China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa Audiobook (Free)

An exciting, hugely revealing accounts of China’s burgeoning existence in Africa-a developing empire already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people.

A prizewinning foreign correspondent and former NY Times bureau key in Shanghai and in West and Central Africa, Howard French is uniquely positioned to tell the story of China in Africa. Through meticulous on-the-ground reporting-conducted in Mandarin, French, and Portuguese, among various other languages-French crafts about China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Creating a New Empire in Africa a layered investigation of amazing depth and breadth as he engages not only with policy-shaping moguls and diplomats, but also with the normal women and men navigating the street-level realities of cooperation, prejudice, problem, and opportunity forged by this seismic geopolitical advancement. With incisiveness and empathy, French reveals the human being face of China’s economic, political, and individual presence across the African continent-and in doing this reveals what is at stake for everyone involved.

We meet a broad spectral range of China’s dogged emigrant population, from those singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, commerce, as well as environment (a self-made tycoon who harnessed Zambia’s now-booming copper trade; a timber business owner established to harvest the entirety of Liberia’s old-growth redwoods), to the people just hardly scraping by (a sibling pair running smaller businesses despite total illiteracy; a karaoke pub owner-cum-brothel madam), still convinced that Africa affords them better opportunities than their homeland. And we encounter an similarly panoramic array of African responses: a citizens’ backlash in Senegal against a “Trojan equine” Chinese construction project (a tower complicated to be built over a precious soccer field, which locals thought would lead to overbearing Chinese pressure on the overall economy); a Zambian politics applicant who, having protested China’s intrusiveness during the previous election and lost, now turns accommodating; the ascendant middle income of the industrial boomtown; African mine employees bitterly condemning their foreign employers, citing insufficient safety precautions and wages a portion of their immigrant counterparts’.

French’s nuanced portraits reveal the paradigms developing around this new world order, in the all-too-familiar echoes of colonial ambition-exploitation of assets and labor; cut-rate infrastructure tasks; dubious treaties-to new frontiers of ethnic and economic exchange, where dichotomies of suspicion and trust, assimilation and isolation, idealism and disillusionment are in powerful flux.

Part intrepid travelogue, part cultural census, component industrial and political expose, French’s keenly observed accounts ultimately offers a fresh perspective on the most pressing unknowns of contemporary Sino-African relations: why China is building the incursions it really is, just how extensive its cultural and economic inroads are, what Africa’s role in the formula is, and just what the ramifications for both parties-and the watching world-will maintain the foreseeable future.