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Life at the Heart of Africa-China Trade 

by Eric Olander
File image of an African trader negotiating with a Chinese merchant in Yiwu. Image via Xinhua.

COVID and government crackdowns have hollowed out Guangzhou’s once-thriving African community. While many of these traders have left China, some are relocating to Yiwu. The city, in Zhejiang province, is one of the world’s largest centers for the trade in consumer goods. 

The economic anthropologist Jing Jing Liu shows how Yiwu’s role as an Africa-China trade hub exacts its own costs on the lives of Nigerian traders who frequently live complicated double lives to make a living. 

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