BAMAKO, Mali — Drive through downtown in this West African capital, past traditional markets and mosques, and you arrive, unexpectedly, in a neighborhood with bubble tea shops and Chinese boutiques, where virtually every sign is in Mandarin.
In the mornings, radishes, spring onions and Chinese cabbage fly off the stalls of a husband-and-wife vegetable stand. At lunch, another couple from China prepares spicy beef stew and stir-fried snails at a restaurant across the street. As the sun sets, Chinese workers and business owners take evening strolls on the promenade that runs along the Niger River.
Chinese expats have long gravitated to this part of the Malian capital, also home to Western embassies and nonprofit headquarters, but their presence has become more visible in recent years, transforming the neighborhood into a Chinatown of sorts, according to business owners, residents and Western diplomats.
It is emblematic, experts say, of how Chinese communities in Africa exist — and often thrive — independent of the government in Beijing and state-backed enterprises. They are born of commercial desire and individual motivation, said Deborah Brautigam, director of the China-Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Often, they operate in boom-and-bust cycles, she added, rapidly expanding or contracting based on the political and economic realities in China and their host countries.
Mali’s Chinatown has been in a period of growth, according to dozens of interviews with migrants last month, but is now at an inflection point as Islamist militants threaten the capital.
“Everything is possible here,” said Yi Zhi Qiang, a muscular man who wiped sweat from his brow one morning as he took a break from filling vegetable orders received on WeChat, the popular Chinese social networking app. He and his wife arrived from Guangxi province, near the border with Vietnam, in 2018, he explained, encouraged by former neighbors who had settled in Bamako. “If I didn’t have the courage to live in Mali,” he said, “how would I have money?”
In recent months, however, this landlocked nation — long racked by violent insurgencies — has entered a new and dangerous chapter. Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants have encircled Bamako and attacked fuel trucks across the country in a bid to bring the military government to its knees.
On the street outside Yi’s shop was a long line of motorists waiting for gas, which has become so scarce that schools have been shuttered for weeks. Asked whether he would stay, Yi looked down, explaining in a combination of Mandarin and French — Mali’s official working language — that he was not sure.
“Mali in this time,” he said, shaking his head, “is not doing well.”
Finding their place
Formal data on Chinese migrants in Africa is difficult to come by, experts say. But their numbers probably peaked around 2015 and are now believed to sit between 500,0000 and 700,000 continent-wide, according to Eric Olander, the editor in chief of the China-Global South Project, an independent media initiative.
As insecurity has deepened in Mali in recent years — driven not just by Islamist militants but also by violent crackdowns carried out by the military and Russian mercenaries— the presence of state-backed Chinese companies has shrunk, Olander said, with authorities in Beijing increasingly averse to risk.
But the informal Chinese presence has grown, according to Western diplomats in Bamako, as well as Chinese and Malian residents, evident in the restaurants and shops in the Cité du Niger neighborhood.
Oge Onubogu, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said China’s economic ties with Mali are among its deepest in Africa, dating back to the 1970s, creating a pathway for its citizens to strike out on their own here.
“They want to find their place in the local economy,” she said. “It’s clear there’s a drive to engage.”
Five years ago, when Mali’s military staged a coup and cut ties with France, some European businesses closed up shop and Chinese entrepreneurs filled the gap, said a Malian hair dresser, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of government reprisals.
The salon he manages was empty on a recent day, but business was booming at the Chinese-owned one around the corner, where a recently arrived hairdresser in a “Hustle for Muscle” shirt gave rapid-fire cuts.
In the chair was 39-year-old Tony Tu, a solar panel vendor who said he’d always been able to make a good living, benefiting in part from the country’s chronic electricity shortages. The number of Chinese expats in Mali had exploded since he arrived eight years ago — “too many to even count,” he said with a laugh.
“The reason,” said Yuhua Wang, 50, as he tallied the morning’s sales at his modest produce stand nearby, is “always money.”
Cornering the market
Beijing is pushing to expand its soft power across Africa and other parts of the Global South, said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center. But in Mali, she said, the push is coming from the ground up.
“Chinese follow Chinese,” she said. “Things like Chinese restaurants appear when people know there is a market.”
An Qun, the self-described “queen of tea” in Bamako, described the market in Mali as similar to China before it began to open its economy in the 1970s. And there was always opportunity here for those who sought it out.
“In China, trying to open a tea shop was like feeding a belly that was already full,” she said, standing in her shop. “Here, I knew I could be one of the great tea sellers.”
On a good day in Bamako, she added, she can make what would take her a month to earn back home.
Growing fears
But no one is blind to the growing dangers, or the precarity of life in Mali.
Chinese informal migrants typically operate “on the fringe and without rules,” said Olander, sometimes arriving on tourist visas and then overstaying — or finding local networks of Chinese businesspeople who have a system for bribing local officials to get the paperwork and permits needed to live and work.
Often, he said, they are a headache for the local Chinese embassy, where the attitude can be summed up as: “You went to this part of the world. Now you’re on your own.”
As he walked along the Niger River at sunset, Liang Qiao, 44, explained the draw and the downside of his new adventure.
Liang, who arrived just a few months ago, is a prospector for a Chinese mining company. “You can find gold anywhere,” he said.
But his colleagues have warned him about the risks posed by armed groups. So he tried to limit his movements, he said.
In the tea shop, a group of men traded cautionary tales: One had been stopped by masked men who took his money. Another said he was too scared to leave Bamako. An Qun, the tea-shop owner, said she had friends who were kidnapped by militants while working as miners. The assailants demanded ransom not from China’s government, she said, but from the local Chinese community.
“Mali is no longer safe because of the terrorists,” she said. “We are all scared.”
Back in the hair salon, Tony Tu pulled up pictures of rivers and forests in his native province. For the first time in eight years, he has started to think seriously about returning to China.
“I am afraid,” he said, “and I want to go home.”
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