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The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
China is now the biggest foreign player in Africa: largest trade partner, largest infrastructure financier, and fastest-growing source of foreign direct investment. Chinese entrepreneurs are flooding into Africa, investing in long-term assets, such as factories and heavy equipment.
The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, in particular the United States. For fifty years the West has engaged in countless poverty-alleviation and development-aid programs in Africa, yet Africa still has the largest number of people living in extreme poverty of any region in the world.
Considering Africa's difficult history of colonialism, one might suspect that the current story of China in Africa is merely a story about exploitation of resources. Author Irene Yuan Sun follows these entrepreneurs and finds, instead, that they are factory owners, building in Africa what they so recently learned to build in China--a global manufacturing powerhouse.
This gives rise to a tantalizing possibility: that Africa can industrialize in the coming generation. With a manufacturing-led transformation, Africa would be following in the footsteps of the United States in the nineteenth century, Japan in the early twentieth, and the Asian Tigers in the late twentieth century. Many may consider this an old-fashioned way to develop, but it's the only one that's proven to raise living standards across entire societies for generations. And with every new Chinese factory boss setting up machinery and hiring African workers, that possibility becomes more real for Africa.
With fascinating stories of entrepreneurs, workers, and government officials in Africa, along with incisive business and economic analysis, The Next Factory of the World will make you rethink both China's role in the world and Africa's future in the globalized economy.
The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, in particular the United States. For fifty years the West has engaged in countless poverty-alleviation and development-aid programs in Africa, yet Africa still has the largest number of people living in extreme poverty of any region in the world.
Considering Africa's difficult history of colonialism, one might suspect that the current story of China in Africa is merely a story about exploitation of resources. Author Irene Yuan Sun follows these entrepreneurs and finds, instead, that they are factory owners, building in Africa what they so recently learned to build in China--a global manufacturing powerhouse.
This gives rise to a tantalizing possibility: that Africa can industrialize in the coming generation. With a manufacturing-led transformation, Africa would be following in the footsteps of the United States in the nineteenth century, Japan in the early twentieth, and the Asian Tigers in the late twentieth century. Many may consider this an old-fashioned way to develop, but it's the only one that's proven to raise living standards across entire societies for generations. And with every new Chinese factory boss setting up machinery and hiring African workers, that possibility becomes more real for Africa.
With fascinating stories of entrepreneurs, workers, and government officials in Africa, along with incisive business and economic analysis, The Next Factory of the World will make you rethink both China's role in the world and Africa's future in the globalized economy.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published November 7, 2017
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August 10, 2017
Irene Sun seeks to challenge our perceptions of China exploiting Africa’s natural resources for its own industrial needs. To do so, she draws upon her one-on-one interviews with Chinese businessmen, sometimes over a cup of quaint Chinese tea, in Nigeria, Lesotho, Kenya and Ethiopia and taking a gracious tour of their factories.
The danger of this anecdotal evidence is that it is collected in an informal, arbitrary manner and relies heavily on personal testimony that is by its very nature unreliable. Irene Sun does intersperse her interviews with statistics, but it does not obviate the need for substantiated arguments and compelling evidence to back up the premise of the book.
The author heralds the fostering of the nascent manufacturing industry by the Chinese as the solution to the chronic levels of unemployment for the burgeoning population.
Despite admittedly substantial investments by China in Africa, there is a long and well documented history that many of these investments have been one-sided and not actually to the benefit of Africa’s overall competitiveness. Many of these Chinese deals are struck at the highest political levels, where corruption abounds, and they often lack transparent and competitive tendering processes. To make matters worse, the promises of massive job creation does not come to fruition as the actual labour force employed in these ventures are predominantly Chinese.
Rather than confronting these controversies head on, the author skirts the issues and focuses on the individual, instead of the overall picture.
In summation, the title of the book is rather misleading. A far more accurate title would have been: "A few accounts of Chinese factory owners in Africa". But let's be honest, that is just not as catchy.
The danger of this anecdotal evidence is that it is collected in an informal, arbitrary manner and relies heavily on personal testimony that is by its very nature unreliable. Irene Sun does intersperse her interviews with statistics, but it does not obviate the need for substantiated arguments and compelling evidence to back up the premise of the book.
The author heralds the fostering of the nascent manufacturing industry by the Chinese as the solution to the chronic levels of unemployment for the burgeoning population.
Despite admittedly substantial investments by China in Africa, there is a long and well documented history that many of these investments have been one-sided and not actually to the benefit of Africa’s overall competitiveness. Many of these Chinese deals are struck at the highest political levels, where corruption abounds, and they often lack transparent and competitive tendering processes. To make matters worse, the promises of massive job creation does not come to fruition as the actual labour force employed in these ventures are predominantly Chinese.
Rather than confronting these controversies head on, the author skirts the issues and focuses on the individual, instead of the overall picture.
In summation, the title of the book is rather misleading. A far more accurate title would have been: "A few accounts of Chinese factory owners in Africa". But let's be honest, that is just not as catchy.
September 29, 2017
Fascinating reading about societies and development economics in one book.
A Chinese girl who sat in a car for the first time aged six, and was later reared in America, visited hundreds of Chinese run factories across Africa. Some are manufacturing for export. Some are manufacturing ceramic tiles for the wealthier African needs. These factories are not all wonderful places to work. But by seeking an extra two percent profit on their investment, the owners are providing jobs. These manufacturing jobs, says the author, are lifting Africans out of abject poverty.
I enjoyed the introduction in which the author tells of the tractor making firm that improved standards for people in her native Changchung. In Africa she stood in another branch of that firm, now improving life for Africans. She progresses to her visits in Part One. As well as better profit and lighter regulations - sometimes corruption and environmental despoliation - she tells of the simple fact of example. The bosses started off as factory workers in China, working for bosses who had come from Taiwan. Those bosses had started in factories run by Japanese. Manufacturing moves, she says. We get graphs showing the 'flying geese', moving basic work like garments from one developing economy to the next, and moving a better developed economy upwards through goods to high tech.
Despite their familiarity with 'eating bitter' - working hard - and distance from Asia, the Chinese prefer their own cuisine and tea rituals. With enough saved, they open shops and hotels to sustain their own ways of life. We read about the 'East Asian economic miracle'. Japan, getting factories while China was still reeling from mass starvation. As the miracle spread by Japan opening factories elsewhere, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea benefited. The author tells us that in the early 1980s (which was a depression in Ireland and UK) China was poorer on a per capita basis than Ethiopia or Mali. Deng Xiaoping set economic targets and in order to meet them, outside industrialists were welcomed; China became the Factory of the World. Over three decades China lifted 750 million people out of poverty.
With interesting footnotes, like in 1904, the British government brought 64,000 Chinese indentured labourers to the South African gold mines, we can see that a long and rich history exists. Personal note: Ireland has been bled dry of money for African missions, by the Church, and famine relief and refugee support, by both church and secular movements. And yet the poverty is greater than ever, because people saved in one famine go on to have multiple children who create the next one. Several years ago, Bob Geldof described his compassion fatigue.
Nigeria provides a nice case study for the author; her economics explains why, when oil was extracted, the textile factories crashed. The currency had appreciated so overseas firms bought from new markets and the locals were able to import fabrics. All was well until the oil prices crashed, by which time the factory spindles were obsolete and machinery inefficient. To help the textile industry, the government imposed tariffs on imports, so the local firms felt no need to raise standards. Meanwhile, of course, Asian firms became ever more efficient. This disparity was so great, that Asian smugglers started smuggling clothes in, paying bribes, and still making profits. Africa became de-industrialised.
The McKinsey group employed the author who co-led a team surveying Chinese investment and manufacturers in Africa; her tally comes to over ten thousand firms in eight major countries, an unsuspected figure. A third were manufacturing. Largely they are privately owned firms selling to private buyers. One example is the Lee Group factory in Nigeria, making 1.2 million pairs of flip-flops a day. These lines often run 24 hours and turn out cheap goods for local markets.
A factory in landlocked Lesotho by contrast is making Reebok shirts for America. This is labour intensive work which can be done by uneducated staff, though cotton spinning we see can be mechanised. Some of the factory owners are women. Local standards can be poor, from power supply to fire brigades, safety or cell phone systems. (The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911 New York is later referenced for comparison.) Exporters are at the mercy of exchange rates and material prices. Yes, it's typical entrepreneur time. And Western nations which sent work to China with its poor environmental standards, will find it ironic that once Shanghai raised its environmental standards, the work shifted to Nigeria.
The second part of the book is about possibilities for the future. We see a case study of a young local man employed in a box making firm, who became a trusted manager, family man and employer of relatives. The author tells us that from her survey, 89% of employees were Africans. China's one-child policy has shrunk its labour pool so cheaper labour is sought. We also hear from Indian or Lebanese factory owners. (This is a vast continent. All Australia, or the contiguous US states, could easily fit into just the Sahara Desert.) The sub-Saharan population is set to double to two billion by 2050, according to the UN. While Nigeria is set to have the third largest population in the world by 2050. These workers may not currently be considered as educated or efficient as Chinese staff. By nipping adroitly from nations of the past, the author demonstrates that in early industrial times, the bosses always look down on the workers.
I like that the author spends time hearing from one of the women workers, a mother. Only at this point, in Lesotho, does the author look at women. She had observed that three quarters of workers here in garment factories were women, yet the union officials were nearly all men who had worked in the mines. When she met women organisers, she found that the men tended to ask for better pay, whereas the women asked for heaters, hot water and safer working areas. Factory work is allowing the women to take a degree of control over their lives and aspirations. The author calls this an upturning of the societal norm here.
Finally the author predicts that local supplier firms will open to serve the big factories. Africans open firms but don't appreciate the sheer hard work. Some Chinese are marrying locally and she speculates whether enclaves will arise. Social media pages are holding them together. I particularly enjoyed an account of how to clean up bribery of customs officers. Illnesses such as HIV and TB are being reduced, and a better resourced populace will improve on that, though foreign countries still provide most of the drugs. For this discussion the author visits Ethiopia. Wildlife gets a brief mention at the end, regarding opening a road.
Notes are P179 - 206 in my e-ARC and followed by an index. I counted 19 names that I could be sure were female, including Jane Goodall and Angelina Jolie. Most of the references are WHO, UN, World Bank and such organisations, aside from personal interviews.
I enjoyed this look at the Chinese influence in developing Africa and recommend it to anyone interested in or studying development economics and social theory, journalism or industrial revolutions. The language flows very well and concepts are clearly explained.
I would also recommend reading :
Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations by McMichael, Anthony J.
The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by Abraham, David S.
The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos by Piper, Karen.
The People's Republic of Chemicals by Jacobs, Chip and Kelly, William J.
Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Mason, Paul.
I downloaded an ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
A Chinese girl who sat in a car for the first time aged six, and was later reared in America, visited hundreds of Chinese run factories across Africa. Some are manufacturing for export. Some are manufacturing ceramic tiles for the wealthier African needs. These factories are not all wonderful places to work. But by seeking an extra two percent profit on their investment, the owners are providing jobs. These manufacturing jobs, says the author, are lifting Africans out of abject poverty.
