Few topics have shaped perceptions about China’s engagement in Africa more than the presence of Chinese construction sites across the continent. Chinese contractors have built countless ports, roads, railways, and more, but the way that work has been done has been very controversial over the years.
There’ve been widespread complaints about mismanagement, abuse, and discrimination at Chinese-run construction sites across the continent. While there’s no doubt some veracity to those claims, many of the allegations are also rooted in vastly different expectations between Chinese managers and local workers.
For some perspective on this complex dynamic, Eric & Cobus spoke with two longtime Africa-China scholars, Mandira Bagwandeen, a political science lecturer at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, and Elisa Gambino, a Hallsworth Research Fellow in political economy at the University of Manchester, to discuss their latest research on Chinese-African labor relations in the construction sector.
Show Notes:
- The Conversation: Chinese workers on Africa’s infrastructure projects: the link with host political regimes by Pippa Morgan and Andrea Ghiselli
- The Washington Post: Chinese firms — and African labor — are building Africa’s infrastructure by Frangton Chiyemura
- Der Spiegel: The Chinese Builders Behind Africa’s Construction Boom by Heike Klovert
About Mandira Bagwandeen & Elisa Gambino:
Mandira Bagwandeen is a lecturer at Stellenbosch University’s Political Science Department, where she teaches Global Political Economy and Africa and International Relations. Previously she was a Senior Research Fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She also provides consulting services for think tanks and South African and international corporate companies. Mandira is affiliated with several organisations: She is a Research Associate at the Institute for Global African Affairs (University of Johannesburg), The African Centre for the Study of the US (ACSUS) (University of Witwatersrand), and the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique (Foundation for Strategic Research); a Research Fellow at: African Studies Centre (ASC) (Metropolitan University Prague), Afro-Sino Centre of International Relations (ASCIR); a Non-resident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI); an Affiliate at the Conflict Peacebuilding and Risk Unit (Stellenbosch University); and, a Consultant at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). Mandira has authored several academic, research, and opinion articles on Africa-China issues and she often provides commentary for various media outlets.
Elisa Gambino is a Hallsworth Fellow in political economy at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Previously she was a fellow in the International Politics of China in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE). Elisa’s current research focuses on China-Africa relations, with a specific emphasis on Sino-African economic engagement in the infrastructure and mining sectors. She previously obtained her Ph.D. in African Studies at the University of Edinburgh as part of the ERC-funded African Governance and Space (AFRIGOS) Project, to which Elisa contributed to research on the internationalization of Chinese state-owned companies in Africa.
Transcript:
Eric Olander: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China in Africa Podcast, a proud member of the Sinica Podcast Network. I’m Eric Olander, and, as always, I’m joined by CGSP’s Managing Editor, Cobus van Staden, who, as always, joins us from Johannesburg, South Africa. A very good afternoon to you, Cobus.
Cobus: Good afternoon.
Eric: Cobus, today is going to be very interesting. We’re going to talk about one of the themes of the China-Africa relationship that literally dates back to the early 2000s and really kind of set the stage for so much of what we talk about today in the China-Africa relationship — that’s construction and labor and the intersection between those two. And it’s interesting for you and I, who’ve been doing this show now for 14 years, to think back about how prominent those two issues have been in the discussions about the Chinese in Africa. In fact, I was just looking at some comments from U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken on his last trip to Africa last year. And sure enough, he brought it up, about the question of imported labor coming into Africa. He talked about poor working conditions for both Chinese and for Africans. And, again, he didn’t say the Chinese by name, but you knew who he was talking about.
And so many of those, again, those themes and those memes were set in the early 2000s and have proven to be very, very durable. And while the West has used these as weapons in many ways to criticize the Chinese, Africans have developed their own narratives about labor relations with the Chinese, oftentimes, deeply rooted in their relationships with previous colonial powers. And at the same time, the Chinese themselves have also portrayed this sense of win-win framed around labor. Cobus, I was sharing some political cartoons with you earlier today in preparation for the show, and it shows an African worker and a Chinese worker arm in arm embracing infrastructure development. And I think what you and I have seen over these years is it isn’t quite that simple.
Cobus: Yeah, it’s definitely not as simple as these cartoons, which frequently, we should be clear, these are cartoons that usually appear in publications like China Daily. So, they portray a really egalitarian relationship. The kind of Western critics frequently, they stick to a very outdated view of a lot of Chinese workers being kind of imported into Africa and taking away African jobs. The reality, as we’ll discuss today, in a lot of ways, kind of somewhere in between, not nearly as happily egalitarian as the propaganda shows, a lot more embedded in local practices, much more than Western critics would acknowledge, but at the same time, really problematic in lots of different ways, and in lots of ways kind of reminiscent of older kind of labor problems in the African construction world.
