Zanzibar and its Chinese communities

Abstract

Zanzibar hosts three different groups of Chinese: the so‐called huaqiao community with beginnings that can be traced to the 1930s; the government‐sent teams of experts who since the revolution of 1964 have consolidated the links to the People's Republic of China (PRC); and a new wave of business people since the late 1990s, individual migrants who engage in various trades and generally are very mobile. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Zanzibar in 2001–2004, I explore the backgrounds of these communities and their social relations, as expressed through kinship ties, businesses, medical services, food exchanges and other means of interaction. With few exceptions, members of the three groups were not much interested in increasing relations between each other. They represent different economic positions and wealth, and different allegiances to the local community and to China. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Migrants chinois au Mali : une pluralité de mondes sociaux

“…Les travaux d'E.Hsu à Zanzibar (Hsu, 2007) montrent bien comment ce processus a orienté l'évolution de la population chinoise, la différenciation croissante des groupes qui la composent.…”

“…L'importance des cadres sociaux locaux de l'installation a été soulignée par certains auteurs (Waldinger et Tseng, 1992 ;Hsu, 2007) : l'histoire des flux migratoires chinois dans le pays d'accueil considéré, l'économie locale, les formes urbaines, les politiques publiques marquent le développement des réseaux migratoires et les stratégies des migrants. Toutefois la multiplicité des interactions avec les groupes sociaux « indigènes » est rarement prise en considération 1 .…”

Chinese Migrants in Africa as New Agents of Development? An Analytical Framework

“…Often speaking different languages, let alone identifying as a coherent group, Chinese in Africa have flexible identities and generate greater or lesser senses of community among themselves depending on a range of factors (Wilhelm, 2006;Hsu, 2007;Ho, 2008). Clans and associations organised along the lines of dialect groups further exacerbated the problem.…”

“…Between the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s (with the exception of the Cultural Revolution), at least 150 000 Chinese technical assistants were dispatched to Africa (ECOWAS-SWAC/OECD, 2006). Although the numbers of aid workers was not huge and many stayed only temporarily, a significant number of workers stayed on (Hsu, 2007) to engage in commercial activities. At the same time, the perception of Overseas Chinese shifted from being seen as traitors to the new vanguards of Third World nationalism (Thuno, 2001), and migrants were now freer to engage in tangible activities linking them to home in the form of remittances and charity (Young and Shih, 2003).…”

“…Catering has partly grown out of retailing, but also to service the growing Chinese populations in Africa's capital cities and resource frontiers. In terms of medical practitioners, Hsu (2007) shows how in Tanzania/Zanzibar, some Chinese doctors, who had worked for aid teams in the 1970s, stayed on to set up private practices using both Chinese and 'western' medical technologies.…”