Usually when I read books that aim to discuss Africa as the next continent in line for whatever, I roll my eyes. Many of the well meaning writers who embark on such expedition sit in their Western bubble and think what worked for Europe or North America should work in Africa.
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Irene's book is refreshingly different. Not only has she researched the economic history of major African Industralised countries, she has lived in a few and visited many other for research purposes. She truly has a global perspective of things.

As she herself is Asian and from China, a country that only 25 years ago was poorer than Kenya and Nigeria; she is able to relate to a number of economic downturns that have plagued many African countries.

She educates the reader and tells practical stories of how China became the first developing country to become a global leader in the world.

She also shows the correlation between factories and development; and her theory is that small incremental changes will lead to development that will enable Africa as a continent become the Powerhouse that it is primed to be.

As a book, it's a good initiative, for its optimistic portrayal of one giant country's business ventures in one giant continent but my problems with the book are aplenty: the author uses Nigeria and Africa's economics almost interchangeably - Nigeria is a a country, Africa is a continent. The experience of one part cannot and is not the experience and reality of the whole. After half of the book has gone through Chinese businessmen in Nigeria and their local workers (even though no definite statistic is given on Chinese investment versus that of other countries in Nigeria itself), Kenya features mid-way in the book and that too as an example of how new ideas are being turned into manufactured goods to China ('8% of Africa's exports to China versus 30% of Chinese products to Africa are manufactured goods') - is that different from other goods sent to and from other countries?

I also do not see how the experience of a Nigerian factory worker is so drastically different than that of any other factory worker in any other poverty-stricken country where literacy job options are limited and how the impact of Chinese presence is any different than that of any other foreigner who has opened an avenue for jobs, profits and circling of money locally.

Nor how desired actions for sustained growth are any different in any African country versus any other country in the world.

And I fail to see China's responsibility in eradicating HIV/AIDS in Namibia or anywhere else. China is not responsible for the 'human and social needs' of Africa - and I don't know how much has China donated to the $30billion Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, malaria and GAVI in Africa, but the book mentions dangers of following China and India as examples for nurturing pharma industry because their internal policies made drugs available locally, cheaply, though not of a high quality and stopped entry of foreign drugs that could've saved lives. What I did not understand is how a Chinese businessman planning a pharma plant in Ethiopia is significant - he thought he'd make money, Glaxo-Kline obviously thought they won't.

Also, for such a resource-rich continent like Africa, all that the book shows is good honest hard-working Chinese interest in entrepreneurship.. The political dimension of economic expansion by countries like U.S., Russia, China, etc. and the historical relationship different African countries have had with such and other 'ruling' countries like UK, France, Italy, Portugal etc. is not given. What has happened in Sudan (and is now happening in South Sudan) is the off-shoot of vested foreign interests in local resources. War created locally as a means to an end. A stricken country is not good for factories though it may very well be the only way to grab oil, diamonds, gold.

How is American or EU or UK industrial investment in various African countries different from that of Chinese? Are more average Chinese seeking Africa as a dream continent than Americans or Britishers? What about nationals from other under-developed or developing countries? After all, the author also says that the Chinese presence in Nigeria is not like that of a colonial power.

And what also remains unexplored is, that apart from providing money and opportunity for the locals, what impact do Chinese businessmen / workers have on the local culture and discourse, if any.

The biggest surprise? That Chinese (in China) did not own TV or cars in 80s! And that (irony of ironies) China used to be poorer than Kenya, Lesotho and Nigeria.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2135286368

AN INTERESTING INSIGHT INTO CHINESE FACTORIES IN AFRICA

This is my first NetGalley review and I’m really excited about it! This website gives you the chance to apply for reading ebooks for free before they are published so that publishers and authors can receive early feedbacks. I applied for The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun and I was really delighted to find out that my request had been accepted!

I chose this book because I had already heard about Chinese investments in Africa and I wanted to know more about this challenging topic.

Irene Yuan Sun was born in China and raised in the United States. She studied at Harvard and spent some time working in Africa.

The Next Factory of the World deals with the stories of several private Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa, industrialization in that continent and the role played by China.

