country, suggesting that migration to the periphery is not sustainable, in the

long term, by migrants from a single region.

My research demonstrates that the Fujianese in Lesotho approach the

country’s mountainous margins with a set of strategies that allow them to cultivate

the periphery as a prime site for capital accumulation. These strategies include

group purchase and transport of goods and targeted pricing campaigns against local

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competitors. Given the small numbers of buyers in remote areas, Fujianese traders

are reliant on captive markets for the profitability of their enterprises. The need to

establish a small monopoly over a given resource in a given area produces a

centrifugal force that continuously pushes new arrivals from Fujian further and

further into Lesotho’s periphery.

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Chapter 2. A Review of Literature on China’s Engagement with Africa

There has, in recent years, been an explosion of interest in ‘China and Africa’.

While the socio-‐economic changes brought about by China’s reforms and rapid

economic ascendancy have, for some time, been a focus for scholarly interest, it is

only in the last two decades that China’s engagement with Africa has come under

academic scrutiny. This recent scholarship on ‘China and Africa’ has focused almost

exclusively on the geopolitical implications of China’s activities in Africa. In reviewing

the recent body of literature on Sino-‐African relations I hope to demonstrate the

extent to which the majority of these writings present top-‐down, macro-‐scale

narratives of Chinese engagement with African countries. By contrast, there is a

conspicuous dearth of ethnographic studies of the Chinese diaspora in Africa and

the migratory trajectories that have brought them to even the most remote corners

of the continent. This paper is intended to help redress this gap since, as Alden

rightly explains, ‘for most ordinary Africans it is these Chinese small-‐scale

entrepreneurs, and most especially retail traders, who have had the greatest impact

on their lives’ (2007, p. 37).

It is easy to see why the geopolitics of Sino-‐African relations has recently

become a ‘hot’ topic amongst academics from a wide range of disciplines. There is a

sense in the literature that the academic community was caught off-‐guard by

China’s sudden (re)intensification of its relationships with African governments. The

Chinese Communist Party strongly denies claims that its interests in Africa are

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opportunistic and instead propounds a discourse of ‘ongoing partnership’ with the

African peoples, dating as far back as the 15th century (Alden & Alves, 2008, p. 43).

However, in spite of the warm Communist rhetoric, there have been clear

fluctuations in the intensity of China’s African diplomacy, at least over the last sixty

years.

Writings published in English during the last decade by African, European and

American scholars on China’s engagement with Africa have tended to emphasise the

materialistic dimension of China’s relationships with African governments (Alves,

2008; Ennes Ferreira, 2008; Kragelund, 2007; Soares de Oliveira, 2008). However,

during the Mao years (1949-‐1976), the emphasis of China’s African diplomacy was

unmistakably ideological. Indeed, according to He, it was the Bandung Conference of

1955 that set the precedent for the future of Sino-‐African relations (He, 2008, p.

147). Alden & Alves argue that the ‘South-‐South solidarity’ expressed in the Non-‐

Aligned movement persists to this day in China’s strictly bilateral approach and

emphasis on ‘mutual benefit’ (Alden & Alves, 2008, p. 47).

However, despite this politicised language, there was clearly a dilution of the

ideological pro-‐activism of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai during the first decade under

Deng Xiaoping (1978–1989) (Alden et al., 2008, p. 5). Following the 1978 reforms,

Beijing has tended to avoid overtly political discourse in its dealings with foreign

governments and instead placed a greater emphasis on economic co-‐operation

(Power & Mohan, 2008b, p. 26).

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The latest surge in scholarship on ‘China and Africa’ has been in response to

the stepping-‐up of Sino-‐African relations in the wake of the Tiananmen Square

uprisings of 1989, which left Beijing in desperate need of political allies. The

subsequent rapprochement between the party-‐state and African governments has

been consolidated, in economic terms, by the ‘Go Out’ policy (走出去战略）of 1999,

which has set the tone for more proactive overseas investment by Chinese

companies.

It is clear from the scholarly literature produced outside China over the last

two decades that China’s ’going out’ to Africa has become a cause for real concern

amongst many who have traditionally imagined Africa as being part of a peripheral

space at the hinterland of Western economic empires. That is to say that the

majority of scholarship on ‘China and Africa’ appears to be written in response to

China’s perceived threat to the geopolitical status-‐quo rather than in response to

real changes happening on the ground as a result of interactions between Chinese

and African communities.

In an insightful review of representations of Sino-‐African relations in British

broadsheet newspapers, Mawdsley (2008) identifies a number of recurring

discursive patterns that pervade reporting on China’s activity on the African

continent. I intend to borrow Mawdsley’s rubric as a starting point from which to

frame my own discussion of the academic literature surrounding contemporary

China-‐Africa relations. Mawdsley’s critique highlights a number of characteristics,

which define recent scholarly accounts of China’s engagement with Africa. In each

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case, these characteristics are the result of a decided preference for top-‐down

appraisals of China’s presence in Africa and a failure to understand the significance

of this presence from the perspective of the Chinese who have made their

livelihoods there.

The first trend identified by Mawdsley in her review of British reporting on

Sino-‐African relations is the tendency to conflate non-‐Western actors in accounts of

engagement between ‘China’ and ‘Africa’. I use inverted commas to highlight the

need to disaggregate ‘China’ and ‘Africa’ since, as some have rightly pointed out,

‘neither represents a coherent and uniform set of motivations and opportunities’

(Power & Mohan, 2008b, p. 19). Even within academic writing, there is a widespread

tendency to refer to ‘the Chinese’ in Africa, despite the fact that this designation

encompasses a huge range of different actors often with ‘competing and

contradictory interests’ (Mawdsley, 2007, p. 406). Conflated within this category are

numerous governmental and non-‐governmental bodies, private and state-‐owned

enterprises as well as diverse settled populations of Chinese across Africa.

Indeed, there is a tendency to speak of ‘China’ and ‘Africa’ ‘as if there were

relationships between two countries instead of between one & fifty-‐three’ (Chan,

2007, p. 2, in Power & Mohan, 2008b, p. 34). While Mawdsley is right to be critical

of writing which collapses the interests of ‘the Chinese’ into a single category, there

is just as much scope for criticism of those who conflate ‘Africa’ and African actors.

Accounts of Chinese dealings with ‘Africans’ suggest an undifferentiated and

nebulous population of natives passively enduring exploitation by ‘China’ and ‘the

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West’. This trend manifests itself most frequently in accounts that lump African

countries together and speak of ‘Africa’ in its continental, rather than its political

configurations. In refusing to acknowledge complexity and multiplicity of African

actors, these accounts highlight Africa’s peripherality as a vast yet marginalised

space at the fringes of the world economy.

Mawdsley’s second observation in her study of British journalism is a decided

preference amongst British journalists for focusing on the negative aspects of

China’s engagement with Africa (Mawdsley, 2008, p. 518). In the context of

academic writing, I intend to break down this point into two criticisms. Firstly, a

criticism of those academic writings which frame ‘China’ as a ‘dragon’ or ‘ravenous

beast’ and secondly, a criticism of those academics who choose to focus solely on

‘issues and places of violence, disorder and corruption’ (ibid.), and within that on the

P.R.C.’s engagement with odious regimes and resource-‐rich countries in Africa.

The image of China as a dragon or rampant leviathan is a discursive pattern

that pre-‐dates the recent intensification of China’s economic relations with African

governments. It reflects the genuine apprehension felt by many in ‘the West’ in the

face of China’s accelerated economic development and increasingly important role

in the geopolitical arena. In the context of recent activity in Africa, China is

frequently described in academic writing as ‘a monolithic beast with an insatiable

appetite for African resources’ (Power & Mohan, 2008b, p. 22). This discourse

simultaneously reinforces negative narratives of Chinese economic development

and reproduces narratives that construct ‘Africa’ as a marginalised space of plunder

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within a binary scenario of exploitation by major economic powers. In the following

passage we see an extreme example of this kind of writing:

In just a few years, the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) has become the most aggressive investor-‐nation in Africa. This commercial invasion is without question the most important development in the sub-‐Sahara since the end of the Cold War -‐-‐ an epic, almost primal propulsion that is redrawing the global economic map. One former U.S. assistant secretary of state has called it a "tsunami." Some are even calling the region "ChinAfrica"(Behar, 2008, p. 1).

Writing such as this serves to perpetuate narratives that construct China’s

presence in Africa as a ‘scramble’, ‘mad dash’, ‘resource grab’, or even a

‘rape’(Power & Mohan, 2008b, p. 24). Criticisms of China’s interest in African natural

resources are often voiced explicitly by those who firmly believe that Chinese

investment in Africa is part of a long-‐term strategy to control and exploit African

natural resources, particularly oil (Askouri, 2007, p. 72). Often, China is portrayed

not only as a pillager of African resources but also as a direct competitor in those

industries that are seen as key to Africa’s development. Here, China’s presence in

Africa, like America’s presence before it, is regarded as problematic because it is

thought to undermine the autonomy of African societies through forms of

imperialism that transcend the nation state (Hardt & Negri, 2000 and Johnson,

2004):

The undermining of manufacturing in Sub-‐Saharan Africa as a consequence of Asian Driver competition in SSA and external markets is likely to lead to increased unemployment, at least in the short run, and heightened levels of poverty (Kaplinsky, Robinson, & Willenbockel, 2007, p. 25)

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China’s presence is also considered to be detrimental to the pursuit of

developmental sustainability in Africa because of its disregard for good governance.

Within the body of recent academic writing on China’s engagement with Africa, we

can also identify a distinct preference for accounts of China’s dealings in resource

rich countries (Alves, 2008, Ennes Ferreira, 2008, Kragelund, 2007, Power, 2008,

Soares de Oliveira, 2008) and those countries where China appears to be supporting

odious regimes (Askouri, 2007, Karumbidza, 2007, Large, 2008a, Tull, 2008).

This tendency is a clear manifestation of the desire, within the non-‐Chinese

academic community, to highlight the negative aspects of China’s ‘Going out’ to

Africa. The positive elements of Chinese activity in Africa, including debt

cancellation, investment, commodity price impacts and support for a greater

international voice, are ignored in favour of a focus on problem issues (Mawdsley,

2008, p. 518). This concern with China’s negative impacts on the continent is

concurrent with a postmodern discourse that is inherently suspicious of global

economic powers and, as such, fails to recognise the significance of day-‐to-‐day

interactions between Chinese and African people.