Eric: And there’s some real deep cultural misunderstandings that often exist in the China-Africa perceptions about labor. And when I was living in Kinshasa many years ago, I remember there was the meme back then that was circulating that China was importing prisoners into Africa to work on construction sites. And I would go and talk to project managers and I would ask them, I said, “Do you have any prisoners? Is that something that’s actually done?” And they laughed and they said, “No, of course, that’s ridiculous because I mean the cost of bringing prisoners over from China to Africa is ridiculous and they don’t want to work very hard.” And they said, “No, that’s absurd.” And okay, so I Kind of let that go. And then I’m walking by a construction site, and you see all of these walls around the site, and you think to yourself, “Well, that’s kind of interesting.”
Okay. And then oftentimes they have little semi like guard towers and they’ll put barbed wire around it. And then the Chinese will oftentimes have their workers wear uniforms, and the Chinese will also shave their heads — Chinese workers commonly do this — and they do a lot of exercises. And then they work seven days a week oftentimes because they’re under enormous pressure to deliver projects. And so, no wonder the perception is that, well, of course, these are prisoners because who else would do that? And it’s interesting when you talk to Chinese project managers on these construction sites, they’ll tell you that no, the walls are there not to keep people in, but to make sure that people don’t steal our equipment and to keep from the outside from breaking in. Of course, the way that they do the exercises, that’s a thing that they do in lots of Asian countries.
Here in Vietnam, workers also do exercises in the morning, in Korea as well. So, these are common cultural things that are oftentimes misperceived by people in other cultures. We’re going to talk about that intersection between culture, labor, and construction today. There’s a fascinating new book that just came out — Africa’s Global Infrastructures: South–South Transformations in Practice. It’s edited by, I want to make sure I give them credit, but I’m afraid that I’m going to hack their names, but Jana Honke, Eric Cezne, and Yifan Yang. I want to give them credit for editing it. We’re going to focus today on Chapter Seven in the book that focuses specifically on construction and labor. And it was written by Mandira Bagwandeen, who’s a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, and Elisa Gambino, who’s a Hallsworth Fellow in Political Economy at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Mandira, Elisa — welcome back to the show, and congratulations on this fascinating chapter.
Elisa Gambino: Thank you so much.
Mandira Bagwandeen: Thanks.
Eric: Again. We want to start our conversation at this higher level before we get into some of the research that you did to put this together. Let’s just talk about those misperceptions that I mentioned in my experience and what I saw in Kinshasa. Those were themes that came up. Now, some of these misperceptions are, again, misunderstandings. But as you found in your research, there are some real hierarchical, there are real structural differences between the Chinese and their local African employees, particularly in countries like Kenya where you did your research, Elisa, at the Port of Lamu. So, let’s just start with both of you giving us a high-level introduction to what your chapter and what your research found in terms of the broad trends of Chin-Africa labor relations in the construction sector. Elisa, let’s start with you and then Mandira, I’d love to hear your opening remarks.
Elisa: Thank you so much and thanks for having us. I think what I find perhaps the most interesting about the Lamu Port Project is that this is a project that is financed by the Kenyan government, not by Chinese sources. And that’s why I started studying it in the first place because I was really interested in figuring out whether some of the broader dynamics that are discussed when it comes to Chinese finance infrastructure would also resonate in projects that are not effectively financed by China, but that are only constructed by Chinese companies that have won tenders. So, try and see whether some of the dynamics in terms of labor, but also managerial practices, as well as hierarchies within a deconstruction site are reproduced or whether they’re more influenced by market labor markets in the context where they are. And so in the chapter what we do is first we try and make a point for construction sites to be studied in close connection to the dynamics that they’re embedded in social relations, labor markets, but also broader political economies, both from the Chinese side but also in this case from the Kenyan side.
And we focus on the practice of living at work, which you were just talking about. So this idea that, well, not an idea, the fact that workers are living within the place where they work in little houses or temporary accommodations that are within the perimeters of the construction site. And we try to operationalize this idea by looking at the spatial material and social dynamics that characterize this in African workplace, this construction sites. And we find that there is definitely a boundary that is very clear, very demarcated — what is inside, what is outside, who is inside and outside. This is particularly evident in Lamu because of the contextual situation in which there is a lot of terrorist activity, it is very close to Somalia, and so this is a very guarded boundary as well. It’s very difficult to reach the construction site by road. And when I conducted my research there, I could only access it by boat directly from Lamu. But we tried to go beyond this idea of what is inside and what is outside the construction site and instead to try and connect broader global political economic dynamic and broader labor market dynamics with what happens on a daily basis within the construction site. And so we try to show how the workplace dynamics of the construction site are shaped by relation across multiple scales.
So, for example, we look at nontechnical hierarchy that perhaps Mandira can speak to a little bit. We look at how a space is organized and also the movement of workers, whether they have access to spaces reciprocally, but we also look at daily interactions centered around food, around commuting, as well as around brokering labor controversies, which are very frequent in the construction sites.