The author was born in China and lived there until she was six. At that time, cars were not so common in her country as in America. She was more familiar with buses and bicycles. In the early 1990s, almost nobody had a car in China. The author’s hometown is Changchun, near the frontier with eastern Russia. In 1991 she sat in a car for the first time. It belonged to a family friend who was a government official. Chinese streets were full of bicycles in the early 1990s, but now are full of cars (and pollution). The author proudly announces that 750 million people were lifted out of poverty.

Irene Yuan Sun grew up in the United States and after college she went to teach in Namibia, in southwestern Africa. She was a volunteer teacher and her subjects were math and English. Her pupils were the children of subsistence farmers. In Namibia she met a self-made Chinese man who was looking for a wife, but most Chinese women didn’t want to live in Africa. He tried to impress the author, but she realized that, despite being rich, he was illiterate. Why didn’t he want to marry an African woman? Why do Chinese people usually marry within their own community? Why don’t they want to mix with the locals?

The author visited more than fifty Chinese factories in Africa. She thinks that Chinese factories in Africa will create prosperity for Africans. Seriously? Chinese factories in Italy only use Chinese workforce and in Chinese stores here you can see mostly Chinese employees with sometimes the addition of Romanian women and Bangladeshi men. No jobs for the locals. No jobs for Italians. My husband, who is Mexican, thinks that this happens because only immigrants are willing to accept the low wages offered by Chinese employers, but I don’t know if they even tried to hire Italian workers. It looks like “foreigners united against the natives”.

According to Irene Yuan Sun, China is the current factory of the world while Africa will be the next one. Chinese factories in Africa produce either for the local markets or to export their goods, taking advantage of African low labor costs.

The author believes that factories bring prosperity, as it happened with the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the eighteenth century, in America in the nineteenth century, in Japan and other Asian countries in the twentieth century. At least she admits that many factory bosses in Africa are racist, pay bribes, drink to excess and frequent prostitutes. Moreover their factories pollute air and water, like we can see in nowadays China. However, in the previous examples of industrialization, the factory owners belonged to the same country they were contributing to develop. Are we sure that the same development will follow in Africa, if the factory bosses are Chinese and not Africans?

The book focuses on four African countries: Nigeria, Lesotho, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Nigeria has the largest population and the largest economy of the continent. Lesotho is instead completely surrounded by South Africa. Kenya is the principal economy of East Africa and Ethiopia… It isn’t true that Ethiopia was never colonized by a European power! Even if for a short period (1936-1941), it was an Italian colony! A shameful past for Italy, but history can’t be hidden.

According to Irene Yuan Sun, donors and global aid organizations won’t solve the poverty problem in Africa, but factories with their employment opportunities can do it. First example: Mr. Sun owns a factory that produces ceramic tiles in Nigeria. He’s only an elementary school graduate and he started working when he was just 13 years old. Chinese factories owners accumulated their know-how working for Taiwanese factory owners, who in turn had learned from Japanese ones.

Mr. Sun comes from Wenzhou, a midsize city in southeastern China. He dropped out of school when he was thirteen and started working in factories. He worked long hours, saved money and finally opened his own factory. Nice story, but not everybody can become a factory boss, otherwise who’s going to do all the menial jobs? The sad reality is that rich individuals can exist only if there are many poor people. Mr. Sun manufactured leather goods in China, but in the late 2000s costs were rising. He needed to move his factory abroad. He considered Bangladesh and Uzbekistan, then a friend told him about Nigeria.

When Mr. Sun visited Nigeria for the first time, he immediately saw a lot of beggars asking for money, but he then realized that there were also a lot of rich people. He found out that ceramics were the heaviest products that China exported in large quantities to Nigeria, so he decided to open a ceramic tile factory in the country. He invested almost 40 million dollars and he employed nearly 1,100 workers, a thousand of whom are locals. I liked this point: employing the locals. Everybody should follow this example.

The author then attends a lunch in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. Location: a Chinese restaurant. There she meets some Chinese businessmen. They started their career working for Taiwanese firms with businesses in Lesotho. At that time, in the late 1980s and 1990s, it was common for Taiwanese firms in need of cheap labor to use labor agencies to find young Chinese workers. They spoke neither English nor Sesotho, the local language. In the 1990s there were no cell phones and no internet. They could call home just once a year, because they didn’t have enough money. After years of hard work, some of them started factories while others ran small shops.

