Audiobook10 hours
China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
Written by Howard W. French
Narrated by Don Hagen
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
An exciting, hugely revealing account of China's burgeoning presence in Africa-a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people.
A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting-conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages-French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China's economic, political, and human presence across the African continent-and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.
We meet a broad spectrum of China's dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia's now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia's old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner-cum-brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens' backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China's intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts'.
French's nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition-exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties-to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.
Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political expose, French's keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa's role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties-and the watching world-will be in the foreseeable future.
A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former New York Times bureau chief in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting-conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among other languages-French crafts a layered investigation of astonishing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the ordinary men and women navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, corruption, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical development. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human face of China's economic, political, and human presence across the African continent-and in doing so reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.
We meet a broad spectrum of China's dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, and even environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia's now-booming copper trade; a timber entrepreneur determined to harvest the entirety of Liberia's old-growth redwoods), to those just barely scraping by (a sibling pair running small businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke bar owner-cum-brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an equally panoramic array of African responses: a citizens' backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan horse” Chinese construction project (a tower complex to be built over a beloved soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on their economy); a Zambian political candidate who, having protested China's intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle class of an industrial boomtown; African mine workers bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing inadequate safety precautions and wages a fraction of their immigrant counterparts'.
French's nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms forming around this new world order, from the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition-exploitation of resources and labor; cut-rate infrastructure projects; dubious treaties-to new frontiers of cultural and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in dynamic flux.
Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, part industrial and political expose, French's keenly observed account ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: why China is making the incursions it is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa's role in the equation is, and just what the ramifications for both parties-and the watching world-will be in the foreseeable future.
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Reviews for China's Second Continent
Rating: 4.06818178030303 out of 5 stars
4/5
66 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Terribly written. If you want to see true imperialism in Africa, look no further than what the West is doing (I.e. the CFA franc and the IMF)
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This is a grumpy cynic’s vacation journal, not an in-depth investigation of China’s involvement in Africa.
The book is a series of travelogue anecdotes and brief summaries of interviews with business people and politicians in various African countries. The author spent a great deal of time describing his hotel rooms, route, and African roads, but he didn’t bother with any academic studies. He wrote about who he knows and how things have changed since the last time he visited each place, but didn't share many personal insights or interesting analysis of what he saw.
The opening and closing sections of the book were the best parts because they briefly escaped the microscopic focus of the rest of it. I was am still interested in the subject described by the title of this book, and I'm confident the author could teach me a lot about it. Sadly, in this book he didn't. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Written as a travelogue, this book explores China's version of imperialism in Africa, to where many Chinese have immigrated, mostly to better their own personal situations (high or low), but bringing with them, high and low, an insular cultural arrogance that threatens to mimic the West's looting of the continent in the 19th and 20th centuries.