Mandira: I think Chinese companies, especially the kind of construction, I’d also go far to say mining companies have this reputation of building these like gated enclaves so to speak, either residential kind of corporate enclaves. And that they have their own government or governance type of models and the way of doing things that is rather detached from the society in which they operate and the kind of local economies in which they operate. And so, I think, as you mentioned, Chinese construction sites and or these Chinese enclaves have been for quite a while a lot of kind of interest and especially in terms of looking at how Chinese labor practices and labor governance, it’s kind of exported to the continent or absorbed in local communities. And Ellie, I think pointed out that I should maybe just touch on what we found that was quite prevalent in this case was the practice of kind of ethno technical hierarchy.
And this is essentially looking at how powers and privileges are unequally distributed by, in this case we could say Chinese kind of management and Chinese workers versus local Kenyan employees, both at the kind of skilled and unskilled level. And what Ellie found was that in terms of her field research, this extended to things around like who has access to things like gym equipment, kind of the standard of accommodation as well. I think she could possibly go into that a bit more. Ellie, would you want to jump in?
Elisa: Yeah, happily. I think one of the most interesting things that perhaps has been overlooked by some of the literature on construction site, or broadly labor relations, is this idea that the Chinese workers are kind of a homogeneous group, right? And they benefit equally from some of the labor conditions within the construction site. But one of the things that was very clear, living in the construction site, is that there is also a hierarchy among Chinese workers. So, managers enjoy much better housing, brick-walled housing, air conditioning, single rooms, and private bathrooms while unskilled Chinese labor is in temporary accommodations, they’re sharing rooms, they’re sharing sanitary facilities as well.
But then the conditions of Kenyan workers living accommodations are completely different, and they’re sharing with many people. There’s no air conditioning, the sanitary facilities are also shared with much more many people than the Chinese unskilled laborers. And there is a non-reciprocal access to these spaces. So, Chinese managers and foreman can just walk freely across the entire camp while Kenyan workers can only walk up to a certain point, and they cannot enter the Chinese accommodation areas. So, there’s both a hierarchical managerial structure but there’s also one that is based on more of a ethnic-based as well as the sort of level of management within the company itself.
Cobus: So, Mandira, and also Elisa, feel free to jump in, just to put this in a broader context, how different is this from other transnationally driven infrastructure work sites in Africa? How special are the Chinese sites in setting up these boundaries and maintaining these kind of relationships, and to which extent is that kind of par for the course when you are a transnational construction company working in a country like Kenya?
Elisa: Yeah, I would say there’s not much Chinese about it. It’s quite a common practice in the construction industry worldwide that people live inside the construction site, especially in large projects that also had a stake in key development agendas or national security-related infrastructure. So, these are very common practice in the construction industry worldwide and it’s particularly prominent across global south context as well — they’re living at work. I think there’s some particularities in terms of the history that living at work has within China’s political economy. It traces back to planned economy, the danwei system. So there’s a continuum there. However, the sort of living and working in the same place, sorry, working and living in the same place in, for example, a Kenyan pea farm under colonial rule or mines in South Africa during Apartheid were quite similar in terms of the organization of space as well.
Eric: Mandira, there is a perception, again, not entirely sure if it’s accurate or not, it’d be interesting to get your take on this, that working for Chinese companies, not just in Africa, but this is a perception in other regions as well, is quite difficult and that a lot of the Chinese managers are tough. There is a lot of frustration on the part of Chinese managers that they feel that they can’t get their work to work hard enough. On WeChat, in many of the posts that you see about managing Africans in particular, there is a theme of, well, Africans are lazy and they don’t want to work extra and they don’t want to eat bitter and put that extra effort the same way we, Chinese, want to do it. This is the memes that they have.
At the same time, you’ve talked about in your paper about the segregation that exists within these work sites where the Chinese will oftentimes have separate eating quarters, sleeping quarters, even their transportation to work sites is different where Chinese managers will go in cars and oftentimes local workers either have to take buses, bikes, or walk. And they also live in a very precarious relationship with their Chinese managers that if there’s any infraction, they can be terminated or fired. And so there’s a stress that exists there. Do you know how much of this is brought over from China, transported is the word that you guys use in your article, and how much of this is just the nature of working in construction in Africa today?
Mandira: Thanks, Eric. That’s a very interesting question. I think well documented and well reported, Chinese kind of work ethic and work culture is almost this putting yourself through hardships and enduring long working hours and working to deliver projects really quickly and really fast. And that doesn’t necessarily translate to every country or kind of every society where we often aren’t kind of, I would say workhorses so to speak. And I think that does prove, especially I think if you come from a society or culture that’s not set up around work or working extremely hard like the Chinese do, it can be a bit challenging, especially when you are strapped for jobs. And if your only kind of job opportunity is to get work at a Chinese construction company, you’d have to adjust to their standards and norms around work.
And I think that could be a bit challenging, especially when you consider cultural and linguistic differences. And I think it is difficult for African laborers to adjust to Chinese standards and ways of doing things. But also, I think Chinese people, especially a lot of the laborers or kind of engineers that come to Africa, as we outline in the chapter, kind of eating botanists in a way and like moving away from home, trying to build up their careers to kind of almost eventually make their way back to higher-level paying jobs in China as such. I think both are kind of enduring hardships but at different levels. And it does, I think, make it challenging when you come with certain expectations and expect locals to work like Chinese people or expect kind of the same commitment so to speak.