A wave of Japanese entrepreneurs generated a wave of Taiwanese entrepreneurs that generated a wave of Chinese ones. This is why the author thinks that the next wave can be African.

The author was born in Changchun, a provincial capital of two million people in Manchuria, between Russia and North Korea. In the late 1980s her father spent a year in Japan for a postdoctoral fellowship. The author, who was just two years old, stayed in China with her mother. At that time nobody owned a refrigerator and very few people had a television. As for industrialization in Asia, Japan was the first country, then followed by Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In the early 1980s, China was poorer than Ethiopia and Mali.

It was interesting to find out that the first Chinese entrepreneurs arrived in Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s. After its independence, the country had a thriving textile sector, but it collapsed when Nigeria started to export oil. Another engaging story is that of the flip-flop factory owned by the Lees in Nigeria: they produce huge quantities of cheap flip-flops whose retail price is just about a dollar a pair. This is possible because the models are very few. These products are destined to poor consumers who can’t afford to pay more and are sold in Nigeria and other West African countries. Their price is so low that nobody tries to import smuggled flip-flops.

The author’s mother is from Shanghai and her surname is Shen like that of the next factory owner we meet. The author’s father is instead a northerner. In Lesotho, a Chinese-owned factory produces Reebok T-shirts for American consumers. The workers are locals. Incredible but true: clothing production is not very automated because the product designs change every season, so it would be too expensive to change the machines to automate the job every few months. It’s better having many workers and sewing machines. In Lesotho, a large number of factory owners are foreigners, but the workers are mostly locals because wages are modest.

Factories in Lesotho export their products while Nigerian ones mainly produce for the internal market. This happens because Lesotho is a small country with a small population, but it’s near the excellent South African transport infrastructure. On the other hand Nigeria has a large population and bad roads.

Sad but true: it’s easier to pollute in Nigeria than in China because it’s legal. Government wants to attract foreign investors, so outdated machinery can be shipped from China to Nigeria. Moreover several Chinese businessmen use money to bribe government officials.

The author interviews also a Nigerian man who tells that Chinese-owned factories usually don’t meet safety standards. Moreover, you can’t ask questions, you can’t make phone calls and you have to work for twelve hours without talking. The author thinks that factories will bring full employment in Africa, but I believe she’s too optimistic.

Several Chinese factory owners think that Africans are lazy and this is why they fire a lot of them. They expect to be paid even if they don’t show up on time or they don’t go to work every day. The fact is that Chinese bosses are used to manage people from their own country who are more productive than the new African class of factory workers.

In Addis Ababa, the author finds out that a Chinese restaurant owner has married a local woman who works as a waitress in his restaurant and they have a curly-haired son. A nice example of mixed family! Other interesting pieces of information: in Lesotho women were used to live on remittances from their husbands working in South Africans mines, but now many of them are working in factories where the majority of workers are women. In Kenya, the manufacturing sector is instead dominated by East Africans of Indian descent. Intermarriage between this community and the locals is still rare, despite a century of living in the country. In West Africa, the same happens with the Lebanese community and its resistance to integration. The author hopes that Chinese people in Africa will follow a different path.

Other interesting opinions from the author: African countries should develop their own pharmaceutical factories because there is a limit to what outsiders can be expected to do. A generation ago, China was poorer than many African countries, but the government offered cheap land and tax incentives to establish pharmaceutical firms. Developing countries like China are more willing to invest in other developing countries like Ethiopia because few people from the developed world would work there without seeing their families for a year, living in a mud-field while building factories in inhospitable places.

Epilogue

Chinese population is ageing, labor costs are rising in China and Chinese economic growth is now slower than in the past three decades. This is why Chinese companies are investing and relocating their factories abroad, in places like Africa where the population is burgeoning and workers can be paid less than in China.

