Howard W. French > Quotes

“In families one can’t choose one’s siblings. Within regions one doesn’t choose one’s neighbors. And if you are one of the world’s leading producers of a critical industrial resource like copper, in the end you can’t really choose your customers. China and Zambia will just have to get along.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“I didn’t want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government’s orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“I sketched North America onto my crude and now crowded map, and Hao was astounded to learn that it was not a piece of Europe, as he had always assumed.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“Hao tried flagging down a couple of trucks that rumbled by. There was much cursing, and amid his frustration he ordered John to pursue one of the trucks with the pickup and cut it off. John simply sat there, nodding to the music that was playing loudly in the cab. He had either not understood the command or he had coolly decided to ignore it.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“Africa occupied a relatively blank space in the minds of most Americans, and when they stopped to think about it, aided by old and deeply ingrained habits of press coverage, all they could imagine was volcano, occupation, disease, and horror.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“American diplomats had been slow to understand the scope of the change being driven by Chinese migration to Africa. The phenomenon had been flagged in State Department cables as early as 2005, with diplomats identifying the budding, large-scale movement of people from China to Africa as part of a campaign to expand Beijing’s political influence and simultaneously advance China’s business interests and overall clout. These early, classified warnings also spoke of the spread, via emigration, of Chinese organized crime, particularly in smuggling and human trafficking. For the most part, however, it seemed that American diplomats were still in search of the right voice, the right message. All too often, Washington struck a paternalistic tone that came across as: Listen up children, you must be careful about these tricky Chinese.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“A huge advertisement in the unmistakably bright red tones of Vodacom, the global mobile phone giant, looked on this tawdry scene. It read to me like a distilled message about the only values that remained in this country, whose leaders were once committed Marxists: money and power.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“You could see the future right away here,” Hu Renzhong, a pig and poultry producer, told me. “Food was expensive and people didn’t have enough meat to eat. They couldn’t afford it. The land was good, though, and back then it was still cheap.” Hu received me one morning at his mansion farmhouse on the outskirts of Lusaka, offering me a seat in the marble chill of his enormous living room, before taking me on a long walking tour of his acres and acres of hog-breeding pens and sprawling, temperature-controlled chicken hatcheries, all impressively modern and minutely organized. He had come to Zambia from China’s Jiangxi province in 1995 as a twenty-two-year-old simple laborer, but soon got into business for himself, raising chickens at first with another Chinese immigrant. It wasn’t long before the two had struck it rich, buying land and building ever-bigger houses. “Things had started developing really fast back home, and a lot of people tried to tell me I’d made a mistake,” he said. “But I’ve never really looked back.” I”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“One can hardly fault China for seizing on a great bargain, but for Zambia, the auctioning off of its most lucrative economic resources at fire-sale prices constituted another big stroke of bad national luck. Copper prices were still depressed and the government’s state of near bankruptcy at the time meant that Zambia had little negotiating power. Edith Nawakwi, who was the Zambian finance minister at the time of the sale, said that the country was pressured by its more traditional partners to accept this pittance. “We were told by advisers, who included the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that … for the next twenty years, Zambian copper would not make a profit. [Conversely, if we privatized] we would be able to access debt relief, and this was a huge carrot in front of us—like waving medicine in front of a dying woman. We had no option [but to go ahead].” The”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“The phenomenon of laborers staying on at the end of their contracts with big public works companies is likely the biggest single source of Chinese migration to Africa. Workers would arrive from a given locality in China and discover there was good money to be made in some corner of an Africa they had never before imagined viable. Soon, they were sending word back home about the fortunes to be made there, or the hospitality of the locals, or the wonders of the environment, or the joys of a free and relatively pressureless life. In short order, others would follow. Li”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“When I first met Hao, I thought of him as unusual and discounted the possibility that the sorts of ideas he espoused and incarnated could be representative of much of anything beyond his own gruff and often cynical persona. But I would learn that his brand of free-spoken disaffection from the system back home was widespread among China’s new emigrants. To be sure, a desire for better economic opportunities was the biggest driver behind their exodus. Still, contributing to the decision for many to take a great leap into the unknown and move to Africa was a weariness with omnipresent official corruption back home, fear of the impact of a badly polluted environment on their health, and a variety of constraints on freedoms, including religion and speech. Many migrants also invoked a sheer lack of space.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“The road north out of central Lusaka quickly transitions from a world of impressively broad avenues and fancy new commercial districts to a stop-and-start tour of desolate, overcrowded slums. There, half-dressed young men sit around glumly, seemingly lacking the motivation in the face of persistently high unemployment to even bother looking for work. When at last one reaches the highway that leads north to the Copper Belt it is the oncoming traffic that makes the strongest impression. It consists mostly of van after jam-packed van full of poor Zambians. They are overwhelmingly young and desperate to get off the land and they arrive in the capital with dreams of remaking their lives in the big city. When most people think about China’s relationship with Africa they reduce it to a single proposition: securing access to natural resources, of which Africa is the world’s greatest storehouse. As one of the top copper-producing nations, Zambia, a landlocked country in southern Africa, is doubtlessly a very big part of that story.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“Senegal had always boasted one of Africa’s most vibrant merchant cultures. The country’s boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar’s traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“To my eyes, the presence of a few families like these only brought into sharper relief the ambiguous morality of the evacuation. The marines were doing their job with typical efficiency and even dignity, but there was no escaping the ugly fact that America was swooping into this country once again to conduct a triage, neglecting precisely those who were least able to fend for themselves. Ordinary Liberians were being relegated to a category of subhuman existence whose intimate workings I had first learned about as a young reporter covering police headquarters in New York. There, I quickly deduced how certain murders were automatically classified as nickel-and-dime cases—‘jobs’ that required little follow-up by detectives, and by inference, by the press as well. It was another insidious form of triage, and it took only a few days on the assignment to understand that the ‘garbage’ cases almost invariably involved people of color”
― Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

