How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
by Howard W. French
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Readers' rating:
Published May 2014
304 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
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 exposé, 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.
"The book will appeal to students of China and Africa, and anyone interested in the shifting contours of the global economy and its geopolitical consequences." - Publishers Weekly
"French capably illustrates that although Chinese omnipresence in Africa may be a form of soft imperialism, it is also a result of the crushing pressures - lack of space, merciless business competition, pollution - of modern Chinese society." - Booklist
"For those who have an interest in China or in Africa or who just like to see history repeating itself." - Library Journal
"The huge and growing ties between China and the African continent will be one of the most crucial relationships of the 21st century, and you simply could not invent a better guide to it than Howard French." - Adam Hochschild, author, King Leopold's Ghost
"This is an essential book for understanding not just China and Africa but our changing world." - Peter Maass, author, Crude World
"Almost no other writer would have dared the reportorial and story-telling challenge Howard French has set for himself in China's Second Continent, and absolutely none could have pulled it off as well. This is foreign reportage and analysis presented as compelling human drama." - James Fallows, author, China Airborne
This information about China's Second Continent was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Howard W. French wrote from Africa for The Washington Post and The New York Times. At the Times, he was bureau chief in Central America and the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Japan, and China. He is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club awards and a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee. The author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone, among other national publications. He is on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York.
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