One notable outcome of the predominantly macro-‐ level portrayal of China-‐

Africa relations is a strongly biased interpretation of the role of Africans in these

interactions. Accounts of China’s activity in Africa regularly portray Africans either as

‘victims’ or ‘villains’ (Mawdsley, 2008, p. 518) , and sometimes as both, thus

endorsing images of a politically impotent African population, perpetually at the

mercy of foreign powers and corrupt leaders. As Mawdsley stresses in her last

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criticism of British journalism on Sino-‐African relations, the intensity of this focus on

China as a new threat to African prosperity leaves room for little more than a

‘complacent account’ of the West and its past and present dealings with African

peoples.

Within this uncritical narrative, Chinese activity in Africa is negatively

contrasted against Europe’s historical forays into the continent. As Mawdsley

explains, ‘Western colonialisism is claimed to at least have had a

paternalistic/developmental dimension and well-‐intentioned elements -‐ an attitude

that has translated into an ethical concern for Africa in the postcolonial period’

(Mawdsley, 2008, p. 519). The implication is therefore that Europe and the U.S. have

moved on to a more enlightened concern for Africa. This concern implies moral

superiority over any Chinese interests on the continent, which are assumed to be

purely opportunistic. This configuration constructs the Chinese state as potent force

of chaos in the African context.

It is clear from numerous writings (Bräutigam, 2008b; Campbell, 2007; Gill,

Morrison, & Huang, 2008; Marchal, 2008) that there is considerable concern,

amongst African, European and American academics, regarding Beijing’s recent

foreign policy towards Africa. Criticisms of China’s dealings with African

governments arguably reflect a broader concern that China represents a chaotic

force which seeks to undermine Western efforts to promote good governance,

global security and debt sustainability in Africa. I will examine each of these points in

turn, concluding that these simplistic representations ignore the complexity of

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‘Chinese’ activity in Africa and the many faces of China’s ‘presence’ on the

continent.

That Beijing’s African policies are a threat to the promotion of good

governance on the continent is a mantra frequently repeated in recent Sino-‐African

scholarship (see: Breslin & Taylor, 2008; Dahle Huse & Muyakwa, 2008; Karumbidza,

2007; Naím, 2007; Power, 2008; Power & Mohan, 2008a). These critical writings

accuse China of undermining efforts to improve transparency and accountability in

Africa by financing and supporting authoritarian leaders and states, by supplying

arms in conflict situations, by doing business without ‘ethical’ conditionalities, and

by taking advantage of corruption.

Many Western scholars argue that China’s behaviour threatens to undo the

fragile gains that have been made in terms of democracy, transparency and

accountability in Africa over the last six decades. For instance, in Zimbabwe, China is

accused of funding the state’s ‘acquisition of military-‐strength radio jamming

equipment to block opposition equipment ahead of the 2005 elections’

(Karumbidza, 2007). Accusations such as these have focused on Beijing’s apparent

willingness to finance corrupt and autocratic regimes in Africa, and stories such as

these are often denoted as being emblematic of Sino-‐African ties.

Scholars are quick to point out China’s attractiveness as a lender ‘outside the

existing hegemony of development actors and institutions referred to as ‘traditional’

donors or ‘the West/Western donors’ (Dahle Huse & Muyakwa, 2008, p. 8). They

26

warn that China appeals to African leaders through its discourses of ‘respect’ and

‘mutual benefit’, stressing that, unlike the West ‘China avoids the status of ‘donor’

and the word ‘aid’ is often avoided altogether when talking about Africa’ (Power,

2008).

The post–9/11 security agenda has included a greater focus on ‘failed states’, counterterrorism activities and development. China now represents at least a geopolitical complication in Africa, at worst a threat in its relations with states and groups potentially hostile to the West (Mawdsley, 2007, p. 407).

Amongst those who promulgate narratives which view China as a ‘hidden

dragon’, there are many who view China as a ‘threat to healthy, sustainable

development’ arguing that China is ‘effectively pricing responsible and well meaning

organizations out of the market in the very places they are needed most’ whilst

‘underwriting a world that is more corrupt, chaotic and authoritarian’ (Naím, 2007,

p. 95).

There seems to be a real fear that China’s ‘rogue lending’ (Naím, 2007) will

‘burden poor countries with debt—a burden from which many have only just

escaped’ (Lancaster, 2008, p. 1). Dahle Huse and Muyakwa argue that the lack of

transparency in the disbursement process of Chinese ‘soft loans’ to African

governments ‘makes it difficult to assess how much debt is being contracted and on

what terms’ (Dahle Huse & Muyakwa, 2008, p. 5). They argue that ‘Zambian NGOs,

donors and well-‐wishers need to keep a close eye on Chinese loans and raise the

alarm when need be’ (Dahle Huse & Muyakwa, 2008, p. 5).

27

In summary; accounts, such as these, which frame discussions of China’s

economic impact in Africa in terms of its role as an irresponsible financer of corrupt

African regimes and general promoter of disorder in African economies, are

characteristic of much recent writing on Sino-‐African relations. Indeed, in analysing

writings published in English during the last two decades by African, European and

American scholars on China’s engagement with Africa, we can identify the following

popular tendencies:

1. A preference for generalised narratives of ‘China’ and ‘Africa,’ which flatten

both sets of actors, producing a series of simplistic and dichotomous

scenarios that ignore the complex interactions between different local actors

and different Chinese actors, particularly members of the Chinese diaspora.

2. A preference for constructing ‘China’ as a powerful and homogenous force of

chaos in Africa, suggesting that all aspects of Chinese activity in Africa are

somehow related to the geopolitical ambitions of the Chinese state.

3. Implicit reference to supposedly ‘superior’ Western intentions and practices

and a simplistic and half-‐hearted attempt at understanding African

perspectives, motivations and interests with relation to China’s presence on

the continent.

While these tendencies are by no means universal in writing on Sino-‐African

relations, they define the default parameters of imagined configurations of ‘China’

28

and ‘Africa’ in which much academic writing on Sino-‐African relations is situated. For

instance, accounts of Chinese activity in Africa have typically overlooked the hugely

important role played by Africa’s diverse Chinese communities in changing

consumptive habits in places such as Lesotho.

While it is certainly true that the presence of the Chinese diaspora in Lesotho

and other parts of Africa is an outcome of political and economic changes in China

mediated by the Chinese state, my research shows that the vast majority of ‘Chinese

activity’ in Africa is completely outside state control. Indeed, the majority of Chinese

migration to Africa occurs through non-‐governmental channels and even in

instances where migration was organised as part of official programmes of

development assistance or resource extraction, individuals usually disassociate

themselves from the Chinese state within a few years of arriving in Lesotho. In this

way, Sino-‐African relations are increasingly dominated by individual interactions that

transcend the nation-‐state.

In conclusion, this paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by providing a more

balanced account of the multiplicity and complexity of engagements between

‘China’ and ‘Africa,’ avoiding the tendencies that Mawdsley argues are characteristic

of so much writing on Sino-‐African relations. The intention is to provide a lens

through which to understand the ways in which individual migrants deploy potential

social networks to make a living in some of Africa’s poorest regions.

29

Chapter 3. Methodology 3.1 The Ethnographic Approach

The essence of qualitative research is that it can construct and interpret a part of reality based on what grows out of the fieldwork – rather than on the researcher’s a priori theories and knowledge (Bu, 2006, p. 223).

Bu’s assertion -‐ that good qualitative research is born out of an open-‐minded

encounter with the field -‐ was highly influential in shaping my methodological

approach to understanding Fujianese migration to Lesotho. The findings outlined in

this paper are the product of an ethnographic study of resident Chinese in Lesotho,

based on semi-‐structured interviews as well as informal conversations and

participant observation. These informal meetings allowed me to corroborate

conclusions drawn from my semi-‐structured interviews, a technique favoured by

Kjellgren (2006, p. 237).

Bu goes on to highlight the importance of going out into the field (Bu, 2006,

p. 221). Although this may seem like an obvious point to make, it is worth stressing

the centrality of ‘place’ in studies of migration and, hence, the fundamental

importance of visiting the research site. Indeed, Pieke et al. argue that the aim of

ethnographic research should be to seek to ‘elucidate the social processes that

imagine, produce and challenge specific places and communities’ (Pieke et al. 2004,

p. 6).

30

Speaking from experience, Pieke et al. point out that official figures and

statistics on Fujianese migration are scarce and often unreliable. Consequently, they

propose that ethnographic research is the most appropriate path for understanding

the contingent and dynamic nature of Chinese migration (Pieke et al. 2004, p. 6).

Furthermore, Bu stresses that insiders and outsiders may have different perceptions

of the same event and that going out and speaking to people is the only way to gain

a real insight into their worldview (Bu, 2006, p. 214). A good example of this is the

extent to which definitions of ‘legal’ vs. ‘illegal’ are dependent on context,

particularly in the case of Chinese migration. As Bu points out, maintaining a

sensibility to the insider’s perspective can provide fascinating insights into the

reasoning behind their actions and strategies (ibid., p. 223).

3.2 The Fieldwork

For the purposes of this investigation, I travelled to Maseru, Lesotho’s capital

and first port-‐of-‐call for foreign migrants. Unfortunately, limited time and resources

meant that a wider survey of Lesotho’s resident Fujianese population would have

been outside the scope of this investigation. Rather than spending days travelling

between mountain villages in the hope of finding willing Fujianese respondents, I

chose to focus my efforts on interviewing settled migrants in the Maseru district,

which contains both Lesotho’s most populous urban centre and the country’s

highest concentration of Chinese immigrants.

31

In total, I spent 17 days in Maseru, from the 3rd to the 20th of December 2010,

conducting in-‐depth interviews with adult male and female urban residents of

Mainland Chinese origin. Respondents were gathered through contacts in Lesotho,

and later through ‘snowball sampling’ (Goodman, 1961). All interviews were

conducted in Mandarin and lasted between 30 and 90 minutes. The total number of

respondents was 25, ranging from shop-‐owners to hairdressers. The objective of

these interviews was to answer the following questions:

1. What were the migrant’s aspirations in coming to Lesotho?

2. How do they perceive the ‘remoteness’ and ‘peripherality’ of Lesotho in

relation to China and other ‘marginal’ Third World spaces?

