Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia 9888528041, 9789888528042

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Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Title Pages Miriam Driessen

(p.i) Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness (p.ii) (p.iii) Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness

(p.iv) Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong https://hkupress.hku.hk © 2019 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8528-04-2 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Title Pages A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co. Ltd., Hong Kong, China

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Acknowledgments

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

(p.vi) Acknowledgments Miriam Driessen

Neither the dissertation nor its conversion into a book would have been possible without the support of a great number of people. My first and greatest debt is to all those—Chinese and Ethiopians—whose paths I crossed in Ethiopia. I sadly lost touch with many Chinese interlocutors who, at the time based in southeastern Tigray, northern Ethiopia, and Addis Ababa, have now spread across the country and other parts of Africa, including Somalia, Uganda, and Chad. Through others I learned that some have moved farther afield to Pakistan, Malaysia, and Jamaica. Few have returned to China. Recent developments—in particular, the slowdown of the construction industry—have made their return home more challenging. Moving back implies not only adjusting to a different lifestyle but also switching profession and compromising on a salary that is not quite enough to sustain the middle-class lives that they had newly attained. For many, the “way out,” as they referred to their move to Ethiopia, turned out not to have a way back. In Addis Ababa, Aklilu Yilma, Sisay Tekle, brothers Semeneh and Sirak Ayalew, Muna Bayou and her family, and the Ethiopian women of the Swedish mission provided me with a soft landing and offered me sustained support during return trips to the capital. The Addis Ababa City Roads Authority and the Ethiopian Roads Authority generously supported my research. I would like to thank Marco Di Nunzio for his help with kick-starting my research by providing valuable contacts and extend my appreciation to the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, which welcomed me as visiting scholar in 2011–2012, even though I spent most of my time outside the peaceful and pleasant surroundings of the institute on dusty and deafening building sites. This publication would not have been possible without the generous support of a number of institutions, including the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. I received support from Wolfson College, the Grimstone Foundation, and the Godfrey Lienhardt Fund, as well as the Confucius Institute. Finally, without a generous three-year research (p.vii) fellowship of the Leverhulme Trust, the additional financial support of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Jesus College, and the John Fell Fund, I would not have been able to complete the manuscript.

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Acknowledgments In Oxford I am much indebted to my academic mentors Xiang Biao and David Zeitlyn and the scholars who shaped my work with instructive comments and thoughtful advice, including Neil Carrier, Elisabeth Hsu, Rachel Murphy, and David Pratten. I am also grateful to Ching Kwan Lee, who, as external examiner, offered invaluable feedback on my work. The companionship of a wonderful cohort of doctoral students sustained me through the writing process. Our office at 43 Banbury Road was for a long time my second home. I would like to thank Kristen Biehl, Imogen Clark, Juliet Gilbert, Andrea Mariko Grant, Catherine Hardie, Sonia Lam-Knott, Alejandro Reig, Nick Shapiro, Ann Wand, and Zoë West. I still miss our enjoyable lunch, coffee, and fresh air breaks. During my two years in Beijing I received generous support from Liu Haifang, who welcomed me at the Centre for African Studies of Peking University. I would also like to express my gratitude to Li Anshan and other faculty and students at the School of International Studies who opened my eyes to an entirely different perspective on Chinese involvement with African countries. One of the main challenges of this project has been to navigate radically divergent Chinese, Ethiopian, and Western discourses. Rather than choosing one perspective, I have opted for the rocky middle ground. This is the reason that I refrain from making big statements and broadbrush comparisons—between Chinese involvement in Africa and European colonialism, for instance. Indeed, as my reviewers correctly noted, I am pulling my punches. As an anthropologist, I believe I ought to be careful with and cautious of drawing parallels geographically and temporally. More importantly, I want to keep true to what my interlocutors, both Chinese and Ethiopian, believe. For most of them, China is engaged in a new type of relationship with African countries. Comparing Chinese involvement in Ethiopia with European colonialism elsewhere in Africa leads not only to anachronism but also to assault. Such a comparison neglects the agency that Ethiopians possess in engaging Chinese actors, the very agency I underscore in this book. Therefore, rather than engaging in debates that cast China as neocolonialist, I have tried to stay close to the ground and keep to firsthand narratives and observations. If readers feel inclined to draw parallels in time and space based on the ethnographic data provided in this book, they are of course welcome to do so. Colleagues and friends at Peking University, including Che Lin, Seung Cho, Anatoly Detwyler, Pete Millwood, and Florin Morar have been a great source of encouragement and moral support. I had the fortune of sharing time and inspiring conversations outside the campus with Denise van der (p.viii) Kamp, Cheryl Schmitz, Chen Nan, Mo Mengfei, Wang Ruojing, Zhou Enlin, and Zhou Wenping. Since my return to Oxford, I have been fortunate to be part of an incredibly stimulating intellectual community. Zoe Cormack, Karuna Dietrich-Wielenga and Shashank Kela, Matthew Erie, Liz Fouksman, Benoît Henriet, Pamela Hunt, Kyle Jaros, George Kunnath, Ceren Lord, Sebabatso Manoeli, Rana Mitter, Rachel Murphy, and other faculty of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (now the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies) and the Oriental Institute have been an exceptional source of support. I am also grateful to many others with whom I enjoyed stimulating conversations and who helped shape my work, including Marthe Achtnich, William Allen, Akanksha Awal, Tom Boylston, Hannah Dawson, Elizabeth Ewart and Tadesse Wolde, Coraline Goron, Sneha Krishnan, Lu Xiaoyu, Pete Millwood, Graham Riach, Willy Sier, Sun Yuzhou, Hannah Theaker, Zhou Yunyun, and Zhu Ruiyi. I continue to learn a great deal from my graduate students, and I am especially indebted to Alys Davies, Christy Pang, Johanna von Pezold, Viola Rothschild, and Yang Yifan for inspiring, refreshing, and Page 2 of 3 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Acknowledgments challenging my thinking. Furthermore, I owe a big thank-you to Pál Nyíri and Frank Pieke for their encouragement and guidance and Andrea Mariko Grant for the enjoyable writing retreats. At Hong Kong University Press I would like to thank Yuet Sang Leung for being an advocate of the book and Eric Mok for shepherding it with enthusiasm and professionalism through the publication process. I also thank the two reviewers for the press for providing valuable guidance, Michael Athanson for his assistance with rendering the maps, and Susan Scott, Carole Pearce, and Clara Ho and her team for their fantastic editorial work. Portions of Chapter 5 and Chapter 7 have been previously published in “The African Bill: Chinese Struggles with Development Assistance,” Anthropology Today 31 (1): 3–7, and parts of Chapter 1 in “Pushed to Africa: Emigration and Social Change in China,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (15): 2491–507. Finally, I would like to thank my parents. Without their support, trust, wisdom, wit, and inspiration, I would not have been able to start or finish this project.

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Introduction

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Introduction Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords Exploring the everyday encounters between Chinese managers and Ethiopian laborers on the construction site in Tigray, this chapter challenges depictions of Chinese engagement with Africa as a model imposed on a practice. Chinese workers’ initial expectations of life and work in Ethiopia stand in contrast to the difficulties they face on the ground. Puzzled by the apparent ingratitude of Ethiopians, their lack of cooperation, and, worse, their repeated attempts to sabotage the building work, Chinese road builders are left disenchanted. Firm hopes of helping Ethiopians develop are offset by the bitter taste they experience in the face of repeated pushbacks, not only on the building site but also in the courtroom. Unraveling the intricacies of Chinese-led development in Ethiopia, this chapter discusses internal divisions in the Chinese community, road builders’ vain efforts to fashion Ethiopian laborers, and Chinese narratives of bitterness that address their own perceived lack of agency. Keywords:   China, Ethiopia, development, agency, hope, bitterness

We are surviving in order to survive. —Chinese manager in Ethiopia, July 27, 2017 Yu Bohai’s comment captures a widespread sentiment among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia. As we sped over the newly compacted road base in his black Toyota Hilux, Yu explained his predicament. The charm hanging from the rear-view mirror—a green imitation jade Buddha on a red string— knocked against the windscreen as we left the main road for a pitted track around the construction work. To survive in Ethiopia meant to swallow disappointment. Yu’s initial expectations of life and work there stood in sharp relief to the less rosy realities on the ground, leaving him disenchanted. He could not get his head around why Ethiopians were so unwelcoming, or, as he put it, “unfriendly.” “We [Chinese] are being discriminated against.” Convinced of the benevolence of

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Introduction their activities, Yu, like many of his coworkers, had imagined Ethiopians to be keenly awaiting Chinese development assistance. In fact, the attitudes of members of the host society bore little resemblance to what Yu envisaged. Ethiopian laborers proved—in Yu’s eyes—to be irresponsible and indolent, and local residents recalcitrant and uncooperative. The unsupportive attitude of state authorities made matters worse. Rather than protecting Chinese corporate interests, they appeared to be on the side of local laborers. Like most Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Yu was puzzled by, and resentful of, the apparent ingratitude of Ethiopians, their lack of cooperation, and worse, their repeated attempts to sabotage the building work. This turn of events led to disappointment on the part of Yu and his coworkers—a sentiment that originates, however, not only from the challenges of everyday encounters with Ethiopians on and off the construction site. Their tastes of bitterness are embedded in expectations that are intricately linked to their position in a rapidly developing Chinese society, in which they try to stay afloat. Enduring hardships—or “eating bitterness” (p.2) (chiku)—in Ethiopia was a means to “survive” (shengcun) in China. Men like Yu moved to Africa for work not only to build a respectable life at home, but also to sustain it. Moving overseas was a way to become someone. “I used to be nobody in China. Only when I am in Ethiopia I feel I have some value,” Yu contemplated once. Like most Chinese migrants in Africa, he grew up in the countryside. After serving in the army for five years, he took up work as a builder with a state-owned enterprise in his home province, Heilongjiang. After a few years, his employer offered him to transfer to Africa for much better pay. He jumped at the opportunity. A self-proclaimed “old overseas,” Yu had lived in Ethiopia for nearly ten years. I first met him in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, in 2011, before crossing paths again in 2017 at a road project in the southwestern corner of the country, close to the South-Sudanese border. He had managed to climb up from foreman to deputy manager. In 2011, Yu insisted that he would be back in China after, at most, three years. The reason why he was still in Ethiopia keeping body and soul together after ten years, he confided, was the fact that there are no opportunities for him in China. This is not to say that he did not want to return. “I can’t possibly stay my whole life in Africa,” he exclaimed somewhat agitatedly upon my question whether he planned to remain. Following nearly four decades of mass migration from the countryside to the cities and to overseas destinations, mobility has become the norm in contemporary China. To be mobile is a coveted way of life, a cultural imperative, and a means of crafting a fulfilling future. For men like Yu, however, mobility is as much a necessity as a value or a resource. Only by migrating are they able to stake claim to social presence in a rapidly developing Chinese society. In order to achieve a feeling of belonging as well as a sense of dignified personhood, they are compelled to be and remain on the move. If mobility is not necessarily perceived to lead anywhere in the present tense, it continues to hold a radical promise of future belonging. This is what kept Chinese men like Yu Bohai in Ethiopia. “Work is our life. We don’t have anything else,” explained Yu with slight self-scorn. He works seven days a week, driving from one site along the project road to another to supervise the construction work, assign tasks, and give instructions. When he has no work on his hands, he slides the driver’s seat backward and throws his feet on the steering wheel to watch the historical drama series Three Kingdoms on his Huawei Smartphone, a device he bought in Ethiopia after his iPhone from China got stolen.

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Introduction “You don’t understand why I don’t just quit my job and go home…. You can. You have social security [in Europe].” Even though Yu’s monthly salary has gone up from CNY 6,000 in 2011 to CNY 25,000 in 2017, and despite the fact that he earns much more than the average Chinese worker in Ethiopia, his income was not enough to ease a lingering feeling of insecurity: “What if (p.3) something happens one day?” This question was repeated by many Chinese migrant men I met in Ethiopia. Yu and his peers were driven—or rather pushed—by a sense of insecurity, buckled as they were under the weight of what they called “social pressure” (shehui yali) in China. Their decision to move to Ethiopia with domestic companies was pragmatic rather than idealistic. They admitted frankly that earning a better salary was their main, if not their sole, motivation for going to Ethiopia. Despite their pragmatism about their own lives, Chinese road builders were more idealistic in their desire to transform the lives of African others. Their aspirations of “helping Ethiopia become powerful and prosperous,” as one engineer put it, account for the bitterness they swallowed in response to the apparent ingratitude of those whose lives they sought to transform. This bitter taste, then, reveals the discrepancy between their initial expectations and the realities they faced on the ground. Combined, tales of hope and tastes of bitterness cast light on Chinese-led development from below, revealing its contested and, at times, fraught nature. Indeed, Chinese-Ethiopian encounters frequently turned out to be Ethiopian-Chinese encounters, as Adams Bodomo (2009), critical of the assumed asymmetry between African countries and China, would have it. Ethiopians challenged the very social and political inequalities inherent to Chinese involvement in Africa. As a result, they came to set the terms of the encounter and the standards of its outcomes. Chinese migrants’ narratives of bitterness, then, embodied the lack of agency that they perceived to possess. The mundane actions of Chinese workers and their interactions with the Ethiopian laborers on and off the construction site thus reveal the ambivalent nature of the encounter. In the West we have depicted the Chinese engagement with Africa much as we used to describe European colonialism—as an abstract force, “a structure imposed on local practice” (Stoler 1989, 135)—or we have invested abstract concepts (e.g., “China”) with human qualities. A glance at headlines illustrates the point: “When China Met Africa” (Francis and Francis 2011), “China’s Material Needs: The Hungry Dragon” (the Economist, February 19, 2004), “Resource-Hungry China Invests in Africa” (Reuters, September 29, 2009), “China’s Oil Fears over South Sudan Fighting” (BBC News, January 8, 2014), “China: Africa’s Plunderer or Growth Partner?” (BBC News, May 21, 2012). China is described as a human being (or a dragon) with appetites and needs; so is Africa. The politically charged concepts and sensationalist tone of the debate have cast a shadow over the people who actually live the China-in-Africa experience. More importantly, they conceal the power of local practice to challenge sociopolitical asymmetries. In her revealing study of representations of China in Africa in British broadsheet newspapers, Emma Mawdsley (2008) demonstrates that the stereotypes commonly paint the Chinese in Africa as criminals, while Africans (p.4) are painted as victims and Westerners as do-gooders. Chinese migrants are routinely portrayed as a homogenous collective, Chinese enterprises as “nationally discrete entities” (518) with single interests, and Chinese engagement with the continent —“China’s African safari”—as merciless and unscrupulous, in contrast with supposedly benign Western involvement.1 This book highlights the opposite of these media tropes: Ethiopians vis-à-

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Introduction vis their expatriate employers as in a position of power, the Chinese community as heterogeneous, and the Chinese workers as victims of their own aspirations.