And we talk in the chapter about having brokers within the construction site that try to navigate these complexities and challenges between the local laborers and the Chinese managers. Ellie was lucky enough in her fieldwork to observe these interactions and how vital these brokers are in helping the locals keep their jobs, navigate language barriers and things, and as well as navigate things around like salaries, wages, and things. So, it is definitely quite a complex landscape, but somehow, even with this kind of hierarchical nature, the cog moves so to speak.
Eric: Yeah, things get done. I mean railroads are built, roads are built, hospitals are built, it’s remarkable. Cobus, we saw that when we interviewed the directors of the movie Eat Bitter, how difficult it was for the managers to overcome the cultural and linguistic barriers that Mandira is talking about. But at the end of the day, buildings actually still went up, and that was always very impressive to me.
Cobus: Yeah, certainly. Because for all of the bad things one can say about these labor relations, they also are extremely challenging to the people involved, also including the managers. It really is amazing. Elisa, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what you saw on the site when you saw these labor brokers in action. Like, who are they, what do they do? How do they do their jobs?
Elisa: Yes, absolutely. So, these are usually Kenyans who are employed as supervisors. They’re not supervising people; they’re supervising part of construction. So, they are slightly higher in the managerial scale than an unskilled laborer that’s, for example, pouring cement. However, they’re not technically supervising people. They’re supervising bits of the construction. And some of them fall into this role of brokers almost by chance because they’re often in close communication with Chinese foremen and Chinese engineers. Chinese engineers often do speak a bit of English, some of them speak really good English. They’re generally quite young around like 26, 28-year-old, while the foremen are usually men in their 40s, late 40s, and they often don’t really speak much English at all. And so these brokers almost emerge out of necessity and out of circumstance. For example, in the construction sites, the way that Lamu Port was set up, as I was there, it was the construction was ongoing 24 hours a day because there had been some delays.
So, the night shift is the one that I didn’t observe. I wasn’t observing night shifts, but what happened during the night shift is usually there was some washing with water pumps to wash the construction site and prepare it for the next day. And in the morning, because of the washing process, there would be a lot of issues, some bits had detached, things needed to be fixed. And in the early morning around six 7:00 AM that’s when a lot of the labor controversies emerged. And I remember very starkly one morning I got to the construction area with the person that I was shadowing, which was this broker, in the chapter we call him Bonnie, and I arrived with him and suddenly there’s a lot of screaming, someone’s getting fired because one part of the job that he had done the day before had been washed away during the wash [inaudible 0:22:07] process. And the Chinese manager the who is screaming at him to work faster, redo the job, is trying to just tell them to go home after they’ve finished redoing the job, then he’s getting fired.
And so Bonnie intervenes and he tries to take the Chinese manager aside. They have somewhat of a conversation which is half gestures rather than a proper interaction. And later on, one of the engineers arrives and Bonnie’s in between the engineer and the Chinese foreman who was firing this person and tries to negotiate a way around it. And so instead of firing the worker to suspend them for the day and then perhaps have them join another team. And the engineer is listening to the Chinese foreman’s perspective is listening to Bonnie, but you could tell from this interaction that he was just trying to get the worker away from this situation, move them somewhere else and just have them start their normal work routine the next day in another team, kind of move them away from the problem instead of terminating their reemployment.
When this type of interactions take place, it’s chaotic, right? So there’s lots of noise, the dredger is dying, it’s just a very busy environment. And so the screaming is not just a scream, it’s mainly because you cannot be heard because of the noise that’s around it, right? But the interaction takes place very quickly. And interestingly, Bonnie’s role is not just that of mediation, but it’s also that of almost scolding in some of the workers. So, after this interaction with the Chinese engineer, he went and talked to the person who was being fired, whose job had just been saved. And then later, he came to me and said, “Well, I told the worker, when I was talking to him, I pretended to be on the Chinese side because he needs to learn that some things need to be done a certain way otherwise, they don’t fulfill the Chinese working standards. And so I pretend to be on the Chinese side so that he learns a lesson, but obviously I’m on his side.” So, this was a quite an interesting representation for me of the type of contradictions that are also inside and obviously embedded within Bonnie’s own position as a broker, which is out of necessity, but at the same time, it involves a series of quite complex calculations in terms of how to socially mediate and negotiate quite important things such as someone’s entire employment and livelihood, right?
Eric: But he’s also financially incentivized to try and keep that worker on the job because if that worker goes, he loses money, correct?
Elisa: No, Bonnie will not be losing money in that sense. But obviously, part of his role as a broker is also that of being part of a broader group of having both Kenyan workers and Chinese workers being able to talk to him. And his position as a broker, the fact he can solve issues, does bring him financial incentives in terms of being able to negotiate salary increases for himself. So, it’s obviously not directly correlated with the fact whether this one worker gets fired, but it is correlated in or perhaps it’s related to his own salary. These increases are quite minor, but I think his social status within the major relations in the construction site is mainly what is at stake as well as, of course, the fact that he does care about hi the workers that are in this area.
