Ex-NYT Journo Howard French Discusses China's Expansion in Africa at the Bookworm, Dec 21

The more that Howard French read about China’s growing kinship with Africa, the more he felt the real story wasn't being told. The esteemed former New York Times reporter, and associate professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, knew the story was about so much more than China’s mammoth investments in the burgeoning continent, or the diplomatic implications that would not only result for both those regions, but also the West. 

“Pretty much all the writing and discussion of this topic was coming from foreign policy wonks discussing what it means for America, whether China is going to destroy or develop Africa, all of it very abstract,” said French during a recent interview with the Beijinger. “No one was really taking the approach of talking to ordinary people.” 

French decided to do just that, spending a year travelling across 18 African countries, interviewing Chinese entrepreneurs, farmers, and even a former lady-of-the-night turned karaoke club owner, all aspiring for a better life in this burgeoning economy. He also gathered the necessary, and all-too-often overlooked, insights of local Africans about this influx from the PRC. It was an approach that French was perfectly poised for, considering the years he’d spent as a Times bureau chief in Shanghai along with central and West Africa. His book, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa, was met with strong reviews upon publication in 2014, and French has been giving talks about this increasingly timely topic ever since. Ahead of his appearance at the Bookworm tonight, French tells us more about his African odyssey.

Tell us more about what inspired you to write this book.
I was seeing far too few Chinese voices, and even fewer African voices, in the reporting of this issue. When these foreign reporters were challenged about this, their excuse was frequently: “The Chinese people working in Africa only speak Mandarin, they’re secretive and walled off.” Almost none of that is true, but to the novice it sort of sounds persuasive. And there's really no excuse for why there were so few African perspectives in the reporting. So all of these Western voices were talking about who's up, who's winning, geopolitically. And the Africans were treated as if they were Hollywood extras in the background. Hearing them out occupied almost nobody's attention.

Even though it was their story.  
Exactly. So I wanted to find out how these Chinese newcomers live, where they come from, how they got there, what sort of relationships they’re forming on the ground, what do the African people they're setting themselves up with think of all this, things like that.

Did any of the interviewees really defy your expectations?
I tried not to have any expectations, to make it just pure reportage. I was wandering around and bumping into people for the most part, asking simple questions and letting that take me wherever it would lead me. That was a good check on preconceived notions, instead of looking for four or five set types of characters, thinking, “This is the cast I want in my movie, I have to go find them.”

There really was no shortage of them. But I think the character that people related most strongly to is the one I responded mostly strongly to, who is the one I opened the book with. It was this Chinese fellow that I met in Mozambique. He was living in the countryside, building a proper homestead but living in lean-to tents in the meantime. It was this very fertile piece of land in an irrigated Mozambique valley, and he’d begun growing cash crops. He was running into problems with the people in the surrounding villages, who thought that he had somehow finagled ownership of this big parcel of really nice land, and he was having wage disputes with the people he had hired. He brought me to the farm and told me all about this, and introduced me to his sons, one 15 and one 12 years old, who he had summoned from China to come join him. And his idea was to pair them of with local girls and have them father children so that, via these relationships, his family could immunize  themselves against the locals’ claims that their ownership was illegal. But the older boy had a girlfriend already. And the father kept browbeating the younger one, who was plump, calling him “Little fatty,” and asking me: “Why can't he get with it, and be more interested in girls?” Even though the boy was only 12. So it was just this unbelievable story on every level. That's why I put him it in the beginning, it was quite a powerful hook.  

How do you feel about the feedback the book has gotten?
It tended to be favorably reviewed, so that was gratifying. I wouldn’t be offended if someone called it boring. Some reviewers said: “There's some repletion here, there's certain themes that keep recurring.” But that’s what I was finding on the ground. Should I mix it up for the sake of gaining some effect? Or should I try to depict the world I’m actually finding? For me the latter was what was important.

Have you gotten much feedback from Chinese reporters or readers?
The book hasn’t been published yet in China, except for Taiwan, so that audience is by definition quite small. I’ve done a lot of public speaking for the book, especially across the US and Europe, and there have been Chinese people in the audience. There is a fairly broad tendency among many Chinese people to be suspicious of Westerners who write about their country. Some are pleasantly surprised and say I treated my Chinese interviewees with dignity and depicted them humanely in my book. Others retain their skepticism, and say: “The only reason you've written about this is because there’s this Western hostility to China.” I don’t know what to say to people who feel that way. I'm at peace with the fact that people will read my book and come to their own conclusions, that some will have their stereotypes reinforced while others will have their minds changed. I believe that when you write a book it no longer belongs to you, but to the audience.

Howard French will discuss his book China’s Second Continent at The Bookworm tonight at 7.30pm. The talk will be moderated by Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo. Tickets are RMB 50. For more information, click here.

Photo: npr.org