“The Italians are back, but now with slit eyes” Chinese road-building activities in Ethiopia are directly linked to a slowdown in the domestic building industry in China, which has pushed construction companies and their workers overseas. China’s road network is by and large saturated, Chinese road builders in Ethiopia explained. Recent activities amount chiefly to the maintenance and upgrading of existing roads. Many Chinese firms operating in Ethiopia are confronted with a shrinking number of projects in China. A few have moved out of the domestic industry altogether. “They’d be better going to Africa than Tiananmen,” one engineer remarked somewhat sarcastically, referring to the government’s concern with the creation of employment in the face of a growing number of unemployed professionals and skilled workers in China’s construction sector. Feared as disaffected, this predominantly male segment of society forms a potential threat to social stability that the central government anxiously seeks to preserve (J. Yang 2010). To relieve pressure in the job market in this industry, the government requires state-owned enterprises at home and overseas to absorb a specific number of new engineering graduates each year. This engineer, who was in his early 40s, had resigned from his job to move to Ethiopia for a lighter workload and a better salary. On his last project in China, he had held three posts simultaneously, not because of a lack of personnel—on the contrary, he reckoned that 30–40 percent of the employees of his company, a regional branch of a major state-owned enterprise, were redundant—but because there were so few new contracts and profits were dwindling as a result. Most Chinese nationals who moved to Ethiopia in the late 1990s and 2000s were involved in constructing infrastructure. Following Chinese engagement in the country’s emerging manufacturing industries and (p.5) Ethiopia’s growing popularity as a port of call for Chinese tourists and youth volunteers, the Chinese community has diversified substantially over the past decade (Arkebe 2015; Bräutigam, Weis, and Tang 2018; Giannecchini and Taylor 2018; Mebratu, Wu, and Yang 2015; Tegegne 2007, 2009). Furthermore, Ethiopia’s political centrality as host of the African Union has attracted diplomats, journalists, and students from China. The number of Chinese citizens in Ethiopia is estimated to lie between 20,000 and 40,000 (Cook et al. 2016, 62). However, in the popular imagination this figure is much higher. Ethiopians often described the arrival of the Chinese as sweeping, or even swamping. Ethiopian government regulations on foreign investment in the local economy are, however, stricter than in other African countries, prohibiting the Chinese, like other foreign nationals, from establishing businesses, such as the China shops and Chinese clinics that have emerged in other parts of Africa, unless they obtain a license through a local partner (see e.g., Bräutigam 2003; Dobler 2009, 2008; Haugen and Carling 2005; Hsu 2007; Lin 2014; Mohan et al. 2014). While a slowdown in the construction industry in China has pushed companies and workers abroad, a building boom, especially in infrastructural development, has drawn them to Ethiopia, among other parts of Africa. With an average real economic growth of 11 percent since 2004, Ethiopia has been one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa (World Bank 2012, 1). Economic growth is driven by the services sector (5.3 percentage points), followed by the industries (2.8 percentage points), largely owing to a surge in construction projects (World Bank 2015, 1). The extension of the road network has been a government priority, as road development is believed to trigger other forms of development and prompt the transition from a

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Introduction predominantly agrarian to an industrialized economy, as anticipated in Ethiopia’s first and second Growth and Transformation Plans. Ethiopia has long been one of the countries with the lowest density of asphalt roads worldwide. With a limited budget at its disposal, the Ethiopian government sought to attract foreign capital and capacity-rich yet cheap contractors in order to extend the existing 49,000-kilometer road network of 2010–2011 to 136,000 kilometers by 2014–2015 and thereby to increase the road density from 44.5 to 123.7 kilometers per square kilometer. In addition to road transport, the Ethiopian government is planning to build up a full-fledged railway network (Ministry of Finance and Economic Development of Ethiopia 2010). On January 1, 2018, the USD 3.4 billion Chinesebuilt railway linking Addis Ababa and the port city of Djibouti was inaugurated by then prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, replacing the long-defunct French railway. Some of the Chinese workers introduced in this book, including Yu Bohai, contributed to the construction of this 750 kilometers line after finishing the road project in Tigray where I first met them. Others are working on (p.6) the railway between Addis Ababa and Mekelle that is under construction at the time of writing. Modern road building in Ethiopia began under Emperor Tewodros II (1855–1868) who employed Europeans and soldiers to construct roads (Pankhurst 1968). Tewodros was reputed to have participated in the construction work himself to overcome the soldiers’ ingrained aversion to physical labor, due to the long-standing stigma on craftsmanship in Ethiopia. “From the early dawn to late at night Theodore [Tewodros] was himself at work; with his own hands he removed stones, levelled the ground or helped to fill up small ravines,” one of the Emperor’s captives wrote. “No one could leave so long as he was there himself; no one would think of eating or of rest, while the Emperor showed the example and shared the hardships” (Pankhurst 1968, 284). Emperor Menilek II (1889–1913) enjoyed a similar reputation as a “great road builder” who knew how to put “stone to shoulder” (288). Recognizing the strategic potential of roads, Menilek built a significant number of roads in the vicinity of Addis Abeba, and from the capital to the Gulf of Aden ports.2 In 1904, the local Armenian, Sarkis Terzian, imported the first steam roller, and in 1907, the first car made its entry in Ethiopia. During the reign of Menilek, Rases (comparable to dukes) served as main road builders, expanding the road network beyond the capital, such as Ras Makonnen, governor of Harar. He was responsible for the construction of a road from Dire Dawa to Harar, which was planned by the French engineers who built the railway from Djibouti to Addis Abeba between 1894 and 1917. Road construction intensified under the regency of Ras Tafari Makonnen, who would become Emperor Haile Selassie. He founded a Public Works Department in 1922 and devoted his attention to expanding the road network in and around Addis Abeba and make it more suitable for motorized traffic at a time in which the number of cars was increasing steadily. He did so with the help of European engineers and American machinery. In the wake of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the roads in the vicinity of the capital and those between the capital and the sea, had considerably improved (Pankhurst 1968). “The Italians are back, but now with slit eyes,” remarked an Ethiopian army veteran once, evoking memories of Italian efforts to expand the country’s road network during their occupation of Ethiopia between 1936 and 1941. In this period Italy spent about USD 120 million on the construction of nearly 2,500 kilometers of roads, all of which were treated with macadam to accommodate heavy military transport. This network was extended (p.7) with funds from the International Development Association of about USD 113 million in the 1950s and 1960s.3 The

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Introduction motorway programs set up and sponsored by the international community (see International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 1972, 1967, 1957, 1954) under the aegis of the International Development Bank in Washington (later the World Bank) seemed to be developed to facilitate the export of a single product: coffee beans. Whereas road construction during the period of Italian occupation served chiefly military purposes, American involvement in road development from 1950 onward implied a shift to the generation of commercial agriculture. The World Bank continued to fund road building during the 1980s and 1990s, when the Road Sector Development Project was inaugurated with the establishment of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. The first Chinese-built road was the nearly 300-kilometer gravel road from Weldiya to Wereta in Amhara regional state, a stretch that the UN general road survey of 1969 had deemed to be of low priority (United Nations Development Programme 1969, 7). China committed to the construction of the road in an aid agreement signed by Emperor Haile Selassie and Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971, barely a year after the establishment of diplomatic relations between Ethiopia and Communist China; yet the work started only in 1975, after the Ethiopian Revolution. The road was finished in 1983. (The first and last sections of the road have been upgraded recently by Chinese companies.) The few Chinese who knew about the project described it as a genuine aid (yuanjian) project, in contrast to the projects carried out more recently. The first Chinese company entered the Ethiopian construction market as a competitive contractor in 1997, embarking on the construction of the Addis Ababa Ring Road, a project sponsored by the World Bank. Chinese involvement in Ethiopia in the past two decades has, as in other African countries, centered on infrastructure development, filling the void left by traditional donors who shifted away from infrastructural construction to humanitarian aid (Bräutigam 2010). Chinese contractors in Ethiopia are estimated to have built about USD 6.5 billion worth of roads, totaling approximately 3000 kilometers.4 Most of these projects were paid for by the Ethiopian government and the International Development Association, and their construction was supervised by Ethiopian or international (e.g., Indian, Swiss) consultant companies. A handful of flagship projects, such as the Addis Ababa–Adama expressway, have been financed through Chinese loans. Chinese involvement in African road-building sectors is striking for two reasons: the sheer number of projects taken up by Chinese contractors and the sudden arrival of a large number of Chinese nationals. As of 2010, fully 75 (p.8) percent of the ongoing road projects in Ethiopia were carried out by Chinese companies, according to the Chinese embassy in Addis Ababa. The Chinese dominate road building in Ethiopia in another respect: individual projects commonly include more than a hundred Chinese expatriate citizens, in contrast with other foreign construction companies operating in the country, such as Italian, Turkish, Japanese, and Korean enterprises, which work with an expatriate staff of, at most, ten engineers. About 13 percent of all the Chinese companies active in Ethiopia are state-owned, yet these companies are the biggest and employ the largest number of both Chinese and Ethiopians (World Bank 2012, 11). In the face of their growing internationalization, Chinese state-owned enterprises have come to compete against each other (Gonzalez-Vicente 2011, 406). This is also relevant in the Ethiopian construction sector. Whereas connections play an important role in the allocation of projects in the domestic market, in Ethiopia, generally the lowest bidder wins projects funded by public money or the World Bank. Most loans extended to Ethiopia by the

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Introduction Chinese government or the China-Africa Development Fund are, however, conditional upon noncompetitive single sourcing from China. Whereas large-scale state-owned enterprises with international licenses normally act as main contractors, they subcontract smaller provincial or city-level state-owned enterprises and privately owned enterprises. Chinese companies have outcompeted Korean, Middle Eastern, European, and local companies because they were willing to carry out projects for a low price. “If this camp were an American or European camp, it would be big and beautiful. The Chinese keep it simple. They can sleep on the asphalt, if they have to,” an Ethiopian work inspector once remarked while we drove past a Chinese compound. Savings on wages, equipment, housing, and construction materials have allowed Chinese companies to keep their costs low. More importantly, Chinese state-owned enterprises are backed by company savings and state bank loans (Morck, Yeung, and Zhao 2008). “Chinese taxpayers are paying the African bill,” one Chinese respondent remarked. By contrast, Ethiopian companies with small budgets have to abort building works if they go over cost. With access to seemingly unrestricted capital, Chinese companies have sufficient capacity in both labor and machinery to continue works even if they incur a loss. A share of the government-funded projects in fact did. Xie Yang, manager of a project in southern Ethiopia that was losing up to 40 percent on the contract price, saw road building in Ethiopia as a learning process for which the Chinese had to “pay tuition fees.” Chinese contractors in Ethiopia stumbled upon many obstacles, such as limited budgets, shortages of building materials and resources, in Xie’s words “unreasonable (p. 9) design specifications,” and difficulties with cross-cultural communication. And yet, despite significant losses, the Chinese contractors continued, in order to uphold “the reputation of the company and the dignity of the Chinese.” Perhaps more to the point, once on board it was difficult to abandon ship. Companies had made a considerable initial investment in equipment, transportation, and mobilization. Recouping these investments required them to stay and try their luck on the next project; eat bitterness and get on in the hope for a rosier future.

Fashioning workers Tolo, tolo—“quick, quick” in Amharic—was the most repeated injunction on the building site. It was used by Chinese managers to exhort Ethiopian workers, urging them to speed up their work. Conveying irritation, or even exasperation, the word tolo, as it was used by Chinese managers, expressed the intricate sentiments that they held about their Ethiopian laborers and their life and work in Ethiopia more generally. Complaints abounded. The expatriate management held Ethiopian laborers accountable for holding up the building work and driving up production costs, even if their modest salaries made up a negligible share of the overall cost. Chinese foremen routinely called local workers lazy, aimless, and unwilling to work. The Ethiopians lacked that same desire to improve their lives that, they believed, had propelled four decades of rapid economic growth in China and helped bring the country back on track with the world after the Cultural Revolution. To understand Chinese attitudes toward Ethiopian workers and labor more generally, we should take into consideration their experiences at home. Most of them had been rural migrants in urban China who had fueled the country’s growth engine with their cheap and assiduous labor, or they were the children of that generation and had seen their sacrifices and determination up close. Subjected to a new form of governance that the reformist Chinese state cultivated in an effort to push for a shift from a planned to a market economy, both generations had been inculcated with a sense of their duty to work hard, coupled with a willingness to make sacrifices. Page 7 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Introduction Central to the state-led market reforms was the cultivation of a secular form of asceticism, a practice that entailed the rigorous abstention from self-indulgence in the name of development. Asceticism came to be seen, by the state and the individual alike, as a main prerequisite for driving social and economic development. The heightened self-cultivation of mind and body intrinsic to it was essential to the demands of the precarious labor regime that enabled China to become the factory of the world (e.g., Pun 2005; H. Yan 2003). In The Dragon’s Gift (2009), Deborah Bräutigam shows how China’s development assistance to African countries is marked by its own experience of (p.10) development during the economic reform period, when Japan and Western nations provided turnkey investment, along with loans, technology, and expertise, in exchange for resources, mainly oil. Chinese development blueprints in Africa, such as the Angola model, the supposedly uniquely Chinese model of oil-backed loans for infrastructure, in fact repeat patterns of foreign investment in mainland China throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In this book, I would like to extend Bräutigam’s plea to compare development in China with Chinese development overseas. Apart from development strategies and policies, perceptions of development and the epistemological assumptions on which they are based are repeated and rehearsed as well. Decades of unprecedented economic growth in China account for a vested belief of Chinese citizens in the power of markets and neoliberal subjectivity as a precondition for wealth generation. The development discourse that workers brought with them to Ethiopia bears striking similarities to what James Ferguson calls the productionist premise (2015, 36) of Western approaches to development that emphasize productivity over the production process itself—including putting people to work—and thereby fail to take into account a reality in which most people are excluded from the production system in the first place. The Chinese productionist premise and what we may call the productivist promise—the enchantment with productivity and its fruits—are, however, based on the distinct foundation of top-down state-led development. The model of the developmental state, passionately endorsed by the late prime minister of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi (2011), and his successors, has been viewed as the foundation of China’s economic miracle and continues to inform the country’s economic policies overseas. Since the start of China’s reforms, countless government campaigns, especially those aimed at raising the suzhi (quality) of the population (Kipnis 2006; Murphy 2004; H. Yan 2003), have articulated the idea that productivity is the responsibility, or even duty, of all citizens. The promarket reforms prompted a shift in public discourse, emphasizing the need for individuals to distinguish themselves and grasp life with both hands (Ong and Li 2008). This change in discourse went hand in hand with a radical transfer of responsibility—and risk—from state institutions to the individual. Entrepreneurialism and diligence were believed to be crucial to stimulating the economy, as was individual freedom, if restricted to the socioeconomic realm (X. Zhang 2008). One’s position in society came to be seen as reflecting one’s achievement and ability, rather than unfortunate class origins, as was thought under Mao Zedong’s regime, or disadvantageous government policies. Government campaigns calling citizens to improve the self and society found traction, as many citizens saw their productivity generously rewarded. (p.11) Much like their counterparts at home, the Chinese workers in Ethiopia credited the present state of their country to the blood, toil, sweat, and tears of individuals motivated to improve their lives and society as a whole. Development was, in their eyes, a collective rather than an individual endeavor. This explains their chagrin with the supposed indolence of