Eric: Quick question about the composition of the labor force that you saw at Lamu. Again, I mentioned at the top of the show that U.S. Secretary of State stating, all the way back to Hillary Clinton in 2010 or ’11, have really used this idea that the Chinese import workers to Africa to work on construction projects. This is something that Professor Carlos Oya and Weiwei Chen at the University of London back in 2019 dispelled, looking at research in Angola and Ethiopia. Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology many years ago also found that local labor content on Chinese construction sites was in the 80% to 90%. And in fact, local labor content across the continent from research on Chinese construction sites has been one that is in the 80 to 90% in most countries.
Some countries where there is very hard to find people, it goes down into the 70%. Kenya is an interesting case because there’s an ample workforce. On the Standard Gauge Railway, again, the research came out, almost all local labor content except for skilled positions. What was your observation at the Port of Lamu in terms of were there Chinese workers pushing wheelbarrows as they say, unskilled Chinese workers, or was all the unskilled jobs, were they being done by, locals?
Elisa: Yes, at the time I was there in February, March 2019, there were around 1,200 workers in the construction site. Around a thousand of them were Kenyan workers, and the remaining were Chinese workers. There had been a fluctuation in the sense that at the beginning of the project, there were more than 200 Chinese workers, but then these had phased out once the sort of setting up part of the job had been completed. As per contractual condition, 75% of labor had to be local, so this was likely above the contractual agreement between the Kenyan government and the Chinese company. But obviously, it’s not just a question of quantity of jobs available, it’s also obviously a dimension of a question of quality. And out of the workers, the skilled labor was Chinese.
Eric: But unskilled labor was local, right? Or were there unskilled Chinese workers there, too?
Elisa: No, so the unskilled labor was local labor. And there was also different levels of skills within that. So, there’s people who train on the job, within three dive, and they do what is unskilled labor in the construction site. There’s some things that require more training and perhaps previous skills like operating cranes and operating machinery, those were also jobs that were being done by local workers, but they were still considered tech technically unskilled. But so it’s training that they probably received in the past in other construction sites. And this is a trend that I observed in the fact that those on the higher spectrum of salary and operating machinery usually worked for other Chinese construction sites or for Japanese contractors.
Cobus: Mandira, in the bigger context of how construction is evolving in Africa, obviously the Chinese contractors remain very strong players. There’s somewhat of a resurgence from some Western actors to move back into an infrastructure space in Africa, but also what we are really seeing is the emergence of a whole set of other global south contractors — Turkey, United, Arab Emirates, India, like similar kind of actors kind of moving into that space. In looking at the Chinese experience and the Kenya and Chinese experience around these kind of large-scale construction sites, what kind of conclusions are you drawing around how we should think about south-south relationships in the construction sector in Africa?
Mandira: That’s definitely a question I think you could have a good cup of tea discussing. The short answer is, as we know, every region or every country has different labor practices, different forms of labor governance. And I think when you have an entity from let’s say China operating in countries, such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, what-have-you, to see how they kind of work practices and labor practices are I think imported, and to a sense embedded or tends to embed it, is I think what’s interesting. I mean, I don’t follow the kind of construction market very closely, but I think looking at say the political economy or the economic of construction, I think especially zoning in on Kenya and Kenya’s construction industry, it kind of reflects a significant change in employment practices in the global construction sector.
There’s kind of reduced permanent labor forces and more this use of temporary workers. And what I’ve read in the literature, especially in the global south, is this kind of supplying companies, especially in the informal setup is with kind of these construction gangs that are headed by kind of a construction gang leader that will kind of do the work of gathering laborers, setting up kind of deals between the contractor and the laborers, and serve as the kind of recruiter so to speak, and sometimes supervisor for these construction, I’d say construction gangs. And I think in the global south, that’s been practiced or this practice is quite common, and it’s been seen in… observed in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Nepal. I also think in South America, in Mexico, in Brazil.
I think commonalities can be drawn, but also differences can be drawn across different construction markets and industries in the global south. And I think it’s definitely, as you said, observing the entry of Turkey, India as well. It would be good to get to do more kind of a wider kind of, or a comparative case study of let’s say Chinese construction companies and that of Turkish construction companies and how they go about engaging with local labor and seeing what are the commonalities and differences.
Eric: Let’s close our discussion reflecting back on the chapter and the research that you did. I had a difficult time when I finished the chapter, trying to think if the contribution of Chinese construction companies to things like what’s going on in Lamu is a net positive or it’s a net negative because it seemed to be a very complex mix of both. On the one hand, infrastructure is getting built, but on the other hand, there are these very, very deep-seated asymmetrical segregations and injustices, and almost a certain degree of discrimination that exists within the hierarchies in these construction sites that make it kind of… ooh, that doesn’t feel like it’s very positive and it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of skills transfer that’s going on. And it makes me wonder that two or three decades now into the modern Chinese engagement in Africa era, we don’t see a stronger role for Kenyan construction companies who should be doing a lot of this work or Namibian or in other countries. For example, in South Africa, the Chinese don’t do any construction because South African construction firms are quite robust. So, could you help us understand, at the end of this chapter, at the end of your research, what should we take away from this complex relationship that both of you explored? Elisa, let’s go with you first and then Mandira.