I enjoyed the introduction in which the author tells of the tractor making firm that improved standards for people in her native Changchung. In Africa she stood in another branch of that firm, now improving life for Africans. She progresses to her visits in Part One. As well as better profit and lighter regulations - sometimes corruption and environmental despoliation - she tells of the simple fact of example. The bosses started off as factory workers in China, working for bosses who had come from Taiwan. Those bosses had started in factories run by Japanese. Manufacturing moves, she says. We get graphs showing the 'flying geese', moving basic work like garments from one developing economy to the next, and moving a better developed economy upwards through goods to high tech.
Despite their familiarity with 'eating bitter' - working hard - and distance from Asia, the Chinese prefer their own cuisine and tea rituals. With enough saved, they open shops and hotels to sustain their own ways of life. We read about the 'East Asian economic miracle'. Japan, getting factories while China was still reeling from mass starvation. As the miracle spread by Japan opening factories elsewhere, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea benefited. The author tells us that in the early 1980s (which was a depression in Ireland and UK) China was poorer on a per capita basis than Ethiopia or Mali. Deng Xiaoping set economic targets and in order to meet them, outside industrialists were welcomed; China became the Factory of the World. Over three decades China lifted 750 million people out of poverty.
With interesting footnotes, like in 1904, the British government brought 64,000 Chinese indentured labourers to the South African gold mines, we can see that a long and rich history exists. Personal note: Ireland has been bled dry of money for African missions, by the Church, and famine relief and refugee support, by both church and secular movements. And yet the poverty is greater than ever, because people saved in one famine go on to have multiple children who create the next one. Several years ago, Bob Geldof described his compassion fatigue.
Nigeria provides a nice case study for the author; her economics explains why, when oil was extracted, the textile factories crashed. The currency had appreciated so overseas firms bought from new markets and the locals were able to import fabrics. All was well until the oil prices crashed, by which time the factory spindles were obsolete and machinery inefficient. To help the textile industry, the government imposed tariffs on imports, so the local firms felt no need to raise standards. Meanwhile, of course, Asian firms became ever more efficient. This disparity was so great, that Asian smugglers started smuggling clothes in, paying bribes, and still making profits. Africa became de-industrialised.
The McKinsey group employed the author who co-led a team surveying Chinese investment and manufacturers in Africa; her tally comes to over ten thousand firms in eight major countries, an unsuspected figure. A third were manufacturing. Largely they are privately owned firms selling to private buyers. One example is the Lee Group factory in Nigeria, making 1.2 million pairs of flip-flops a day. These lines often run 24 hours and turn out cheap goods for local markets.
A factory in landlocked Lesotho by contrast is making Reebok shirts for America. This is labour intensive work which can be done by uneducated staff, though cotton spinning we see can be mechanised. Some of the factory owners are women. Local standards can be poor, from power supply to fire brigades, safety or cell phone systems. (The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911 New York is later referenced for comparison.) Exporters are at the mercy of exchange rates and material prices. Yes, it's typical entrepreneur time. And Western nations which sent work to China with its poor environmental standards, will find it ironic that once Shanghai raised its environmental standards, the work shifted to Nigeria.
The second part of the book is about possibilities for the future. We see a case study of a young local man employed in a box making firm, who became a trusted manager, family man and employer of relatives. The author tells us that from her survey, 89% of employees were Africans. China's one-child policy has shrunk its labour pool so cheaper labour is sought. We also hear from Indian or Lebanese factory owners. (This is a vast continent. All Australia, or the contiguous US states, could easily fit into just the Sahara Desert.) The sub-Saharan population is set to double to two billion by 2050, according to the UN. While Nigeria is set to have the third largest population in the world by 2050. These workers may not currently be considered as educated or efficient as Chinese staff. By nipping adroitly from nations of the past, the author demonstrates that in early industrial times, the bosses always look down on the workers.
I like that the author spends time hearing from one of the women workers, a mother. Only at this point, in Lesotho, does the author look at women. She had observed that three quarters of workers here in garment factories were women, yet the union officials were nearly all men who had worked in the mines. When she met women organisers, she found that the men tended to ask for better pay, whereas the women asked for heaters, hot water and safer working areas. Factory work is allowing the women to take a degree of control over their lives and aspirations. The author calls this an upturning of the societal norm here.
Finally the author predicts that local supplier firms will open to serve the big factories. Africans open firms but don't appreciate the sheer hard work. Some Chinese are marrying locally and she speculates whether enclaves will arise. Social media pages are holding them together. I particularly enjoyed an account of how to clean up bribery of customs officers. Illnesses such as HIV and TB are being reduced, and a better resourced populace will improve on that, though foreign countries still provide most of the drugs. For this discussion the author visits Ethiopia. Wildlife gets a brief mention at the end, regarding opening a road.
Notes are P179 - 206 in my e-ARC and followed by an index. I counted 19 names that I could be sure were female, including Jane Goodall and Angelina Jolie. Most of the references are WHO, UN, World Bank and such organisations, aside from personal interviews.
I enjoyed this look at the Chinese influence in developing Africa and recommend it to anyone interested in or studying development economics and social theory, journalism or industrial revolutions. The language flows very well and concepts are clearly explained.
I would also recommend reading :
Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations by McMichael, Anthony J.
The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by Abraham, David S.
The Price of Thirst: Global Water Inequality and the Coming Chaos by Piper, Karen.
The People's Republic of Chemicals by Jacobs, Chip and Kelly, William J.
Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Mason, Paul.
I downloaded an ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
September 3, 2018
Usually when I read books that aim to discuss Africa as the next continent in line for whatever, I roll my eyes. Many of the well meaning writers who embark on such expedition sit in their Western bubble and think what worked for Europe or North America should work in Africa.
.
Irene's book is refreshingly different. Not only has she researched the economic history of major African Industralised countries, she has lived in a few and visited many other for research purposes. She truly has a global perspective of things.
As she herself is Asian and from China, a country that only 25 years ago was poorer than Kenya and Nigeria; she is able to relate to a number of economic downturns that have plagued many African countries.
She educates the reader and tells practical stories of how China became the first developing country to become a global leader in the world.
She also shows the correlation between factories and development; and her theory is that small incremental changes will lead to development that will enable Africa as a continent become the Powerhouse that it is primed to be.
.
Irene's book is refreshingly different. Not only has she researched the economic history of major African Industralised countries, she has lived in a few and visited many other for research purposes. She truly has a global perspective of things.
As she herself is Asian and from China, a country that only 25 years ago was poorer than Kenya and Nigeria; she is able to relate to a number of economic downturns that have plagued many African countries.
She educates the reader and tells practical stories of how China became the first developing country to become a global leader in the world.
She also shows the correlation between factories and development; and her theory is that small incremental changes will lead to development that will enable Africa as a continent become the Powerhouse that it is primed to be.
October 2, 2017
As a book, it's a good initiative, for its optimistic portrayal of one giant country's business ventures in one giant continent but my problems with the book are aplenty: the author uses Nigeria and Africa's economics almost interchangeably - Nigeria is a a country, Africa is a continent. The experience of a part cannot and is not the experience and reality of the whole. After half of the book has gone through Chinese textile businessmen in Nigeria and their local workers (even though no definite statistic is given on Chinese investment versus that of other countries in Nigeria itself), mid-way in the book Kenya comes about and that too as an example of how new ideas are being turned into manufactured goods to China ('8% of Africa's exports to China versus 30% of Chinese products to Africa are manufactured goods') - is that different from other goods sent to and from other countries?
I also do not see how the experience of a Nigerian factory worker is so drastically different than that of any other factory worker in any other poverty-stricken country where literacy and job options are limited, nor how the impact of Chinese presence is any different than that of any other foreigner who has opened an avenue for jobs, profits and circling of money locally.
Nor how desired actions for sustained growth are any different in any African country versus any other country in the world.
And I fail to see China's responsibility in eradicating HIV/AIDS in Namibia or anywhere else. China is not responsible for the 'human and social needs' of Africa - and the author does not say how much, if at all, China has donated to the $30billion Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, malaria and GAVI in Africa, but the book does mention dangers of following China and India as examples for nurturing pharma industry because their internal policies made drugs available locally, cheaply, though not of a high quality and stopped entry of foreign drugs that could've saved lives. What I did not understand is how a Chinese businessman planning a pharma plant in Ethiopia significant - he thought he'd make money, Glaxo-Kline obviously thought they won't.
Also, for such a resource-rich continent like Africa, all that the book shows is good honest hard-working Chinese interest in entrepreneurship. The political dimension of economic expansion by countries like U.S., Russia, China, etc. and the historical relationship different African countries have had with such and other 'ruling' countries like UK, France, Italy, Portugal etc. is not given or the changing global dynamics. What has happened in Sudan (and is now happening in South Sudan) is the off-shoot of vested foreign interests in local resources. War created locally as a means to an end (an unstable country is better for some businesses.) A stricken country is not good for factories though it may very well be the only way to grab oil, diamonds, gold.
How is American or EU or UK industrial investment in various African countries different from that of Chinese? Are more average Chinese seeking Africa as a dream continent than Americans or Britishers? What about nationals from other under-developed or developing countries? After all, the author says that the Chinese presence in Nigeria is not like that of a colonial power.
And what also remains unexplored is the impact, if any, Chinese businessmen / workers have on the local culture and discourse, apart from providing money and opportunity for the locals.
The biggest surprise? That Chinese (in China) did not own TV or cars in 80s! And that (irony of ironies) China used to be poorer than Kenya, Lesotho and Nigeria.
I also do not see how the experience of a Nigerian factory worker is so drastically different than that of any other factory worker in any other poverty-stricken country where literacy and job options are limited, nor how the impact of Chinese presence is any different than that of any other foreigner who has opened an avenue for jobs, profits and circling of money locally.
Nor how desired actions for sustained growth are any different in any African country versus any other country in the world.
And I fail to see China's responsibility in eradicating HIV/AIDS in Namibia or anywhere else. China is not responsible for the 'human and social needs' of Africa - and the author does not say how much, if at all, China has donated to the $30billion Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, malaria and GAVI in Africa, but the book does mention dangers of following China and India as examples for nurturing pharma industry because their internal policies made drugs available locally, cheaply, though not of a high quality and stopped entry of foreign drugs that could've saved lives. What I did not understand is how a Chinese businessman planning a pharma plant in Ethiopia significant - he thought he'd make money, Glaxo-Kline obviously thought they won't.
Also, for such a resource-rich continent like Africa, all that the book shows is good honest hard-working Chinese interest in entrepreneurship. The political dimension of economic expansion by countries like U.S., Russia, China, etc. and the historical relationship different African countries have had with such and other 'ruling' countries like UK, France, Italy, Portugal etc. is not given or the changing global dynamics. What has happened in Sudan (and is now happening in South Sudan) is the off-shoot of vested foreign interests in local resources. War created locally as a means to an end (an unstable country is better for some businesses.) A stricken country is not good for factories though it may very well be the only way to grab oil, diamonds, gold.