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Introduction Ethiopian workers, which they took as a sign of their irresponsibility. When productivity is considered to be a social responsibility, unproductivity is by implication shameful. Some Chinese workers characterized Ethiopian men as having lost their self-respect. Coming from a country with ample employment opportunities, the Chinese rarely question the availability of employment in Africa. Much in line with the Western productionist premise, they saw redistribution of wealth as futile or even counterproductive, for it cultivates a “greedy character” and makes Africans “naturally hold out a hand and ask for money,” as a Chinese interlocutor phrased it. Even if they were modest about their own ability, the Chinese I met in Ethiopia believed they had a strong duty to impart discipline and instill in their Ethiopian workers a will to improve (cf. Li 2007). As such, they resemble the figure of the Han “constructor” (jianshezhe) in Xinjiang province described by Tom Cliff (2016). Priding themselves as harbingers of development in what they view as one of China’s backward outposts, Han constructors are involved in more than physical labor. For them, construction is part of a broader project of social and cultural transformation (27), the success of which is measured by the quality of the habitat, the habits, and the habitus of the population (34). In order to achieve all-round civilization, Chinese reformers believed that the improvement of material conditions in society should be accompanied by the enhancement of people’s morality and the cultivation of their moral consciousness (Bakken 2000). Much like their counterparts in Xinjiang, the Chinese workers in Ethiopia believed they were well equipped to demonstrate what development entails. When their convictions met with little response, as they often did, they turned to the ethnographer for confirmation: “You have been to China. You have seen how developed China is compared to Africa, haven’t you?” Development was viewed by my interlocutors not only as the hard truth, as Deng Xiaoping had it, and therefore a necessity, but also as a privilege or an exclusive opportunity provided by generous Chinese gifts. In Taming Tibet (2013) Emily Yeh demonstrates how China’s legitimation of its sovereignty over Tibet rests on the presumption that Tibetans are grateful for the bestowal of the gift of development in the form of government subsidies and investment in large-scale infrastructure, agriculture, and housing. She shows how culturally specific idioms of development shape its political and economic outcomes. The ways in which the expansionist Chinese state fashions Tibetan citizens as subjects who desire development are reminiscent (p. 12) of the ways in which the Chinese developers expect Ethiopians to welcome their initiatives and guidance. Whereas Chinese claims of sovereignty over Tibet are founded on the argument that Tibetans are part of a larger Chinese family, the Han majority being the “big brother,” it is harder to use claims of kinship in Africa. The Chinese government, however, continues to fall back on historical narratives of Third World solidarity, inspired by the principles of peaceful coexistence drawn up at the Bandung Conference in 1955 (Alden and Large 2011; Cooley 1965; Institute of Pacific Relations 1955). While appealing to a common past as victims of European colonialism and a shared experience as developing countries, China simultaneously prides itself for its newly gained glory, or guangrong (guang means “brilliant,” rong “honor”), to justify its role in leading the way. China’s ambivalent position as equal and superior is however questioned and challenged on the ground.

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Introduction Disciplining management As Frederick Cooper (1997, 80) remarks in his study on Zanzibari and Kenyan plantation workers in the colonial period, “work discipline is part of a structure, not a habit.” Worker defiance is often a response to managerial caprice. On Chinese-run road building sites in Ethiopia, efforts to discipline the local workers frequently proved counterproductive. Ethiopian workers have become skilled at resisting management, so much so that they themselves were able to discipline the Chinese managers, who were forced to improve labor conditions over work contracts, wage levels, and punishments. On some occasions workers even came to make expatriate managers look foolish. Importantly, the Ethiopian workers could rely on the support of local civic authorities, such as the police and the town administration. More significantly, they had the law on their side. The ruling of the judges at wereda courts,5 the lowest-level state courts in Ethiopia, discriminated in (p.13) favor of the local workforce, at least so Chinese managers believed. Ethiopian workers increasingly came to fight their employers not only on the construction site but also in the courtroom—with considerable success. The ad hoc coalitions that evolved between workers, village and town residents, and civic and legal authorities, increased the leverage of local laborers vis-à-vis their Chinese employers and boosted their morale. Many have argued that African actors, whether they are political elites, civil servants, small entrepreneurs, or ordinary workers, are drawing the short straw in their encounters with the Chinese. More recently, however, a number of scholars have pointed out the agency that Africans exert in their interactions with Chinese (Alden 2007; Bodomo 2009; Cheru 2016; Moyo 2010). Far from being a passive space that is increasingly subject to intervention by China, Africa is a contested terrain, where Chinese actors are constantly challenged (Corkin 2013; Lee 2017; Mohan and Lampert 2013; Soulé-Kohndou 2018). Of course, we should be wary of romanticizing resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990), especially when taking into consideration the Ethiopian rank-and-file workers of Chinese multinational enterprises. Indeed, Chinese involvement in the African construction sector has produced new dependencies (Brooks 2010; French 2014; Nielsen 2013). In this book, however, I seek to highlight the leverage of Ethiopian actors in negotiating labor conditions and, more importantly, the circumstances and mechanisms that worked to enhance their leverage vis-à-vis their Chinese employers. At the other end, I look at the Chinese response, which is revealing of the lack of agency they perceive to possess. Why were the Ethiopian laborers able to negotiate working conditions so boldly and effectively? And why were the expatriate managers forced to give in to workers’ demands? The leverage of the workers seems remarkable, given that the construction industry is one of the most precarious sectors worldwide. Casualization is rampant, and the lack of unionization places construction workers in an extremely vulnerable position, especially in racialized corporate structures. Most Chinese construction companies in Ethiopia work with an all-expatriate management. Ethiopians, both natives to the region and workers who hail from other parts of the country, take up the manual, unskilled, and semiskilled jobs. The racial glass ceiling mostly prevents them from attaining management positions higher than that of foreman. Despite the casualized and racialized labor regime on construction sites, however, there are factors inherent in road building that increased the agency of Ethiopian workers. Road-building sites are publicly accessible—indeed, Chinese construction activities in southeastern Tigray drew many curious spectators from surrounding settlements—and abusive labor practices were thus to a large extent visible to the public and condemned collectively as a result. Ethiopian (p.14) workers, a significant number of whom are members of the local

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Introduction community, built alliances with local residents in their attempts to resist Chinese management. They were often successful, and worker resistance was thus nestled in local communal structures. Despite the lack of trade unions or any other support structures, Ethiopian workers proved to be remarkably successful in challenging the expatriate managers and improving their working lives as a result. Labor resistance and protest covered the broad spectrum from subtle transgressions to strikes, even if the latter remained restricted to single companies. The local builders’ most effective leverage against their Chinese employers was the collective withdrawal of labor, even though work stoppages commonly did not last longer than a day. On the construction site, the Chinese managers were often challenged from within, that is, with the same discursive tools and methods that were used to discipline the local workforce. The laborers appropriated the ideas and concepts that had been introduced by management itself to implement labor discipline and used these against management. While the managers pushed casualization to extremes, by replacing a worker after the slightest confrontation, laborers copied them by voting with their feet, leaving one company for another. This strategy forced the Chinese companies to increase wages, as they sought to retain good workers. In the courtroom the workers proved even more successful in fighting their Chinese superiors. The wereda courts not only routinely ruled against the Chinese expatriates, regardless of the evidence presented in court, they also created awareness among workers of their labor rights and among the Chinese managers of their obligations as employers over issues such as employment contracts, severance and overtime payments, and dismissal procedures. Faced with a soaring number of lawsuits filed against them, the Chinese were stupefied. In addition to this, the wereda courts and town administrations turned a blind eye to—and thereby effectively legitimized— the workers’ subversive activities, such as pilfering. This went against the expatriate managers’ ideas about the local state and its expected support for local industries. This attitude is not surprising when we take into consideration the situation in mainland China, where powerful coalitions exist between county and municipal governments on the one hand and industries on the other. Resentment of Chinese labor practices, coupled with more general anti-Chinese sentiment, then, spurred the creation of both ad hoc and more longterm coalitions between workers, local residents, and the authorities in an effort to resist malfeasance. Whereas the interests of the central government and the Ethiopian Roads Authority in Addis Ababa dovetailed with the Chinese push for more discipline, the interests of local authorities converged (p.15) with those of the workers on these matters. Consequently, Chinese involvement prompted divisions between central and local authorities. The most common responses of the Chinese managers to forms of defiance, especially when they concerned coalitions with state institutions, were acquiescence and compromise. Often the Chinese could not change a situation to their advantage. For one thing, they lacked the authority to intervene. This meant that the best solution, from their perspective, was simply to swallow their anger and remain silent. At least in this way they could save face, safeguard their credibility, or prevent more harm from befalling their reputation. As workers grew bolder and alliances among various actors in the local community stronger, the Chinese managers were compelled to give way over contractual arrangements, working times, advances on salaries, and medical expense coverage. Far from being unblemished, the honor derived from “helping the Africans develop” thus had a distinctly bitter taste, as the Chinese found their generosity Page 11 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Introduction unreciprocated. However, as the fraught encounters with the Ethiopians left a bitter flavor, so too did divisions within the Chinese road-building community.

Rescuing Chineseness The Chinese road-building communities in Ethiopia were riddled with hierarchies and divisions. Differentiation occurred on many levels, starting with the type of sector in which Chinese workers were employed, the company for which they worked, the contract under which they were appointed, and the nature of their job. In daily life, the distinction between Chinese companies was expressed by referring to the quality of what was called daiyu, meaning “treatment,” broadly defined. The concept of daiyu was taken to indicate the level of salary, yet it also implied economic and social benefits and employment security, as well as the status of the living conditions offered by employers. The respondents unanimously agreed that in Africa the daiyu of Chinese state-owned companies was better than, and preferable to, that of private enterprises. Within companies there were also dividing lines. The older generation of Chinese workers, who ranked higher in the company hierarchy, were quick to point out the differences between temporary, project-based staff, whom they called peasant workers (nongmingong) and permanent employees, or “people of our work unit” (women danwei de ren). Although the peasant workers were Chinese, they were not considered part of the work unit, despite the fact that they had sometimes worked up to 7 or 8 years for the company. Permanent employees commonly hailed from urban regions or had enjoyed a higher education, whereas the peasant workers came from rural backgrounds. This separation reflects the rural-urban divide in China, which was transported (p.16) overseas and found expression in all spheres of life in Ethiopia. The number of peasant workers hired by state-owned enterprises was, however, small. Most of them worked for private subcontractors. Chinese workers from poor rural backgrounds under a temporary contract with private construction companies—somewhat pejoratively referred to as the dalaocu (big old ruffians) by their superiors—were seen as threats to the reputations of civilized and cultured Chinese. Sharing food with local families, speaking regional vernaculars, and pursuing intimate relations with Ethiopian women, these workers became the main target of occasional civilizing offensives initiated by the project management. Chinese workers were allowed to straddle ethnic (or racial) boundaries, that is, to taste the food of the other, yet not too greedily, and speak the other’s language, but not too fluently. Sexual intercourse was another matter, for this form of intimacy annulled the social and racial distances between “us” (the Chinese) and “them” (the Ethiopians) that were so carefully protected by the high-level managers. They attempted to retain the positive image (xingxiang) of the Chinese community, if often in vain. Their preoccupation with reputation derived from lingering anxieties about the potential contamination of Chinese integrity in the dual sense of the word, as the quality of having strong moral principles and as the condition of being undivided. Narratives of China’s overseas development are intimately connected with the emphasis on improving the suzhi (quality) of the Chinese population and the project of building material and spiritual civilization at home, as Nyíri Pál (2006, 2013) illustrates. The suzhi of the Chinese was cast in a more favorable light than that of the Ethiopians, who came to serve as the background against which their Chinese counterparts were able to see themselves as more advanced and affluent, more refined and knowledgeable, thereby boosting their pride in a common Chinese identity. Even if Chinese road builders in Ethiopia had to a certain extent lost out on development at home, they expressed strong nationalist sentiments. The patriotism emanating Page 12 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Introduction from the grand narratives of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative has only further boosted their confidence and has, more importantly, instilled in them a sense of purpose. The chasm between the dominant rhetoric of unity and solidarity and the underlying concern with the reality of sharp social divisions marked the lives of Chinese workers in Ethiopia. Anxieties produced by what Ann Laura Stoler (2009, 1997, 1989) calls the “interior frontier” in the context of the colonial Dutch Indies did not derive only from an in-between category of mixed-race babies, or métissage in the historical trajectory described by Stoler, but also by a category of Han Chinese who were regarded as inferior and impure, based on class-based categories and connotations transported to Ethiopia. Social stratification within the Chinese migrant community was (p.17) to a large extent based on socioeconomic divisions originating in Chinese society; divisions that were put to the test in daily interactions with the Ethiopian host community. The tension between, on the one hand, the promotion of a single identity—a common Chineseness—and, on the other hand, the exclusionary rhetoric that prevailed in informal narratives among road workers, came to influence Chinese interactions with Ethiopians and taint their feelings of accomplishment.

Speaking bitterness Bitterness was a common sentiment expressed by Chinese managers on the construction site and in the private quarters of residential compounds. Narratives of bitterness were made in a variety of registers, conveying sorrow, frustration, and occasionally wrath, but also pride and confidence. On the one hand, narratives of suffering—or speaking bitterness (suku)—sought to explain the limited success of the Chinese projects in Ethiopia. Alluding to the apparent hostility of the local people, they spoke of laborers, residents, and authorities as thwarting, or worse, sabotaging Chinese benevolence. The bitterness tasted and expressed by Chinese workers can be explained by the felt disjuncture between their hopes and the circumstances they faced on the ground, in particular, the lack of gratitude on the part of the Ethiopians. On the other hand, tales of hardship could bear a distinctly positive connotation, in particular, when they suggested that the ability to eat bitterness was part of Chinese identity. Personal disappointment was, then, turned into self-sacrifice and a form of national pride. This idea is reproduced in the Chinese state media, which remind workers of their patriotic duties and praise them in return for transferring China’s glory, or guangrong, overseas. For one thing, their ability to endure hardships was seen to set them apart from the Ethiopians. Used in a comparative perspective, the moralistic tone of speaking bitterness draws a boundary between the Chinese managers and Ethiopian workers that muddles, or even legitimates, the at times denigrating attitude of managers toward their Ethiopian laborers (cf. Lee 2017). “Ethiopians don’t know how to eat bitterness” was a repeated comment on the apparent indolence of Ethiopian workers and their supposed inability to defer gratification, one of the key values of asceticism. “In the evenings they drink away the salaries they earn during the day.” Labor was about saving rather than spending money, the Chinese believed; a view that is not surprising given that the reason for them to work abroad was to save money. The Chinese managers wanted the Ethiopian workers to eat bitterness, or at least make sacrifices, if not for the company and the construction work, then at least in the name of development. Only then would they be able to cast off abject poverty. (p.18) Eating bitterness, on the flip side, demands full submission to company discipline. As Ching Kwan Lee (2017) in her work on Chinese mine workers in Zambia notes, eating bitterness is composed of a “combination of individual moral compulsion with corporate control imperatives” (53), and it resonates with Max Weber’s depiction of inner-worldly asceticism, the Page 13 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Introduction focus of people on attitudes and activities that lead to salvation. Inner-worldly asceticism, as preached in Protestantism, teaches that the fulfillment of obligations in the world is the main, if not the only, method of proving one’s (religious) merit. The asceticism embraced by Chinese workers in Ethiopia holds that the dutiful and diligent fulfillment of obligations is the principal way of proving individual and, more importantly, collective value. Asceticism, in other words, entailed personal sacrifice with an eye to achieving collective salvation. However, eating bitterness was not just part of the management culture. It was the very foundation of migrant life in Ethiopia that lent value to the migrants’ projects. By eating and speaking bitterness, Chinese workers hoped to gain respect not only from Ethiopians but also from those at home. The discourse construed their activities in Ethiopia as a virtuous sacrifice for the Chinese nation and for development at large. As the public image of Chinese workers overseas has been distorted from that of brave and noble representatives of the nation into men who move to Africa to pan for gold (taojin), workers sought to retain their recognition and dignity. In the popular Chinese imagination, Africa is commonly classified as poor and backward, and moving there is not held in particularly high regard. To a certain extent, the discourse of eating bitterness added virtue, if not value, to their endeavor.