Elisa: That’s a very good question. I think what one observes, even zooming out of the case of Lamu, it is a very difficult context in terms of skill training, skill transfer, technology transfer, something that has been looked at a lot in the literature as well and it’s very difficult to see the results of the skill transfer, whether it has happened. Overall, I think it’s quite clear as others like [inaudible 0:33:58] have said, to see that the construction boom, the China-led construction boom has really done very little to integrate African contractors into this China-led infrastructure network. In terms of providing job opportunities, it is, of course, I imagine very welcome in any context in terms of increasing employment. I feel one of the points that perhaps I don’t think we’ve had much space even in the chapter to explore is this idea of then who is being hired.
And so putting closer look in terms of whether local content regulations are being fulfilled, both in terms of personnel but also materials. And at the same time ensuring that there is a much more nuanced understanding of what local content means. Because if the requirement is, for example, to have 75% Kenyan labor, anyone with a Kenyan citizenship is a local worker in the eyes of the contract and the Chinese company. However, when this infrastructure being built in perhaps historically marginalized regions of a country or politically, areas where there’s a strong political opposition, this can also create tensions because populations indigenous to the regions are feeling like they’re not reaping the benefits. And this, it becomes very difficult to then change the contract once it’s been signed. So, I think sort of takeaway for me is the fact that there is a question to be answered on whether skill training and technology transfer is actually taking place.
And from my research and observations, the answer is not really. And, on the other hand, requires the need from host governments to be much more specific in terms of what they need and want to get out of these type of agreements with Chinese construction companies.
Mandira: I think the case reflects almost like this microcosm or I think it’s reflective of China-Africa relations at large and specifically the asymmetrical kind of power balance between the two regions. And specifically, I think it also speaks to questions the role of African agency, specifically the government or the Kenyan government, as Ellie mentioned, this project is driven by the Kenyan government. So, what was their role in advocating for labor standards or specifically specific salary brackets to be agreed? I think we need to also question African agency around how are African governments, first, African governments are allowing foreign entities and companies to come and build infrastructure to make use of local labor, but what kind of checks and balances are they putting in place to ensure that these entities are adhering to national labor practices or local labor practices and avoiding the exploitation of workers and things.
I think the takeaway I take here is the need to bring in more of like a explorational examination of the role of African governments or whether that be at a local or national level in promoting the interests of their laborers.
Eric: The book is Africa’s Global Infrastructure: South-South Transformations in Practice. You can actually go and get it on Amazon. It’s releasing on Wednesday, May 1st. and Cobus, I always say this every time we have a book written by a bunch of academics, this one is actually affordable. $30 is the paper book, $19 is the Kindle. It’s not these absurd $300 for book prices that are out there. You’re going to want to forward when you get the book, and I do encourage you to go get it, go to Chapter Seven, and you’re going to see this wonderful chapter on A Global Sense of Workplace: Labor Relations and Sino-African Construction Sites by Mandira Bagwandeen, who’s a lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Stellenbosch University in Cape Town, and Elisa Gambino, a Hallsworth Fellow and Political Economy at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester, who did all that exciting fieldwork in Kenya at Lamu.
Mandira, Elisa — congratulations again on the chapter and the contribution to this discussion that is so important and one that I have a feeling, 10 years from now, we’re still going to be talking about, but it’s really important to have these conversations today, and we really appreciate your time.
Elisa: Thank you so much for having us. Always a pleasure.
Mandira: Thanks a lot Eric. Thanks Cobus. It’s been great
Eric: Cobus, so interesting and so exciting for us to have this conversation. Again, going all the way back, it brings me back to 2010, 2011 when we were talking about these same things. But let me put you in the role of president or prime minister of a country in Africa. And by the way, this could be a country anywhere. Okay. Your legislature has given you money now to build a port, a railroad, something, okay? You have two years to get it done. So, the Chinese will come up with a bid that says, “We will get it done in a year and a half. We will bring in our own suppliers, we will bring in our own managerial talent, we’ll work with brokers to get local labor, and bam, we’re done.” Right? Or do you hire local firms that may not have had as much experience building large-scale infrastructure the way the Chinese have, but you’re contributing to your local economy more, you are diverting those funds domestically and not to foreign suppliers like the Chinese?
Your political future in many respects is on the line depending on whether or not you can deliver this big piece of infrastructure. And let me remind you that it is not easy to deliver this infrastructure. I sit in a city here in Ho Chi Minh City where they started a subway 12 years ago and it still is not done. Okay. Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, what do you do?