“Like Barry before him, Diop complained that Chinese projects were negotiated with a total lack of transparency. “If we are paying for big projects we want them to include real transfer of technology and of expertise, but the Chinese bring all their own workers, and the few Guineans are reduced to the role of task boys. In one case we had here, a Chinese company was hired to build a bridge and they did most of their work at night, and they wouldn’t let anyone onto their site. Between the groundbreaking and inauguration ceremonies, they give out no information at all, nothing.” Diop said that his group and others in the civil society coalition had repeatedly tried to speak with Chinese contractors and Chinese diplomats to impress upon them the need to reconsider their approach to things in Guinea, but had been either patronized or turned away. “You go to see them and they say go see your minister, or go see your president, he’s the one who approved these arrangements.” I heard very similar language from disgruntled civil society figures virtually everywhere I traveled.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“The Chinese work in a very peculiar manner. They prefer to deal directly with the president and to make a spectacular gesture, and that is that. They don’t go for any public discussion, and they won’t give importance to many international norms, or to civil society, or to principles like democracy. That is the backdrop to some of their big deals in this country—not just iron, but also for oil and for timber.” Despite these misgivings, Rahall said that the arrival of Chinese money had given countries like his new options, and hence more breathing space, meaning unaccustomed freedom for once from the West.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Crawford Young and Thomas Turner’s seminal 1985 study of Zairian politics and history, which should have been a prerequisite for any reporter.”
― Howard W. French, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