Road work Set in rural southeastern Tigray, the book follows a road under construction by a Chinese contractor, which I call RCE, from mid-2008 to early 2013. RCE, a national state-owned enterprise, had subcontracted a large part of the work to six Chinese companies: five private enterprises from the provinces Fujian (two), Hebei, Shandong, and Liaoning, and one provincial state-owned company from Heilongjiang, as well as a number of smaller Ethiopian companies from Addis Ababa and Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray region. The road works were supervised by two Ethiopian consultant firms in a joint venture and funded by the Ethiopian government and the European Commission. All managers, down to the on-site foremen, were Chinese, with approximately 120 men and five women in total (as of March 2012). Most of the physical labor was carried out by Ethiopians, varying from workers with little or no skill or experience, to skilled workers such as machine operators, masons, and carpenters. Unskilled laborers were mainly drawn from towns (p.19) and villages along the project road, whereas many skilled and semiskilled workers came from Amhara and Oromia regional states, being brought in by the Chinese companies from previous projects. In total, about 700 to 800 Ethiopian laborers worked on the road at the peak of the building works.

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Introduction The project contract was signed on December 31, 2007, and mobilization started not long after that, yet construction work did not gain full pace until early 2011. “The Ethiopian Roads Authority is nervous, but we are even more nervous,” said a staff member of the Chinese contractor. The delay of the project was caused by the design specifications, which fit neither the geographical terrain nor the estimated contract costs of Ethiopian birr (ETB) (p. 20) 645,000,000 (including value-added tax).6 The slope gradients and curve radii of the existing gravel road were too steep and too short, respectively, and needed adjustment, but complying with the Ethiopian Roads Authority’s specifications Map 1: Addis Ababa–Axum–Asmara road, would entail extra work and prove to be a Ethiopia drain on the contractors’ limited budget. After more than a year, both parties gave in to reach a compromise. “We have learned a lot from Alamata,” acknowledged the deputy director of the Ethiopian Roads Authority’s Design and Build Department. He pointed at the overview design of the Addis Ababa–Adama motorway that graced the wall of the general office of his department. “Have you heard of the new expressway from Addis Ababa to Adama? That road is also under construction by the Chinese. Perhaps you should have a look at that project.” This motorway was to become a success story: for 57 percent funded with a loan from the Export-Import Bank of China, the budget was high, as were the stakes, and the media were on top of the project, which gave the Chinese contractor an extra push to finish the works before the date stipulated in the contract. In contrast, the Alamata–Hewane road project was a painful learning experience, being the first design-andbuild project for the employer as well as for the Chinese contractor. Traversing the northern part of Raya, a region that covers the very north of Amhara and the very south of Tigray, the project road runs in the direction of Mekelle City. The route from Alamata to Hewane had been a gravel road constructed as a detour for the Alamata–Betemara section of the Addis Ababa–Aksum road, the main north-south axis of the country, which was being upgraded at the time. After completion, though, the detour proved to be more popular than the main asphalt road, in particular for drivers of heavy trucks and trailers, who preferred to circumvent the steep slopes and hairpin curves of Mount Gera Kahsu. (Different stories account for the name of this infamous mountain: some say it was the name of a wealthy man; others claim it was a curse shouted by an Italian engineer who absent-mindedly let a concrete pipe roll down the slope.) For this reason, the Ethiopian Roads Authority decided to upgrade the detour to a DS-4 asphalt concrete road with a single asphalt layer (5 cm) and two carriageways (7 m each).7 (p. 21)

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Introduction (p.22) From Alamata, the starting point, the road crosses the Raya plain, curving around the mountains, then climbing into the mountains until its end just before the town of Hewane. The borders of Raya, I was told, did not correspond with the borders that had been drawn up when the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia was established in 1991, yet the people of Raya shared a common origin, language, and culture. The road runs through three rural weredas: Raya Alamata, Raya Azebo, and Hintalo Wajirat, and one urban wereda, Alamata town. Together, a total population of 463,760 lived in these four weredas (Central Statistical Agency of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 2012). The district was predominantly rural. Raya Azebo, for instance, with Mehoni town as administrative center, had a population of circa 150,000, whereas the town itself numbered only about 15,000 residents (interview, Raya Azebo wereda administration, January 25, 2012). The towns, then, were dependent on road traffic and the services provided to the surrounding rural areas.

Map 2: The project road, southeastern Tigray

With a population of approximately 40,000, Alamata was the largest town along the project road (interview, Alamata wereda administration, May 18, 2012). Established by the Italians in 1936, Alamata had begun as a road-builders’ camp for the Italian construction firm Azienda Autonomia Statale della Strada and the Italian military (Tsega-Ab 2000, 22), situated on a plain south of the mountain foothills. Alamata became an important stop on La Strada della Vittoria (The Road of Victory) built by the Italians during the occupation. In 1938, the town counted 1,850 inhabitants and was the major settlement in the region. Mehoni had at that time a population of 560 (35). After the Italian interregnum, the new administration of Emperor Haile Selassie faced stiff resistance in this part of Tigray, and, even now, the attitude of the area’s inhabitants toward the central government in Addis Ababa remains ambivalent, despite the fact that the governing party hails from Tigray. The Chinese had thus entered a region marked by historic tensions between local communities and the central state. Political tensions were woven into the fabric of the region as early as 1943, when a coalition of peasants, bandits, and members of the aristocracy who saw their autonomous position under threat by the Imperial regime initiated a rebellion known as the Weyane rebellion (Gebru 1984; Young 1998). Taking place off the main road (in the region crossed by the project road), the revolt was crushed that same year by the central government, aided by the British Royal Air Force, resulting in the confiscation of land by the state (Aregawi 2004). In 1953, after a series of disputes between former landowners and purchasers, the Imperial government decided to

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Introduction return the lands (Tsega-Ab 2000, 44–46). Even so, the central administration remained (p.23) discredited in the region, not least because the new taxes were much higher than they had been under the Italians (Erlich 1981, 217). Then, in the 1980s Alamata became a stronghold of the Derg, the Marxist-inspired regime that took power following the ousting of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, which tried to hold onto the towns along the main road (Hammond 2002, 97). Meanwhile, areas farther off, such as Azebo and Mehoni town, fell into the hands of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in 1981. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front fought against the Derg regime and Amhara dominance (Aregawi 2004; Donham 1999; Young 1998). Alamata became the scene of an important battle and fell into the hands of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front as late as 1989 (Tsega-Ab 2000, 69). Together with the state, Chinese companies were the major employers in the Raya region, where most of the population live off agriculture. Rayans told me with pride that their region was the most fertile in Tigray, growing maize, sugarcane, sorghum, and teff8 as the main crops. Most of the peasants were smallholders. The national and international markets’ reach into the area was limited, in contrast to more fertile regions in Oromia and Gambella in southern Ethiopia. There was one livestock farm along the project road that produced exports for the Middle East. Another large fruit and vegetable farm run by an expatriate British citizen of Indian origin was situated 15 kilometers off the road. In the past this region had also produced cotton for the Italian-founded cotton ginning factory in Alamata. Rumor had it that the factory had been seized by the central government of Emperor Haile Selassie to punish defiant Tigrayans and was sold to Jimma in the southwest of Ethiopia (Tsega-Ab 2000, 46). Despite the land’s fertility and suitability for agriculture, the region’s history has been marked by droughts and famines, most notably in 1965–1966, 1973–1974, and 1984–1985 (63). In response to these famines, the Derg regime resettled inhabitants from Raya and adjacent areas to places in southwestern Ethiopia (Pankhurst 1992). People in the region commonly identify themselves along religious lines. Although Tigray is largely Orthodox Christian—more than 4.1 million of the 4.3 million Tigrayans are Orthodox Christian (Central Statistical Agency of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 2007)—a large number of the nearly 171,000 Muslims in Tigray live in Raya. The Muslims in the region share an Oromo origin. The names of the villages along the project road, such as Ta’a and Kukufto, are reminiscent of the Oromo pastoralist settlements on the Raya Plain that date to the sixteenth century, when their livelihood was dependent on raising cattle and camels (Gebru 1984, 83). An Ethiopian laboratory technician noted that there were still a number of (p.24) people in Kukufto town who could speak Oromiffa. Muslim pastoralists in the heart of this Orthodox Christian area were often raided and fought by monarchs such as Emperor Yohannes IV (1871–1889) (Tsega-Ab 2000, 5–7). To this day, the pastoralists remain unpopular. Town administrators I interviewed, for instance, saw the Muslims in their region as a nuisance, contending somewhat indignantly that they were generally disloyal. They were different from the peoples of Saudi Arabia who had arrived in Ethiopia in the seventh century, I was told by a former history teacher who had a post in the Raya Alamata wereda administration. He contended that the Muslims in Raya were impure, or in his words, “not proper Muslims.” The second-largest town on the project road was Mehoni, referred to by the Chinese as Maoni or simply as zhen (township). The administrative center of Raya Azebo wereda, Mehoni was argued to have taken the place of Korem on the old Italian-built route as an inn for truck drivers on the way to Mekelle and farther on to Aksum. With its strategic placement—a day’s ride from Addis

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Introduction Ababa—and with the arrival of asphalt in March 2012, Mehoni was transformed into a mediumsized road town in a relatively short time and is likely to continue to grow as a stop on the new Weldiya–Mekelle railway. Farther north, the road leaves the plain and starts to climb at kilometer 58, passing Adiqey (kilometer 86), and the highest point of the project road at an altitude of 2,636 meters, at the village of Adimesno (kilometer 95). The difference in climate between Adimesno and the lowest point of the road, close to Alamata, with an altitude of 1,446 meters, was palpable. The project road joins the main (Italian-built) road again after 116 kilometers. At the junction, the end of the road close to Hewane town, a board had been posted advising drivers to use the main road. Few complied, especially drivers of large trucks and trailers for whom the old route was a headache. Minibuses, however, continued to travel along the old route, as more people, and thus more customers, lived along that road. Although the book is mainly based on 10 months of field research in Tigray in 2011 and 2012, it also draws from research in Addis Ababa, where I followed the construction of the Ring Road Project Phase 3 in 2011, and the Southern Peoples, Nations, and Nationalities Region in southwestern Ethiopia, where I observed a road under construction in 2017. I spent time and conducted interviews with the Chinese involved in road building up and down the corporate hierarchy, including project managers, engineers, draftsmen, contract managers, surveyors, mechanics, service personnel, and foremen on site, as well as the Ethiopian employees of the Chinese construction companies and the Ethiopian engineers employed by the Ethiopian Roads Authority or Ethiopian consultant firms that supervised the roadworks, and I accompanied them to the construction site. To protect (p.25) the identity of my respondents, I use pseudonyms for the names of both individuals and companies, and occasionally altered distinguishing details about them. Because of the importance of geographic locations in my study, geographical names have been left unchanged. During my time in Tigray I spent almost the same amount of time living in the Chinese and Ethiopian compounds. Furthermore, I went through documents,9 including contract documents, monthly progress reports, and correspondence between the client, contractor, and consultant. Road-building projects typically involve three main parties: the client (often referred to as “the employer”), who commissions the contractor to carry out the construction work and who employs the consultant, the client’s representative on site, to supervise the works with respect to quality, time, costs, and general building practices. The Chinese road builders worked 7 days a week, from 7 in the morning to 6:30 at night. As a consequence, recorded interviews raised practical difficulties. After a quick dinner in the camp canteen, they retired to their rooms for a rest, to watch a TV series, or to play video games. Or they disappeared into the table tennis room. Apart from a series of structured interviews I conducted in the late evenings, I gathered most of the data from casual conversations in cars and on construction sites replete with the sometimes overwhelming sound of excavators and road rollers, and exposed to the sun. “You get darker day by day,” kidded an Ethiopian friend once when I returned to Addis Ababa: “You are starting to look like the Chinese on the construction site.” Another practical difficulty was mobility, or rather the lack thereof. With more than 100 kilometers to cover in my field site, traveling became a major concern. The fact that I did not have a car turned out to be an unexpected advantage as much as an expected disadvantage. By hitching rides I gained access to people on the road. I chatted with the drivers and fellow Page 18 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Introduction passengers of Bajajs,10 pickups, land cruisers, Isuzus, dump trucks, trailers, minibuses, and horse carts: all men. (I only rarely spotted a female driver and that was in urban Ethiopia.) Hitching rides from the camps to the building sites also enabled me to talk to the Chinese workers, who spent their only free hours and relaxing moments on a busy working day in their air-conditioned cars. A recurring issue, however, was the simultaneity of events. Due to my limited mobility, I could not simply go from one event at kilometer 103 to another at kilometer 14. I was forced to make choices. (p.26) Thanks to my respondents, I learned to think and talk in kilometers. Not only distances but also locations were perceived and expressed in kilometers. The often-posed questions “Where are you?” or “Where are you going?” was answered accordingly, with “I am at kilometer such-and-such” or “I am going to kilometer such-and-such.” On my first day I was informed that the asphalt had reached kilometer 18, the base course was approaching kilometer 8, and the subbase had entered Alamata town at kilometer 1 plus 800 (meters). After becoming familiar with the pace of different construction works—the project’s asphalt works, for instance, moved at about the rate of a kilometer a day—I developed a sense of which works were happening where, and at which kilometer. After a few months I also got on reasonably well with the engineer’s jargon. Certainly, reading project documents facilitated this process. I learned that an RE was a resident engineer, that PM stood for project manager, that a turning point (or TP, or a time-out gesture with the hands) was a surveying term indicating a point temporarily marked to establish the position of a level instrument at a new position, that RHS stood for right-hand side and a ROW problem for a rightof-way problem; a problem that occurred repeatedly, as the site was not fully cleared before the construction works commenced. I learned the different road base layers and their specifications (thickness or liter per m2), as well as the important names in the profession. These technicalities and inside knowledge were essential to understand communications on site. In terms of language, Chinese-run construction sites across Ethiopia are a linguistic Wild West. Chinese managers and Ethiopian workers communicate with each other in Chinese, Amharic, English, and regional languages such as Tigrinya, or, most commonly, in a pidgin of these languages. On all the road projects I followed, Amharic was the lingua franca among Ethiopians, as most of the consultant staff and foremen came from Addis Ababa or Amhara regional state. As a European, I came to embody the critical second other (the West). My position in the field was neutral at best and threatening at worst. Much to my surprise, however, I was seen as Chinese by many young Ethiopians, despite my white skin and blonde hair. On the road, I was often greeted by children with “China, China!” much as the Chinese were. If I was not seen as China, I was perceived as a collaborator with China. When I was walking to Hotel Meaza in Alamata on January 20, 2012, a young man shouted angrily at me from the other side of the road: “Why are you working? You should go to church and pray!” It was Epiphany (Am. T’imqet),11 a religious holiday. Nonetheless, the Chinese continued their building works on that day, which (p.27) resulted in conflict on and off the construction site. On this occasion, I could feel the anger that many locals carried against the Chinese. For the Chinese and Ethiopian engineers, I was, for better or worse, a Westerner. Despite my focus on the Chinese perspective, I tried to grasp different points of view on the social life of work on the building site, including those of the three parties of the engineering triangle: the employer, the contractor (and subcontractors), and the consultant. This proved challenging, as the three parties had conflicting interests and held various secrets that I, as a Page 19 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Introduction researcher, was potentially prying into or passing on to other parties. The fact that the project was running at a loss and was plagued by failures, some of which I personally witnessed, did not make the situation any easier. Notably, the concerns of both the Chinese and Ethiopians that I was perhaps getting to know too much did not reflect their views of international politics. At the start of my field research I was cautious of how to position myself vis-à-vis interlocutors. Predominantly negative media coverage in Europe of China’s role in Africa led me to assume that Chinese workers would be suspicious of me as a Western researcher. In general, though, they were not, although the situation has changed recently.12 Only once was I reminded of international politics, when Chen Delin, a mechanic and manager of an asphalt crew, asked me out of the blue, “Do you really think that Hilary Clinton is right in saying that we are colonizing Africa?” Chen and I were hiding from the sun in a box culvert; above us was the deafening rumbling of asphalt rollers, next to us were giggling local children following our conversation. “The Chinese government surely has her motives; to gain votes in the UN, for instance. People and states are in essence the same. They need friends to win against their enemies. But honestly, do you really think we are colonizing Africa?” Chen had just explained that his company, a private construction firm based in Shandong province, had lost at least ETB 10 million to theft in Ethiopia, mainly of petrol, tires, steel, and spare parts. From his perspective, it was the Chinese who were being exploited, rather than the other way around. Notes: (1.) There are quite a few studies on (ill-informed) depictions of Chinese involvement in Africa in Western media and popular discourse (see, e.g., Bräutigam 2015; Sautman and Yan 2009, 2014; Woods 2008; Yan and Sautman 2012). (2.) Although Emperor Yohannes IV (1871–1889), who originated from Tigray, played an important role in uniting Ethiopia (Levine 2000, 160), little road construction took place during his reign. A devout Orthodox Christian, Yohannes IV was said to be more interested in building churches than means of communication (Pankhurst 1968, 288). (3.) My calculation of data in Masresha (1970, 8). (4.) My calculation of data in Alemayehu and Atenafu (2010, 20–21). (5.) Weredas are third-level districts that follow regions (Am. kililoch, sing. kilil) and zones (Am. zonoch, sing. zon), and precede kebeles, the lowest-level government units. Ethiopia has a dual judicial system that is made up of two parallel, separately functioning, court structures, on the federal and state level respectively. Supreme federal judicial authority is vested in the Federal Supreme Court in Addis Abeba. Until recently, only the federal cities of Addis Abeba and Dire Dawa housed Federal High Courts and First Instance Courts. There are also three levels of state courts: the State Supreme Court, the State High Courts, and the First Instance Courts. State Supreme Courts sit in the capital cities of the respective states and bear final judicial authority over matters that concern State law and jurisdiction (Girmachew 2010). In Tigray, the State Supreme Court is based in Mekelle. The nearest State High Court sat in Maychew, while Alamata, Mehoni, and Hewane, the three towns of my field site, all housed First Instance Courts that dealt with a growing number of lawsuits involving Chinese companies and nationals. State