3. In which sectors of the economy are they established and how did they

become established in those sectors?

4. What are their present aspirations, do they intend to return to China?

3.3 Gaining Access

As Heimer and Thøgersen point out, good contacts are often a necessary

prerequisite for doing research, particularly when doing research on China and the

Chinese (Thøgersen & Heimer, 2006). Having previously researched official Chinese

development assistance to Lesotho, I understood the importance of ‘gatekeepers’ in

providing access to research respondents. Fujianese migration to Lesotho was an

entirely new research field for me and, as such, I had no Fujianese contacts on the

ground to kick-‐start my investigation. Instead, I was compelled to take Solinger’s

32

advice and ‘draw upon any relationship one might have with any person willing to

be of help in one’s ploy to meet potential subjects’ (Solinger, 2006, p. 157).

Solinger also stresses the importance of retaining old contacts (ibid., p. 158). I

was lucky enough to be able to remain in touch with one of the respondents from a

previous visit to the field, a Taiwanese shop owner by the name of Mr. Lin. His

practical assistance in helping to arrange meetings with Fujianese migrants gave me

free access to respondents who would otherwise have been intensely suspicious of

my project. Presumably out of the kindness of his heart, Mr. Lin devoted every

afternoon of my time in the field to arranging interviews with recent Fujianese

migrants, as well as with established resident Chinese from Shanghai and Taiwan.

When I offered to reimburse him for his troubles, he refused, saying that he felt

grateful that someone from a reputable academic institution had taken interest in

the plight of Lesotho’s Chinese community.

Mr. Lin would meet me every day at an appointed time before lunch with a list

of respondents with whom he had arranged meetings. He would then drive in his

pickup truck to see each of the respondents, negotiating access with security guards

and escorting me onto their business premises. Not only was Mr. Lin’s assistance

invaluable in terms of providing practical access and transport, but also in facilitating

introductions and sometimes communication with Fujianese migrants to Lesotho.

These individuals were understandably wary of a foreigner taking such a close

interest in their presence in the country. Although the majority spoke intelligible

Putonghua, there were occasions when I had to ask Mr. Lin to clarify the meaning of

33

Fujianese expressions or to translate from the Fujianese dialect into Mandarin. This,

he did willingly, all the while allaying the suspicions of my respondents and helping

to navigate through sensitive issues.

Although I was grateful to Mr. Lin for sacrificing so much of his personal time

and effort to assisting me in my research, I was also aware that his positionality as

an economically successful Taiwanese resident in Maseru would have an effect on

the findings of this investigation. As a result, I was careful to maintain a critical ear

throughout my time in the field, subjecting Mr. Lin’s well-‐meant comments and

theories to the same scrutiny as the information given to me directly by my

respondents. However, despite Mr. Lin’s inexplicable dedication to helping me in my

research, I have no reason to suspect him of having dubious ulterior motives and

remain enormously grateful for all his help.

3.4 The Interviews

Interviews were semi-‐structured, focusing on content rather than on the

questions themselves. The approach was informant-‐focused, viewing the

respondents as agents in an unfolding narrative, rather than ‘mere vessels of

answers’ (Silverman, 1997, p. 149). The ‘pyramid strategy’ was used in all interviews.

‘Easy-‐to-‐answer questions’ were asked first and ‘abstract and general questions’

were asked last (Hay, 2000). The style of questioning was semi-‐formal, to allow for

conversational development towards more ‘sensitive issues’ (ibid.). Notes were

34

taken during all the interviews and I typed up a daily report of my research findings

for my own records.

The difficulty involved in earning the trust of my respondents made me

reluctant to rouse suspicions by seeking to record interviews electronically. Previous

experience of interviews with Chinese in Lesotho had taught me that the mention of

a Dictaphone could either end an interview or restrict the conversation to

discussions of mundane topics. This echoes the advice given to Kjellgren by a

Chinese-‐American scholar who blankly stated that ‘‘you definitely want to avoid

carrying a tape-‐recorder if you want people to talk” (Kjellgren, 2006, p. 232). This

seemed self-‐evident, given the ethical considerations involved in interviewing illegal

migrants operating businesses without licenses. As a rule, I followed Solinger’s

advice and only pushed sensitive topics as far as the respondent was willing to go

(Solinger, 2006, p. 164).

Given the emphasis placed by numerous authors on the proper

acknowledgement of positionality in qualitative research (Pratt, 2000; Rose, 1997;

Seale et al., 2007; Valentine, 1997), I was aware, going into the field, that my

position as a student from Oxford with Mosotho ancestry could affect my

investigation. Bu discusses the difficulties encountered by ‘outsiders’ in seeking to

gain an insight into the lives of ‘insiders’ and the comparable difficulties faced by

foreigners seeking to understand aspects of Chinese society (Bu, 2006). However,

Kjellgren argues that these dichotomies are often unhelpful, since they allow little

room for ambiguity in terms of race and background:

35

These twin dichotomies allow little room for most researchers of flesh and blood since few if any fit the racial and cultural stereotypes that come together with them, and needless to say they leave even less room for variation among the people on the other side of the notebook (Kjellgren, 2006, p. 225).

Also, given the complex interplay of numerous prejudices between whites,

locals and Chinese migrants in Lesotho, I was unsure of how I -‐ a mixed race

researcher with a Sesotho name -‐ would be treated by my respondents. Rather than

opt for dissimulation, I chose to be honest about my origins and my research

agenda. Generally, I felt this was conducive to openness and, thanks to the

mediatory role played by Mr. Lin, a considerable degree of trust was extended to me

by my informants. Indeed, as I will explain, my ambiguous background often proved

an advantage in navigating through the interview process.

Solinger asserts that better knowledge of the context of the interview leads

to better interviews (Solinger, 2006, p. 161). She argues that such prior knowledge

can provide a ‘springboard’ for diving much deeper into more complex or sensitive

issues (ibid.). For this reason I tried to read as much as possible about Fujianese

migration to Africa before heading out into the field. Furthermore, having lived in

Lesotho before and being partially of Basotho descent, I was able to display a degree

of local understanding beyond that of a foreign researcher.

However, even with the reassuring presence of Mr Lin at my side, many of

my respondents were initially very suspicious and unwilling to discuss their private

36

histories of migration to Lesotho. When asked fairly mundane questions about the

Chinese community in Maseru, several informants tried to deflect my attention onto

the established Indian presence in Lesotho. This reluctance to communicate

highlights the fact that the majority of Fujianese migration to Lesotho takes place

through illegal channels and that those who stay in Lesotho often live outside the

law. In most cases I was able to establish a workable degree of trust with my

respondents but in some cases I was left to extrapolate information from their

silences or their eagerness to discuss other topics. Rather than being disheartened

by this lack of cooperation, I tried to remember Bu’s assertion that ‘even if we do

not discover any absolute truths we can, at least, get somewhat closer to the

realities’ (Bu, 2006, p. 223).

My informants, like those questioned by Kjellgren, were keen to assess my

level of understanding at an early stage in the interview. Like Kjellgren’s

respondents, they wanted to know whether I knew enough Mandarin to be able to

understand them, whether I knew enough about China to understand their

references to home and Chinese culture, and whether I knew enough about Lesotho

to understand the local situation (Kjellgren, 2006, p. 233).

When seeking answers to more sensitive questions I was able to play up my

‘externality’ as an ‘outsider’ unlikely to report to the Lesotho government or to

authorities at home in China. By contrast, my local understanding of the general

situation of Chinese migration to Lesotho helped me to avoid generic discussions

and focus on more personal accounts of transnational mobility. In this sense, taking

37

the time at the start of each interview to establish my positionality as an

insider/outsider, rather than hindering the conversation, worked to my advantage,

establishing a common framework for the discussion of both general and personal

topics. In this way, I was required to present what Solinger terms a ‘Daoist-‐type’

ideal of understanding: appearing ‘at once knowledgeable but ignorant, knowing

and not knowing’ (Solinger, 2006, p. 161).

38

Chapter 4. Findings and Discussion

4.1 Lesotho’s Established Chinese Communities

The recent flow of Mainland Chinese migrants to Lesotho is by no means an

isolated instance of transnational mobility. Indeed, it would be impossible to write a

history of Mainland Chinese migration to Lesotho without referring to earlier flows

of ‘pioneer migrants’ from Taiwan and Shanghai. In her study of Chinese

communities in Zanzibar, Hsu identifies three distinct groups of Chinese on the

island: government-‐sent teams, business people and an established community of

overseas Chinese (Hsu, 2007). In Lesotho I have identified three comparable but

distinct Chinese communities, each of which represents a different phase of Chinese

migration, reflecting Lesotho’s position within global migratory flows at different

periods in its history.

First among these groups is the established community of skilled Taiwanese

experts, originally sent to Lesotho during the early 70s as part of Taiwan’s official aid

to Africa. Second is the community of skilled Shanghainese businesspeople,

recruited by Taiwanese employers during the early 90s to run their businesses in the

garment and retail sectors. Third is the larger community of recent arrivals from

Fujian, consisting predominantly of unskilled traders who have established a virtual

monopoly over the retail of basic consumer goods, penetrating into regions of

Lesotho previously unreached by either foreign or domestic retailers. Taking

39

advantage of contingent and dynamic trajectories of mobility, this last group

represents the paradigm of much Chinese migration to Africa today.

My research demonstrates that the arrival of each of these groups to

Lesotho corresponds to the context of Lesotho’s economic situation and national

policies in relation to those of Taiwan and Mainland China at a given time.

Successive waves of Chinese migration to Lesotho are thus the product of the

evolving geopolitical configurations between these three countries. The impact of

national policies on the volume of migratory flows at different points in Lesotho’s

history suggests the continued importance of the nation state as a determinant of

transnational mobility. This being said, it is clear that Chinese migration to Lesotho is

highly regionalised, with discrete communities of migrants from Taiwan, Shanghai,

Fuqing and Fuzhou. This suggests that the role of the nation state in facilitating

migratory flows is heavily inflected by regional specificities and localised knowledge

networks.

