Gordon Mathews with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang, The World in Guangzhou : Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace

Any observant traveler to cities in Asia will at some point cross paths with conspicuous foreigners living and working there.Despite millions of such foreigners crafting interesting livelihoods for themselves, scholarship on this topic remains scant compared to Europe and North America.The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China's Global Marketplace helps fill this gap by providing a fascinating ethnographic inquiry into the lives of African traders operating in southern China.The work is authored by Gordon Mathews, author of Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (another fascinating ethnographic study of globalization in Asia), and two of his former graduate students, Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang.Their work is interesting, accessible, objective, and broaches important topics that transcend the scope of China and the work itself.The book is based on several years of fieldwork, where Mathews and his students would travel to Guangzhou to interview and spend time with African traders pursuing the "Chinese dream" (29).While the book makes mention of foreigners from many backgrounds, the focus is on sub-Saharan Africans and the ways they are connecting African consumers with Chinese products.The book is comprised of eight chapters, each of which discusses a different dimension of African-China encounters.The chapters contain a healthy balance of overview, analysis, and ethnographic data, and broach topics such as the lives of African traders, the difficulties they face living and operating in China, racial and ethnic dynamics, legal issues, marriage and relationships, religion, and the logistics of working in China, among others.The book has many positive aspects, but arguably the interesting ethnography combined with earnest and accessible analyses are what make the book so enjoyable.Mathews's writing style and honest depictions make the book compelling for anyone broadly interested in this topic.While written for a broader audience rather than an academic one (4), the book still engages with many important ideas that are of interest to academics.The most central of these is "low-end globalization," defined as "the transnational flow of people and goods involving relatively small amounts of capital and informal, sometimes semi-legal or illegal transactions, often associated with 'the developing world '" (81).This spotlights the micro-level agents that make these movements of "low-end" goods possible.The book covers the dynamics of such processes in considerable detail, highlighting the logistics of how these operations work and incorporating ethnographic data from the African continent, which further elucidates the interconnection between Africa and China.The book also delves into ethnic and racial tensions that underlie the dynamics of the southern China marketplace.These include racial conflicts between Africans and Chinese, conflicts between Africans of different national and ethnic origins, and religious conflicts between African Christians and African Muslims.This "low-end glo-