[Research] Global Change… International Migration in China: African Migrants in Guangzhou & Foshan >>EXCERPT<<

By Tabea Bork-Hüffer, Birte Rafflenbeul, Frauke Kraas and Zhigang Li (2014) Megacities

Micro-review: This article puts forward the not-so-fresh idea that Africans are moving away from Guangzhou and into Foshan – as there they find less document checks and laxer overstaying sanctions. I’m not so sure about when the article was written, though. At times it appears to have been written before 2010, although it was only recently published (2014). For those new to the topic of ‘foreigners in China’, this article presents a brief literature review and a historical overview of Guangzhou’s (and the PRD region) urban developments. Two interesting points made in the article are: a) that more attention needs to be paid to how the notion of ‘waishi‘ (a term referring to China’s strategy to deal with the ‘foreign’) influences/determines the (un)desirability of certain types of foreigners; and, b) how the notion of the ‘foreign/outsider’ is routinely deployed to highlight the ‘otherness’ of the non-Chinese, thus hampering any possible integration of those ‘fundamentally different’ into Chinese society. Moreover, the authors claim to have demonstrated that there are ‘illegal migrants without a valid visa or passport’ in the city, who did not enter  the country illegally, but that were ‘most probably only pushed into illegality by the tightening of entry regulations’ (p.149) – these are not new findings, however. Issues of (im)mobility and (un)documented African presence have been previously discussed by Haugen, 2012 and Lan, 2014, amongst others. Finally, on a slightly negative note, this is yet one more article that uncritically reproduces rumours about a figure of 200,000 ‘illegal’ Africans in the city (p.140). Rating: ★★★✩✩✩