The first Chinese community to settle in Lesotho arrived from Taiwan in the

early 70s, during a period of warm diplomatic relations between Taipei and the

newly independent right-‐wing government of Lesotho. The Republic of China had

been keen to establish ties with Africa’s young nations in an attempt to win

international support for its independence from the Mainland, which, by contrast,

was in self-‐imposed diplomatic isolation. In addition to establishing relations with

Lesotho following the kingdom’s independence from Britain in 1966, Taiwan had

40

been actively building bridges with the apartheid regime in neighbouring South

Africa, which had been equally eager to gain political allies.

South Africa and Lesotho were early recipients of Taiwanese development

assistance in the form of technical medical and agricultural teams sent by the

Taiwan government. In most cases, the experts dispatched to Lesotho returned to

Taiwan as soon as their mandated terms had elapsed, however a significant number

stayed on in Lesotho to take advantage of perceived openings for business in the

local economy. These early arrivals were pioneers in establishing informal supply

chains between Lesotho and the Far East. Their model has been copied and modified

by successive waves of Shanghainese and Fujianese migrants. The specifics of the

Fujianese model will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. Today there are few

Taiwanese left in Lesotho who date back to the era of Taiwanese government

largesse. The majority have either returned to Taiwan or have moved on to Western

Europe or North America.

Those remaining in Lesotho whom I interviewed during the course of my

fieldwork formed part of the initial influx of Taiwanese migrants to Lesotho. These

were the first Chinese traders to establish themselves in Lesotho’s retail sector,

alongside existing Indian merchants who had, in turn, partly displaced Western

traders as the country’s main vendors of groceries and imported manufactured

goods. The Taiwanese proved to be highly successful in business, quickly increasing

their market share and even establishing their own chamber of commerce. Today

there are fewer than 20 retail businesses in Lesotho owned by Taiwanese

41

merchants. Those who have remained in Lesotho are the owners of large and

successful wholesalers selling building materials, spare car parts and other

manufactured goods sourced from Taiwan and Mainland China, either from

importers based in South Africa or directly from suppliers in Hong Kong, Shanghai

and Taiwan.

The decline of Lesotho’s Taiwanese community was foreshadowed by a

diplomatic caesura that saw Maseru establish relations with Beijing in April 1983,

following a visit by the Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan to the Chinese mainland in

the same year. Jonathan’s decision to embrace Beijing was concordant with the

prevailing government ideology of the time, which called for a move away from

Taipei and its association with the apartheid regime in South Africa. However, it was

not to last, as ‘following China’s violent suppression of demonstrations in

Tiananmen Square in 1989, a newly democratic Taiwan began to reinvigorate its

‘checkbook’ diplomacy efforts to win recognition’ (Bräutigam, 2008b, p. 13). The

year of 1986 also saw a military coup in Lesotho, followed in April 1990 by the

renewal of ties with a newly munificent Taipei. The final twist came in 1993 with the

election of a BCP Basotholand Congress Party government in Lesotho, which

restored relations with Beijing in January 1994.

As in the case of its earlier relationship with Taiwan, Lesotho’s political

orientation during the late 80s and early 90s had a direct impact on migratory flows

to the country. Beijing, like Taiwan before it, was keen to express its solidarity with

African nations through technical assistance. As elsewhere in Africa, these projects

42

helped initiate the earliest flows of migration to Lesotho from Mainland China (see

Hsu, 2007, pp. 114-‐5). Indeed, these ‘pioneer migrants’ were often members of

teams of technical and medical experts sent as part of Chinese development

assistance (He, 1994, pp. 150-‐162).

With branches in every province and at prefecture level, the Foreign

Economic Liaison Ministry was responsible for organising and managing these

overseas aid projects and played a crucial role in determining early migratory

trajectories (Xiang, 2009, p. 421). Workers would be recruited by prefectural

branches and then dispatched overseas to work on China’s aid projects, thus

creating ‘agent chains’ which strongly resemble the structure of today’s

commercialised labour migration chains (ibid.). In most cases, members of these

teams returned to China at the end of their contracted posting but some found ways

of remaining in Africa after their work was done (Hsu, 2007).

Concurrent with the growth in numbers of arrivals to Lesotho from Mainland

China was decline in the size of the number of Taiwanese living in the country. This

was due, in part, to Lesotho’s political orientation but also, importantly, to Taiwan’s

rapid economic development, which began increasingly to provide incentives for

settled Taiwanese in Lesotho to return to their homeland. However, economic

transformations in the R.O.C. coincided with political transformations in the P.R.C.,

which represented a turning point in the history of Chinese migratory trends.

43

By far the most important contributor to the dramatic increase in Chinese

outmigration to Lesotho in the 90s was the ‘gradual but fundamental relaxation of

the country’s emigration policy from 1978 onwards’ (Pieke, 2007, p. 84). Following

nearly three decades of government-‐imposed isolation, China had once again

opened its doors to the outside world and begun to reposition itself within the

increasingly complex and contingent context of transnational economic and

migratory flows. In the case of Chinese migration to Lesotho, this repositioning took

place in the context of earlier flows of Taiwanese labour; which catalysed the

formation of new flows of Mainland Chinese labour to Lesotho.

By the early 90s, a sizeable proportion of the Taiwanese community in

Lesotho was involved in the country’s export-‐oriented textiles industry. Lesotho had

become an attractive destination for garment manufacturers because of its

exemption from the Multi-‐Fibre Agreement which, from 1974 to 2004, enforced

quotas limiting imports from developing countries to the U.S. and to Europe, except

from those developing countries granted preferential access to these economies.

Under these conditions, many Taiwanese and some Shanghainese investors

undertook to move their assembly operations to Lesotho, so as to circumvent the

quotas placed on garment exports from Taiwan and China.

As the flow of skilled Taiwanese migration to Lesotho began to slow down in

the early 90s, Taiwanese factory owners and traders increasingly found themselves

in need of new managers and administrators to help run their businesses. In most

cases, bosses were reluctant to employ local Basotho, either because they were not

44

qualified or not trusted as employees. The shortage of Mandarin-‐speaking

administrative staff was compounded by the fact that, owing to the R.O.C.’s

economic takeoff, business owners could no longer offer attractive salaries to tempt

skilled labour from Taiwan. This scarcity of cheap Chinese labour prompted the

Taiwanese to begin recruiting skilled labour from the Chinese mainland.

The first to take advantage of these vacancies were skilled workers from

Shanghai. The overwhelming majority were recruited through private labour

agencies in Shanghai to fill positions in garment factories owned by Taiwanese and

Shanghainese multinationals. One of my respondents, a Shanghainese medical

expert by the name of Dr. Huang, was invited to Maseru in 1988 by the owners of

the Shanghainese ‘Bright Garment’ plant, to investigate a mysterious sickness that

had afflicted their workers. Having identified the disease as hepatitis and having

served his term at ‘Bright Garment’, Dr. Huang chose to stay on in Lesotho,

establishing his own practice in a shopping mall in Maseru. The majority of my

Shanghainese respondents had similar stories to tell. Although they were mostly

recruited on short-‐term contracts to work in Taiwanese owned factories, many – like

Dr. Huang – chose to stay on in Lesotho, buying up shops and small businesses that

had originally been owned by Taiwanese merchants.

Nowadays there are few Shanghai Chinese in Lesotho who hark back to that

era. My respondents explained to me that the majority moved on two to three years

ago because they felt that doing business in Lesotho had become too difficult. Some

complained that the 2008 economic crisis had severely diminished the purchasing

45

power of local consumers and increased commodity prices, thus limiting the

profitability of sales of goods imported from China. Others felt that they could no

longer compete in a market that had become crowded by Fujianese competitors

willing to operate under increasingly tight profit margins. Of those who remain, the

majority are involved in running clothing outlets, selling low-‐quality garments

sourced directly from Shanghai or from Chinese wholesalers in Johannesburg and

Durban.

Observing the transition, in Lesotho’s Chinese retail sector, from domination

by Taiwanese merchants to domination by Shanghainese merchants leads us to

three major conclusions:

Firstly, we see that both Taiwanese and Shanghainese migration to Lesotho

were precipitated by changes in the national policies of the sending and receiving

nations. My research demonstrates that Chinese transnational mobility does not

take place in a political vacuum, but rather that the nation state is still a significant

frame for analysing and explaining migratory flows. It is clear that national political

allegiances and migration laws both play an instrumental role in establishing

migratory flows at the periphery.

Secondly, the ebb and flow of successive waves of Chinese migration to

Lesotho is strongly inflected by the relative poverty or wealth of the sending area in

relation to the receiving area. Periphery to periphery migration, through non-‐

governmental channels, can only be sustained when the sending area occupies a

46

relatively marginalised place in the world economic system, as in the case of Taiwan

until the 1970s and Shanghai until the 1990s. This dependency contributes to the

unsustainably of periphery-‐to-‐periphery flows and the cyclical nature of ethnic

diversification of these flows.

Thirdly, my findings show that although flows from Taiwan, Shanghai and

Fujian are undeniably discrete phenomena, they are clearly linked in a transnational

social and economic space that connects Maseru, Taipei, Shanghai and Fujian. The

evolving nature of Lesotho’s settled Chinese communities and the history of their

involvement in the country’s retail sector suggests that migration to the periphery is

not sustainable to a given group from a given region, but rather that the contingent

nature of economic and political developments produce malleable migratory

networks that are sensitive to change.

The Taiwanese were clearly pioneers in establishing a foothold in Lesotho’s

retail industry; however, the fact that shops once owned by Taiwanese were later

bought up by Shanghainese traders, only to be sold on again to Fujianese traders

demonstrates that Chinese communities at the periphery are not self-‐perpetuating.

Rather, they deploy a set of strategies which allow them turn the periphery into a

lucrative space, leaving as soon as they have accumulated enough capital to

continue on their migratory trajectories. Their departure creates new opportunities

for other migrants from elsewhere in the global periphery.