Cobus: This is a tough question, but I think the direction I would go in, but I can imagine I would hit a lot of barriers, but the direction I would go in would be kind of a hybrid between the two where the project is run by the Chinese, but one is an interventionist African government in the sense that one sets up some kind of mechanism for more formal, more implemented training of the local companies, whatever you select a group of local companies and you kind of embed them with the Chinese. And then you hunt among your recent graduates from China, your African students who had been studying in China to set up a translation and interpreting team to facilitate the interactions between the two. That would be roughly my approach. But I can foresee many people pushing back, particularly the Chinese who would be saying like, “Look, this is going to slow everything down, it’s going to make everything very complicated. This is not how we do business.”
I can imagine that it would get a lot of pushback, but I think this kind of proactive kind of, in the first place, just drawing on the chapter and knowing how complicated the work is being made through language barriers. I mean, that’s the first thing. But then also to just be very cognizant of the need for once that project is done, it’s not enough for the company to just back up and leave and take all the skills with them. There has to be skills that stay in Africa. And that just has to be the bottom line I think for African governments. And that, of course, makes things a lot more complicated, but it also the key to making them more valuable, I think.
Eric: Well, of course, the irony here was, and this is something that Professor Deborah Brautigam talks about in her book, what was it? The Dragon’s Gift? Was that the book?
Cobus: That was the first one, yes.
Eric: That was the first one, yeah. And she talks a lot about the skills transfers in the ’70s and ’80s by the Japanese to China, and how the Chinese later in the ‘80s and’90s required all the joint ventures and foreign engagements and foreign partnerships to… they mandated skills transfers. So, this is a topic by the way that the Chinese are intimately familiar with because they, themselves, in many ways perfected it, but yet don’t necessarily do that when they go abroad. The problem is that I can foresee is that the Chinese would say, “Sure, no problem, we’re going to do more skills transfer, we’ll get those graduates, we’ll set up institutes, but it’s going to take more time and more money to do your project.”
Cobus: Yeah, I can totally imagine, and probably for a good reason.
Eric: And for a good reason. And that’s where I can imagine that coming back to domestic politics, that a lot of those folks in the legislature or in the factions that control the money for this infrastructure say, “You know what? I don’t really care. I just want to get this road done, or I just want to get this bridge done. That’s my biggest priority because I’m going to run and my power base is going to be impacted by whether or not I deliver this infrastructure.”
Cobus: Definitely. I mean, I can definitely see that, and I think that is the calculus among many African decision makers. On the counterpoint, I would say that integrating this kind of local stakeholdership more and being able to setting up something where there’s more skills transfer and better communication will probably end up saving time in the short term by just avoiding kind of labor disputes and local community disputes, which we’ve also seen is a big problem in Chinese work sites. But in the slightly longer term, it will have political payoff, particularly if that site, that work site happens to be in some kind of voting community where you can demonstrate, for example, local employment benefits. So, it’s not necessarily that the benefits and the costs are not only one side, they kind of happen on both sides depending on whichever one of the approaches one takes. But yeah, I can definitely see that it would probably slow down proceedings.
Eric: So, we’ve talked a lot about the linguistic deficiencies of the Chinese managers, but we didn’t talk as much about the cultural deficiencies as well. And if you read and write Chinese or read Chinese at least, WeChat is an absolute goldmine for first-person narratives about what it’s like for Chinese construction managers to work in Africa. It’s amazing how many people just go up onto WeChat groups and share their experiences in these very open almost diary-style posts that they write. And one of the things that you see consistently in post after post, and I’ve been looking at these four years, is that a lot of the managers coming to Africa from China are coming from very rural parts of China, where they’ve not only not had any experience outside the country, they’ve not had much experience outside their own province or township.
And so many of them are very unsophisticated about cross-cultural management. And I think that also plays into it that they just have no experience in how to deal with people from such diverse backgrounds when they arrive in countries in Africa. But also, again, this is the same challenge in Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia. We’ve been talking all week about workers in Pakistan given the violence that’s been afflicting Chinese workers there. And so that I think is also another part of it. But the interesting part of that, Cobus, which is also a parallel to this, is that there is a whole culture of Chinese managers now who’ve spent the past 20 years working all over the world-building infrastructure. And we talk about that in the context of the U.S. and Europe now that want to start building infrastructure in places like Africa and in the Americas where there isn’t a whole class of people who have experience working in frontier countries in some of the most difficult circumstances and environments you can possibly imagine to be architects and project managers and civil engineers. We don’t have those people readily available.
In fact, we have labor shortages in most of Europe, Japan, and the United States for those jobs. And so the Chinese have this whole class of people who’ve spent decades now working in these environments, but oftentimes many of them are culturally illiterate when it comes to the particular country that they’re working in. And I think that’s a very big problem as well.
Cobus: It’s a really big problem because it also feeds into kind of unhelpful narratives, I think, on both sides, or a lack of communication, particularly around labor issues. So, as Elisa and Mandira were mentioning, there is this whole cult of eating bitter, this idea of overcoming hardship, and a very strongly embedded narrative within China about how Chinese people overcome hardship for success, right? And that in lots of ways is true. It really reflects how unpleasant a lot of that is, but it is also self-romanticizing in really key ways. And what it doesn’t show and I think they were really smart in their chapter to point that out is that the eating bitter narrative now comes with a very strong payoff, right?
