Financial Times | By: Various Authors | August 28, 2017:
From 1m in 2013, the number of Chinese in the continent is in decline, analysts say
Like dozens of others from his sleepy fishing village on China’s south-east coast, Wen Wenyuan set off a few years ago to start a new life in Africa. But this year he decided to return.
Wen is one of hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers — both private entrepreneurs and employees of state-run companies — to have returned from Africa in recent years, as lower commodity prices hit many of the continent’s economies.
Sub-Saharan Africa grew at 1.5 per cent in 2016, its slowest in two decades, while South Africa slipped into recession this year. “The economy got worse, so we came back,” says Mr Wen, 33, who ran a supermarket near Johannesburg for five years.
The volume of Chinese returnees — 150,000 are estimated to have left oil-rich Angola in the past four years alone — means that the Chinese population in Africa is now in decline from about 1m in 2013, according to analysts.
While most of China’s migration to Africa has been by small-scale entrepreneurs, the number of contract workers serving Chinese state-owned enterprises fell 32,000 last year to 233,000, according to the state-run China International Contractors Association.
“Continent-wide there seems to be a decrease,” says Barry Sautman, who monitors Chinese migration to the continent at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “In part because of a downturn in the commodities cycle, it became unsustainable for many Chinese to continue their businesses.”
The migrant decline mirrors a fall in trade and investment between China and Africa, which reached more than $200bn in 2015, before falling below $150bn last year. China’s direct investment in the continent is negligible compared with trade.
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