How is American or EU or UK industrial investment in various African countries different from that of Chinese? Are more average Chinese seeking Africa as a dream continent than Americans or Britishers? What about nationals from other under-developed or developing countries? After all, the author says that the Chinese presence in Nigeria is not like that of a colonial power.
And what also remains unexplored is the impact, if any, Chinese businessmen / workers have on the local culture and discourse, apart from providing money and opportunity for the locals.
The biggest surprise? That Chinese (in China) did not own TV or cars in 80s! And that (irony of ironies) China used to be poorer than Kenya, Lesotho and Nigeria.
May 11, 2019
Really interesting book about how Chinese businessmen are building factories in Africa. In the process, the businessmen are getting rich and Africa is being developed. Sun claims that this was the route through which China developed and she explains why this is likely to work for Africa as well. It's an interesting book and I learned a lot. One thing Sun does not discuss is the environmental impact of all of this industrialization on a region that is already experiencing the hardest edges of climate change.
April 7, 2019
I was curious about China’s influence in Africa, so decided to read the book. The interviews with Chinese factory owners are well written and interesting. The book’s key conclusion, however, is shallow and not well researched. The author claims that the industrialization leads to prosperity citing the examples of Great Britain, Japan and South Korea. She doesn’t explain, however, why industrialization of Soviet Union back in 1930 didn’t lead to prosperity. Moreover, it caused great suffering and murder of 5 million Ukrainian peasants. The author’s excitement about how the new Nairobi-Mombasa railroad was built is hard to swallow. It makes no sense from the passenger’s perspective (it doesn’t really connect CBD of Nairobi to CBD of Mombasa) and causes great harm to environment. If you are in Nairobi, please visit Nairobi national park and see with your own eyes the ugliness of the new railroad cutting directly through one of the most precious national reserves.
September 10, 2017
AN INTERESTING INSIGHT INTO CHINESE FACTORIES IN AFRICA
This is my first NetGalley review and I’m really excited about it! This website gives you the chance to apply for reading ebooks for free before they are published so that publishers and authors can receive early feedbacks. I applied for The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun and I was really delighted to find out that my request had been accepted!
I chose this book because I had already heard about Chinese investments in Africa and I wanted to know more about this challenging topic.
Irene Yuan Sun was born in China and raised in the United States. She studied at Harvard and spent some time working in Africa.
The Next Factory of the World deals with the stories of several private Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, industrialization in that continent and the role played by China.
The author was born in China and lived there until she was six. At that time, cars were not so common in her country as in America. She was more familiar with buses and bicycles. In the early 1990s, almost nobody had a car in China. The author’s hometown is Changchun, near the frontier with eastern Russia. In 1991 she sat in a car for the first time. It belonged to a family friend who was a government official. Chinese streets were full of bicycles in the early 1990s, but now are full of cars (and pollution). The author proudly announces that 750 million people were lifted out of poverty.
Irene Yuan Sun grew up in the United States and after college she went to teach in Namibia, in southwestern Africa. She was a volunteer teacher and her subjects were math and English. Her pupils were the children of subsistence farmers. In Namibia she met a self-made Chinese man who was looking for a wife, but most Chinese women didn’t want to live in Africa. He tried to impress the author, but she realized that, despite being rich, he was illiterate. Why didn’t he want to marry an African woman? Why do Chinese people usually marry within their own community? Why don’t they want to mix with the locals?
The author visited more than fifty Chinese factories in Africa. She thinks that Chinese factories in Africa will create prosperity for Africans. Seriously? Chinese factories in Italy only use Chinese workforce and in Chinese stores here you can see mostly Chinese employees with sometimes the addition of Romanian women and Bangladeshi men. No jobs for the locals. No jobs for Italians. My husband, who is Mexican, thinks that this happens because only immigrants are willing to accept the low wages offered by Chinese employers, but I don’t know if they even tried to hire Italian workers. It looks like “foreigners united against the natives”.
According to Irene Yuan Sun, China is the current factory of the world while Africa will be the next one. Chinese factories in Africa produce either for the local markets or to export their goods, taking advantage of African low labor costs.
The author believes that factories bring prosperity, as it happened with the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the eighteenth century, in America in the nineteenth century, in Japan and other Asian countries in the twentieth century. At least she admits that many factory bosses in Africa are racist, pay bribes, drink to excess and frequent prostitutes. Moreover their factories pollute air and water, like we can see in nowadays China. However, in the previous examples of industrialization, the factory owners belonged to the same country they were contributing to develop. Are we sure that the same development will follow in Africa, if the factory bosses are Chinese and not Africans?
The book focuses on four African countries: Nigeria, Lesotho, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Nigeria has the largest population and the largest economy of the continent. Lesotho is instead completely surrounded by South Africa. Kenya is the principal economy of East Africa and Ethiopia… It isn’t true that Ethiopia was never colonized by a European power! Even if for a short period (1936-1941), it was an Italian colony! A shameful past for Italy, but history can’t be hidden.
According to Irene Yuan Sun, donors and global aid organizations won’t solve the poverty problem in Africa, but factories with their employment opportunities can do it. First example: Mr. Sun owns a factory that produces ceramic tiles in Nigeria. He’s only an elementary school graduate and he started working when he was just 13 years old. Chinese factories owners accumulated their know-how working for Taiwanese factory owners, who in turn had learned from Japanese ones.
Mr. Sun comes from Wenzhou, a midsize city in southeastern China. He dropped out of school when he was thirteen and started working in factories. He worked long hours, saved money and finally opened his own factory. Nice story, but not everybody can become a factory boss, otherwise who’s going to do all the menial jobs? The sad reality is that rich individuals can exist only if there are many poor people. Mr. Sun manufactured leather goods in China, but in the late 2000s costs were rising. He needed to move his factory abroad. He considered Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, then a friend told him about Nigeria.
When Mr. Sun visited Nigeria for the first time, he immediately saw a lot of beggars asking for money, but he then realized that there were also a lot of rich people. He found out that ceramics were the heaviest products that China exported in large quantities to Nigeria, so he decided to open a ceramic tile factory in the country. He invested almost 40 million dollars and he employed nearly 1,100 workers, a thousand of whom are locals. I liked this point: employing the locals. Everybody should follow this example.
The author then attends a lunch in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. Location: a Chinese restaurant. There she meets some Chinese businessmen. They started their career working for Taiwanese firms with businesses in Lesotho. At that time, in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was common for Taiwanese firms in need of cheap labor to use labor agencies to find young Chinese workers. They spoke neither English nor Sesotho, the local language. In the 1990s there were no cell phones and no internet. They could call home just once a year, because they didn’t have enough money. After years of hard work, some of them started factories while others ran small shops.
A wave of Japanese entrepreneurs generated a wave of Taiwanese entrepreneurs that generated a wave of Chinese ones. This is why the author thinks that the next wave can be African.
The author was born in Changchun, a provincial capital of two million people in Manchuria, between Russia and North Korea. In the late 1980s her father spent a year in Japan for a postdoctoral fellowship. The author, who was just two years old, stayed in China with her mother. At that time nobody owned a refrigerator and very few people had a television. As for industrialization in Asia, Japan was the first country, then followed by Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In the early 1980s, China was poorer than Ethiopia and Mali.
It was interesting to find out that the first Chinese entrepreneurs arrived in Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s. After its independence, the country had a thriving textile sector, but it collapsed when Nigeria started to export oil. Another engaging story is that of the flip-flop factory owned by the Lees in Nigeria: they produce huge quantities of cheap flip-flops whose retail price is just about a dollar a pair. This is possible because the models are very few. These products are destined to poor consumers who can’t afford to pay more and are sold in Nigeria and other West African countries. Their price is so low that nobody tries to import smuggled flip-flops.
The author’s mother is from Shanghai and her surname is Shen like that of the next factory owner we meet. The author’s father is instead a northerner. In Lesotho, a Chinese-owned factory produces Reebok T-shirts for American consumers. The workers are locals. Incredible but true: clothing production is not very automated because the product designs change every season, so it would be too expensive to change the machines to automate the job every few months. It’s better having many workers and sewing machines. In Lesotho, a large number of factory owners are foreigners, but the workers are mostly locals because wages are modest.
Factories in Lesotho export their products while Nigerian ones mainly produce for the internal market. This happens because Lesotho is a small country with a small population, but it’s near the excellent South African transport infrastructure. On the other hand Nigeria has a large population and bad roads.
Sad but true: it’s easier to pollute in Nigeria than in China because it’s legal. Government wants to attract foreign investors, so outdated machinery can be shipped from China to Nigeria. Moreover several Chinese businessmen use money to bribe government officials.
The author interviews also a Nigerian man who tells that Chinese-owned factories usually don’t meet safety standards. Moreover, you can’t ask questions, you can’t make phone calls and you have to work for twelve hours without talking. The author thinks that factories will bring full employment in Africa, but I believe she’s too optimistic.
Several Chinese factory owners think that Africans are lazy and this is why they fire a lot of them. They expect to be paid even if they don’t show up on time or they don’t go to work every day. The fact is that Chinese bosses are used to manage people from their own country who are more productive than the new African class of factory workers.
In Addis Ababa, the author finds out that a Chinese restaurant owner has married a local woman who works as a waitress in his restaurant and they have a curly-haired son. A nice example of mixed family! Other interesting pieces of information: in Lesotho women were used to live on remittances from their husbands working in South Africans mines, but now many of them are working in factories where the majority of workers are women. In Kenya, the manufacturing sector is instead dominated by East Africans of Indian descent. Intermarriage between this community and the locals is still rare, despite a century of living in the country. In West Africa, the same happens with the Lebanese community and its resistance to integration. The author hopes that Chinese people in Africa will follow a different path.
Other interesting opinions from the author: African countries should develop their own pharmaceutical factories because there is a limit to what outsiders can be expected to do. A generation ago, China was poorer than many African countries, but the government offered cheap land and tax incentives to establish pharmaceutical firms. Developing countries like China are more willing to invest in other developing countries like Ethiopia because few people from the developed world would work there without seeing their families for a year, living in a mud-field while building factories in inhospitable places.
Epilogue
Chinese population is ageing, labor costs are rising in China and Chinese economic growth is now slower than in the past three decades. This is why Chinese companies are investing and relocating their factories abroad, in places like Africa where the population is burgeoning and workers can be paid less than in China.
What I liked most: Chinese entrepreneurs interviewed by the author frankly admit that they’re investing in Africa for profit. If their moves have also positive effects on Africans that’s fine, but that’s not their main purpose. On the other hand, Western NGOs present themselves as pure altruism, but skeptical people don’t believe in fairy tales.
