Paper short abstract:

Drawing on data from interviews with students-traders from a range of African countries in Zhejiang, China, this study creates a composite profile of the young, well-travelled, well-educated Africans that come to China to study, work, and find their place in an increasingly competitive global order.

Paper long abstract:

Driven by macro-level trade and investment, engagement between China and African countries has grown significantly in recent years, giving rise to increased migration flows between the two regions. This paper examines the emergence of a class of young African student-entrepreneurs in greater Zhejiang Province, China. Whereas the vast majority of existing literature on Sino-African relations focuses on China's economic and developmental impacts in Africa and the increasing number of Chinese on the continent, literature on Africans in China is comparatively lacking. The little scholarship that does exist concentrates overwhelmingly on African petty traders in Guangzhou. This study fills a wide gap by investigating the region with China's second-largest (and rapidly growing) African population, and identifying a new subset of young, worldly Africans that have come to China to "chuang shijie闯世界"—take the world by storm.

Drawing primarily on data from semi-structured interviews with students-traders from a wide range of African countries and school administrators at universities in Zhejiang, as well as businesspeople and local officials in the nearby international trade city, Yiwu, this study seeks to create a composite profile of the young, well-travelled, and well-educated Africans that come to China to study, work, and find their place in an increasingly competitive global order. Further contextualized by ethnographic participant data from living with a cohort of African student-traders during the 2014-2015 academic year, this paper analyzes their backgrounds, goals, motives, and trajectories, and ultimately argues that this little-studied group plays significant and constructive role within the wider matrix of Sino-African Relations.