47

4.2 From Fujian to Lesotho: Periphery-‐to-‐Periphery Migration

Fujian has long been a centre of outmigration. As long ago as the Tang

dynasty (618-‐907 A.D.), settlers from Fujian deployed sets of network-‐based

strategies, allowing them to spread throughout South-‐East Asia, establishing settled

communities at the periphery in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia. Today,

Fujianese migrants in Lesotho still perceive peripherality with a set of strategies that

allow them to achieve a very high pace of capital accumulation and business

expansion in places where others see no opportunity for profit. Based on the

findings of my research, I argue that these strategies are a facet of Fujian’s

distinctive ‘culture of migration’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 194).

In Fujian, the decision to emigrate is strongly determined by cultural context.

Findlay and Li explain that this cultural impetus takes the form of values and goals

which are internalised by individuals via dominant discourses propounded within

their communities or extended kinship networks (Findlay & Li, 1997). It has been

argued that most Fujianese are involved in migration, to a greater or lesser extent,

irrespective of whether they themselves move (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 18). Not only

are the aspirations and decisions of migrants affected by their particular cultural

context but their actions, in turn, shape the goals and aspirations of the next

generation of migrants, thus perpetuating the culture of migration indefinitely

(Massey et al., 1993 and Tsuda, 1999). In this way the Fujianese culture of migration

‘prepares all able-‐bodied men and women for their eventual departure’ (Pieke et al.,

2004, p. 194).

48

Fujian’s migratory culture constructs emigration as ‘the best, even the only,

avenue to true wealth, power and success’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 48). Indeed, in

many parts of Fujian, migration is ‘the dominant locally available opportunity of

advancement’ (ibid., p. 194). In this economy of perceived worth, local alternatives

to emigration are often devalued as less desirable, or even as signs of failure (Pieke

et al., 2004, p. 194). Given that this economy of values is distinct from local and

transnational economies of labour, migratory cultures of this kind ‘can and often do

persist after the opportunity structure in the destination countries or home areas

has changed’ (ibid.).

According to Pieke et al. (2004), this ‘culture of migration’ is, in part, a

consequence of Fujian’s relative isolation from the rest of China. The province is

hemmed in to the North-‐West by impassable topography and shares no major

waterways with neighbouring provinces (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 41). A second major

contributor to outmigration is Fujian’s relative poverty in comparison other coastal

provinces. With a population of over 36 million (FSB, 2010) and arable land

amounting to less than 10% of total surface area (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 41), Fujian is

often described as being ‘eight parts mountain, one part water, and one part

farmland’ (八山一水一分田). This geographical configuration has severely limited

the potential for economic prosperity based on agriculture. Furthermore, for many

years, Fujian’s geopolitical position as a military frontier between the mainland and

Taiwan precluded it from a large part of the investment apportioned to other

coastal provinces (ibid.).

49

However, with the end of the strategy of containment of Taiwan, Fujian’s

position changed ‘from a military frontier zone to a key region of economic

development’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 42). Fujian was subsequently designated as a

site for foreign investment and Fujianese authorities were encouraged to build

trading ties with the outside world (ibid.). Realising the opportunities created by the

liberalisation of China’s economic and emigration policies, these authorities seized

upon the idea that Fujian’s standard of living could be raised by promoting

emigration, as had happened in the coastal overseas areas (Thunø & Pieke, 2005). In

this way, Fujian – a relatively peripheral province economically – quickly became a

major centre of Chinese outmigration.

Xiang describes how, in 1988, the Fujianese provincial government coined

the term ‘nongovernmental channels’ to describe labour migration organised by

companies that provide individual labourers for private-‐sector firms, rather than

sending labourers overseas as state employees to work on its own projects (Xiang,

2009, p. 421). According to Xiang, by 2007, the Ministry of Labour and Social

Security had licensed more than 300, mostly private, labour migration agents,

granting them the power to send Chinese labourers abroad (ibid.).

The influx of Fujianese migrants into Lesotho’s labour market began in

earnest between 1998 and 2000. Like earlier flows of Shanghainese labour,

Fujianese migration to Lesotho was catalysed by developments in China’s economy,

particularly the emergence of Shanghai as a new centre of global commerce. As a

50

result of increased prosperity in parts of China’s coastal regions towards the end of

the 90s, Taiwanese and Shanghainese factory owners began to find it increasingly

difficult to entice cheap labour from Shanghai, leading to the establishment of new

trajectories of mobility from nearby Fujian province. Fujian, of course, already had

an established history of outmigration and, in many instances, Taiwanese or

Shanghainese employers were able to take advantage of existing sending networks

of Fujianese labour.

Given the clandestine routes taken by most Fujianese to enter and remain in

Lesotho, there are no reliable figures for the total number of Chinese immigrants

living in Lesotho at present. One government census taker described arriving at

Fujianese businesses just in time to see a truck full of Chinese workers driving out of

the gate to avoid being counted. These census-‐duckers exist outside the legal

framework of residence and taxation and constitute a significant proportion of the

total population of resident Chinese in Lesotho. Estimates of the size of this total

population range from 4,000 to 10,000. Most Chinese respondents estimated the

size of the Chinese population to be 4,000-‐5,000. In short, it is difficult to be sure of

the exact magnitude of Fujianese migration to Lesotho, although their economic

presence is highly visible throughout the country. In any case, the highly contingent

and opportunistic nature of Fujianese migration means that exact figures of

population size at a given time are not always helpful for understanding broader

trends.

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The contingent nature of Fujianese migration also plays an important role in

determining the demographic structure of the resident Fujianese community in

Lesotho. With one exception, all of my respondents were young or middle-‐aged

adults and during my time in the field, I saw no other Fujianese immigrants outside

this age range. In most cases, elderly relatives had been left behind in Fujian. These

relatives were the principal recipients of savings remitted to Fujian. Children were

also left behind in China to be educated. One Fujianese parent told me that it was

more important for children to understand their own culture than to be with their

families overseas. I was informed by another respondent that some locally resident

Chinese send their children to school in Lesotho or South Africa although these

families are thought to represent less than 10% of the total community.

Today the Fujianese constitute the vast majority of Chinese in Lesotho

although, before this investigation, their reasons for migrating to Lesotho were

unclear. In seeking to understand these new migratory flows, I borrow the well-‐

known rubic of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors: ‘push’ factors being those incentives which

encourage migrants to leave home and ‘pull’ factors being those incentives which

draw migrants to a particular destination. In the context of Fujianese migration to

Lesotho, obvious ‘push’ factors are Fujian’s economic situation and historic culture

of migration. ‘Pull’ factors include perceived opportunities for profit in Lesotho,

family reunification and Lesotho’s weak immigration controls in comparison to other

countries in the region. Each of these factors will be considered in turn, based on

information derived from conversations with Fujianese migrants in Lesotho.

52

I have already discussed the importance of migratory culture in promoting

outmigration from Fujian. Equally important is Fujian’s peripherality within China

and its specific history as sender of migrants to other peripheral places across the

world. It is important to note that irregular migration of the kind discussed here is

not simply the product of absolute poverty. On the contrary, increases in the volume

of irregular migratory flows can be a direct product of economic development, as

increased prosperity exposes would-‐be migrants to the knowledge of opportunities

available elsewhere (Skeldon, 2000, p. 17). In Fujian’s case, the regional economy is

strongly oriented towards promoting migration and is heavily dependent on capital

remitted by overseas Fujianese, thus further strengthening the creation of migrant

communities.

While Fujian’s particular economic context certainly provides a strong ‘push’

for the departure of Fujianese migrants, it does not explain how or why they

become established in Lesotho, probably one of the most peripheral countries in the

world. My research suggests that the ‘pull’ of the periphery in Lesotho is related to a

perceived opportunity for profit identified by Fujianese migrants. In all my

interviews, I encountered the recurrence of the idea that there was ‘easy money’ to

be made in Lesotho, through opportunities that had largely been overlooked or

underexploited by Western traders and local businesspeople. Throughout Lesotho,

the Fujianese have succeeded in making money in situations traditionally deemed to

be fundamentally unprofitable. They have achieved this by deploying specific

strategies to mobilise transnational business networks, allowing them to cut costs

53

and maximise profits. These strategies will be considered in detail later in this

chapter.

For many migrants, the decision to come to Lesotho is determined by familial

obligation rather than economic imperatives. Individual migrants are embedded

within households situated within wider, often transnational, networks of extended

family, kin and community (Goldschieder, 1987, pp. 686-‐687). Thus, the presence of

fellow villagers and relatives in the destination area can act as a major ‘pull’ factor in

decisions of mobility. Many young Fujianese leave their natal homes to help their

families in Lesotho to run existing businesses and expand existing operations. In this

sense, the dispersed family remains the migrant’s core reference group when it

comes to decisions of mobility (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 195).

Another deciding factor in determining the mobility of Fujianese migrants is

the immigration policy of the destination country. Weak immigration controls are a

significant ‘pull’ for migrants from the periphery without access to the resources

that would enable them to enter states in the centre. Several of my respondents

explained that Lesotho was an obvious choice for Chinese migration to Southern

Africa because of its lax border control compared to other countries in the region

and the relative ease with which one can (legally or illegally) obtain a Lesotho visa

and residence permit. When asked, all my respondents replied that they would have

migrated directly to South Africa if they could, suggesting that decisions to migrate

to Lesotho are part of more far-‐sighted trajectories of mobility (Pieke et al. , 2004, p.

54

18). Compared to its neighbours, Lesotho can be considered to have a comparative

advantage in attracting unskilled labour from the global periphery.

4.3 Understanding Fujianese Modes of Mobility

The interaction between different ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors is fundamentally

important in determining the size and direction of trajectories of transnational

mobility. Particularly in the case of ‘pull’ factors, these flows are dependent on

networks of knowledge that link the sending area to the receiving area. In my

discussions with migrants from Fujian, I was interested to discover what they knew

about Lesotho prior to their arrival. None of my respondents had even heard of

Lesotho outside of the context of their own migration but were willing to make the

journey to Southern Africa based solely on fragmented information provided by

family members or Chinese employers. Prior to coming to Lesotho, the majority of

my respondent’s had heard little more than that Lesotho was poor (贫苦) and

backward (落后). This supports Todaro’s assertion that migrants often base their

mobility decisions on incomplete information (Todaro, 1969).