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Introduction First Instance Courts are commonly referred to as wereda courts. I use this term throughout the book. (6.) In January 2012, ETB 1 equaled USD 0.05 (or USD 1 equaled ETB 17.29). Since the end of my field research the Chinese Yuan (CNY) has appreciated and the ETB has depreciated against the USD. My respondents were well aware of the exchange rates and the fluctuating value of currencies. (7.) DS-4 stands for Design Standard 4. At the time of research, there were ten design standards in Ethiopia, running from Design Standard 1 (DS-1), for roads that accommodate an Average Daily Traffic of 10,000–15,000 to DS-10, for rural roads that accommodate an Average Daily Traffic up to 15. The width of the road and the surface type are defined accordingly. Roads with a Design Standard running from 1 to 4 have an asphalt surface, while DS-5 to DS-8 roads have a gravel surface. DS-9 and DS-10 roads are made of earth, and are administered by the wereda road offices. DS-1 to DS-5 are administered by the federal road authorities, while the remaining roads (DS-6 to DS-8) fall under the regional road authorities. For a detailed and informative discussion on the construction and administration of lower-level roads in Ethiopia, see the work of Rony Emmeneger (2012, 2016). (8.) Teff is an African cereal cultivated chiefly in Ethiopia and used to make flour for injera, a sourdough-risen flatbread with a spongy texture that is consumed in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and among Ethiopians and Eritreans in diaspora. (9.) The (untranslated) documents that appear in this study have been reproduced exactly as they appear in the original, errors included. (10.) The Bajaj is a three-wheeler imported from India and used for passenger transport. Bajaj is the name of the Indian manufacturer. For an excellent discussion of the Bajaj system in urban Ethiopia, see Mains and Kinfu (2017). (11.) When I offer the Amharic versions of words, I mark these as Am. (12.) Westerners, especially those involved in Africa, are usually assumed to bear anti-Chinese sentiments. For a fascinating discussion of (Western) perceptions of Chinese engagement with Africa and the ways in which Chinese actors respond to these perceptions by performing “China in Africa” for the West, see Cheryl Schmitz’ work (2014, 2018).

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Pushed to Ethiopia

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Pushed to Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords What drives so many young Chinese to Ethiopia? Moving down to a less developed place rather than up to the developed world, Chinese migrants indicate that they are forced to move to Africa in pursuit of a better income and a chance to improve their lives and that of their (future) families. While the desire to migrate, which continues to be viewed as an avenue for upward social mobility, remains prevalent in Chinese society, the incentives for doing so have changed. Recent social, political, and economic transformations in mainland China have generated a sense of insecurity, of falling behind in a fierce competition for resources. This feeling is particularly strong among Chinese workers employed by domestic companies in Ethiopia, for whom moving to Africa is a way out. This way out, however, turns out to be one that offers no way back. Keywords:   Migration, social mobility, transformation, rural, urban, way out

Zheng He did not intend to go to Africa. He just got lost at sea. —Chinese engineer in Ethiopia, February 18, 2012 The above statement is not only a veiled critique of Chinese state rhetoric, in which Zheng He (1371–1433 or 1435), the Ming dynasty court eunuch, diplomat, and fleet admiral, has been exalted as a symbol of Chinese-African relations; it is also a reflection of the engineer’s own point of view. Owing to his financial situation at home, with a mortgage loan waiting to be repaid, this engineer contended that he had no option but to move to Africa. In his words, he was pushed to Ethiopia. In this chapter, I link the recent wave of Chinese labor migration to Africa, which gained momentum in the early 2000s, to salient societal transformations in China. The most notable change was a shift away from the flurry of optimism and idealism that swept through Chinese society in the 1990s and much of the 2000s to a mood of careful conformism fueled by the yearning for security that is characteristic of the labor migrants involved in public works projects undertaken by Chinese enterprises in Ethiopia. The reason frequently given for

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Pushed to Ethiopia moving to Ethiopia was societal pressure (shehui yali) at home. What precisely this social pressure entailed was often left unexplained. Before I turn to everyday encounters between Chinese and Ethiopians on the construction site in the chapters that follow, I will first contextualize Chinese road-building activities in Ethiopia by unravelling workers’ motivations for migration, placing them in the socioeconomic circumstances that they leave behind. Chinese workers have a precarious place in a society that has undergone sweeping social, economic, and demographic transformations over the past decades. This provides the essential backdrop to their views of life in Ethiopia and their experiences of their day-to-day encounters with Ethiopians. Indeed, their past experiences and motivations for moving to Ethiopia have shaped and colored their approach to development and the steps they have taken to achieve it. (p.29) While the desire to migrate, viewed as an avenue for upward social mobility, remains prevalent among a broad cross section of Chinese society, the incentives for doing so have changed in response to the unprecedented economic growth and sociopolitical transformation that have generated what Chinese scholars refer to as jiaolü, often translated as anxiety, but better captured by the notion of angst—a persistent but unfocused fear. Representing a lingering distress of lagging behind in a fierce competition for resources, such as wealth, jobs, and housing, this angst challenges individual agency in a society in which the principle of freedom is celebrated, at least in the socioeconomic sphere. Angst weighs upon the dispossessed— those who fail to attain the status they think they must achieve. Against this backdrop, “the desiring self” (Rofel 2007), embodying the desires that drove Chinese individuals to get ahead in the early post-reform period, has come to yearn not so much for self-realization and material wealth as for security and stability. Haunted by the fear of missing out in a competition for resources, as Xiang Biao (2014) argues, Chinese (would-be) migrants seek to displace the present by migrating overseas to earn quick money in order to get ahead when they return to China. Transplanting one’s life to Africa is a means of jumping toward the future, an investment in time for the sake of accumulating wealth or start-up capital that would enable them to benefit from rapid development at home. Moving down to a less developed region rather than “up” to the developed world, labor migration to Ethiopia is decidedly China oriented, and, being largely state led, it is relatively predictable and secure. However, the displacement of the present invariably leads to spatial displacement, as migrants, especially those at work on construction sites, view Africa as a transitional space rather than a destination, and their time spent there as liminal. None of the Chinese I worked with envisioned a future in Ethiopia, at least not initially.

Way out Migrating to Ethiopia was described by my interlocutors alternatively as a mission, a duty, a temporary sacrifice, an investment for the future, an exercise in eating bitterness, or simply a way out (chulu). Most migrants, however, regretted having to migrate to Ethiopia in the first place. They were almost unanimous in downplaying their agency in the decision to migrate, contending that they were pushed (tui) or forced (bi) to move to Africa. The driving factor behind their decision was their fear of insecurity. Only a few migrants referred to specific personal predicaments. Indeed, to justify to themselves and their family members their decisions to migrate, they often (p.30) describe themselves as victims of macro-level forces beyond their control (see Reichman 2011).

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Pushed to Ethiopia This emphasis on necessity rather than volition in their migration projects stands in contrast to the current discourse in China on ziyou (freedom) versus occupational choice (X. Zhang 2008) and popular discourses of self-development and self-realization, which emphasize agency in the shaping of individual lives. By contrast, migrants imply they had no freedom to choose to migrate to Ethiopia. For them, mobility has produced a sense of entrapment rather than freedom, a feeling that is aggravated by their isolated experiences in Ethiopia. Most migrant narratives reflect the view that migrating for the Chinese is never truly voluntary. Discussing the aspiration/ability nexus of migration, Jørgen Carling (2002) argues that migration commonly involves both choices and constraints. Those who aspire to migrate overseas are not always able to do so. Yet, even for those who manage to realize their overseas ambitions and hopes, migration is often not completely voluntary—at least, it is not construed as such. Plagued by a constant sense of insecurity in the face of growing inequality at home, Chinese migrants believe they have to keep on climbing the social ladder to avoid tumbling down. In Ethiopia they could earn their first barrel of gold (di yi tong jin), with which they often hope to buy a house in the city and the freedom to do what they actually want upon their return to China (Driessen 2015). The persistent feeling of insecurity that drives the Chinese to Ethiopia is rooted in three decades of economic reforms that were not just economic in nature, as they are commonly depicted. China’s open-door policy heralded major social, cultural, and political changes that radically transformed peoples’ lives in both the cities and the countryside. For one thing, the shift from a planned to a market economy fundamentally altered the mechanisms of social and economic stratification. Markets opened up alternative avenues for social mobility through emergent entrepreneurship and labor markets, and changed existing opportunity structures previously dominated and controlled by the redistributive bureaucracy, even though the old elite kept a foot in the door to obtain wealth generated from industries, construction, and lucrative land deals. The reforms of enterprises, starting in the 1990s and continuing in the 2000s, weaned the urban Chinese from their dependence on the work unit and its restrictions. The work unit, or danwei, which was not only the place of employment but also the locus of social life in the Mao period. Under the government policy, “seize the big [enterprises], and let go of the small,” the privatization of small- and medium-sized state-owned enterprises resulted in mass layoffs, fueling growing uncertainty among Chinese employed in the previously secure and stable state sector, who saw their “iron rice bowl” being smashed (Lee 2007). At the same time, foreign investment spawned (p.31) industrial growth in the coastal south and produced a new entrepreneurial elite. Rapid industrialization and urbanization in China’s sunbelt generated a large wave of rural migrants who moved to the cities. This pull from the cities coincided with a push from the countryside, where demographic growth and improvements in agricultural productivity had increased “surplus” rural labor. How “surplus” such labor was, however, is open to question, as those who left the countryside were able-bodied youths who were vital for agricultural production. Rural migrants, whose numbers swelled from 2 million in 1980 to 277 million in 2015 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2016), came to towns to work as laborers in factories and on construction sites, and in low-level service jobs. Some managed to climb the social ladder, as a plethora of new opportunities to get ahead in the city opened up. Increased upward social mobility generated new aspirations and expectations, as rags-to-riches tales about peasants-turned-millionaires fed the imagination of a whole nation and became central to China’s self-image (Osnos 2013).