This is my first NetGalley review and I’m really excited about it! This website gives you the chance to apply for reading ebooks for free before they are published so that publishers and authors can receive early feedbacks. I applied for The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun and I was really delighted to find out that my request had been accepted!
I chose this book because I had already heard about Chinese investments in Africa and I wanted to know more about this challenging topic.
Irene Yuan Sun was born in China and raised in the United States. She studied at Harvard and spent some time working in Africa.
The Next Factory of the World deals with the stories of several private Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, industrialization in that continent and the role played by China.
The author was born in China and lived there until she was six. At that time, cars were not so common in her country as in America. She was more familiar with buses and bicycles. In the early 1990s, almost nobody had a car in China. The author’s hometown is Changchun, near the frontier with eastern Russia. In 1991 she sat in a car for the first time. It belonged to a family friend who was a government official. Chinese streets were full of bicycles in the early 1990s, but now are full of cars (and pollution). The author proudly announces that 750 million people were lifted out of poverty.
Irene Yuan Sun grew up in the United States and after college she went to teach in Namibia, in southwestern Africa. She was a volunteer teacher and her subjects were math and English. Her pupils were the children of subsistence farmers. In Namibia she met a self-made Chinese man who was looking for a wife, but most Chinese women didn’t want to live in Africa. He tried to impress the author, but she realized that, despite being rich, he was illiterate. Why didn’t he want to marry an African woman? Why do Chinese people usually marry within their own community? Why don’t they want to mix with the locals?
The author visited more than fifty Chinese factories in Africa. She thinks that Chinese factories in Africa will create prosperity for Africans. Seriously? Chinese factories in Italy only use Chinese workforce and in Chinese stores here you can see mostly Chinese employees with sometimes the addition of Romanian women and Bangladeshi men. No jobs for the locals. No jobs for Italians. My husband, who is Mexican, thinks that this happens because only immigrants are willing to accept the low wages offered by Chinese employers, but I don’t know if they even tried to hire Italian workers. It looks like “foreigners united against the natives”.
According to Irene Yuan Sun, China is the current factory of the world while Africa will be the next one. Chinese factories in Africa produce either for the local markets or to export their goods, taking advantage of African low labor costs.
The author believes that factories bring prosperity, as it happened with the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the eighteenth century, in America in the nineteenth century, in Japan and other Asian countries in the twentieth century. At least she admits that many factory bosses in Africa are racist, pay bribes, drink to excess and frequent prostitutes. Moreover their factories pollute air and water, like we can see in nowadays China. However, in the previous examples of industrialization, the factory owners belonged to the same country they were contributing to develop. Are we sure that the same development will follow in Africa, if the factory bosses are Chinese and not Africans?
The book focuses on four African countries: Nigeria, Lesotho, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Nigeria has the largest population and the largest economy of the continent. Lesotho is instead completely surrounded by South Africa. Kenya is the principal economy of East Africa and Ethiopia… It isn’t true that Ethiopia was never colonized by a European power! Even if for a short period (1936-1941), it was an Italian colony! A shameful past for Italy, but history can’t be hidden.
According to Irene Yuan Sun, donors and global aid organizations won’t solve the poverty problem in Africa, but factories with their employment opportunities can do it. First example: Mr. Sun owns a factory that produces ceramic tiles in Nigeria. He’s only an elementary school graduate and he started working when he was just 13 years old. Chinese factories owners accumulated their know-how working for Taiwanese factory owners, who in turn had learned from Japanese ones.
Mr. Sun comes from Wenzhou, a midsize city in southeastern China. He dropped out of school when he was thirteen and started working in factories. He worked long hours, saved money and finally opened his own factory. Nice story, but not everybody can become a factory boss, otherwise who’s going to do all the menial jobs? The sad reality is that rich individuals can exist only if there are many poor people. Mr. Sun manufactured leather goods in China, but in the late 2000s costs were rising. He needed to move his factory abroad. He considered Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, then a friend told him about Nigeria.
When Mr. Sun visited Nigeria for the first time, he immediately saw a lot of beggars asking for money, but he then realized that there were also a lot of rich people. He found out that ceramics were the heaviest products that China exported in large quantities to Nigeria, so he decided to open a ceramic tile factory in the country. He invested almost 40 million dollars and he employed nearly 1,100 workers, a thousand of whom are locals. I liked this point: employing the locals. Everybody should follow this example.
The author then attends a lunch in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. Location: a Chinese restaurant. There she meets some Chinese businessmen. They started their career working for Taiwanese firms with businesses in Lesotho. At that time, in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was common for Taiwanese firms in need of cheap labor to use labor agencies to find young Chinese workers. They spoke neither English nor Sesotho, the local language. In the 1990s there were no cell phones and no internet. They could call home just once a year, because they didn’t have enough money. After years of hard work, some of them started factories while others ran small shops.
A wave of Japanese entrepreneurs generated a wave of Taiwanese entrepreneurs that generated a wave of Chinese ones. This is why the author thinks that the next wave can be African.
The author was born in Changchun, a provincial capital of two million people in Manchuria, between Russia and North Korea. In the late 1980s her father spent a year in Japan for a postdoctoral fellowship. The author, who was just two years old, stayed in China with her mother. At that time nobody owned a refrigerator and very few people had a television. As for industrialization in Asia, Japan was the first country, then followed by Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In the early 1980s, China was poorer than Ethiopia and Mali.
It was interesting to find out that the first Chinese entrepreneurs arrived in Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s. After its independence, the country had a thriving textile sector, but it collapsed when Nigeria started to export oil. Another engaging story is that of the flip-flop factory owned by the Lees in Nigeria: they produce huge quantities of cheap flip-flops whose retail price is just about a dollar a pair. This is possible because the models are very few. These products are destined to poor consumers who can’t afford to pay more and are sold in Nigeria and other West African countries. Their price is so low that nobody tries to import smuggled flip-flops.
The author’s mother is from Shanghai and her surname is Shen like that of the next factory owner we meet. The author’s father is instead a northerner. In Lesotho, a Chinese-owned factory produces Reebok T-shirts for American consumers. The workers are locals. Incredible but true: clothing production is not very automated because the product designs change every season, so it would be too expensive to change the machines to automate the job every few months. It’s better having many workers and sewing machines. In Lesotho, a large number of factory owners are foreigners, but the workers are mostly locals because wages are modest.
Factories in Lesotho export their products while Nigerian ones mainly produce for the internal market. This happens because Lesotho is a small country with a small population, but it’s near the excellent South African transport infrastructure. On the other hand Nigeria has a large population and bad roads.
Sad but true: it’s easier to pollute in Nigeria than in China because it’s legal. Government wants to attract foreign investors, so outdated machinery can be shipped from China to Nigeria. Moreover several Chinese businessmen use money to bribe government officials.
The author interviews also a Nigerian man who tells that Chinese-owned factories usually don’t meet safety standards. Moreover, you can’t ask questions, you can’t make phone calls and you have to work for twelve hours without talking. The author thinks that factories will bring full employment in Africa, but I believe she’s too optimistic.
Several Chinese factory owners think that Africans are lazy and this is why they fire a lot of them. They expect to be paid even if they don’t show up on time or they don’t go to work every day. The fact is that Chinese bosses are used to manage people from their own country who are more productive than the new African class of factory workers.
In Addis Ababa, the author finds out that a Chinese restaurant owner has married a local woman who works as a waitress in his restaurant and they have a curly-haired son. A nice example of mixed family! Other interesting pieces of information: in Lesotho women were used to live on remittances from their husbands working in South Africans mines, but now many of them are working in factories where the majority of workers are women. In Kenya, the manufacturing sector is instead dominated by East Africans of Indian descent. Intermarriage between this community and the locals is still rare, despite a century of living in the country. In West Africa, the same happens with the Lebanese community and its resistance to integration. The author hopes that Chinese people in Africa will follow a different path.
Other interesting opinions from the author: African countries should develop their own pharmaceutical factories because there is a limit to what outsiders can be expected to do. A generation ago, China was poorer than many African countries, but the government offered cheap land and tax incentives to establish pharmaceutical firms. Developing countries like China are more willing to invest in other developing countries like Ethiopia because few people from the developed world would work there without seeing their families for a year, living in a mud-field while building factories in inhospitable places.
Epilogue
Chinese population is ageing, labor costs are rising in China and Chinese economic growth is now slower than in the past three decades. This is why Chinese companies are investing and relocating their factories abroad, in places like Africa where the population is burgeoning and workers can be paid less than in China.
What I liked most: Chinese entrepreneurs interviewed by the author frankly admit that they’re investing in Africa for profit. If their moves have also positive effects on Africans that’s fine, but that’s not their main purpose. On the other hand, Western NGOs present themselves as pure altruism, but skeptical people don’t believe in fairy tales.
August 14, 2017
I received an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.
I requested this book because I found the topic intriguing. After reading the book, I still find the topic intriguing, yet I feel that the author could have done more to illustrate all sides of the development. I am going to follow along with the progress mentioned in this book to see if the title comes to fruition, or if China will continue to profit from the endeavor with minimal positive impact for Africans.
I requested this book because I found the topic intriguing. After reading the book, I still find the topic intriguing, yet I feel that the author could have done more to illustrate all sides of the development. I am going to follow along with the progress mentioned in this book to see if the title comes to fruition, or if China will continue to profit from the endeavor with minimal positive impact for Africans.
February 19, 2019
This was such and enjoyable read and a fascinating book.
I’ve come to realize recently that for me, when it comes to learning new things there is a certain value to sticking with what you know. In the case of this book, I was already quite familiar with manufacturing (industrial and consumer) with China and Chinese manufacturing, but I know practically nothing about Africa (even broadly as a continent, let alone individual countries). Based on the knowledge that I already have, I found that Irene Sun’s words resonated with me and I found that I had the same knowledge and impressions as her on the topics with which I am familiar. This made it very easy to absorb the new information she presented and integrate it into my understanding of these topics, and presented and exciting backdrop for me to learn about the recent history of Africa and its relations with the rest of the world.
What I especially love about this book is that Irene Sun really grapples with nuance in a way that you rarely see in a book that is as accessible as this one. In the introduction, she makes a juxtaposition of the altruistic work that she does as a school teacher in Africa, and the many Chinese businesspeople in Africa who are “pure capitalist, with seemingly little regard for the welfare or rights of locals”. Which one of them was making a difference for Africa, if he is creating jobs and she is teaching children skills that are not really relevant to present-day life in Africa?
Later in the book, she discussed in depth how the generosity of global donors and pharmaceutical companies has actually doomed African pharmaceutical manufacturers and in fact made it harder for African nations to respond to new emerging health crises, such as the recent Ebola crisis. She says “we want simple stories, with pure heroes and pure villains, and our minds rebel at the notion of bad outcomes arising from good deeds. This is not a simple story. Both the goodness and the fallout are real.” She talks about the “gut-wrenching trade-offs” that China and India have made in the past in order to bring themselves into the good position that they enjoy today in pharmaceutical development.
