Methodological challenges

Researchers working around the African communities of Guangzhou have found various methodological challenges regarding the demographics, the size, and the mobilities associated with the African population. At this point, I will briefly mention some of the most salient challenges and how this book engages, confronts, and attempts to resolve them (I continue this discussion later in Chapter l).The first (and perhaps the biggest) challenge is defining who is an ‘African in Guangzhou’ — a question that directly relates to the issue of who should be counted as part of the city’s ‘African population’.

In his pioneering study, Africans in China, Bodomo (2012) — the one researcher who has consistently grappled with this issue — solves the problem in a rather simple way: anyone who is a national of any of the 54 African states and/or anyone who identifies as being of African origin is to be considered an ‘African in China’. Following Bodomo’s definition, white people from South African nations, Maghrebi Arabs from North Africa, African-Americans, Europeans of African descent (whether white, black, Indian or Arab), and Afro-Americans from Brazil, Colombia, or Trinidad and Tobago, among many others, could be included within the category‘Africans in China’.

In this book, the way I define ‘Africans in Guangzhou’ is more limited. The politics of African identities (and of African national identities) are too complex to be dealt with within the space of an introduction, or in a book about recent African presence in Southern China. So, the way in which I use the term ‘African’ here stems strictly from my fieldwork. In Guangzhou, as in many parts of China, the term is usually conflated — by Chinese and black people alike — with black people of sub-Saharan origin. This use broadly follows Bodomo’s suggestion about an identity divide between those from the Maghreb region and those from sub-Saharan Africa. As Mathews et al. (2017) have noted, there are also many other foreigners in the urban spaces where Africans congregate. In particular, there are many North Africans and Middle Easterners. However, in my interactions with North Africans, for instance, most of them privileged their national, religious, and/ or linguistic identities over the identity label of‘African’. As such, I will not impose that label upon individuals who most often do not characterise themselves as ‘African’.Therefore, from herein after, when I write ‘Africans in Guangzhou’, I am mainly referring to people of sub-Saharan origin who identify themselves as ‘black’ and ‘African’ and who are, in most cases, citizens of sub-Saharan African states.

After defining who to identify as an ‘African in Guangzhou’, a second methodological challenge linked to estimating the size of the population rapidly emerges: what criteria need to be met to count as part of that population? Should every single black person of sub-Saharan origin, regardless of the rationale behind their sojourn in the city, be considered as part of the city’s African population? The short answer here is no. A French citizen on a two-week business trip in Hong Kong, for example, is normally not considered as part of the ‘French population’ of Hong Kong. Similarly, Chinese tourists in Australia are not considered part of Australia’s Chinese population. Indeed, the intentions of the thousands of Africans who have passed through or sojourned in Guangzhou over the years have been very diverse. To the majority of Africans arriving in the city, Guangzhou is not a destination. Many of them, for instance, recurrently visit the city for short periods of time on business or tourists visas; others arrive as tourists, but have the intention of staying for longer periods; and some individuals, the smallest percentage, overstay their visas and live in that situation for periods of time. These complexities, combined with a lack of statistical data, shed serious doubts on the reliability of any population calculation made by researchers. As noted earlier, as a consequence of public fears over disease outbreaks (e.g. Ebola and COVID-19), local authorities have released certain population figures. While these figures can be used as reference, they should be taken with a grain of salt, because the foreign population management system has critical deficiencies (I expand on this in Chapter 3).

A third methodological challenge hovering in the shadow of the last one is the attempt to elucidate the national composition of the African population. Unsurprisingly, early researchers produced strikingly different accounts of the nationalities in Guangzhou’s African communities — this may have been a consequence of their positionality. French researchers had more access to francophone communities, for example, while West African researchers were more prone to contact those of West African nationalities. Indeed, as I show throughout this book, more important than nationalities, numbers, and types of people, are the multiple modalities of foreign emplacement in the city. While certain modalities can be correlated with national origins (i.e. young Nigerian males tend to become overstayers), these modalities are not exclusive to any particular nationality (there are many overstayers of other nationalities, but in smaller numbers). The modalities of emplacement are not only determined by the Chinese visa system and by national and transnational regimes of mobility, but also by individual trajectories, activities and, more importantly, by intentions and aspirations: dreams.

Moreover, these modalities cannot be accurately fixed. Individuals often switch back and forth between different types of sojourning and modes of emplacement. These unstable modalities (that I discuss in detail in Chapters 1 and 3), coupled with the fact that, as noted earlier, the Chinese government does not provide a clear and comprehensive data set on the nationalities and modalities of foreign presence in the country, further complicate attempts to make sense of the numbers and national composition of the African ensemble in the city.

A final issue, which is less of a methodological challenge but still relevant to this introduction, is the selection of Africans in Guangzhou as a ‘case study’. As will become evident in Chapter 1, the places with a higher concentration or visibility of

Africans are also places with high levels of Middle Eastern presence, along with foreigners from many other parts of the world. So, in an analysis of‘transnationality’, why focus on Africans and not bring others in? A simplistic answer would be: because Africans are undoubtedly the major foreign ‘group’ in the city. More importantly, however, their centrality is derived from the types of connections that they have been establishing in the city. Indeed, it could be said (as I argue in Chapter 3) that many Africans have managed to somehow insert themselves within the complex Chinese transethnic system.The depth and intensity of interactions between Africans and transprovincial internal migrants (in business and romantic relationships) has no paragon in previous histories of foreign presence in China and has been leaving an important mark on the Chinese hinterland well beyond Guangzhou.

In fact, African presence in Southern China has become a point of convergence between transnational and (Chinese) translocal flows.With their businesses and affective relationships, Africans and Chinese are not only connecting nations but, perhaps more importantly, locales like Owerri, the capital of Imo State in Southeast Nigeria with say Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province — locales that up until recently seemed unlikely to be connected in transnational or translocal ways. Indeed, some Chinese women from poorer provinces and/or backgrounds are marrying some of these African entrepreneurs as a means of social and economic advancement. Arguably, none of the other foreign ‘groups’ found in Guangzhou are interacting with Chinese on the scale that Africans are. Moreover, if Africans were to completely leave Guangzhou, a number of thriving translocal/transnational sub-economies that they have established, or helped consolidate, would be disrupted and have very real impacts on certain areas, and in local economies. This is, to some extent, already happening. Guangzhou’s African communities have started to disperse into the Chinese hinterland, and beyond China (I analyse these patterns in Chapters 4 and 6).

Furthermore, Africans have been establishing transnational relations and connections among themselves at the local level — relations that have the potential to transform traditional African identities (see Chapter 3). So, in short, the types of external and internal transnational connections that Africans in Southern China have enabled are very specific to the types of transnational mobilities that they seek and achieve. On top of all these, the analysis I present throughout this book is performed in the shadow of the overarching narrative of Africa-China relations. African presence in China, as well as Chinese presence across the African continent, are natural spaces to wonder about and discuss transnational connections.