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Pushed to Ethiopia The economic reforms have, however, created an unprecedented gap of both income and security (Xiang 2014). In light of the idea that one’s position in society is a reflection of one’s ability and one’s ability alone, the fierce competition for resources has left winners and losers who believe they have only themselves to blame. Owing to government discourses of asceticism, the accumulation of wealth—and the slide into poverty, for that matter—is chiefly attributed to individual merit or the lack thereof. This attitude corresponds with the widespread assumption that the diligent pursuit of social mobility through talent, schooling, industriousness, and perseverance will eventually lead to self-betterment, an assumption that explains the hunger for social advancement that went hand in hand with the reforms. As many Chinese, especially those at the bottom ranks of society, face the limits of upward social mobility due to soaring costs of living and the reduction of employment in the primary and secondary industries in mainland China, Africa and other regions of the Global South have become an alternative way out. China’s economic reforms also sparked emigration as an avenue to upward social mobility. From the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until the late 1970s, very few Chinese citizens left their country. Viewed as a division between the socialist and capitalist worlds, China’s national border was highly politicized. Those who applied to leave China individually were thought to be dissatisfied with the socialist system and suspected of conspiring against the Chinese state (G. Liu 2009, 314). The few citizens who did go abroad went as members of political missions or aid programs to Africa, among other destinations. Beginning in the late 1950s, China started dispatching goodwill missions to Africa made up of (p.32) agricultural and medical experts, as well as railway and motorway engineers. In fierce competition with Taiwan, with an eye to securing more votes on the UN General Assembly in case a vote arose on whether Beijing should be given the UN seat held by Taipei, the government of the People’s Republic of China attempted to gain political support from newly liberated member states in Africa (Yu 1968). To help cement new diplomatic relations with African countries, as many as 150,000 Chinese technicians and workers were sent to Africa under the government of Mao Zedong (Park 2009). In contrast to brother socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, and countries in Africa that became socialist, such as Egypt, Guinea, Ghana, and Tanzania, the imperialist West was not yet considered a migration destination at the time. This changed in the decades following the opening up of the People’s Republic and the economic reforms beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, when Europe and North America became popular destinations for a wave of new migrants (Nyíri 2001, 1999; Thunø 2001). These chiefly consisted of entrepreneurs, professionals, and students, as well as political migrants following the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Africa declined in importance as a migration destination until the revival of SinoAfrican relations in the 2000s. An important premise of these new flows of labor and educational migrants was the recognition by both the central and local Chinese government of the social and economic benefits of migration. This appreciation was crucial for the gradual liberalization and institutionalization of emigration in China (Xiang 2003). The types, origins, and destinations of Chinese migration have since proliferated. Under Mao Zedong and in the early years of economic reform, engineers were chosen to go to Africa. Seen as serving the nation abroad, such migrants enjoyed esteem at home. At the time, employment was allocated by the state, and Chinese citizens were accustomed to going wherever they were assigned a job. This system greatly facilitated aid bureaus in recruiting competent professionals for projects overseas (Snow 1988, 147). In the early post-reform era, chains of labor recruitment under state command were gradually transformed into recruitment

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Pushed to Ethiopia agent chains. In 2002 the Chinese government completely transferred its control of the export of labor to private agents. With this policy shift, labor migration was redefined as the overseas employment of individuals rather than as state projects (Xiang 2003). Although commercial recruitment agents play a crucial role in facilitating emigration from China to overseas destinations, most of my interlocutors had entered their companies through more direct channels, such as recruitment at university job fairs in the case of state-owned enterprises and recruitment through home-based kin and acquaintance networks in the case of private subcontracting companies.

(p.33) Visions My hopes are not at all unreasonable, I think. I hope my future life will be stable [wending]. I hope to have a stable family, just live a good life in China…. I don’t necessarily have to earn a lot of money. I don’t have to drive a fancy car. Happiness [for me] is a stable family and a stable income. (Accountant, male, 29 years old; June 7, 2012) In 10 years I won’t be abroad any more. If I still work abroad, it means I have switched to another sector, or I have become depressed. If I’m still here [in Ethiopia] at the age of 40, I’ll be too tired. Life here makes you tired. I don’t want this to be the case…. My hair is already getting gray, if I continue work here, I will soon be completely gray. (Draftsman, male, 31 years; May 16, 2012) Let me use a Chinese expression, yourenyouyu [to do something skillfully and easily]. I will be very busy, very tired over the coming 10 years. But I hope after 10 years I will have more of my own ideas. I hope I will have improved [myself] and become skilled in what I do. In fact, the life I hope to live is very ordinary…. I just want to become a better person; become a little bit kinder, have a little bit more money, be a little bit nicer. (Public relations manager, male, 27 years; June 8, 2012) In 10 years I will be 50 years old. Fifty years is half a life time. I hope to have a small business, so I can be my own boss…. For many years, I have had people above me. I have always listened to others and followed other people’s orders, or followed the assigned work schedule…. One day I will become my own boss. (Surveyor, male, 40 years; June 11, 2012) Ten years? That’s too far away! … Surely, the Ethiopian road network will be saturated by then. (Site manager, male, 26 years; June 1, 2012) I don’t place the greatest hope in myself, but in my next generation. I hope that they will be able to stand out among their peers. I hope they will be able to develop themselves and become officials or join the army. (Materials engineer, male, 24 years; June 3, 2012)

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Pushed to Ethiopia I’m not sure yet. Right now, I’m here for my house, which I think is the right thing to do. I’m planning to buy another house. Last year the prices have started to go down. I should grasp the moment and quickly buy [a house] now the prices are lower. (Materials engineer, male, 43 years; June 2, 2012) To start with, I will be married and have a little child. I will have bought a house and earn a stable income. Like a moderately affluent life [xiaokang shenghuo]. I won’t be rich. Just a normal life in the city. (Contract manager, male, 25 years; May 25, 2012) I will have a stable income that is enough to provide for my family, to buy food and clothes. That’s it. My demands are not high. I will have a house and a car. This car I will be able to drive myself, of course…. I hope my child will do well in school, so that I don’t have to worry. Just no worries, then everything is fine. (Surveyor, male, 31 years; June 17, 2012) (p.34) I don’t really know my place yet. I’m still young. I still have aspirations…. If I have the opportunity, I will go abroad; migrate [yimin]. I would like to go to Japan. Although China-Japan relations aren’t very good, I have quite a lot of respect for Japanese culture…. I believe in them. The Chinese are a bit, how shall I say … they are too wrapped up in social climbing. They are not very attentive in the things they undertake, only when it comes to getting into [particular] circles. [They are] all very superficial…. If you live in a society like this for too long, you will discover that you will become loathed. (Site manager, male, 27 years; May 26, 2012) In contrast to the reputation that the Chinese in Africa have as gold diggers (taojinzhe), my interlocutors were in search of a life without financial concerns or worries of any other kind. They sought to gain stability and security, rather than strike gold. The modesty of their hopes is reflected in their responses to the question of how they envisaged their lives in 10 years’ time. While they are entrepreneurial in pursuing a job that earns money abroad, Chinese workers seem rather conservative in envisioning their lives after they return to China. Aiming to gain respect rather than prestige, they hope to secure a financial base for themselves and their (future) families. Most aspire, in the long run, to become their own boss, to set up a shop or a trading company and regain the autonomy and agency they have lost upon moving to Ethiopia. Migrants’ visions also feature a domestic focus, reflecting a strong sense of duty and responsibility vis-à-vis their family members, feelings that ultimately tip the scale and make them decide to go to Ethiopia for work and leave their family behind. This family orientation is reminiscent of earlier waves of Chinese labor migrants, such as the Guangdong miners and merchants in North America in the late nineteenth century and the Fujianese migrants in Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. All bore, at least initially, a strong desire to improve the social and economic situation of their families at home (Pieke et al. 2004; H. Liu 2002). Their narratives were also couched in a language of self-sacrifice for the advancement of their family of origin (Pieke et al. 2004, 195).

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Pushed to Ethiopia The dream of migrating abroad upon return to China, expressed by the 27-year-old site manager, is exceptional. Although quite a few interlocutors spoke critically of Chinese society, this engineer was the only one who envisioned or, in his words, dreamed about moving to what he deemed to be a morally better world. Note his use of the word yimin (migrate) to indicate permanent settlement. For him, migrating to Japan was a goal instead of a mere means to an end, as his move to Ethiopia had been. In Ethiopia he was merely someone who went abroad or a Chinese in Africa. The notion of yimin is seldom used in the context of Chinese labor migration to Ethiopia. Typically, Africa does not figure in Chinese workers’ visions of the future. Nobody envisioned, or hoped, to still be in Ethiopia in 10 years’ time. (p.35) This would mean that their lives had been put on hold; a prospect that was seen as undesirable. Life in Ethiopia was viewed as making one age faster: note the comment of the 31-year-old draftsman who says that life in Africa is turning his hair gray. The blame falls on the African sun but also, more crucially, the monotony and dullness of daily life and work, which is held to turn one into a human machine (renrou jiqi) or a walking corpse (xingshizourou), as workers phrased it. Focused on life upon their return home, their visions are thus China oriented, and their migration projects China rooted. How can we explain the apparent lack of boldness in migrants’ hopes for the future? Much like their decision to migrate, the dreams that inspire these decisions are embedded in particular social and historical contexts and should be understood this way. Having grown up in rural China or to rural parents, this group of migrants lacks the starting capital, the safety net and the crucial urban connections to achieve upward mobility, or even to attain what they consider a certain level of decency. Their reluctance to take risks is linked to the national shift away from the unbridled optimism and idealism of the early post-reform period. Rather than getting rich fast or making it, these migrants seek to measure up to what the 25-year-old contract manager calls a moderately affluent life—an idea based on the ideal of a moderately prosperous society (xiaokang shehui) promoted by previous presidents and more recently by president Xi Jinping, in reference to economic policies that are meant to realize a more equal distribution of wealth in China. Their goal is being able to attain a certain status, instead of surpassing it. Recent college graduates who moved to Ethiopia right after graduation, in particular, bemoan the social pressure they are subject to upon “entering society,” as they framed it. They might have secured urban residence through their university degree but, to live up to their urban status they are expected to buy residential property, as well as to maintain a certain level of (conspicuous) consumption. Given their defined and limited expectations, migrant projects are predictable and secure ventures. They are set deals offered by domestic companies. The firm organizes the entire journey, from providing air tickets to Addis Ababa to movement within Ethiopia. Upon arrival, Chinese employees hand in their passports, which are kept with their other personal documents in the head office in the capital city. Throughout the period of employment, the Chinese employer is their sole caretaker and provider of housing, transport, food, medicine, daily utensils, and entertainment. As such, the employer has full command over the mobility and the lifestyle of its employees and creates in them a sense (or illusion) of security. The investment in time is fixed, as is the financial reward. My interlocutors were confident that they would be able to recoup their investment back in China. The three-to-five-year contracts they signed before embarking on (p.36) work in Ethiopia provided a sense of security. Given the investment made, in terms of airline tickets, work permits, and living costs, employers are

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Pushed to Ethiopia unlikely to replace employees without due cause, a threat that is very real in the increasingly competitive construction sector in China itself. At worst, employees are transferred to another project in Ethiopia or Africa when there are issues. Despite their abundant complaints about life and work, few of the migrants I spoke to regretted having moved to Ethiopia. Relocating to Africa for work is not so much about winning or losing as about following set migratory trajectories. Although the migrants viewed their circumstances as rough and tough, employment in Ethiopia is an attractive alternative to the short-term employment contracts and lack of welfare benefits that come with the increased informalization of labor in China (Gallagher, Lee, and Kuruvilla 2011).

Sacrifices If you go to Africa, you have to prepare yourself for the following: 1. Have you ever thought of malaria? This is the name of the most deadly disease in Africa. Since I have been there I have seen many Chinese suffering from malaria. 2. Africa is a place that even a lot of local Africans seek to escape. Can you imagine how it feels to be far removed from modern technology and civilization? 3. In general if you go to Africa, in terms of language and customs, Chinese and locals inhabit two totally different circles. Can you imagine the feeling of loneliness when you are surrounded by a black ocean? 4. If you live with Chinese in Africa, it is like living in jail. This is very gloomy. I have come across this very often. Would you be able to live in prison? 5. Most of the Chinese who left to go to Africa in my year, all returned [to Africa after the holidays]. There are only a few who persist in struggling [to make a living] at home. They endure their yearning because there is so little pressure of competition [in Africa]. The question is, however, do the time and the investment [of going to Africa] pay off? 6. You should not think that this is a place of blue skies and jade water where you can set your mind at rest and learn. To be frank, I have lived in Africa for a long time, and everyone I know who has returned to China has taken a long time to catch up with the pace of life. 7. You should not think that you can earn a lot of money in just a few years. Opportunities like these have become scarce. 8. You should not think that it is easy to start a business. The local government is eager to crack down on Chinese who try to set up small businesses. Have you ever seen a stray dog? The Chinese who start small (p.37) businesses in Africa are even more pitiful than Africans who set up small businesses. Of course, if you are prepared for the above, what you find in Africa is: 1. Fresh and clean air, primitive life. And if you don’t mind [gossip], you can also get a black sister (local woman or prostitute). 2. If you are naturally open-minded and outgoing, Africa is heaven for you. 3. The market there is a blank space. It is up to you to fill it out. 4. My hand is sour [from writing], haha. (Liu Bo’s response to the question of whether it is worth going to Africa and how to prepare for it on Zhihu, the Chinese question-and-answer website, July 9, 2013) Liu Bo’s portrayal of Africa and his warnings to the questioner, a student who is contemplating moving to Africa to work with a Chinese state-owned enterprise after graduation, is reminiscent of what Charles Piot (1999, 2) has termed the orientalization of Africa, in which the continent is Page 8 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Pushed to Ethiopia depicted as a place that is steeped in tradition, a place where drought and tropical disease run rampant and political conflict and chaos are the norm. The themes addressed by Liu Bo are recurring tropes in Chinese migrant narratives. For my interlocutors, working in Africa featured as a transitional stage, rather than as a destination or as a promised land with greener pastures, blue skies, and jade water. The involuntary nature of their journeys, as discussed above, accounts for the sense of Chinese workers that they are making a huge sacrifice. They have given up their relative autonomy and career prospects for the sake of a better life upon return. If China had more to offer in terms of employment opportunities and employment security, or if companies overseas paid salaries equal to those in China, most contended that they would not have left for Ethiopia in the first place. Second, the nature of the place where they were forced to spend a good part of their youth contributed to the feeling of having to make a sacrifice. They had traded a life close to friends and family members, but also close to modern technology and civilization, for what they described as a primitive life in Ethiopia. In an essay titled “Angolan Belles-Lettres,” Sheng Wei (2015) portrays the lives of the Chinese construction workers he encounters on his travels in Angola. Attracted by their toughness and intrigued by their persistently sunburned faces, Sheng Wei asks why this group of Chinese, who were the first generation to be born under the one-child policy, and who are known as having grown up in the honey pot, are trying to make a living thousands of miles away from home. Sheng Wei observes that they pursue their dreams with great persistence and perseverance, and that they make huge sacrifices. They live like hermits, far removed from rapid progress—the word he uses (p.38) is rixinyueyi (literally “daily renewal, monthly change”)—in China. Cut off from the rest of the world, they do not know about the latest films and the latest developments in science and technology. For example, he finds that they have only just familiarized themselves with the social medium WeChat. In fact, what Sheng Wei does not mention is that this group of workers does not necessarily belong to the pampered class of urban singletons. Rather, many of them grew up in the countryside in much less privileged conditions. Nonetheless, the image sketched by the author strikes a familiar chord with migrant narratives that speak of enduring hardships in Africa. Notably, the orientalization of Africa in Chinese migrant narratives does not reflect a simple binary opposition between “us equals good” and “them equals bad.” Rather, it reflects a mirrored reversal along the lines of “what is good in us is [still] bad in them, but what got twisted in us [still] remains straight in them” (Baumann 2004, 20). Chinese superiority, in terms of scientific progress, implies loss: of what is no longer spontaneous, carefree, and pure—if only in terms of the blue skies and the jade water. The joy Africans are thought to find in life and their “aboriginal believe [sic] of living every day as if it were one’s last” (Q. Zhang 2012) is part and parcel of the orientali-zation of Africa. The workers I spoke to held that Ethiopians are easily satisfied, which mitigates the hardships they suffer. One Chinese grader operator pointed out, “These black boys [hei xiaozi] are happy. They believe in Jesus. They are easily satisfied. They are already pleased when their bellies are full.” Religion is thought to produce contentment, which is, to the exasperation of Chinese managers, believed to be a major impediment to hard work. Since Ethiopians have not yet encountered scientific progress and rapid economic development, they accept their present state naïvely. “The Chinese have to work; otherwise, they have nothing to eat,” was their often-repeated remark. Chinese society makes its citizens work hard—even pushing them into Africa—while taking from them their joy in life.

