It was not that long ago that entire neighborhoods in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou were overflowing with African migrants. Although there are no precise figures, scholars estimated that between 20,000-100,000 African immigrants used to lived in Guangzhou, or as it is glibly known as “chocolate city.”
Today, those same neighborhoods, once filled with halal food shops and other stores that catered to China’s African migrants, have been completely transformed, or as the Chinese government prefers to characterize it as “beautified.” Across Guangzhou, there are ever-mounting pressures on African migrants that are prompting more and more to just pack up and leave.
Although Guangzhou’s urban planning agenda and tighter immigration controls may be partially responsible for the displacement of the African migrant community, experts believe that the PRC’s changing economy is more likely the main reason as to why the African population is rapidly disappearing. The harsh reality is that it is a lot more expensive to do business in China today than it was just a couple of years ago. With the standard of living in many of China’s major cities comparable to those of in many parts of Europe, it is much more expensive to live and do business in places like Guangzhou today than it was even just a couple of years ago.
Hong Kong-based journalist Jenni Marsh has been covering the African communities in China for several years, first for the South China Morning Post and now as a producer for CNN International. She recently published a multi-media report on the growing number of African migrants who have given up on the Chinese dream. Jenni joins Eric & Cobus to discuss what’s behind the new phenomenon known as “U-Turning” where thousands of African migrants are leaving China to return home.
Show Notes:
- CNN.com: The African Migrants Giving Up on the Chinese Dream by Jenni Marsh
- Quartz: African migrants are returning from China and telling their compatriots not to go by Lily Kuo
- UTurn.Asia: Gambian Migrants Experience in Asia by Heidi Østbø Haugen and Manon Diederich
About Jenni Marsh:
Jenni Marsh is a Features producer on CNN’s Global Projects team, covering the Asia Pacific region from Hong Kong. Her work has been published by CNN, the South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera, the Daily Mail, the Independent, and the Guardian. In 2015, she won a Society of Publishers in Asia award for Excellence in Feature writing for her report on Afro-Chinese marriages in Guangzhou. An alumna of the Wits University China Africa Reporting project, she continues to research China-Africa relations from a human interest perspective.