What I liked most: Chinese entrepreneurs interviewed by the author frankly admit that they’re investing in Africa for profit. If their moves have also positive effects on Africans that’s fine, but that’s not their main purpose. On the other hand, Western NGOs present themselves as pure altruism, but skeptical people don’t believe in fairy tales.

As an Asian growing up in Hong Kong, I have heard enough about the malpractices of the Chinese business owners in China since the 80s. Spending my last 20 years in the U.S. helps me to understand the business ethnics that seems "normal" in China in fact is far from being "civilized." Yet, the Chinese has contributed a lot to push the global economy to the next level recently and the role of these Chinese businesses is crucial to move the economy forward in both the developed and the developing countries.

I used to work for a firm and few of my clients are from China. Since mid 1990s, they have expanded their mainland China/USA business divisions to Africa. Knowing a bit about the background currently in Africa prompted me to want to read this wonderfully titled book. I want to know more about the prognosis of duplicating what used to happen in China and now happening on Africa would be in the future. After finish reading the book, I don't think I have learned anything more than what I have already learned/expected. Sure I don't have any statistical figures to substantiate my view on the topic prior reading this title yet I still haven't learned much upon finishing the book. Maybe this is a good intro book to people with minimum knowledge on how China expanded in the 80s and the business ethics of these business owners, or might interest those those who plan to venture out to Africa for their next big opportunities. Many practical issues have not been addressed in this book, though- Is Africa really going to be the next China is still early to say but sure the factories setup would help improving the overall poverty. The massive distinction between Africa cultures not being factored into the arguments weaken the author's view tremendously. What about the conversation of natural resources and natural habitats there? Would other countries jump in and limit the expansion of Africa let's say 20 years from now? As a business non-fiction, the book is a let-down somewhat. The writing at times also seems amateurish. For $30, I definitely would not splurge on this title. Maybe at most borrowing a copy from the library if my local library decides to purchase any copy.

I hope this title is only an introduction of such a deep business topic by the author. I strongly believe there are so much more that the author could offer, let's say in her next book.

I requested this book because I found the topic intriguing. After reading the book, I still find the topic intriguing, yet I feel that the author could have done more to illustrate all sides of the development. I am going to follow along with the progress mentioned in this book to see if the title comes to fruition, or if China will continue to profit from the endeavor with minimal positive impact for Africans.

Irene Sun seeks to challenge our perceptions of China exploiting Africa’s natural resources for its own industrial needs. To do so, she draws upon her one-on-one interviews with Chinese businessmen, sometimes over a cup of quaint Chinese tea, in Nigeria, Lesotho, Kenya and Ethiopia and taking a gracious tour of their factories.

The author heralds the fostering of the nascent manufacturing industry by the Chinese as the solution to the chronic levels of unemployment for the burgeoning population.

The danger of this anecdotal evidence is that it is collected in an informal, arbitrary manner and relies heavily on personal testimony that is by its very nature unreliable. Irene Sun does intersperse her interviews with statistics, but it does not obviate the need for substantiated arguments and compelling evidence to back up the premise of the book.

Despite admittedly substantial investments by China in Africa, there is a long and well documented history that most of these investments have been one-sided and routinely cast as detrimental to Africa’s overall competitiveness. Many of these Chinese deals are struck at the highest political levels, where corruption abounds, and they often lack transparent and competitive tendering processes. To make matters worse, the promises of massive job creation does not come to fruition as the actual labour force employed in these ventures are predominantly Chinese.

A thoughtful analysis of the similarities of Africa and China in how Africa could replicate China's jump from an agrarian to a manufacturing country in a very short order.  The author makes some very good , logical points as to how this could be achieved. IN many ways Africa is exactly like China was just one generation ago.  The same Chinese businessmen who made this jump in China are now doing the same in Africa.  And Africa does have the poverty level farmers who would see a low wage industrial job as a step up. Plus by working for these Chinese businesses the Africans can learn how to do run a factory and eventually have factories of their own. The Chinese have recent experience with corruption at home so they know how to deal with African corruption.  I was interested to read that the bulk of investment is from private Chinese firms, not the famous zombie state enterprises.    From a Western perspective we may be losing sight of how simple this could be as we are too far along the technology path . A delightful and useful read.