Like you eat bitter for a while and then you actually, particularly in places like Africa, and then that actually like speeds up your advancement up the ladder by moving to, say, you do one project in Africa, then, as one person they were saying, like then moved to Sri Lanka and then finally moved to China. So, move up that kind of hierarchy. That is not true for African workers. Chinese narratives of eating bitter is useless in the African labor context because these workers are not moving up anyway, right? They’re stuck structurally. They’re so structurally stuck that they can’t even freely work from one end of the work site to the other if they wanted to.
In that sense, from an African perspective, these labor systems seem, even though they are run by other people, in lots of structural ways, they seem straight out of colonial times, right? And with that, these kind of structural ideas of like, you are a certain person, and that means you can’t move up beyond a certain level. Those are two very valid and very powerful labor narratives, right? But they are not narrating with each other, they’re not communicating with each other. The two narratives are never really put into communication with each other and questioning each other. And I think that is a great example of the lapses of the limits of Chinese infrastructure provision in Africa. This kind of Chinese economic engagement in Africa is transformative in some ways, but in other ways, it’s really not. And there, I think we need to have a, a much kind of more robust conversation.
Eric: Let’s just be very clear here that that very strict Chinese work ethic of eating bitter and those tough hours, those long hours, seven days a week, there’s a lot of resistance to that in China where people are rebelling particularly young people, against the 9-9-6 culture, which is you work from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, six days a week. And in fact, there’s a whole movement now called the lying flat movement or tangping, where people, and particularly young people are just revolting against this type of abuse and these brutal hours. It also should be noted, and I used to work in China and I experienced for a brief period this tough, tough culture where they call you at 1:30 in the morning and say, “I need something done on…” this is one 30 on Saturday morning, and you have to get it done by nine o’clock Sunday morning.
And you think to yourself, this is not efficient or effective in terms of productivity. And so, all of these extra hours that they push don’t necessarily lead to better outcomes, and that is being pushed back in China domestically. So, what we’re seeing in many of the frustrations that we see in African countries about working under Chinese managerial conditions are also being resisted back home as well. I think that’s just important context to put there. How have you looked at this issue over the past 15, 20 years and how it’s evolved? Do you think that we’ve made any progress with it or is the conversation that we had today the same conversation we had in 2011?
Cobus: I think there’s been some advances. I think we now think a lot more critically around the broader conversation of governance around these things, I think a lot more critically about worker welfare and about community welfare around work sites. I think that conversation has moved forward a lot. We’ve also seen the birth of an entire scholarly conversation, trying to kind of work out what African agency actually means in this context. What a lot of that is shown is kind of real lapses and real problems on the side of African governments, both local governments and national governments. Those lapses are old, right? Kind of. We’ve been living with them since 2011 and long before that. And so, to a certain extent, those problems are still the same. But I think the way we talk about them, we’ve gained some tools I think to analyze them, but in lots of ways those are not necessarily being echoed on the African managerial side.
I don’t know that for all of the African complaints around these issues, I don’t know that African governments have become more hard-nosed or that much more hard-nosed or particularly have developed that many more tools to particularly kind of deal with these problems. In a lot of ways, I think the problems are still quite similar, but I think the way we talk about them, the way we understand them and the way we kind of analyze them have moved forward. So, it’s a somewhat an unsatisfying situation, I think.
Eric: Unsatisfying, but at least there’s some progress, and that is encouraging in that sense. And this discussion that is happening and that there’s books like this that are still coming out is also very encouraging as well because it’s a really important topic. Chinese construction is still very, very omnipresent throughout Africa. Despite the slowdown in Chinese lending, Chinese contracts, EPC contracts, these are the projects that are being done and funded by either the World Bank or by host governments, and the Chinese contractors themselves are doing it is still very important though. So, even Chinese policy bank, lending’s gone down, and we’re not seeing things like the standard gauge railway anymore. As Elisa pointed out, the port of Lamu was financed by the Kenyans and constructed by the Chinese, same with the standard gauge railway in Tanzania — paid for by Tanzania, built by, at least one part of it, by the Chinese.
And many General Electric projects, these are private companies that are outsourced to Chinese contractors in Africa as well. So, it’s very, very much a timely and relevant issue and we’re so glad that Madeira and Elisa were able to join us to shed some light on that.
Cobus, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of the show. Let’s leave it there. If you’d like to join this kind of conversation every single day and you really want to understand what the Chinese are doing in Africa and other parts of the global south, then you’re going to want to subscribe to China Global South and also just to get our daily newsletter, to try our AI engine, to see our exclusive videos for subscribers, and join our global community of readers. We serve more than 25 governments. We have many of the top universities in the world that subscribe to us. So, if you want to be part of what they are reading, go to chinaglobalsouth.com/subscribe. You’ll get one month for free. We’ve made rates very, very affordable, so it’s accessible to everybody.
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