I am part of the Chinese economic story in Africa. My family moved to Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, in the late 1980s and my parents ran a textile factory through the 1990s.
Until this mom-and-pop factory closed in about 2002 because of increased competition from Chinese imports, it employed 20-80 workers — women who travelled daily from the townships of Madadeni or Osizweni.
Mom would do the books and manage production, while dad maintained the machinery and sold finished garments to wholesalers in Durban and Joburg.
Like almost all other Taiwanese- and Hong Kong-owned factories in Newcastle, ours produced garments for the budget end of the domestic market. Traders and hawkers would buy either from wholesalers or come directly to the factory shops, then sell on in townships and rural areas.
I went to university in Cape Town to study political philosophy in the early 2000s. Many of my classmates, white and black, had parents in the struggle and were active in the ANC and the SACP. As we read the political and philosophical texts and debated South Africa’s future, we would joke that I was from the capitalist class.
Given that my parents had the “means of production” and were factory owners, I was indeed a “son of a capitalist”. Only, instead of huge steam-powered mills with tens of thousands of workers toiling 18 hours a day for us, my folks had a couple of dozen electric sewing and knitting machines.
The Kuos were not industrial tycoons living in opulence with politicians on our payroll
The workers my parents were supposed to be oppressing went home every day at four, as dictated by labour regulations. Regrettably, the Kuos were not industrial tycoons living in opulence with politicians on our payroll.
As the family sat around the dinner table on Thursday evenings stuffing weekly wages into envelopes, my late father used to say: every single vanilla envelope means a family fed. He was rightly proud of his achievements, and I am too.
What can SA do?
With the Chinese Communist Party congress concluding last weekend, analysts have been trying hard to read the tea leaves.
Will China grow more assertive in international politics? Yes — especially if you are the West. Will there be policy changes affecting Africa and South Africa? China really needs Africa onside as its relations with the West continue to sour. And with President Xi Jinping in power for 10 years now, we can see what his policies are; there won’t be any major U-turns.
But, instead of asking what China can do for South Africa, I think the correct way to view China’s rise and China-Africa relations is in terms of African agency. We need to ask what South Africa can do for itself in its dealings with China.
Over the past two decades, South African businesses haven’t fully taken advantage of China’s phenomenal growth. Naspers is the exception: it struck gold by investing in Tencent in 2001, before the WeChat phenomenon took off.
The resources sector, too, has done well — but Australia, Brazil and other resource-exporting countries have done far better. South Africa has lost billions of potential earnings due to the government’s inability to capacitate Transnet’s rail and port services.
But let’s look forward to SA’s engagement with China over the next decade. The first step needs to be a national discussion on a comprehensive free-trade agreement with China, starting with South African fruit and agriproducts. Discussions can also be had about grain production. Chinese agricultural companies have already expressed interest, and begun to invest, in commercial soybean production in South Africa.
The second step is to attract Chinese direct investment. A survey of Chinese businesses in 10 African countries by consultancy McKinsey & Co a few years ago found the main thrust of China’s economic investments in Africa involved not the mega-projects we often read about but thousands of family-run firms.
The researchers interviewed 1,000 Chinese companies across Africa and found that 89% of employees and 44% of managers were African, and 64% of the firms provided training. Even more encouraging was that 74% of Chinese managers, like me, remained optimistic about their business prospects in Africa.
The Chinese story in Africa is not about Brics summits and state visits with 21-gun salutes. It is the story of individuals and families, from China and from Africa, looking for business opportunities and working hard every day to fulfil their dreams for themselves and their families.
* Kuo, a former lecturer at the Shanghai International Studies University in China, is adjunct senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business
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