“Year on year, China’s trade with Africa was growing by as much as 20 percent, and had recently surpassed its trade with both Europe and the United States.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“all across Africa. There was mounting resentment over the way China was seen to be exporting its labor, dumping cheap goods, despoiling the environment, dispossessing powerless landholders or flouting local laws, fueling corruption, and most of all, empowering awful governments.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“That’s one of our government’s bad points, you know, propaganda; it’s always trying to put a good face on everything.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“I have grown so accustomed to a certain strain of Chinese discourse that emphasizes how distinct from others they are, and usually by clear inference this means how superior they feel, this struck me as a rare response. “I reject this,” Li said, commenting about Chinese notions of superiority. “I know that lots of Chinese people feel this way, but that’s because they haven’t experienced anything. Being outside of the country, coming in contact with different people all the time has allowed me to understand.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“Many Chinese have grumbled to me about the unbearable stresses and tensions of daily life back home, and about the lack of rights, the deficiencies in the rule of law, and injustices of every kind. A few even spoke to me with deep skepticism about the soundness of China’s booming economy and its implicit promise of future prosperity. But very few questioned China’s actions in geopolitical terms, easily buying into the state’s line about the country being a new kind of nonhegemonic power, unlike the West; a genuine and sincere partner of the “developing world.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“American diplomats had been slow to understand the scope of the change being driven by Chinese migration to Africa. The phenomenon had been flagged in State Department cables as early as 2005, with diplomats identifying the budding, large-scale movement of people from China to Africa as part of a campaign to expand Beijing’s political influence and simultaneously advance China’s business interests and overall clout.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“with the pleasant and easy life”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“we passed in front of the grand, 1960s-vintage presidential residence, which I’d been told stood empty, awaiting badly needed repairs. “The Liberians would like China to renovate it, but they haven’t said so directly,” Li told me. “There is a difference of psychology at play in this. China knows they want it fixed, but it is waiting for some kind of expression—a request. It’s a matter of face. Liberians haven’t yet understood the workings of face.” With little forewarning, Li began to riff on politics. “Liberia is a country that is controlled by the United States,” he told me. Perhaps that was true sometime in the past, I replied. “No, it is still the case,” he said. “There are Americans in every section of government here. At least one. You could say that Liberians are your cousins,” he said between laughs. “The Americans give a lot of money to this country, but it just gets wasted. It never reaches the people. China has learned from that. We don’t give away money. We build things. That way, the people can see some impact. This government is very close to the Americans, but the people don’t like your country very much. They feel that in all of these years you have never achieved much of anything here.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa

“By 1636, civil authorities on the island decreed a rule that became common in chattel systems throughout the hemisphere: slaves would remain in bondage for life. In 1661, with the island now amid a full-blown sugar boom, the authorities formulated a fuller set of laws governing the lives of slaves, a Black code that one historian has called “one of the most influential pieces of legislation passed by a colonial legislature.” Antigua, Jamaica, South Carolina, and, “indirectly,” Georgia adopted it in its entirety, while the laws of many other English colonies were modeled after it. The law described Africans as a “heathenish, brutish and uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people,” and gave their white owners near total control over their lives. The right of trial by jury guaranteed for whites was excluded for slaves, whom their owners could punish at will, facing no consequences even for murder, so long as they could cite a cause. Other rules barred Black slaves from skilled occupations, thus helping to reify race as a largely impermeable membrane dividing whites and Blacks in the New World. With steps like these, tiny Barbados became an enormously powerful driver of history, not only through the prodigious wealth it would generate, a wealth hitherto “unknown in other parts of colonial America,” but by its legal and social example as well. The island colony stood out as a pioneer in the development of chattel slavery and in the construction of the plantation machine, as the originator of codes like these, and later as a crucial source of early migration, both Black and white, to the Carolinas, Virginia, and later Jamaica. Here was the seed crystal of the English plantation system in the New World, or in the words of one historian, its “cultural hearth.”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“in mounting its push into the South China Sea, Chinese cartographers have adopted a trick from digital photography, where many cameras can change their display ratios, or “aspect,” from square to rectangular to panoramic. In China’s new cartography, its north-south dimension is emphasized. This has the effect of making the South China Sea appear to hang from the southern coastline like an enormous blue banner. Almost magically, it begins to look more or less like a natural extension of the country and less marginal or incidental as it did on the older, more familiar maps. To complete the trick, Beijing has mounted an unrelenting campaign of domestic propaganda instructing the Chinese people that the waters the world identifies today as the South China Sea—a name introduced by Europeans in the nineteenth century—indisputably belong to China. In 2015, one of the most striking examples of this was a promotional video for the People’s Liberation Army Navy that was reportedly shared online more than one hundred million times in the first week after its release. “China’s oceanic and overseas interests are developing rapidly,” it said. “Our land is vast. But we will not yield a single inch of our frontiers to foreigners.”
― Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China's Push for Global Power

“The first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, as so many of us have been taught in grade school, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge trading ties with legendarily rich Black societies hidden away somewhere in the heart of “darkest” West Africa.”
― Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

“Outsiders are awed by China’s extraordinary economic growth over the last thirty years, during which time its GDP had increased tenfold. But along with that growth has come cutthroat competitiveness and grinding stress in daily life that many find unbearable, and which drove many Chinese to leave the country. Time and again, Chinese told me they did not fully realize how oppressive things were at home until after they had left. Living in Africa, they said, it felt as if a lid had been removed from a pressure cooker. Now they could breathe.”
― Howard W. French, China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa