Suchergebnisse

The 21st Century era of globalization has opened up many investment alternatives for Africa. This book examines the role of FDI in Africa's socio-economic development with reference to Europe and two economic powers in Asia - China and India.

"While there is much discussion on Africa-China relations, the focus tends to lean more on the Chinese presence in Africa than on the African presence in China. This book focuses on analyzing this new Diaspora and is the first book-length study of the process of Africans travelling to China and forming communities there. Based on innovative intermingling of qualitative and quantitative research methods involving prolonged interaction with approximately 800 Africans across six main Chinese cities--Guangzhou, Yiwu, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Macau--sociolinguistic and sociocultural profiles are constructed to depict the everyday life of Africans in China. The study provides insights into understanding issues such as why Africans go to China, what they do there, how they communicate with their Chinese hosts, what opportunities and problems they encounter in their China sojourn, and how they are received by the Chinese state. Beyond these methodological and empirical contributions, the book also makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a crosscultural bridge theory of migrant-indigene relations, arguing that Africans in China act as sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural bridges linking Africa to China. This approach to the analysis of Diaspora communities has consequences for crosscultural and crosslinguistic studies in an era of globalization."--Publisher's description

No one knows the exact amount of remittances Africans send home, since not all of this goes through official channels. World Bank figures show that remittances to different regions in Africa hover between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), with West Africa receiving around 4 per cent of its GDP in remittances. Total remittances to Africa stood at $41.6 billion in 2011, while in 2012 the figure rose to $60 billion. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThis article analyses an emerging African trading community in Guangzhou, China. It is argued that migrant communities such as this one act as linguistic, cultural and economic bridges between their source communities and their host communities, even in the midst of tensions created by incidents such as immigration restrictions and irregularities. Socio-linguistic and socio-cultural profiles of this community are built, through questionnaire surveys and interviews, to address issues such as why Africans go to Guangzhou, which African countries are represented, what languages are spoken there, how communication takes place between Africans and Chinese, what socio-economic contributions Africans in Guangzhou are making to the Chinese economy, and how the state reacts to this African presence. Following from the argument that this community acts as a bridge for Africa–China relations it is suggested that both the Chinese and the African governments should work towards eliminating the harassment of members in this community by many Guangzhou law enforcement officials and instead harness the contributions of this community to promote Africa–China socio-economic relations.

Even though many African and Asian countries share a common history of European colonialism and thus a model of economic development shaped within the aegis of center-periphery analysis, many Asian countries have been able to ride through the burden of center-periphery economics and built more successful political economies than most African countries. This state of affairs has often led many African analysts to point to Asian success stories like China and South Korea for comparative analysis and often see these Asian countries as models of socio-economic and socio-cultural success to emulate. In particular, Africans in the Diaspora, especially Africans in China, tend to compare very frequently the socio-economic and socio-cultural conditions of their host countries with those of their source countries. This paper outlines and discusses how a group of Africans living in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia see Korea and Korean culture through the prism of Korean television dramas, which constitute a popular cultural phenomenon among Hong Kong/Asian youths. Through qualitative and quantitative survey methods, participant-observation, and questionnaire surveys, the paper reports on how African community members of Hong Kong and others think of Koreans. We show that Africans draw a lot of comparisons between Korean and African ways of conceptualizing the world.