A Chinese Ethnographer in DR Congo – Part 1

Why would a Chinese PhD student choose to conduct anthropological research in Congo? How did he secure access to the field? Do Chinese-Congolese couples exist, considering the “self-segregation” of the Chinese in Africa? How does a Chinese ethnographer navigate his identity and positionality with both Congolese and Chinese informants in the field?

In a series of four blog posts, Cai Chen, a PhD student at the Université libre de Bruxelles, provides insights from his ethnographic fieldwork experiences in the course of his ongoing doctoral research on Chinese-Congolese couples residing in Congo.

A Chinese Ethnographer in DR Congo: Reflections on the Field and Fieldwork

[Part 1] Expatriation in Africa: The Genesis of a Research Project

I doubted that it was unusual for them to see a Chinese in Congo or travelling to Congo in my case, as David van Reybrouck ironically claimed that “[a] generation is growing up in Kinshasa today for whom a European is more exotic than a Chinese”.¹ Moreover, I used to work and live in West Africa (i.e., Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger) during 2016 and 2019. Based on my previous experiences, I knew that there was a large number of Chinese in the African continent, and it should also be the case in the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter ‘Congo’). However, I kept asking myself, “Why was it still unusual for the Congolese diaspora to see me there—travelling to Congo from Brussels—and what did they think of me as a visibly Chinese among them?”

On board, I was the only Chinese, indeed the only Asian-looking passenger on the plane. However, I had not expected to meet many of my compatriots, as I knew that Brussels is not a popular transit hub for passengers from China to Africa, compared to Addis Ababa and Istanbul among others. There may also be the impact of China’s then zero-COVID policy until early 2023, but at the time it was much less difficult to leave China than to enter. Unlike previous trips that I had made to Africa as an expatriate working for a Chinese company, this time I went to Congo to conduct a pilot fieldwork for my PhD research project. I was a doctoral student in social anthropology at a Belgian university. As the plane slowly took off, I felt excited to be returning to Africa with a new role and the opportunity to discover another country, but without the fear, worry, and anxiety I had when I travelled abroad for the first time in my life at the age of 21 from Beijing (China) to Bamako (Mali) via Istanbul (Turkey).

Living and working in Africa was probably the most important turning point in my earlier life. Although I did not make a fortune there, after three years I was able to realize my dream of studying in Europe in an unexpected way. However, the influence of the material aspect of this experience was incomparable to that of the social environment in which I lived and the people with whom I interacted. It was in Mali that I began to pay attention to and became interested in the interpersonal relationships between people with different phenotypic traits (such as skin colour) and from different ethnic or racial backgrounds. Because of the classic Chinese pop song “Descendants of the Dragon” (longde chuanren), I always believed that I had “black eyes, black hair, and ‘yellow’ skin” like other Chinese. However, I was extremely confused when Malian children kept shouting “tubabu” (“white people” in the local language Bambara) at me as I walked through the streets of Bamako. In the same way, I learnt the equivalent term “nassara” in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). But I also heard the locals call me “petit Chinois” (little Chinese) instead. I have been asking myself and my local friends ever since: “How could I be mistaken for a white person? I am actually a ‘yellow’ person, and I look so Chinese, even with slanted eyes.”

Studying social sciences in the superdiverse Europe (respectively in France, Romania, Spain and now Belgium) has brought me into a ‘new world’ and led me to many reflections about myself, my past, and the society. Taking my own “racial learning”² as an example, I have always been proud of being of the ‘yellow race’ (with different meanings in Mandarin) since my childhood because of the common mythical belief of the yellow lineage—we, Han Chinese, are descendants of the Yellow Emperor. Yellow was also the exclusive colour of the emperor in ancient China, representing power and majesty. Thus, in the Chinese context, ‘yellow’ transcends the simplistic phenotypical notion of skin colour. However, in the European context, ‘race’ is such a slippery term, and it seems politically incorrect to continue to be proud of my ‘race’. ‘Yellow’ evokes connotations of the “yellow peril”, a racist colour metaphor that portrays Asian people as a threat to the West.

Scholars in the North tend to conceptualise ‘race’ from the experiences of predominantly white societies. Why was I happy to be ‘yellow’ in China but not in Europe? Why could I be considered as part of the Whites in Africa? How do Africans perceive the Chinese and their ‘differences’ from ‘real’ Whites? It was with the great curiosity about the ideologies behind all these white-black-yellow encounters, that I decided to dedicate my self-initiated doctoral research to Sino-African ethnoracial dynamics in postcolonial Africa. Since I am studying in Belgium, which has historical links with Congo, and my supervisor specializes in conjugal mixedness, I chose to focus on a specific case study of Sino-Congolese intimate relationships, using the family as a primary site for exploring people-to-people interactions with China’s growing presence in Congo.

References:

1. David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garrett, Fourth edition (London: HarperCollins, 2014), 533.
2. Shanshan Lan, Diaspora and Class Consciousness Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago (New York: Routledge, 2012), 5–7.

* Cai Chen is grateful to Prof. Katrien Pype (KU Leuven), coordinator of the Congo Research Network, for her kind invitation and invaluable comments and editing suggestions. These blog posts have been adapted into a methodology note in French, published in the issue n° 288 of the journal Suds : Géographies critiques, perspectives des Suds.