She addresses the harm that happens when Western donor systems bypass local institutions by undermining the trust that citizens have in those systems. She talks about the real challenges that citizen have when they try to start companies of their own, and the incredible power that both national institutions and global agreements can have in shaping the present and the future of industry and jobs in a particular country. She discusses issues of race, gender, and the environment.
I have been very lucky to be able to discuss with my Chinese colleagues about the enormous changes that have occurred over their lifetime, and I marvel regularly about the fact that during their lifetimes they have experienced and thrived in an environment with such an incredibly rapid pace of change, in almost every aspect of their lives. I thought of my discussions over the last year when Irene Sun wrote “employment of the sort that factories bring is not a questions simply of economics, but also of sociology, psychology, politics, values, and power. Factories in developing countries tend to hire workers who are encountering formal employment outside the home for the first time, which unleashes a torrent of change. People will be forced to move, children will be brought up differently, social norms will shift, power will change hands. There are no guarantees that this will occur smoothly or well - in fact, the lessons of history suggest the opposite. And yet, there is hope mixed in with the worry. People adapt. Learn new skills, provide for their families, invent new futures, perhaps find voices they didn’t know they had.”
I found this book to be inspiring, optimistic, but seemingly totally grounded in reality. I am sincerely looking forward to seeing the future of Africa, and reading more from this very talented individual and author.
I’ve come to realize recently that for me, when it comes to learning new things there is a certain value to sticking with what you know. In the case of this book, I was already quite familiar with manufacturing (industrial and consumer) with China and Chinese manufacturing, but I know practically nothing about Africa (even broadly as a continent, let alone individual countries). Based on the knowledge that I already have, I found that Irene Sun’s words resonated with me and I found that I had the same knowledge and impressions as her on the topics with which I am familiar. This made it very easy to absorb the new information she presented and integrate it into my understanding of these topics, and presented and exciting backdrop for me to learn about the recent history of Africa and its relations with the rest of the world.
What I especially love about this book is that Irene Sun really grapples with nuance in a way that you rarely see in a book that is as accessible as this one. In the introduction, she makes a juxtaposition of the altruistic work that she does as a school teacher in Africa, and the many Chinese businesspeople in Africa who are “pure capitalist, with seemingly little regard for the welfare or rights of locals”. Which one of them was making a difference for Africa, if he is creating jobs and she is teaching children skills that are not really relevant to present-day life in Africa?
Later in the book, she discussed in depth how the generosity of global donors and pharmaceutical companies has actually doomed African pharmaceutical manufacturers and in fact made it harder for African nations to respond to new emerging health crises, such as the recent Ebola crisis. She says “we want simple stories, with pure heroes and pure villains, and our minds rebel at the notion of bad outcomes arising from good deeds. This is not a simple story. Both the goodness and the fallout are real.” She talks about the “gut-wrenching trade-offs” that China and India have made in the past in order to bring themselves into the good position that they enjoy today in pharmaceutical development.
She addresses the harm that happens when Western donor systems bypass local institutions by undermining the trust that citizens have in those systems. She talks about the real challenges that citizen have when they try to start companies of their own, and the incredible power that both national institutions and global agreements can have in shaping the present and the future of industry and jobs in a particular country. She discusses issues of race, gender, and the environment.
I have been very lucky to be able to discuss with my Chinese colleagues about the enormous changes that have occurred over their lifetime, and I marvel regularly about the fact that during their lifetimes they have experienced and thrived in an environment with such an incredibly rapid pace of change, in almost every aspect of their lives. I thought of my discussions over the last year when Irene Sun wrote “employment of the sort that factories bring is not a questions simply of economics, but also of sociology, psychology, politics, values, and power. Factories in developing countries tend to hire workers who are encountering formal employment outside the home for the first time, which unleashes a torrent of change. People will be forced to move, children will be brought up differently, social norms will shift, power will change hands. There are no guarantees that this will occur smoothly or well - in fact, the lessons of history suggest the opposite. And yet, there is hope mixed in with the worry. People adapt. Learn new skills, provide for their families, invent new futures, perhaps find voices they didn’t know they had.”
I found this book to be inspiring, optimistic, but seemingly totally grounded in reality. I am sincerely looking forward to seeing the future of Africa, and reading more from this very talented individual and author.
October 9, 2019
Yesterday night, I finished Irene's Sun's "The Next Factory of the World - How Chinese Investment is Reshaping Africa".
It is a book about how the Chinese are working alongside African businessmen, climbers, dreamers and every day citizen to change the economic landscape of the continent. It's a book of hope on how Africa can benefit from the recent success of China in creating enduring factories for the benefit of Africa and the world.
Unlike what a lot of people think, an overwhelming number of Chinese companies in Africa are not state-owned. They are owed by tenacious businessmen looking for cheaper means of production due to rising labour costs and increasing competition in China. They are grinding it out. A lot of them have failed and continue to fail but the few that succeed tend to do so spectacularly.
You will be entertained by the story of a third-generation owner of one of the largest privately held firms in Nigeria, whose family came to Nigeria fifty years ago from China. Having made Nigeria their home, they send their kids abroad to study in the best schools in the world, but ultimately have them come back to live in Nigeria to run the businesses.
It is to be noted that this is not the first time Africa seems poised for an industrial take-off. Industrialists, from China and other places, had first showed up in the 1960s. It was especially good for Nigeria, with the country benefiting from having a vibrant textile industry, producing half the cotton cloth in all of West Africa, having its clothes prized in sophisticated markets and being the largest private employer of labour.
But the following years brought devastating shocks: a macroeconomic crisis, worsening government corruption and ineptitude, and increasingly fierce global competition. As a whole, Africa de-industrialized. Although manufacturing represented a respectable 10% of its national GDP in 1960, the share was down to 2% by 2010. This is emblematic of trends across the continent. Those who came for the 'Gold' rush 'perished' and had to tuck tails behind their legs and run.
But entrepreneurs seem to always eat optimism for breakfast. Chinese companies have sensed the opportunity for business again, especially with the tariff-free access to American and Asian markets, and are back in droves. Across Africa, there are already three to four thousand Chinese manufacturers. Hundreds of them were surveyed for the book and nearly all those firms are privately owned as opposed to being Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), suggesting that these investments are driven by profit motives rather than by government directives. This may surprise readers familiar with reports that emphasize links between the Chinese government and Chinese business in Africa.
The book also touches on a common perception in Africa and the sentiment in African media that Chinese firms don’t hire Africans. Numerous studies have debunked this. Chinese companies in Africa overwhelmingly hire locals. Across a sample size of more than 1,000 Chinese firms employing more than 300,000 people, 89% of employees were Africans. In manufacturing, this proportion is even higher, at 95%. Moreover, other studies show that the longer Chinese companies operate in Africa, the higher their proportion of local hires.
And with this comes the main reason I picked up the book: How can Africans benefit from the success of Chinese in Africa and learn from their failures? African nations already have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world, with an overwhelming majority of them in their teens and early twenties.
First, we need to understand how important manufacturing is. Manufacturing drives demand for other jobs: for every manufacturing job that’s created, 1.6 service jobs follow. You may also be surprised that good factory jobs are one of the few ways that Africa can realistically make up for its bad schools. An average factory work requires no academic qualifications, yet the worker can progress to top management learning on the job.
As some of the stories in the book show, if young Africans taking factory jobs understand that such jobs open up tremendous entrepreneurial opportunities for them, they may be inclined to take the jobs more seriously. They should understand that some of the most successful Chinese factory owners were themselves factory workers. They learnt on the job.
In making this argument for Africans, Irene also touched on the tendency of Chinese managers to term African workers lazy, forgetting that 'laziness' is a universal quality that reflects the timeless tensions of industrialization. It's not easy to get used to factory jobs. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, English workers were not only lazy on the job but also missed entire days of work; Mondays in particular were popular for not showing up. But the factories molded them and it was soon the turn of the Germans whose scholars considered "difficult to work with". Productivity was so low that factory owners in Germany were described as casting “admiring and envious glances...across the Channel at the English industrial worker.” Fast forward a century, and the same complaints abound in the early days of Chinese industrialization. In 1991, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “Chinese lack work ethic...Most Chinese employees spend as much as half their eight-hour workdays goofing off.”
The point is that factory owners have always complained about their workers during the early phases of industrialization, and Chinese bosses in Africa today are no exception. That’s because they’re accustomed to managing workers from their own country. Both the African worker and the Chinese owner reach for race as the explanation, when in fact the new workers simply haven’t been industrialized as long as workers in their home country have.
My criticism: To get me past the first chapter, I had to forgive its dreadful economics, especially about the consequences of structural transformation programs in Africa. I also had to get through her narrative that the West has been tried and has failed, thus cannot be learned from. Her notion that Africa can only learn from China is misguided seeing that she alluded to successful Indian and Lebanese companies across the continent.
But forgive all these and you are treated to stories of human possibilities and economic triumph of individual people in Africa.
Chinese companies, despite their many failures, have a personal willingness to be in Africa as it is, as well as a fearlessness about building its future, come what may. Some of the owners and workers look at Africa and comment that they have seen worse poverty, failure and bureaucracy where they are coming from, and have a firm belief that the future can be great. Some of them have even renounced American citizenship in favour of citizenship of African countries. Balls!
Talk about words backed by actions. But do Africans believe as much as them? If not, progress would be a herculean task. History shows that no country becomes great without the belief and efforts of its citizens.
It is a book about how the Chinese are working alongside African businessmen, climbers, dreamers and every day citizen to change the economic landscape of the continent. It's a book of hope on how Africa can benefit from the recent success of China in creating enduring factories for the benefit of Africa and the world.
Unlike what a lot of people think, an overwhelming number of Chinese companies in Africa are not state-owned. They are owed by tenacious businessmen looking for cheaper means of production due to rising labour costs and increasing competition in China. They are grinding it out. A lot of them have failed and continue to fail but the few that succeed tend to do so spectacularly.
You will be entertained by the story of a third-generation owner of one of the largest privately held firms in Nigeria, whose family came to Nigeria fifty years ago from China. Having made Nigeria their home, they send their kids abroad to study in the best schools in the world, but ultimately have them come back to live in Nigeria to run the businesses.
It is to be noted that this is not the first time Africa seems poised for an industrial take-off. Industrialists, from China and other places, had first showed up in the 1960s. It was especially good for Nigeria, with the country benefiting from having a vibrant textile industry, producing half the cotton cloth in all of West Africa, having its clothes prized in sophisticated markets and being the largest private employer of labour.
But the following years brought devastating shocks: a macroeconomic crisis, worsening government corruption and ineptitude, and increasingly fierce global competition. As a whole, Africa de-industrialized. Although manufacturing represented a respectable 10% of its national GDP in 1960, the share was down to 2% by 2010. This is emblematic of trends across the continent. Those who came for the 'Gold' rush 'perished' and had to tuck tails behind their legs and run.