I noticed that young migrants were significantly less enthusiastic about the

opportunities for business in Lesotho than their parents. Several complained about

the lack of social opportunities outside of the family sphere and many stated openly

that they would return to Fujian if they could. To these young migrants, China’s

rapid economic development presents new and exciting life opportunities beyond

those available in Lesotho. When asked why they had left China in the first place, all

55

those in the 20-‐30 bracket replied that they had been compelled to migrate by their

parents who had requested or demanded their assistance in running businesses in

Lesotho. This would imply that, as Fujian begins increasingly to benefit from China’s

economic takeoff, Fujianese migrants, like their Taiwanese and Shanghainese

predecessors, may become increasingly reluctant to migrate to the periphery.

This again suggests that periphery-‐to-‐periphery migration cannot be

sustained exclusively by one single ethnic group. Migratory flows of this kind appear

to be sustained by periodic ethnic ‘regeneration,’ catalysed by political and

economic developments at the sending area. Thus, it may be that in the future,

Fujianese businesses in Lesotho will be appropriated by merchants from elsewhere

in the global periphery, though it is uncertain as to whether new migrants will be as

successful as the Fujianese in generating capital in Lesotho’s highly peripheral

mountainous hinterland.

The means by which Fujianese migrants reach Lesotho proved to be a highly

sensitive issue in all discussions with locally resident Chinese and it was nearly

impossible to derive any meaningful data on this topic from my interviews with

settled Fujianese. Only by reading poignant silences and noting attempts to change

the subject of conversation was I able to surmise that the majority of Fujianese that

reside in Lesotho do so illegally. This hunch was corroborated by my discussions with

Lesotho government officials, who described ‘the Chinese’ as the worst ‘tax-‐evaders’

and ‘census duckers’ they had ever encountered. However, as Pieke et al. explain,

for Fujianese migrants, ‘the many forms of “legal” and “illegal” migration constitute

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a continuum of alternatives rather than activities that are very different from each

other’ (2004, p. 2). This is suggests a different worldview in which the cultural

imperative to migrate often overrides the comparatively arbitrary designations of

‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ transit.

According to Xiang, many unauthorized Chinese migrants enter their

destination country by legal means and then overstay their visas (Xiang, 2009, p.

422). This certainly appears to be the case in Lesotho, where weak immigration

controls make it easy to bribe one’s way into the country and perpetuate one’s stay

indefinitely. Typical routes for Fujianese migrants involve travelling by plane from

Fuqing to Fuzhou or Hong Kong and then on to Johannesburg and Maseru. These

journeys are often mediated by people-‐traffickers known as ‘snakeheads’ (蛇头).

Although these individuals are frequently depicted as ruthless mercenaries who

make their livelihoods out of the misfortune of others, this designation is unhelpful

in that it obscures the real nature of the relationship between snakeheads and their

clients. Indeed, snakeheads are not simply the masterminds behind sinister

trafficking networks, they are providers of professional migration services and they

may even be respected members of the migrant’s community (Pieke et al., 2004, p.

198).

The decision to pay an agent to smuggle someone out of the country is made

collectively, in consultation with the migrant’s extended family. Given the risks

involved in transit and the relative poverty of the average Fujianese migrant, very

few of those trafficked make advanced payments to their traffickers (Skeldon, 2000,

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p. 21). It is more common for migrants to make an advance downpayment of 10%,

with a further payment on departure (or en-‐route) with the balance paid after

arrival at the final destination (ibid.).

Skeldon goes on to explain that migrants often borrow from their families in

order to be able to pay the costs of their transit. In this way, they ‘exchange a

primary debt to the traffickers for a secondary debt of money and obligations to

their families’ (Skeldon, 2000, p. 21). This is an extremely risky investment, not only

because of the risk of death or injury en-‐route but also because there is no

guarantee that the migrant will be able to repay the money invested in them by

their extended family. If a migrant fails to succeed in one place, they will often

continue on their migratory trajectory, trying in a different place rather than facing

humiliation at home in Fujian.

4.4 Making the Periphery Profitable

Despite the enormous financial risk involved in migrating, many Fujianese

continue to be drawn to Lesotho by accounts of perceived opportunity reported to

them by friends and relatives. Today most Fujianese in Lesotho are involved in the

retail sector, running small shops throughout Lesotho. These shops typically

specialise in one or more of the following three types of commodities:

1. Basic groceries: including non-‐perishable food, cooking oil and other daily

necessities.

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2. Clothes: including shoes, bags, accessories and cosmetics.

3. Gas for cooking.

The Chinese embassy in Lesotho has done little to facilitate Fujianese

migration to the country, preferring instead to disassociate itself from the

burgeoning population of Fujianese traders. Rather, the success of these traders has

depended on commercial networks, often organised around socio-‐economic nodes

such as the Fuqing Association (福清同乡会) and the Association of Chinese

Enterprises (中资商会). New Fujianese arrivals to Lesotho can approach these

economic ‘societies’ and request to borrow money to open a shop in Lesotho.

These funds are provided by established members of the society and are

borrowed at high interest. Unfortunately my Fujianese respondents were very

guarded about the internal structure of these organisations but it is clear that new

arrivals must work very hard to pay back these high interest loans over periods of

several years. It would appear that these business organisations also play a

regulatory role in managing competition within the Chinese retail sector. For

instance, I was told that in the Maseru area there is an unwritten understanding that

Chinese-‐owned shops should be no less than 200m apart. Regulations such as these

are intended to prevent what Xiang terms the ‘crowding out’ of the core business of

Fujianese migrant communities (Xiang, 2005, p. 80).

Thus, the establishment of Fujianese businesses in Lesotho is both facilitated

and mediated by existing networks of traders, mostly based in Maseru and the

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country’s other urban centres. These associations also act as support networks in

case of personal misfortune, as in the case of a recent fundraising initiative launched

by the Association of Chinese Enterprises to help rebuild a Fujianese-‐owned shop in

Maseru, which had burned down. According to one of my respondents, the initiative

raised over 5m Maloti (US$ 738,676), a significant amount, given that the majority of

Chinese in Lesotho operate without official insurance.

The strong presence of foreign-‐owned businesses in Lesotho’s retail industry

is by no means a new phenomenon. Foreign trading posts have been a common

sight in Lesotho for decades, although the ethnicity of the owners has changed

significantly. The western Europeans who dominated trade in Lesotho in the early

part of the twentieth century were joined after the country’s independence in 1966

by a contingent of Indian traders who began to make their mark on the country’s

retail sector. Lesotho’s trading landscape was once again transformed by the arrival

of Taiwanese merchants in the 1980s, who bought up many of the businesses once

owned by white and Indian traders. Given this history, the Lesotho government is all

too aware of the threat posed to local businesses by competition from immigrant

trading communities and has enacted a policy making it illegal for foreigners to own

businesses of less than 1000m2.

The ban on ownership of small retail enterprises by foreign nationals has

been comprehensively circumvented by Fujianese traders. This is done by paying a

local Mosotho to register the business under their name. Meanwhile, the day-‐to-‐day

running of the shop is left to the Chinese merchant, who is the de-‐facto owner. In

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the event that the authorities should appear to question the legitimacy of the outfit,

the local ‘owner’ can be summoned to vouch for his Chinese ‘staff’. In addition to

being more ingenious than their predecessors is circumventing government

interventions, the Fujianese have distinguished themselves by the extent of their

expansion into Lesotho’s economic frontier.

Lesotho’s mountainous terrain has traditionally presented a significant

barrier to economic penetration, by foreigners and locals alike, beyond Maseru and

the surrounding lowlands. Costs of transportation and often-‐inhospitable weather

conditions have historically limited the number of trading posts in the highlands,

where margins for profit are frequently deemed to be too slim to be worth pursuing.

However, this discourse of profitability has been radically overturned by the

Fujianese who have succeeded in establishing a foothold in villages which have

never had their own general store.

The fact that the Fujianese have pushed the boundaries of the retail sector

right into the highlands suggests a pioneer mentality that perceives peripherality

with a series of strategies for turning the frontier into a lucrative space. Furthermore,

the diffusion of Fujianese-‐owned shops in Lesotho challenges the assertion made by

Pieke et al. that Fujianese migrants do not respond mechanically to wage

differentials but tend to move to areas ‘where an established community from their

village or wider area of origin already exists’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 24).

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While it is true that low-‐skilled Fujianese labour is predominantly drawn to

Lesotho by the country’s existing Chinese communities, the profitability of the

periphery is ensured by a centrifugal force that pushes new arrivals away from areas

where a strong Fujianese presence already exists. This is because the Fujianese

model relies on total monopoly over tiny village markets. The Fujianese specialise in

driving out local competitors and establishing small regimes of hegemony in remote

areas. Thus, new arrivals have no choice but to leave behind the saturated markets

of Lesotho’s urban centres in search of opportunities at the margins.

This centrifugal pattern strongly resembles the kind of ‘diffusion migration’

identified by Xiang in his study of outmigration from Wenzhou (2005, p. 80). As

among the Zhejiangcun community in Beijing, this spreading out and moving out is

rationalised by the Fujianese in Lesotho as ‘an entirely natural, if not essential way

of doing business’ (ibid.). Like Wenzhou traders in Beijing, Fujianese traders in

Lesotho have clustered around identical trades, leading to increased competition

within the Chinese retail community (ibid.). It has therefore been in the interest of

established traders in Lesotho to help new arrivals to identify business opportunities

in Lesotho’s economic hinterland, rather than at the saturated centre of Chinese

business activity.

Thus, Fujianese diffusion at the periphery is facilitated by the knowledge

networks of existing communities of Fujianese traders in Lesotho. Upon arrival,

these networks are little more than a potential resource but they are quickly

mobilised, both by new arrivals and existing merchants, in order to ensure the

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profitability of the system as a whole. This is because these networks remain

profitable only as long as they are expanding outwards through centrifugal diffusion.

Already there is evidence in Lesotho to suggest that this trend may be reversing, as

my respondents repeatedly mentioned the increased saturation of the retail sector,

even at the limits of the country’s mountainous periphery.

Having been advised by established traders to survey a given area at the

periphery, new arrivals from Fujian will typically use local Basotho to collect data on

the existing shops in the local area. These ‘market analysts’ will supply the new

entrants with information about competitors’ prices and business strategies. Armed

with this information, new entrants will approach an existing business association or

informal network of retails with a proposal to start a new business and a request to

borrow money to launch the new venture. As I have already mentioned, these loans

are arranged with high levels of interest, such that the lenders have a vested interest

in the success of the new business. In this way, peers will subsidise the new entrant

until they are able to capture the market.