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Pushed to Ethiopia Common descriptions of joyous, contented, and passionate Africans strike a familiar chord with discourse of the noble savage. The noble savage, who inspired romanticist literati in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Europe, is the embodiment of the idealized other, valued for his innate goodness, proximity to nature, and distance from the corrupting forces of civilization. The male (rather than female) figure of the guilt-free and honest African serves a similar function in Chinese accounts. Inhabiting a space and an era that has been spared by the intruding forces of modernity and civilization, he is valued for his radically different ways of being that are located elsewhere. For better or worse, the African continent continues to be the site of absolute otherness (Pierre 2013, see also 2012), and Africans “the Other with a capital ‘O’” (Mbembe 2001, 3) in Chinese narratives. (p.39) “Of course, I have given this thought before I signed my contract,” a 26-year-old design engineer confided, recounting his initial reservations about relocating to Ethiopia. “I knew I wouldn’t go to Europe or America. Africa, in our minds, is poor, backward, and chaotic. I was thinking, what if I fall ill? What will I do when I end up in the midst of war and chaos? Or even when I die?” The reason this young man ultimately decided to go was the attractive salary he was offered. “In fact, a lot of people work abroad for this reason.” Having lost his father at the age of 17, and as the only son and eldest sibling, he saw it as his duty to take on the role of father in the family. Consequently, he was prepared to sacrifice time and career opportunities to secure a financial base at home in Guizhou, southern China, for his mother and sister. Young men like this engineer make ideal employees from the point of view of Chinese enterprises in Ethiopia. They stay on for a good number of years, making the company’s investment in its new employee worthwhile. The ability to endure hardships is, in fact, one of the main requirements for a job in Africa.

Overseas Project Design Engineer1 Salary: 10,000–15,000 Chinese Yuan/month Date: 25 January 2018 Job responsibilities – Preparation of initial sketches and advanced designs in accordance with the stipulations of the client – Taking measurements and preparing the steel design – Reporting to consultants for examination and approval – Reviewing design documentation for examination and approval on the construction site – Writing progress reports on the construction work – Tracking the degree of progress as required – Daily management tasks, including reporting to management, placing design plans on file and passing them on

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Pushed to Ethiopia Person specification – 21–30 years of age – In the possession of an undergraduate degree or higher in bridge engineering or civil engineering, or a related subject – College English test level 4 or higher (p.40) – Familiarity with [Microsoft] Office software and CAD cartography software – Familiarity with standard specifications of engineering, cartography, and related design regulations – Good level of specialized knowledge and in possession of good communication skills – Takes work responsibilities seriously – Able to eat bitterness and work hard [chikunailao]

Wages are typically measured according to the work and living conditions in specific regions rather than revenues made in particular countries or the technical difficulty of the project. Only those with a thick skin are expected to endure life in Africa for a substantial length of time. “Ideally you have a younger or an older brother, a father who has left home [for work], a mother who is ill, and your brother takes care of you at home,” commented one laboratory technician somewhat sarcastically. The more vexed the situation and the greater the need for a stable income, the more easily parents agree to their son going to Africa. “Eating bitterness,” construed as undergoing and overcoming sorrow by succumbing to the task, is part and parcel of sacrifice. By temporarily eating bitterness in Ethiopia, Chinese labor migrants hoped to improve their financial circumstances at home and to prevent their children from eating bitterness in the future. The hardships, it appears from the narratives of the migrants I met, are mostly related to the perceived dullness of the work and the loneliness of life in Ethiopia. Chinese workers often compared their compounds to prison, and their life in Ethiopia to life in jail. It is not only the restriction on physical movement that heightens the feeling of isolation and is seen as the bitterness that the Chinese workers have to swallow, but also the monotony of daily life. Compounding the prison-like isolation is the fact that the work week is a full 7 days. Working from 7 in the morning to 7 in the evening every day left little spare time to do as they wanted. When asked about memorable moments in Africa, interlocutors typically referred, apart from the fresh air and the food security—conditions they did not enjoy in China—to the moments in which they received their salaries in their bank accounts. They hoped that gold would yield gold upon their return to China, that their sacrifices would pay off, and that the money earned abroad would convert into respect, status, and security at home (see Xiang 2014, 190). What, then, are the sacrifices that Chinese labor migrants in Ethiopia make? What do migrants give up for the sake of something better or more valued? Most importantly, they perceive that they are trading a family life (p.41) for a life in isolation. As their visions are family related, so too are their sacrifices. Nevertheless, “When you love your family, why do you choose to leave them?” was a question that arose over and again among married migrant men with children back in China. “My wife and I have asked this question many times. In fact, we are both clear Page 11 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Pushed to Ethiopia about the answer,” said one surveyor, who struggled with his wife’s disapproval of him living in Ethiopia, while she was at home working and taking care of their child and four parents. If the question comes up in Skype conversations, they quickly change the topic, he confided. Second, the Chinese workers believed that they sacrificed their time. By moving to Ethiopia, they lost time—or, perhaps more accurately, time to progress in the world. Sheng Wei (2015) implies that the construction workers he observed lagged behind their peers back home in China. Having only just acquainted themselves with WeChat, they were cut off from advancement, that is, science and technology. The fear of falling behind seems even more prevalent in Africa, where time is perceived to stand still or, in the words of a manager, to move in circles (zhou’erfushi), in contrast to China, where they perceive time moving forward in a linear fashion. The idea of repetitive or stagnating time is reminiscent of Achille Mbembe’s (2001, 16) account of the way African time appears in Western discourse: “neither a linear time nor a simple sequence in which each moment effaces, annuls, and replaces those that preceded it, to the point where a single age exists within society.” African time is, instead, an interlocking series of pasts, presents, and futures made up of disturbances rather than an ordered series and sequence. This idea, which migrants I spoke with advanced either explicitly or implicitly, reflects an acute belief in China’s advancement and superiority in terms of development, as well as pride in its newly established position in the world. Together with this experience of circular time, the migrants also see themselves as losing their youthfulness. “I have given my youth to Angola,” stated Chen Shenlin to a journalist of the Workers’ Daily (S. Yang 2014), suggesting an acute sense of sacrifice. The feeling of having to catch up with development in China was also evident among the Chinese I lived with and echoes Liu Bo’s warning in Zhihu that many Chinese migrants who have returned home struggle to adapt to the rhythm of life in China. Chen Shenlin says he has learned to adjust to keep up with time: “If you want to keep hold of your passions, you have to make sure that you are not being submerged by the dullness of life [in Africa],” he cautions his colleagues. A third sacrifice, then, is that of self-development or self-realization. Time spent in Ethiopia was viewed by my interlocutors as time lost or, worse, wasted, in respect to personal and career development. Ethiopia is, in their eyes, devoid of opportunities to develop the self; an individual project that is seen as a responsibility—a duty almost—in contemporary China. (p.42) Professionally, many thought there is little to learn in Ethiopia. Being cut off from scientific progress and civilization meant that there is little else to gain in terms of experience and culture (wenhua), social etiquette, and educational attainment. Indeed, on a more positive note they said they were able to transfer skills and knowledge to Ethiopian workers and develop themselves into more philanthropic and better human beings. Drawing a contrast between educational migration to the West and labor migration to Africa, the curt response of one 23-year-old mechanical engineer when I suggested he must have gained life experience in the previous year in Addis Ababa was “I’m not in the USA.” However, a higher salary, the main reason for coming to Africa, makes up for the few gains in other fields, not to speak of the sacrifices made along the way.

Displacement In contemporary China, expectations of upward mobility have engendered a lingering yet profound fear of lagging behind in a competition for resources. This has led to what Xiang Biao terms the “displacement of the present” (2014, 186). Migrants and would-be migrants attempt to find ways to cast off their present state with an “instrumental jump into the future” (186). The persistent angst about being left behind is experienced as a fear of time and is translated as a Page 12 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Pushed to Ethiopia “last-bus mentality” (mobanche xintai) (191). If you miss the bus now—that is, in the present— you may miss out on everything in the future. It is precisely this fear of missing out that has propelled young Chinese men toward overseas destinations such as Ethiopia. Migration implies a temporary displacement from the present, as a method of being catapulted into the future upon your return to China. Ironically, migration to Ethiopia is simultaneously viewed as a leap back in time. Seen as a dark spot on the world map, Africa is not necessarily a popular migration destination for this group of people. Their journeys are focused on returning to China. In Ethiopia, they are merely en route. Migration to Ethiopia is at once a displacement in time and a displacement in space. While it is experienced as suffocating, time spent in Ethiopia is viewed as a lull in the hectic lives of these Chinese workers and their projects of self-development. It does not really count, compared with time lived in China, in the midst of progress, civilization, growth, and development. The years spent in Ethiopia are valued only to the extent that they are functional in fast-forwarding life to prepare for a permanent return to China. While abroad, they carefully calculate time: to stay too long in Africa would mean missing the bus altogether. In these shifting imaginaries of displacement and emplacement, or the lack thereof, destination gains a different meaning. Julie Chu’s portrayal of (p.43) the visions of would-be migrants in rural Fujian in the early 2000s as “it ain’t where you’re at, it’s where you’re going”—a play on Paul Gilroy’s insight on diasporic conditions as “it ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at” (1991)—asks, again, for revision. Much like the aspiring Fujianese migrants, my interlocutors were at once rural and cosmopolitan, peripheral and well connected. Their desire to leave China was just as strong. But for migrants from rural regions in China’s southern coastal provinces who have left for the United States and Europe through personal networks and often unofficial channels (Chu 2010; Pieke et al. 2004), the destination of migration was a central orientation. For my interlocutors, instead, destination was of little importance. Whereas the migrants of Chu’s study are driven by the enchantments of capitalist modernity, the Chinese who relocated to Ethiopia said they were pushed by the very expectations and delusions that capitalist modernity has produced. The former were at pains to prove their agency, the latter deny it, albeit with regret. Discussing the power geometry of mobility, Doreen Massey (1993, 61) argues that “different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.” Indeed, my interlocutors had initiated their movement to Ethiopia but only after getting a push in the back from what they referred to as societal pressure. They were not fully in charge of their mobility. In fact, many migrants did not know in which country they would be put to work before signing their preliminary contracts on university campuses, or even when they were informed about a potential transfer abroad. Reflecting the ultimate aim of securing better lives on their return, safety seemed to be the major concern. The fact that the Chinese workers who have moved to Africa in the past decade have migrated down the global ladder of development, rather than up to the developed world, has major implications for the ways in which they imagine and experience time and space, and its displacement and emplacement. Time and space are neither neutral concepts nor static entities, and different values are attached to them. As spaces are “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey 1993, 66), tempo-rality is construed through

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Pushed to Ethiopia constantly changing social imaginaries. Taking this into consideration, the migrants I spoke to viewed Ethiopia as a space crossed instead of as a destination. “It ain’t where you’re from, but where you’re going” therefore has a different connotation. It is about where you’re going in time rather than in space. The focal point of the Chinese workers I met in Ethiopia was a better life in China, instead of a better life overseas. This shift in the migrants’ perceptions and aspirations reflects not only the fact that increased uncertainty is a driving factor in (would-be) migrants’ (p.44) lives, but so is the improved condition of China as a whole, and its status vis-à-vis other countries in the world. To understand Chinese engagement with Ethiopia and Chinese attitudes toward Ethiopians, we must take into account the migrants’ positionality, while bearing in mind the heterogeneity of Chinese road-building communities. Despite their shared angst and common goal of return, Chinese workers in Ethiopia were divided by age, work experience, class, position in the corporate hierarchy, and other dividing lines that were pronounced in their daily encounters with the local community, and these came to influence the migrants’ experiences of life and work in Ethiopia. Notes: (1.) This is a job advertisement from one of the Chinese state-owned enterprises I worked with in Ethiopia. The original advertisement was in Chinese.

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Preserving Purity

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Preserving Purity Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords The bitter taste experienced by Chinese road builders arises not only from the challenges they face in their encounters with Ethiopians, but also from a chasm between a dominant rhetoric of unity and solidarity, and an underlying concern with the reality of social divisions. Straddling ethnic boundaries by sharing food with Ethiopians and gaining fluency in Amharic, some Chinese foremen threaten to close the distance to the other and, by extension, the boundaries between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, and the managers and the managed. The preservation of purity plays a central role in Chinese engagement with the other. Indeed, selfcontrol is a prerequisite for the control of Ethiopian others. The disciplining of Chinese colleagues through the cultivation of restraint and reticence is closely linked to the project of disciplining Ethiopian laborers. Keywords:   Social divisions, stratification, construction, self-control, reputation, enterprises

On October 13, 2011, the project manager sent out the following letter, entitled “Notice of Guidelines for Respecting for Local Customs and Obedience to Local Law,” to all the company’s subcontractors:

To all subcrews, Recently the project department has received various complaints from the local government about incidents in the compounds that involved the behavior of Chinese managers and their employees that runs counter to local customs and are considered illegal. Here I reiterate that every crew member is expected to prioritize improving the management of Chinese employees and local employees to avoid unnecessary disputes and their consequences. 1. Improve the management of local employees with regard to their recruitment, employment, and dismissal. Do this in line with the country’s labor law and the Page 1 of 16 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Preserving Purity regulations of the project department, and in doing so improve working conditions in unison, promote work discipline [laodong jilü], and scrutinize the detailed regulations of management and punishment. Implement all these features. 2. Improve the safety training of workers, improve the prevention of theft and measures against robbery, and avoid driving without a license or after or while consuming alcohol, which may have a bad influence on the construction work. See the previous notice … on punishments for consuming alcohol. 3. Respect local customs and habits. Do not take liberties with women [tiaoxi]1 or take local women to the compound to spend (p.46) the night. When this is found out severe punishments will follow, probably in accordance with local legal practices. If this is the case, the project department will not offer any form of support. 4. Strengthen the management of hygiene in the compounds, environmental protection, and the processing of garbage. Aim to dig pits and bury [the garbage]. Do not discard garbage outside the compound area. This will lead to unnecessary disputes [with local residents]. 5. Discarding earth and creating detour roads should fall strictly within the red borders of the requisitioned land. Space outside the designated areas should not be used at will. You will be held responsible for the consequences of breaking this instruction. To reaffirm matters, the regulations require every crew member to check that they do this correctly and carry these out strictly. [Every crew member must make sure to] respect local customs and abide by the local law in order to establish a good image [xingxiang] of Chinese companies and future successful production and implementation. The Project Management Department