But entrepreneurs seem to always eat optimism for breakfast. Chinese companies have sensed the opportunity for business again, especially with the tariff-free access to American and Asian markets, and are back in droves. Across Africa, there are already three to four thousand Chinese manufacturers. Hundreds of them were surveyed for the book and nearly all those firms are privately owned as opposed to being Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), suggesting that these investments are driven by profit motives rather than by government directives. This may surprise readers familiar with reports that emphasize links between the Chinese government and Chinese business in Africa.
The book also touches on a common perception in Africa and the sentiment in African media that Chinese firms don’t hire Africans. Numerous studies have debunked this. Chinese companies in Africa overwhelmingly hire locals. Across a sample size of more than 1,000 Chinese firms employing more than 300,000 people, 89% of employees were Africans. In manufacturing, this proportion is even higher, at 95%. Moreover, other studies show that the longer Chinese companies operate in Africa, the higher their proportion of local hires.
And with this comes the main reason I picked up the book: How can Africans benefit from the success of Chinese in Africa and learn from their failures? African nations already have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world, with an overwhelming majority of them in their teens and early twenties.
First, we need to understand how important manufacturing is. Manufacturing drives demand for other jobs: for every manufacturing job that’s created, 1.6 service jobs follow. You may also be surprised that good factory jobs are one of the few ways that Africa can realistically make up for its bad schools. An average factory work requires no academic qualifications, yet the worker can progress to top management learning on the job.
As some of the stories in the book show, if young Africans taking factory jobs understand that such jobs open up tremendous entrepreneurial opportunities for them, they may be inclined to take the jobs more seriously. They should understand that some of the most successful Chinese factory owners were themselves factory workers. They learnt on the job.
In making this argument for Africans, Irene also touched on the tendency of Chinese managers to term African workers lazy, forgetting that 'laziness' is a universal quality that reflects the timeless tensions of industrialization. It's not easy to get used to factory jobs. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, English workers were not only lazy on the job but also missed entire days of work; Mondays in particular were popular for not showing up. But the factories molded them and it was soon the turn of the Germans whose scholars considered "difficult to work with". Productivity was so low that factory owners in Germany were described as casting “admiring and envious glances...across the Channel at the English industrial worker.” Fast forward a century, and the same complaints abound in the early days of Chinese industrialization. In 1991, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “Chinese lack work ethic...Most Chinese employees spend as much as half their eight-hour workdays goofing off.”
The point is that factory owners have always complained about their workers during the early phases of industrialization, and Chinese bosses in Africa today are no exception. That’s because they’re accustomed to managing workers from their own country. Both the African worker and the Chinese owner reach for race as the explanation, when in fact the new workers simply haven’t been industrialized as long as workers in their home country have.
My criticism: To get me past the first chapter, I had to forgive its dreadful economics, especially about the consequences of structural transformation programs in Africa. I also had to get through her narrative that the West has been tried and has failed, thus cannot be learned from. Her notion that Africa can only learn from China is misguided seeing that she alluded to successful Indian and Lebanese companies across the continent.
But forgive all these and you are treated to stories of human possibilities and economic triumph of individual people in Africa.
Chinese companies, despite their many failures, have a personal willingness to be in Africa as it is, as well as a fearlessness about building its future, come what may. Some of the owners and workers look at Africa and comment that they have seen worse poverty, failure and bureaucracy where they are coming from, and have a firm belief that the future can be great. Some of them have even renounced American citizenship in favour of citizenship of African countries. Balls!
Talk about words backed by actions. But do Africans believe as much as them? If not, progress would be a herculean task. History shows that no country becomes great without the belief and efforts of its citizens.
April 29, 2020
I admire Sun’s writing style in that she relies on informal interviews to tell a story. Sun tried to remain unbiased but failed in some places as she almost painted China as Africa’s knight in shining armor. There are some opinions opened to disagreement when she made a point about China being Africa’s best chances for development and not Western development programs.
She starts the book with a personal experience of how she thought she could make a difference in Africa through education. However upon having dinner with a factory owner who was instead employing scores, her perception on development changed. Not to discredit education, she feels that it’s sometimes futile to educate people who are going to end up on farms and have no where to use it. If you’re familiar with “Poor Economics” this borders on the poverty trap concept.
So she goes on this research journey to show how industrialization is at the heart of development. She does makes some valid points though and causes one to wonder why the Chinese are open to making heavier investments and risks in Africa than the West.
As you read through, it’s sad to see the loopholes that have made it easy for development initiatives to arise from external parties than from African governments itself. Indeed they need to do better, a whole lot better with formulating and implementing policies.
It is worth a read, bias or not as her book can feed into what will ultimately be your opinion on Sino-African relations.
She starts the book with a personal experience of how she thought she could make a difference in Africa through education. However upon having dinner with a factory owner who was instead employing scores, her perception on development changed. Not to discredit education, she feels that it’s sometimes futile to educate people who are going to end up on farms and have no where to use it. If you’re familiar with “Poor Economics” this borders on the poverty trap concept.
So she goes on this research journey to show how industrialization is at the heart of development. She does makes some valid points though and causes one to wonder why the Chinese are open to making heavier investments and risks in Africa than the West.
As you read through, it’s sad to see the loopholes that have made it easy for development initiatives to arise from external parties than from African governments itself. Indeed they need to do better, a whole lot better with formulating and implementing policies.
It is worth a read, bias or not as her book can feed into what will ultimately be your opinion on Sino-African relations.
April 5, 2022
If your looking for academic literature this book is a basic starting point, but it is not thorougher and wouldn’t be viewed as an appropriate reference for academic literature in the western sphere of academia.
This however is a significant reason for why I have given it a high rating. The audience for this book is not academics and it is not westerners. This book is really about those who are looking for opportunities in Africa. The final frontier of the so called flying geese theory paradigm, where the means of production are relocated to new environments that have better factor endowments.
This book is for entrepreneurs those who create and not for those who explain. It’s is teleological in nature (the explanation) and not etiological (the causation).
This book in my opinion gets rid of this notion of the Chinese debt trap that so many of my fellow Africans and others fret about.
China is better suited to be a development partner than the west for three main reason 1. Africa is in desperate need of infrastructure 2. Africa’s population is rapidly rising and 3. Anti-colonial struggle. China understands and has overcome all these points in recent history and is better equipped to help, how many western technicians are willing to go live in the middle of rural Africa for a year?
This however is a significant reason for why I have given it a high rating. The audience for this book is not academics and it is not westerners. This book is really about those who are looking for opportunities in Africa. The final frontier of the so called flying geese theory paradigm, where the means of production are relocated to new environments that have better factor endowments.
This book is for entrepreneurs those who create and not for those who explain. It’s is teleological in nature (the explanation) and not etiological (the causation).
This book in my opinion gets rid of this notion of the Chinese debt trap that so many of my fellow Africans and others fret about.
China is better suited to be a development partner than the west for three main reason 1. Africa is in desperate need of infrastructure 2. Africa’s population is rapidly rising and 3. Anti-colonial struggle. China understands and has overcome all these points in recent history and is better equipped to help, how many western technicians are willing to go live in the middle of rural Africa for a year?
December 21, 2024
A very good study of Chinese investment strategy in Africa which is both unbiased and yet very critical, a great insight into a hidden part of our new cold war’s battlefront.
June 3, 2021
This book is about the ongoing industrialization of Africa, a feat that seems never-ending and impossible. The topic may sound boring but the author makes it much more interesting and easy to read.
It felt like I had a front-row seat in an Economics class and had an enjoyable lecture about the future of my country and Africa as a whole.
Somehow, it gives me hope that true development might just come to Nigeria...if only we'd take industrialization seriously.
It felt like I had a front-row seat in an Economics class and had an enjoyable lecture about the future of my country and Africa as a whole.
Somehow, it gives me hope that true development might just come to Nigeria...if only we'd take industrialization seriously.
April 25, 2019
This book is a series of profiles on various characters that are involved with the progression of industrialization in various African countries, spurred on by Chinese entrepreneurs.
There are a couple key points the author wants to make:
1. Industrialization in east Asia has been a chain reaction, with Japanese factory workers becoming factory owners in Taiwan, workers in Taiwan becoming owners in China, and now former factory workers in China opening factories in Africa. In each step the workers in the various countries started out very poor, and through industrialization their standard of living and social outcomes improved drastically.
2. Industrialization has a very profound impact on the social norms and culture of a society. Workers in newly industrialized countries have been complaining about the ruthlessness of the clock since the dawn of industrialization, and factory owners have been complaining about the ‘laziness’ of workers since forever too. No group of people in inherently lazy, industrialization molds everyone into productive cogs of the machine.
Another example of shifting social norms is women in Lesotho. It used to be the case that many women would be dependent on men who would go work in mines in South Africa. Now some of them can earn their own living working in garment factories. This changes the nature of relationships in society in a big way.
3. Some Chinese entrepreneurs play it really dirty. There have been cases of competitors’ factories mysteriously burning down, machines that were outlawed in China because of poor environmental qualities being deployed in Nigeria, and bribery. To develop strong labor and environmental protection in these countries will take time, and damage will be done in the mean time.
We will have to see what actually happens over the coming decades. I really hope Africa will be able to shed its legacy of being seen as backward and hopeless, and at the same time I hope it can develop without destroying the environment. Time will tell.
There are a couple key points the author wants to make:
1. Industrialization in east Asia has been a chain reaction, with Japanese factory workers becoming factory owners in Taiwan, workers in Taiwan becoming owners in China, and now former factory workers in China opening factories in Africa. In each step the workers in the various countries started out very poor, and through industrialization their standard of living and social outcomes improved drastically.
2. Industrialization has a very profound impact on the social norms and culture of a society. Workers in newly industrialized countries have been complaining about the ruthlessness of the clock since the dawn of industrialization, and factory owners have been complaining about the ‘laziness’ of workers since forever too. No group of people in inherently lazy, industrialization molds everyone into productive cogs of the machine.
Another example of shifting social norms is women in Lesotho. It used to be the case that many women would be dependent on men who would go work in mines in South Africa. Now some of them can earn their own living working in garment factories. This changes the nature of relationships in society in a big way.
3. Some Chinese entrepreneurs play it really dirty. There have been cases of competitors’ factories mysteriously burning down, machines that were outlawed in China because of poor environmental qualities being deployed in Nigeria, and bribery. To develop strong labor and environmental protection in these countries will take time, and damage will be done in the mean time.
We will have to see what actually happens over the coming decades. I really hope Africa will be able to shed its legacy of being seen as backward and hopeless, and at the same time I hope it can develop without destroying the environment. Time will tell.
August 21, 2018
Basic premise:
• Chinese factories in Africa will create broad-based prosperity for Africans and usher in the next phase of global growth for a large swath of the Chinese economy. Per the flying geese theory, a wave of Japanese entrepreneurs spawned a wave of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, who spawned a wave of Chinese ones, and it is the Chinese entrepreneurs that will spawn the wave of African entrepreneurs. Africa has the potential to become China’s successor as the next Factory of the World. Racist views of factory owners, Chinese in particular, towards African workers are acknowledged, though this tension is framed more broadly as a symptom of industrialization and differences in culture as noted across history. To avoid enclaved communities as noted across Indian Kenyans and Lebanese Ivorians, Africans and Chinese will need to focus on trust-based relationships and integration.