The success of Fujianese traders at the periphery is due to their ability to

mobilise networks to establish retail hegemonies at the micro scale. This is achieved

through calculated strategies of group purchase, which are crucial to the modes of

accumulation that allow these settlers to turn the periphery into a productive space.

In forming consortia and buying in bulk, Fujianese traders are able to overcome the

two fundamental barriers to profitability at the frontier: firstly, the cost of

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transporting regular shipments of stock into the periphery and secondly, the

difficulty of achieving economies of scale when operating a small business.

Group-‐purchase strategies allow the Fujianese to buy their wares in bulk

from local wholesalers and thus undersell local competitors. While food and drink

are usually sourced directly from the producers in Lesotho or South Africa,

manufactured goods, such as toys and clothing, are typically sourced from consortia

based in Johannesburg and Durban who import them directly from China. Groups of

Fuijanese traders will collaborate by collecting money amongst themselves and

buying in bulk. Group buying allows the Fujianese to negotiate sizeable discounts at

the time of purchase. Goods are then transporting collectively and stored on-‐site for

long periods of time, further cutting costs and allowing the Fujianese to undersell

local competitors.

The Fujianese are not only strategic about how they source their wares but

also when they source their wares. For instance, in the run-‐up to Christmas, they

have been known to buy almost everything of value from the local wholesalers. I

was informed by a Mosotho tradesman that it is not uncommon to arrive at the

brewery around Christmas time to find that all the beer has been purchased by

Chinese traders:

They will buy all the beer, for example, from the brewery. If you haven’t got money, or you buy small, when your stock is finished before Christmas, you run to the brewery to buy beer and you find all the beer is gone, or one type of beer has been completely bought up. And production at that time is very

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slow. It’s the holiday period and production capacity in the brewery is limited.

Block-‐buying of this kind is not limited to beer. Indeed, certain Chinese

distributers specialise in buying huge quantities of different kinds of liquor directly

from the Lesotho Brewery Company at very low prices and distributing them to

vendors in the remote areas. The same strategy is used for the purchase of all

locally-‐sourced consumables:

They do that with Coca-‐Cola, soft drinks, mielie-‐meal, EVERYTHING. They do that kind of block thing. If you see them on the day that they buy, there’s a place with a supermarket owned by the Chinese, it’s got a large parking there. You’ll see a large truck parked there and there would be like, around 50 vans owned by Chinese coming to pick soft-‐drinks, coming to pick mielie-‐meal, coming to pick whatever … you know groceries that they’re going to be selling in their shops.

The prices at which these goods are sold are always calculated to be cheaper

than the local competition. Specific businesses are targeted as rivals and Fujianese

traders, supported by capital borrowed from a local Chinese association, will

operate at a loss until the local competitor has been driven out of the market.

Success is virtually guaranteed, since the Fujianese have access to goods and capital

that cannot be matched by Basotho traders. As soon as the local competition begins

to looks shaky, the Fujianese will send a representative to negotiate the purchase of

the failing shop. Once a monopoly has been achieved, the Fujianese trader,

sometimes operating at two sites in the same tiny village, can increase their prices

and begin to pay back the money loaned to them by their peers.

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In this way, Fujianese traders have been able to mobilise local networks,

sometimes transplanted from Fujian, in order to established a retail hegemony in

Lesotho, penetrating corners of the country previously unreached by either local or

foreign businesses. During my interviews with Fujianese traders, several

respondents quoted the maxim “有太阳的地方都可以看到福建人” (wherever the

sun shines, Fujianese can be found). Indeed, Western visitors to Lesotho are often

astounded to discover Fujianese businesses operating in areas without tarred roads,

running water or electricity.

These traders often work on extremely slim profit margins, living on the

premises of their shops and keeping all their earnings on site, rather than depositing

them in a bank, so to avoid incurring additional expenses. Parsimony of this kind is a

product of the financial situation in which these traders are forced to exist in order

to be able to survive at the periphery. Firstly, a proportion of earnings must be set

aside to repay any debts incurred in emigrating from Fujian. Secondly, shop owners

must repay the local Chinese associations that subsidised their efforts to capture the

market. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, migrants must generate savings and

remittances to send back to their relatives (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 195).

Indeed, Pieke et al. suggest that migrants ‘do not measure their earning

abroad by their local purchasing power, but by how much they can save and how

much that money will be worth back home’ (2004, p. 195). In many cases,

remittances are used to fund the construction of ostentatious houses in the natal

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villages, as well as on other forms of conspicuous consumption by the migrants and

their extended families (ibid., p. 26).

The extent to which remittances are deployed to fund conspicuous displays

of wealth gives credence to the structuralist assertion that migrant prosperity does

not automatically equal a meaningful improvement in community welfare in the

sending area (Connell et al., pp. 98-‐104). Rather than contributing to the

development of communal infrastructure and institutions, structuralists argue that

migrants’ earnings are frequently monopolised by migrants and their immediate

families (Lipton, 1980, p. 14). Indeed, conspicuous consumption may reflect a desire

for a certain type of modernity previously inaccessible to migrants’ families (Pieke et

al., 2004, p. 57) and could be understood as a symptom of the lack of investment

opportunities that propelled the initial outmigration (Murphy, 2002, p. 14).

4.5 Sino-‐African Relations at the Periphery

According to Pieke et al., Chinese immigrant labour is ‘independent of the

general supply of labour in the destination country’ (Pieke et al., 2004, p. 26). This

does not appear to be the case in Lesotho. The Basotho businesspeople interviewed

for this project were quick to point out that Fujianese supermarket owners are in

direct competition with local shop-‐owners, driving locally-‐owned stores out of

business through a series of ‘ruthless’ and ‘cutthroat’ practices.

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The highly visible nature of Fujianese domination over the retail sector in

Lesotho has led to considerable friction between the Basotho and the country’s

resident Chinese communities. Unhelpfully, local discussions of the ‘Chinese’ do not

discriminate between Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and other East Asians. This

point was repeatedly raised by my Taiwanese respondents, who felt that their good

reputation in Lesotho had been tarnished by the unscrupulous practices of recent

Fujianese migrants.

Fujianese traders have attracted a great deal of animosity from the local

population owing to the perceived ‘ruthlessness’ of their business model. The local

media frequently publish reports of Basotho businesspeople who have lost their

livelihoods as a result of ‘Chinese’ competition. These stories are interspersed with

reports of ‘Chinese’ traders selling sub-‐standard products, such as poisonous baby-‐

formula, or providing bogus or poor quality services. Local people also argue that

the ‘Chinese’ do not invest in Lesotho, pointing out that the majority of ‘Chinese’

businesspeople are not even registered with the Ministry of Home Affairs, let alone

with a local bank.

Animosity towards the ‘Chinese’ is frequently expressed through

indiscriminate violence towards East Asians in Lesotho. Chinese businesspeople are

frequently attacked, mugged and robbed, not only because they constitute a focal

point of xenophobic aggression but because they are known to carry large amounts

of cash on their person and often keep large cash savings on the premises of their

businesses. Many locally resident Chinese, of all extractions, live in daily fear of

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violent attacks. One of my respondents had been attacked 5 times in broad daylight,

most recently between 8 and 9 in the morning.

Outright animosity towards the Chinese in Lesotho is tempered by increasing

dependence on the services that they provide. For local people, the presence of

these entrepreneurs has had a profound effect on consumptive habits, reducing

dependency on regional centres but increasing dependency on Fujianese village

retailers. Indeed, local attitudes towards the Chinese are often region-‐specific and

Basotho from the rural areas are often surprised by how xenophobic people are in

Maseru. One respondent exclaimed: “if the Chinese got kicked out of Teyateyaneng,

where would I buy?” It is clear that, through their networks, the Fujianese have

changed the playing field by making cheap goods, particularly manufactured goods

from China, available at the margins.

However, the quality of the wares sold in Chinese-‐owned shops remains a

point of contention. The ‘Chinese’ are notorious in Lesotho for selling food that is

well past its sell-‐by-‐date. Rumours abound of Chinese traders using false

measurements to weigh meat and corn flour, or of diluting skin and hair care

products with cheap chemicals. These accusations are an indicator of seething

xenophobia more than a reliable indicator of Fujianese business practices. Indeed,

the attitudes towards resident Chinese that I encountered in my discussions with

local people were almost exclusively negative. Some respondents complained that

Chinese shop-‐owners treat their clientele very suspiciously, employing staff to follow

individual shoppers while they browse. Others complained the Chinese only employ

69

illiterate locals to perform menial tasks. Basotho employees are denied access to the

till and are never allowed to handle any cash. Indeed, repeated reference was made

to the fact that there is little, if any skills transfer between owners and employees in

these businesses:

They are strategic in terms of making sure that Basotho have no access to cash … If you do find a Mosotho at a counter, receiving cash, that Mosotho is under very, very close supervision. You will find him or her sitting there with a Chinaman or Chinawoman breathing down his or her neck. He or she really has no authority. The money that they receive is directly managed or supervised.

The attitudes of local people towards Chinese traders are directly mirrored

by Chinese perceptions of Basotho. Many of my Fujianese respondents described

the Basotho as being lazy and incompetent, particularly in running businesses. The

promulgation of this discourse and the success of the Fujianese bulk-‐buying

strategies have helped entrench the perception that business in Lesotho is easy for

Chinese migrants and that competition with local entrepreneurs is ‘child’s play’.

While the Basotho are universally looked down upon by the Chinese

community, the Fujianese are also the objects of racial prejudice by other Chinese

and Taiwanese residents. One of my respondents described the early cohort of

migrants from Shanghai as being of “higher quality (素质) ” than the Fujianese

migrants who have since become Lesotho’s dominant migrant community. Recurring

references to the ‘quality’ of migrants in my interviews suggest a perceived

hierarchy of migration, which places skilled Taiwanese at the top of a continuum,

70

just above skilled Shangainese migrants and with unskilled Fujianese labour at the

far end of the spectrum.

