Events
Chinese traders in Africa – trapped in liminality
17 Nov 2015
12:00 – 14:00
USC, 8/F, Tin Ka Ping Building, CUHK
Dr. Karsten GieseDiscussant: Prof. Gordon Mathews
Dr. Karsten Giese, Senior research Fellow at the GIGA Institute for Asian Studies, Hamburg, Germany, and editor of the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, has been studying Chinese migration and issues of socio-economic change in China since the late 1980s. Focusing on the social and economic interaction between Chinese entrepreneurial migrants and African actors in Africa as well as on Chinese-African encounters in China since 2010, he has been Principal Investigator of the research projects “Entrepreneurial Chinese migrants and petty African entrepreneurs: Local impacts of interaction in urban West Africa” (2011-13) and “West African traders as translators between Chinese and African urban modernities” (2013-17) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG.
Please email or call the USC office before 10:00am on every seminar day. Thank you.
Tel.: (852) 3943-8763/8765
Email: event@usc.cuhk.edu.hk
Language: English
Fee: Free Admission, HK$20.00 for Lunch
Various studies on Chinese migration to Africa have showed that the Chinese entrepreneurs are generally engaged in cut-throat competition among each other rather than ethnic networking, cooperation and local community building. It seems that they share a strong sense of temporariness, yet they encountered specific difficulties that discourage them from returning to China. Drawing on several waves of qualitative fieldwork in Ghana and Senegal, the speaker explores the migration trajectories particularly of Chinese traders through the analytical lens of liminality and rites de passage and argues that the social phenomena mentioned above can be explained if we understand the economic sojourns of Chinese to Africa as ritual journeys or secular pilgrimages.
Please note that the order for lunch box cannot be cancelled once it has been made. You have to pay for the lunch box you ordered even though you cannot attend the seminar. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