Key points of contention:
1. The Western development community’s focus on strengthening governance (i.e. training government officials, fellowships, monitoring and accountability systems) is counter-productive, by inhibiting industrialization. History has shown in the US, China and India that it is better to let industrialization lead to excesses that eventually create the political and social pressures for regulation and reform. Foreigners should instead focus on how to make conditions merely “good enough,” bootstrapping development by pivoting towards various local partners and adjusting accordingly, rather than trying to fix a system. What is key is that donors don’t bypass local institutions, which only erodes the public’s trust and siphon’s off valuable talent. It is important to let countries “muddle through,” to experiment, adapt institutions and make up regulations as they go along.
2. The current global health strategy of sourcing for instance the lowest vaccines from India is undermining Africa’s pharmaceutical industry, by trapping it in a state of perpetual infancy. By relying on foreign drug makers, there will continue to be a shortfall in how much research Africa’s diseases get and how quickly any new disease outbreak can be dealt with. China and India both rejected the imperative to save as many lives as quickly as possible, by balancing social and economic goals and initially being tolerant of poor quality standards – as a consequence they were able to provide jobs, nurture domestic markets and save lives, eventually shifting to a greater focus on quality requirements and industry consolidation.
Interesting statistics:
• Across a sample size of 1,000 Chinese firms employing more than 300,000 people, 89% of employees were Africans. All but 2 of the 170 employees of Sino-Ethiop Associate Africa PLC are Ethiopian, which is the first and only gel capsule manufacturing plant in sub-Saharan Africa, and accounts for almost all of Ethiopia’s pharmaceutical exports
• Chinese factories in Africa will create broad-based prosperity for Africans and usher in the next phase of global growth for a large swath of the Chinese economy. Per the flying geese theory, a wave of Japanese entrepreneurs spawned a wave of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, who spawned a wave of Chinese ones, and it is the Chinese entrepreneurs that will spawn the wave of African entrepreneurs. Africa has the potential to become China’s successor as the next Factory of the World. Racist views of factory owners, Chinese in particular, towards African workers are acknowledged, though this tension is framed more broadly as a symptom of industrialization and differences in culture as noted across history. To avoid enclaved communities as noted across Indian Kenyans and Lebanese Ivorians, Africans and Chinese will need to focus on trust-based relationships and integration.
Key points of contention:
1. The Western development community’s focus on strengthening governance (i.e. training government officials, fellowships, monitoring and accountability systems) is counter-productive, by inhibiting industrialization. History has shown in the US, China and India that it is better to let industrialization lead to excesses that eventually create the political and social pressures for regulation and reform. Foreigners should instead focus on how to make conditions merely “good enough,” bootstrapping development by pivoting towards various local partners and adjusting accordingly, rather than trying to fix a system. What is key is that donors don’t bypass local institutions, which only erodes the public’s trust and siphon’s off valuable talent. It is important to let countries “muddle through,” to experiment, adapt institutions and make up regulations as they go along.
2. The current global health strategy of sourcing for instance the lowest vaccines from India is undermining Africa’s pharmaceutical industry, by trapping it in a state of perpetual infancy. By relying on foreign drug makers, there will continue to be a shortfall in how much research Africa’s diseases get and how quickly any new disease outbreak can be dealt with. China and India both rejected the imperative to save as many lives as quickly as possible, by balancing social and economic goals and initially being tolerant of poor quality standards – as a consequence they were able to provide jobs, nurture domestic markets and save lives, eventually shifting to a greater focus on quality requirements and industry consolidation.
Interesting statistics:
• Across a sample size of 1,000 Chinese firms employing more than 300,000 people, 89% of employees were Africans. All but 2 of the 170 employees of Sino-Ethiop Associate Africa PLC are Ethiopian, which is the first and only gel capsule manufacturing plant in sub-Saharan Africa, and accounts for almost all of Ethiopia’s pharmaceutical exports
December 18, 2017
It is no secret that manufacturing in China is no longer the cheap utopia that many once found it to be. China is also experiencing pressures and internal economic effects and in the future it may need to change. China has been extending its ‘territorial reach’ and Africa is an area of great interest for it, with a lot of Chinese investment taking place, both official and private. Africa may be the next (Chinese) factory space for the world.
This was a fascinating, well-researched and carefully presented book that provided a total look at the situation-to-date, noting how Chinese companies have been establishing a foothold in Africa. It is not necessarily a new event either, although activity is ramping up today. China’s interest in China is different to that the west has held in the past, seeking to do more than just development aid. This has led to some criticism, suggesting that China is just another asset-stripper and exploiter of the continent and its resources, albeit under a different guise. The author and her research begs to differ. The partnership may not be symmetric, but there is real scope that Africa is the next powerhouse-in-waiting, aided and abetted by Chinese money and know-how.
The book is split into two halves. The first is the realities and situation so far. The latter is the possibilities that can be generated and intimation of what may occur. Credit must be given to the author for this book and its ability to service different audiences at the same time. To a general reader it is an engaging read for the broader story and its individual components. For the focussed economist or business executive it gives all the foregoing and a lot of nuanced, detailed information as well. It is not a hagiography or fluffy PR book and extensive notes for further research and reading are provided for those who want it. The less-attractive side of this development is not being hidden, nor excused. Things may, however, get better with time and experience.
It is very feasible that even in my lifetime there will be some major tectonic shifts in economic power. In the past decade or so we may have only had a taste of what is to come. May we see one-time leaders being – eventually – being ‘developed’ by those who once did all the ‘developing’? Interesting times can lay ahead, that is for sure.
Christmas is coming. If you don’t have a direct need for this book and its intelligence today, why not treat yourself for a bit of holiday-time reading, as it will be a lot more informative and engaging than a lot of the stuff that may appear on the small screen!
This was a fascinating, well-researched and carefully presented book that provided a total look at the situation-to-date, noting how Chinese companies have been establishing a foothold in Africa. It is not necessarily a new event either, although activity is ramping up today. China’s interest in China is different to that the west has held in the past, seeking to do more than just development aid. This has led to some criticism, suggesting that China is just another asset-stripper and exploiter of the continent and its resources, albeit under a different guise. The author and her research begs to differ. The partnership may not be symmetric, but there is real scope that Africa is the next powerhouse-in-waiting, aided and abetted by Chinese money and know-how.
The book is split into two halves. The first is the realities and situation so far. The latter is the possibilities that can be generated and intimation of what may occur. Credit must be given to the author for this book and its ability to service different audiences at the same time. To a general reader it is an engaging read for the broader story and its individual components. For the focussed economist or business executive it gives all the foregoing and a lot of nuanced, detailed information as well. It is not a hagiography or fluffy PR book and extensive notes for further research and reading are provided for those who want it. The less-attractive side of this development is not being hidden, nor excused. Things may, however, get better with time and experience.
It is very feasible that even in my lifetime there will be some major tectonic shifts in economic power. In the past decade or so we may have only had a taste of what is to come. May we see one-time leaders being – eventually – being ‘developed’ by those who once did all the ‘developing’? Interesting times can lay ahead, that is for sure.
Christmas is coming. If you don’t have a direct need for this book and its intelligence today, why not treat yourself for a bit of holiday-time reading, as it will be a lot more informative and engaging than a lot of the stuff that may appear on the small screen!
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March 6, 2020De enige economische literatuur die me echt interesseert gaat over armoedereductie of andere kwesties in 'ontwikkelingslanden', en dit boek past dus perfect. Het is een optimistische kijk op de invloed van Chinezen (en dus niet de Chinese staat) op Afrika's industrie. En het is redelijk overtuigend.
Centraal is het vliegende ganzen-argument. (Heel simplistisch uitgelegd:) In China worden salarissen steeds hoger, en dus zoeken Chinese ondernemers goedkopere arbeidskrachten in Afrika. Europa deed dit eerst in China, en dat heeft geleid tot ongeziene economische groei en armoedevermindering. De kans is er dus dat dit ook zal gebeuren in Afrika, mits samenwerking tussen lokale en Chinese ondernemers goed gaat. Het richt zich met name op verhalen uit Nigeria en Lesotho, en schetst ondernemers als amorele avonturiers.
Twee sterke punten die het boek maakt:
1) Veel positieve ontwikkelingen worden teweeggebracht door amorele spelers. Het gaat de Chinese fabriekseigenaars niet om de wereld verbeteren (in tegenstelling tot de auteur zelf, die als idealist eerst Engelse les gaf aan scholieren), maar zij kunnen veel meer positieve invloed hebben dan men misschien wil toegeven.
2) De negatieve elementen van industrialisering (die er ongetwijfeld zijn) worden vaak nogal gevreesd door mensen uit het Westen, omdat het voor ons zo ver weg is. Het pad is niet zonder problemen, maar Europa heeft het ook bewandeld. Misschien zijn offers noodzakelijk om een bepaald ontwikkelingsniveau te bereiken. Het voorbeeld over de farmaceutische industrie was hier erg treffend (en lastig).
De vraag die onvermijdelijk opkomt bij het lezen van dit boek, is: "Kunnen de statistieken dit boek voldoende ondersteunen?" Het zijn mooie anekdotes, en er worden zeker wat getallen gebruikt (bijvoorbeeld dat >85% van de mensen werkzaam in manufacturing lokaal is), maar het is net niet voldoende. Zeker over de balans tussen SOE's, private Chinese en westerse bedrijven had ik graag meer gelezen.
Centraal is het vliegende ganzen-argument. (Heel simplistisch uitgelegd:) In China worden salarissen steeds hoger, en dus zoeken Chinese ondernemers goedkopere arbeidskrachten in Afrika. Europa deed dit eerst in China, en dat heeft geleid tot ongeziene economische groei en armoedevermindering. De kans is er dus dat dit ook zal gebeuren in Afrika, mits samenwerking tussen lokale en Chinese ondernemers goed gaat. Het richt zich met name op verhalen uit Nigeria en Lesotho, en schetst ondernemers als amorele avonturiers.
Twee sterke punten die het boek maakt:
1) Veel positieve ontwikkelingen worden teweeggebracht door amorele spelers. Het gaat de Chinese fabriekseigenaars niet om de wereld verbeteren (in tegenstelling tot de auteur zelf, die als idealist eerst Engelse les gaf aan scholieren), maar zij kunnen veel meer positieve invloed hebben dan men misschien wil toegeven.
2) De negatieve elementen van industrialisering (die er ongetwijfeld zijn) worden vaak nogal gevreesd door mensen uit het Westen, omdat het voor ons zo ver weg is. Het pad is niet zonder problemen, maar Europa heeft het ook bewandeld. Misschien zijn offers noodzakelijk om een bepaald ontwikkelingsniveau te bereiken. Het voorbeeld over de farmaceutische industrie was hier erg treffend (en lastig).