In many respects, this differentiation resembles the sub-‐ethnic hierarchy

described by Beck in his study of the Chinese community in Liverpool (Beck, 2007, p.

145). That configuration places the Cantonese firmly on top and the Fujianese on the

bottom (ibid.). In Lesotho, this hierarchy is not rigid, as those who have spent more

time in the country are often perceived to be of higher ‘quality’ than new arrivals

because they have a better understanding of the local situation and have learned

local norms and customs.

The mistrust between Chinese communities in Lesotho is similar to that

identified by Hsu in Zanzibar (Hsu, 2007, p. 112). In general, locally resident

Taiwanese consider the Fujianese to be crude and uneducated, often highlighting

their ‘unhygienic’ practices and blaming them for damaging relations with local

people. Beck identifies a similar dynamic between the Fujianese and other Chinese

groups in the U.K. (Beck, 2007, p. 142). He argues that the Fujianese are

marginalised by other Chinese groups because their presence has generated

hostility towards Chinese immigrants among the local population.

4.6 New Directions?

Beck describes the contingent nature of Fujianese migration as being the

product of a ‘sojourner mentality’ (Beck, 2007, p. 147). This rings true in Lesotho,

71

where the majority of my respondents stated that they were prepared to move

wherever there is the opportunity of greater earnings and a better standard of

living. In a context where emigration is the norm rather than the exception, these

individual episodes of migration should be viewed as ‘part of careers of ongoing

spatial and social mobility that do not start when the decision to move has been

made or end upon arrival at the destination’ (Pieke et al. , 2004, p. 18). Fujianese

migration can therefore be understood as an open-‐ended experience rather than a

series of individual displacements.

As my research demonstrates, this is particularly true of migration to the

margins of the global economic system, where migratory trajectories are likely to be

contingent and opportunistic, leading on to new and more profitable destinations

whenever the opportunity presents itself. It was suggested during several interviews

that, at present, there were more Chinese immigrants returning to China than new

arrivals landing in Lesotho. This supports Pieke’s prediction that by 2020/30, China’s

demographic and economic transition will have made it a country of large-‐scale

immigration rather than emigration (Pieke, 2007, p. 192). Indeed, none of my

respondents had chosen to take up Lesotho citizenship, preferring instead to hold

on to their Chinese nationality, obviously with a view to one day returning to China.

This again highlights the fact that migrant communities at the periphery are

not self-‐perpetuating (Massey et al., 1993). Rather, they are dependent on

migratory flows that are inherently unstable and sensitive to economic and political

changes both at the sending area and at the receiving area. While periphery-‐to-‐

72

periphery migration might be ongoing, the specific groups that are represented at

the periphery are likely to change.

73

Chapter 5. Conclusions

In the introduction to this thesis, I defined the notion of ‘the peripheral’ as

consisting of ‘marginalised spaces’, or ‘sites of exclusion’. These are real places that

are separated from the major centres of the global economy and typically

considered to be outside major transnational flows of capital, knowledge and

persons. Lesotho is a prime example of a nation on the fringes of the global system.

With its tiny population, low GDP, scarcity of natural resources and limited

opportunities for economic growth, the country is completely eclipsed by its

powerful neighbour, South Africa. And yet, despite being at the margins of the

global system, Lesotho has managed to attract a significant volume of Chinese

migrants over the past 40 years. Within Lesotho, these migrants have established

themselves at the margins of the margin and on the periphery of the periphery.

The primary aim of this investigation was to discover how and why Lesotho’s

Fujianese migrant communities become established at these marginalised sites. I

was keen to discover their aspirations in coming to Lesotho and to identify the

specific ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors that precipitated their migration. Furthermore, I

wanted to understand how they perceive the ‘remoteness’ and ‘peripherality’ of

Lesotho’s mountainous hinterland and to discern the strategies and systems that

allow them to turn the periphery into a productive space. In carrying out this

research, I hoped to be able to redress the relative paucity of ethnographic research

on the Chinese diaspora in Africa, particularly in small, resource-‐poor nations such

as Lesotho.

74

It is clear that the reforms initiated in 1978 have had a profound impact on

China’s migratory landscape. Nowhere in China is this more true than in Fujian,

where diverse and complex migratory trajectories operate within a ‘culture of

migration’ that valorises, and even normalises, international mobility. The reforms

have repositioned Fujian within a new global space of flows that not only operate

between the core and the periphery but also create new transnational relationships

between diverse peripheries. In this sense, Fujianese migration is both an exponent

and a proponent of ‘globalisation at the margin’ (Xiang, 2009), producing contingent

and dynamic linkages between unexpected sites in the global economy.

In the case of Lesotho, Fujianese migrants have followed in the wake of

earlier flows of skilled Taiwanese, and later Mainland Chinese, investors and

technical support teams tied to foreign aid projects during the 1970s and 80s. The

political origins of these early flows of migrants suggests an ongoing role for the

nation state in catalysing flows of migration from the periphery to the periphery,

although it is clear that these flows are heavily dependent on the economic situation

at the sending area. Furthermore, although flows from Taiwan, Shanghai and Fujian

are undeniably discrete phenomena, they are clearly linked in an evolving

transnational social and economic space. This space is dominated by networks,

which connect recent flows of Fujianese labour to earlier movements of migrants

from Taiwan and the Chinese Mainland.

75

The decision to move to Lesotho is the result of the complex interaction

between various ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. Firstly, the impetus to leave Fujian is

provided by the province’s economic situation and the perceived lack of

opportunities at home. Meanwhile, migrants are drawn to Lesotho by a discourse of

perceived opportunity promulgated by existing communities of Chinese in Lesotho.

Through these knowledge networks, would-‐be migrants are made aware of

Lesotho’s lax border controls and of specific opportunities for business at sites on

the fringes of the country’s retail economy. In this sense, rather than being

marginalised sites of exclusion, Lesotho’s mountainous periphery possesses a

comparative advantage for attracting migrants from China’s margins.

The unprecedented diffusion of Fujianese businesses into Lesotho’s

mountainous hinterland suggests that the Fujianese perceive ‘peripherality’

differently from local people and other migrant groups. I argue that this different

way of perceiving the periphery is an outcome of the Fujianese ‘culture of

migration’, which has allowed Fujianese traders to develop a series of business

strategies that allow them to achieve a very high pace of capital accumulation and

business expansion. This is not to say that the Fujianese have a different ‘map’ of

centre and periphery or that they have mistaken periphery for centre. Indeed, my

Fujianese respondents were all too aware of Lesotho’s marginality within the world

system. Rather, instead of seeing the periphery as a space of constraint, they see the

periphery as a potentially productive space. Furthermore, the geography of Chinese

competition in Lesotho appears to be centrifugal, pushing newcomers further and

further out into the margins.

76

By mobilising potential networks of Chinese businesspeople in Lesotho, the

Fujianese are able to deploy a series of specific network strategies that allow them

to capture the market in Lesotho’s out-‐of-‐the-‐way places. These strategies include

borrowing from economic associations in order to set up new businesses and using

group purchase to buy and transport goods in bulk, so as to be able to undersell

local competitors. Indeed, the limited size of markets in remote areas means that

profitability at the periphery can only be guaranteed by monopoly. The success of

the Fujianese in Lesotho’s periphery lies in their ability to establish small regimes of

hegemony by operating under tight profit margins for long periods of time.

Fujianese penetration into Lesotho’s retail economy also demonstrates the

strength of business and kinship networks between locally resident Chinese and

between these communities and their families in Fujian. Isolated traders in

Lesotho’s mountains should not be viewed as lone pioneers but rather as individuals

embedded in transnational kinship networks. These networks operate

independently of the local Basotho labour market, employing local workers only to

perform menial tasks and without any meaningful skills transfer to the local

populace. Instead, the local population is constructed as economically incompetent

and the Lesotho government as, at best, a recurrent nuisance to be overcome

through business registration by proxy, census-‐ducking and tax-‐evasion.

Beck describes the contingent nature of Fujianese migration as being the

product of a ‘sojourner mentality’ (Beck, 2007, p. 147). Everything about the

77

Fujianese way of life in Lesotho, from their reluctance to deposit their earnings in a

local bank, to the demographic makeup of the migrant population, suggests the

ephemeral nature of their intended sojourn in the country. New arrivals are

increasingly likely to buy businesses from fellow Fujianese who, having generated

enough savings in Lesotho, are ready to continue on their migratory trajectories. As

my research demonstrates, these trajectories are not necessarily always focused on

destinations traditionally understood to be ‘hubs’ of the global economic system.

Rather, Chinese migrants in Lesotho seem ready to move to wherever they can find

the opportunity of greater earnings and a better standard of living.

Progressively, the flow of migrants between China and Lesotho appears to be

reversing, as more and more families look to return to China in the long term.

China’s rapid economic development increasingly presents new and exciting life

opportunities, particularly for young Fujianese, while Lesotho’s market for groceries

and consumer goods has shrunk considerably as a result of the 2008 financial crisis

and because of saturation by Chinese traders. Indeed, fewer and fewer Chinese

appear to be arriving in Lesotho each year, with more Chinese immigrants returning

to China than new arrivals landing in Lesotho. My findings support Pieke’s prediction

that by 2020/30, China’s demographic and economic transition will have made it a

country of large-‐scale immigration rather than emigration (Pieke, 2007, p. 92).

Furthermore, they suggest that migrant communities at the periphery are not self-‐

sustaining, but are dependent on contingent flows from elsewhere in the global

periphery.

78

It is clear then, that the Fujianese in Lesotho possess the networking skills to

be able to perceive the periphery as a productive or lucrative space, sometimes as a

springboard to other destinations and increasingly as a means to enrich themselves

with a view to returning to China. These migrants cultivate the peripherality of

Lesotho’s underexploited consumer market, in order to create new transnational

spaces of opportunity. The periphery is therefore made attractive by virtue of its

exclusion from established centres of capital generation and migration.

Indeed, rather than thinking of Lesotho’s highlands as being at the margins of

the margin, it is more helpful to consider these places as nodes within transnational

space, linked to sending communities in China through contingent networks of

mobility. Flows within these networks are highly dependent on the economic

situation at the source and at the destination as well as on familial obligations and

perceived geographies of opportunity at other nodes within the network.

79

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