De vraag die onvermijdelijk opkomt bij het lezen van dit boek, is: "Kunnen de statistieken dit boek voldoende ondersteunen?" Het zijn mooie anekdotes, en er worden zeker wat getallen gebruikt (bijvoorbeeld dat >85% van de mensen werkzaam in manufacturing lokaal is), maar het is net niet voldoende. Zeker over de balans tussen SOE's, private Chinese en westerse bedrijven had ik graag meer gelezen.
December 1, 2024
Sun argues that, just as China used industrialization to break out of its poverty cycle, Africa could do the same—if it shifts its focus from the Western-dominated development model to one that embraces mass manufacturing.
One of the most engaging aspects of the book is Dixon's firsthand experiences, including her time teaching in Namibia. She highlights the disconnect between well-meaning Western education initiatives (like teaching English to subsistence farmers) and the real economic drivers needed for development, such as manufacturing:
“Nothing is less controversial than the inherent goodness of teaching children and the notion that an educated citizenry is essential for a country’s development.” AND “I was teaching irregular English verb conjugations to future subsistence farmers living in an arid plain where no one spoke English in everyday life.”
Before How Asia Works, this book helped me understand the importance of Manufacturing through the lens of the Flying Goose Theory.
1. First a few firms will show up to try their hand at making a certain product.
2. As they learn, their profits will attract other companies that also try to manufacture that product.
3. But as the field becomes crowded, intensifying competition and thinning profits, some firms will look for a different product.
4. Over time, they’ll be pushed to try something slightly more complicated, something that’s harder for others to copy.
5. The process will then repeat itself, and countries that started out by copying and learning end up inventing and teaching a mere generation or two later.
One of the most engaging aspects of the book is Dixon's firsthand experiences, including her time teaching in Namibia. She highlights the disconnect between well-meaning Western education initiatives (like teaching English to subsistence farmers) and the real economic drivers needed for development, such as manufacturing:
“Nothing is less controversial than the inherent goodness of teaching children and the notion that an educated citizenry is essential for a country’s development.” AND “I was teaching irregular English verb conjugations to future subsistence farmers living in an arid plain where no one spoke English in everyday life.”
Before How Asia Works, this book helped me understand the importance of Manufacturing through the lens of the Flying Goose Theory.
1. First a few firms will show up to try their hand at making a certain product.
2. As they learn, their profits will attract other companies that also try to manufacture that product.
3. But as the field becomes crowded, intensifying competition and thinning profits, some firms will look for a different product.
4. Over time, they’ll be pushed to try something slightly more complicated, something that’s harder for others to copy.
5. The process will then repeat itself, and countries that started out by copying and learning end up inventing and teaching a mere generation or two later.
July 5, 2021
This was a fascinating look into the economic relationship that primarily private Chinese investment into building factories on the African continent has created, providing an interesting contrast to the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises funding of infrastructure projects that has led to China being Africa's top creditor. Ms. Sun, who was born in China and raised in the U.S., began working on the African continent as a teacher in rural Namibia. This work was published in October 2017, built upon data she gathered from extensive interviews during field research in Nigeria, Lesotho, Kenya and Ethiopia. She explains how China grew to become Africa’s largest trade partner, the leading financier for infrastructure development, and a substantial source of foreign direct investment. While Chinese economic engagement across the African continent has not been without challenges, highlighted by an exchange she highlights about a Nigerian businessman who tells of how the Chinese "taught" Nigerians something about corruption (ranked 149/180 on Transparency International's Global Corruption Index). Ms. Sun lays out the challenges for conducting business in Africa and how the risk tolerance of Chinese entrepreneurs makes more will to pursue opportunities in Africa in contrast to their counterparts from Western nations.
October 30, 2017
This book is a remarkably thoughtful, well-written, nuanced account of the most promising economic force that will define the next generation of manufacturing. It effectively narrates the phenomenon of Chinese private investment in the African continent with a combination of data, on-the ground interviews and economic development theory. From textile plants in Lesotho to industrial complexes in Nigeria, the author manages to color in the dark crevices of forgotten links in the global supply chain by documenting the ongoing struggles of foreign entrepreneurs, local workers, and bureaucrats in the iterative effort to industrialize Africa. The book challenges the long-standing notions of aid-driven economic development, as well as the Washington Consensus-style institution-led growth hypotheses. But it also is honest about the downsides of Chinese investment, delving into the difficulties that inevitably accompany the clash of multiple cultures in high-stakes interactions.
It is a smart, fast-paced, surprisingly fun read, and is absolutely required to anyone concerned about industrialization, manufacturing, economic growth, or development.
It is a smart, fast-paced, surprisingly fun read, and is absolutely required to anyone concerned about industrialization, manufacturing, economic growth, or development.
February 18, 2025
The Next Factory of the World: how Chinese Investment is Reshaping Africa by Irene Sun is a bit of a mixed bag. This is more of a series of individual case studies informed by Sun's interactions with businesses and factories scattered about Africa. These case studies are informed by personal anecdotes and a mixture of market, scholarly, and other forms of research. Overall, it is mostly solid. The main point of the book seems to be a relatively (if not overly) optimistic picture that China is helping Africa replicate China's own economic development model through investments in industry. That these companies may have prejudice and be owned by Chinese people, but the prejudice is not unique to China (there's historical precedent for this happening over and over again) and the longer a factory operates the more its workforce is made up of locals (80 to 90+%). Africa is where China was a generation or two prior, and therefore these types of investments can help build up the continent. And as time moves on, Africa becomes a far more attractive place for China's investment and educated workforce. In return, Africa is becoming a more wealthy and industrial place.
July 3, 2019
An interesting account on a hot but under-researched topic. I really enjoyed the insight from field work and interviews with workers and owners of factories across the continent. It gave an eye opening account on the range of Chinese businesses in Africa, their story, their business models and operational difficulties. But though they are clearly significant, it needs more proving than what the book does to demonstrate that these factories will be one of the leading forces transforming the continent (as opposed to natural resources, western factories, ICT sector, remittances, aid, etc). I also felt that there were many topics that were under-discussed, including the role of the Chinese state in pushing some of these investments, the policies of various African countries that often hinder such industrialization, race relations and racism. All in all, the book had a very positive spin on the likely societal impacts of the Chinese factories, but I feel much less sanguine about it than the author. Still a good book I recommend to those interested in the topic!
March 7, 2021
Makes much the same argument as Deborah Brautigam did in "The Dragon's Gift": Chinese industrialists in Africa shouldn't be seen as just the new colonizers, there just to steal resources. They are actually building industries which Africans will benefit from and eventually take over, or emulate, á la "flying geese" theory. They have skin in the game in a way that existing development interventions do not. They are willing to work with pragmatically with flawed political systems ("bootstrapping"). Sun, a McKinsey consultant, is optimistic throughout, acknowledging criticisms of Chinese presence but basically dismissing them all as inevitable costs of an African transformation that can't be achieved otherwise. While she claims to have visited an impressive number of factories and talked to hundreds of people, she only really talks about the Chinese bosses (very approvingly) and a few African entrepreneurs allied with them. Very little from the worker perspective.
November 9, 2020
Interesting look into Chinese investment in Africa, featuring some individual stories of Chinese factory owners and also profiles of certain market --- textiles in Nigeria, pharmaceuticals in Kenya, foreign exports from Lesotho, among others.
Good primer and thoughts into industrialization and the emerging role of China, though it can be a little skewed in some areas, ignoring aspects of exploitation and disproportionate benefits for local workers. It is addressed moreso through an almost ethnographic lens looking at the psychology of Chinese factory owners who tend to make a leap to African countries.
Good primer and thoughts into industrialization and the emerging role of China, though it can be a little skewed in some areas, ignoring aspects of exploitation and disproportionate benefits for local workers. It is addressed moreso through an almost ethnographic lens looking at the psychology of Chinese factory owners who tend to make a leap to African countries.
February 2, 2021
A pragmatic and rational view on China-Africa relations, so much needed these days to debunk the Western sinophobic propaganda and ridiculous compilations of anecdotes about "bad Chinese", "racist Chinese" or "corrupt Chinese".
Those who produce such vile propaganda support the perpetual enslaving of Africa by Western "donors" or Western paternalist "humanitarians".
On the contrary, Irene Yuan Sun goes strait to the facts, both pleasant and unpleasant, and exposes historical facts that lead China to help develop and industrialize a continent in which Westerners did the very opposite.
(Read in Lang Suan, Thailand)
Those who produce such vile propaganda support the perpetual enslaving of Africa by Western "donors" or Western paternalist "humanitarians".
On the contrary, Irene Yuan Sun goes strait to the facts, both pleasant and unpleasant, and exposes historical facts that lead China to help develop and industrialize a continent in which Westerners did the very opposite.
(Read in Lang Suan, Thailand)
August 22, 2022
This is one of my favourite books from recent years. The model of development described strongly aligns with my own so I'm quite prone to agreeing. I like that the book is reasonably short and to the point. Each chapter covers a key compenent of her thesis with some statistics and then an ancedote or two. It makes it readable and engaging, but still focused on the bigger picture. I also love the introduction and the general appreciation she demonstrates for the importance of economic growth. While it can seem abstract, especially in high-income countries, it's reflected in real increases in quality of life which are a lot easier to see in rapidly developing countries.
November 13, 2017
Superb! Irene Sun worked with me on a Centre for Economic Policy Research (UK) grant on Chinese manufacturing investment in Africa. I am delighted that this initial Nigeria research fed into Irene's curiosity about Chinese factories in Africa, and loved getting her updates about other countries she visited for this work. Her fascinating stories and analysis are now available to everyone in her new Harvard Business School press book. Irene is an astoundingly talented person: as a writer, communicator, analyst, thinker. And she's a jolly good person too.
January 26, 2018
In the past quarter century, China has gone from generating 2% of global GDP output to 25%. Chinese entrepreneurs are now transferring these skills and investing in factories in Africa. According to the author, over the next decade 8 out of the 10 fastest-growing economies are projected to be on the African continent. The book convincingly makes the case that, from the English Industrial Revolution onwards, prosperity has always followed the building of factories, and what Africa needs is an upsurge in industrial investment and entrepreneurship, not just charitable handouts.
May 11, 2020
A contrarian approach to Chinese investment in Africa that I have never encountered before in popular news channels. While I think the author's arguments do, at times, neglect to openly address the harm of Chinese factory management and practices in Africa, I understand that is not her prerogative.
Nonetheless, I found this to be a very informative and educational read. I think she brought up very valid points that were appropriately substantiated. Will be interesting to see how her predictions carry out in the next few years...
Nonetheless, I found this to be a very informative and educational read. I think she brought up very valid points that were appropriately substantiated. Will be interesting to see how her predictions carry out in the next few years...
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