The points addressed in the letter reflect the most disputed issues between Chinese migrants and the host community. What then made management so concerned with these issues? The above call for law and order was more than an attempt to remain on good terms with local authorities and residents. The condensed and businesslike tenor of the letter conceals an underlying agenda. The notice is also an attempt to restore the tenuous reputation, or image, as the letter has it, of Chinese companies. If anything, the call for law and order can be read as a civilizing offensive initiated by management and directed at staff of subcontractors to improve the standing of Chinese nationals in southeastern Tigray. Judging from narratives on and off the construction site, the project management was preoccupied with protecting and maintaining its reputation. The image of the civilized and cultured Chinese worker proved crucial in retaining the racial categories on which authority and expertise were based, and which underpinned the racialized corporate hierarchy. At risk was the blurring of boundaries between the expatriate managers, who believed they possessed exclusive knowledge about, and access to, development, and the managed staff, Ethiopian workers who merely sold their crude labor power and were assumed to buy into Chinese engineering expertise and ideas about development. (p.47) The issues addressed—labor control, personal safety, sexual morals, hygiene, spatial control—are precisely the themes that concerned European travelers and explorers in their encounters with Africans during the nineteenth-century colonial expansion in which discipline

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Preserving Purity and self-control came to play a crucial role (Fabian 2000). Note that the strengthening of management (jiaqiang guanli) is taken to be the main, if not sole, solution to the five issues addressed in the letter. As Fabian argues, self-control implies the control of others (7), and the control of others ensures an authoritative physical and social distance from the other. Selfcontrol through the cultivation of restraint and reticence in expatriate employees, then, was closely connected to the project of disciplining Ethiopian laborers, to which I turn further on. The bitterness of the Chinese workers derived not only from the subversive activities of Ethiopian workers and residents. It also, and perhaps more importantly, arose from divisions within the Chinese road-building community, from what Ann Laura Stoler has termed the “interior frontiers” (1997, 199; see also Stoler 2010, xviii, 75, 157). Chinese migrant communities in Ethiopia are riddled with internal divisions. High-level managers routinely complain about their expatriate subordinates—the dalaocu—and hold them responsible for misrepresenting or, worse, contaminating the very essence of what it means to be Chinese. Their skin, they say, is nearly as dark and coarse as the skin of Ethiopian farmers, and their way of talking is at least as rough (cu) and rustic (tu). To make matters worse, the lowstatus members of the road-building community are held to shout, spit, and, as gossip has it, hit their Ethiopian staff. Management at times accused their compatriots of being “just like them [Ethiopians]” or “also just peasants.” (In China, the term “peasant” is negatively charged and refers not only to a profession but also to a lack of social etiquette and formal education.) In her work on colonial rule in the Dutch East Indies, Ann Laura Stoler explores the epistemic anxieties of colonial administrators about “white impoverishment” (1997, 213), the degradation of the white race, and the loss of racial superiority, for which the métissage—children of mixed race classified as European—were held responsible. The offspring of native women and European men threatened to blur the sociopolitical categories between ruler and ruled. Through “moral statecraft” (Stoler 2009, 102), aimed at improving the education and upbringing of mixed-race children, the colonial regime sought to protect the essence of European identity and thereby to preserve white prestige and supremacy. Although the sociohistorical context is fundamentally different, a comparable chasm between a dominant rhetoric of unity and solidarity and an underlying concern with the reality of sharp social divisions characterized the lives of Chinese workers in Ethiopia. The anxieties generated by the (p.48) interior frontier did not derive only from an in-between category of métissage in the historical trajectory described by Stoler but also by a category of “full-blood” Chinese, who were regarded as inferior based on social categories transported from China to Ethiopia and supposedly confirmed by their actions and interactions with the local community. The present chapter addresses this tension between, on the one hand, the promotion of a single ethnic identity—a common Chinese identity—and, on the other hand, the exclusionary rhetoric that prevailed in informal narratives among migrants. In the next chapter I zoom in on one aspect— sexual intimacy—that particularly jeopardized unity within the Chinese community and threatened to annul their carefully cultivated distance from the Ethiopian other.

State-owned, private, and “private private” enterprises To say that there was one internal frontier is inaccurate, for in fact there were many such frontiers. Internal stratification occurred on many levels, starting with the sector in which the Chinese migrants were employed, the company for which they worked, the contract under which they were hired, and the nature of their job. Chinese workers from poor rural backgrounds under a temporary contract with private construction companies were positioned furthest down the pecking order and were, in particular, seen as a threat to the reputation of the civilized and Page 3 of 16 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Preserving Purity cultured Chinese. Embodying the civilizational threat in their filthy, ragged gear and dark, sunburned faces, these workers were the main target of the civilizing offensive. That said, it is important to clarify divisions and to differentiate among companies. A broad spectrum of Chinese companies was involved in the road project, from one-man businesses and private companies to a provincial-level state-owned and a central state–owned enterprise that acted as contractor, which I call RCE. Private and provincial-level state-owned companies entered Ethiopia under the umbrella of RCE, which had been granted a government license to contract for infrastructure projects overseas. The subcontracting companies, however, remained invisible to the Ethiopian authorities. Public activities, such as arrangements for visas and work permits, the purchase of machinery and construction materials, communications with federal road authorities and consultant engineers, and so forth were dealt with by RCE or under its name. As foreign contractors were contractually prohibited from outsourcing more than 10 percent of the building work to subcontractors (in reality, they often subcontracted more than 50 percent of the contract price), the contractors served as one company, at least in their dealing with the outside world. “We can easily tell Ethiopian companies apart, but we simply cannot tell the difference between one Chinese and the other,” sighed an engineer of the Ethiopian Roads Authority. He suspected (p.49) that the Chinese were engaged in illegal subcontracting but could neither confirm this nor act on it, and no wonder. Management had issued a project-wide ban on the use of the English word “subcontractor,” and any Chinese employee caught saying the word would be fined ETB 1,000. Instead, the use of the word “subcrew” (fenbu, used in the letter with which I started) was encouraged. RCE had outsourced the lion’s share of the building while retaining construction management and the purchase of building materials, such as bitumen, steel, and cement.2 Qimo Construction, a private company from Fujian, was responsible for half the earthworks, which involved processing and moving soil and rock to adjust the 15-centimeter-thick subbase—the layer between the subgrade and the base course—of the existing gravel road, to make sure it was in line with the new design, as well as building structural works: bridges, box and pipe culverts, retaining walls, and ditches. The other part of the earthworks and structural works was carried out by Wuhe Construction, a one-man business from a town in Hebei. Duyin Enterprise, a private company from Shandong, was hired to lay the asphalt, and Golden Roads to produce the asphalt and carry out surface treatment of the base-course layer and the 1.5-meter-wide road verges. Jianghe Construction, a provincial state-owned company from Heilongjiang, joined in later to take over part of the structural works from Qimo Construction in the mountains and to apply the 17.5-centimeter-thick base course over half the length of the road. The rest of the base course was laid by Qimo and an Ethiopian company from Addis Ababa. Another private company from Fujian, Lide Construction, took up part of the ditch and culvert work, together with an allEthiopian company with a Chinese director. Signposts were made and placed by Duyin Enterprise, which also carried out road line marking at the very end of the project. In daily life, the distinction between the Chinese companies on the project was expressed by referring to the quality of what was coined daiyu, (p.50) meaning “treatment,” broadly defined.3 Generally, the concept of daiyu indicates the level of salary, yet it also implies economic and social benefits as well as the status of the work and living conditions offered by the employers to the employees. Variations in daiyu between companies were mainly reflected in four spheres: pay scales, the level of social and contractual security, living arrangements in residential compounds, and meals provided by the company to its expatriate staff. Respondents unanimously agreed that in Ethiopia the daiyu of Chinese state-owned companies was better

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Preserving Purity than, and preferable to, the daiyu of private enterprises. Zhang Fu, employed as site engineer by RCE, explained: Today everybody [in China] talks about a stable occupation. You have to make sure you end up working for a state-owned enterprise. Only state-owned enterprises do not go bankrupt. The Communist Party does not want to lose face. Private enterprises go bankrupt when they please. Moreover, if you work for a private company, the Chinese law does not protect workers. Private enterprises blatantly exploit their workers, just as Marx stated. (Engineer, male, June 5, 2012) The private Chinese enterprises operating across Ethiopia had come to be characterized as offering inferior daiyu. Reflecting on Wuhe Construction, a private firm known for its abominable treatment of Chinese staff, site engineer Zhang Zhiyi explained, “That is really a private private enterprise.” He used the term “private” (siyou) as a modifier to suggest everything from overdue salary payments and poor living arrangements to little or no contractual protection whatsoever. When working overseas, everyone agreed, you had better make sure you worked for a Chinese state-owned company. The popularity of state-owned enterprises over private companies is remarkable, given that many of my Chinese interlocutors indicated that they would prefer to work for a private enterprise upon their return to China. Private companies were generally thought to have more innovative and flexible management and to offer higher salaries. The popularity of Chinese stateowned enterprises as overseas employers, however, reflected the improved image of stateowned enterprises in China. In fact, the Chinese media have talked about a renewed “fever” for state-owned enterprises among Chinese college students (Xia 2011, 57). Indeed, state-owned enterprises have managed, partially, at least, to restore the iron rice bowl that had been smashed with China’s enterprise reform beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, guaranteeing lifelong employment and welfare benefits. These reforms had resulted in mass layoffs and caused a growing sense of insecurity among citizens employed in the state sector. After the enterprise reform state-owned companies were forced to market themselves in order to attract (p.51) qualified personnel, and they have done so relatively successfully. “When you work for a state-owned enterprise you won’t go hungry, but you won’t get rich either. You can subsist on your lifetime earnings,” explained Xie Yang, echoing a widespread opinion among migrants, who sought to sooth an intense sense of insecurity. Wuhe and Qimo Construction were reputed to pay the lowest wages of all Chinese construction companies in Ethiopia or to pay no wages at all. The truck driver of Wuhe, I was told by the Golden Roads asphalt plant crew, had once bought a hand grenade to frighten his boss to make him pay him his overdue salary. His method proved successful. Chinese surveyors, machine operators, and foremen of Qimo Construction earned Chinese yuan (CNY) 4,000 to 6,000 per month, hardly more than what they would earn in China in comparable positions. At the end of my fieldwork I met Liu Yongming, who came to Ethiopia without knowing what his salary would be. At that time Qimo was on the brink of bankruptcy. “If they excavated bank notes instead of earth, they would still make a loss,” laughed an engineer of RCE once. Qimo’s financial straits were attributed to the mismanagement of both expatriate and local employees, and a lack of staff with sound technical knowledge and experience in the road-building sector. Indeed, as Johannes Fabian (2000) would have it, the loss of self-control meant the failure of other-control. Companies like Qimo and Wuhe were pejoratively called nongmin danwei (peasant work units), Page 5 of 16 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Preserving Purity referring to the majority of staff, who were rural migrants and had left the Chinese countryside to work in the city. In China, peasant workers have long been looked down upon by their urban or more educated counterparts. Salaries were not a worry for employees of state-owned enterprises, who could expect a salary range of CNY 9,000 to 12,000 (of which up to 70 percent was received in USD and the remainder in CNY). Even if a state-owned enterprise were to go bankrupt, Chinese workers argued, it would still pay out salaries to its employees. “If you watch the news, they say that our state banks, such as the Bank of China or the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, all have dead loans,” explained Zhang Fu. “These loans are mostly owed by state-owned enterprises for salaries to employees. These companies survive from bank loans. If they, so to say, operate badly, they use the loans to survive. The banks give the money. It is a bottomless pit.” Of course, not all state-owned enterprises are loss making, especially those that have been successful overseas. Profitable state-owned enterprises tend to hoard their earnings in bank deposits rather than distribute dividends to shareholders. The profit-making state-owned enterprises provide capital for the loss-making ones (Huang 2012; Morck, Yeung, and Zhao 2008). The level of daiyu was also apparent from residential compounds, which were often compared and ranked according to the worst living conditions. (p.52) The Chinese living in Camp 52 of Wuhe—the number indicating the kilometer peg at which the camp was situated on the project road—and Camp 108 of Qimo were unanimously considered to be the worst off. Wedged between rocky mountains on the final section of the road, Camp 108 generated its own electricity with generators that were switched off at 9 o’clock in the evening, leaving the camp pitch black. When they were switched on again in the early mornings before 6 o’clock, the generators’ warmup cycle—bright white lights switching on again—functioned as wake-up alarms. Entertainment, too, was sparse. While the spacious camps of the state-owned companies were provided with entertainment facilities, the only such facility in Camp 108 was in the manager’s bedroom: a table tennis table, divided in two: one part served as an office desk, the other as a meeting table. Camp 52 had no entertainment facilities whatsoever. Subcontractors’ camps, such as 52 and 108, were workers’ camps. Black air belched from roaring engines in the mornings, leaving a penetrating trail of exhaust fumes. The sand in the courtyards was stained with oil and petrol. In contrast, the project department of RCE was a management camp and therefore quiet and clean. Mobility, too, was at issue. Whereas managers of the contractor had personal pick-ups or four-wheel drives at their disposal, the foremen of Camp 108 often had to take what they called wryly, “the number 11 bus.” In other words, they had to go on foot. The compound of RCE, referred to as the project department, was located next to the consultant camp at kilometer 48, about 500 meters from Mehoni town, situated between sorghum and teff fields that looked out over what a Chinese mechanic called “the continuous up and down of mountain tops” to the west. This camp was in fact an oasis. The water spilled by residents had nourished the sorghum in the adjacent fields, which grew tall and green, unlike the sorghum in most other fields, which was short and yellow. A large part of the harvest failed in the autumn of 2012 because of inadequate summer rains. The contractor and consultant camps both got their electricity from Mehoni and were connected to the town by a water pipe that did not provide water. This was not a major problem, though, since RCE simply ferried water by trucks from the electric water pump in Gujera, a one-way distance of 11 kilometers. The RCE camp, home to twenty-two Chinese men (as of December 2011), who were the managers of design and construction for the project, was the Chinese camp with the best facilities, including a satellite

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Preserving Purity dish, a basketball and badminton court, a conference room that doubled as a table tennis venue in the evenings, a guest flat, and well-equipped offices. Upon arriving at this camp in early 2008, the Chinese had planted eucalyptus and papaya trees to shade the bedrooms and offices. Chinese workers shared rooms with one other colleague and used communal shower facilities. The project manager enjoyed his own bathroom and television. (p.53) Differences in daiyu between Chinese firms were also apparent in mundane areas such as food. The contractor spent USD 15 per person per day on food, which was ample in Ethiopia despite high transportation costs. By contrast, the asphalt plant crew of Golden Roads received ETB 2,000 a month for each employee, an amount equal to around USD 3.70 per person per day. (This amount was still high by comparison with other private companies, whose employees lived even more frugally.) With USD 15 per person per day, state-owned enterprises imported crab, various sorts of fish and shellfish from Djibouti, as well as vegetables, such as cauliflower and broccoli, in addition to the locally available onion, tomato, and cabbage, and fruit, including pineapples, oranges, and mandarins from Addis Ababa. A great variety of mushrooms, tree fungi, seasonings, and sauces from China were also imported, all items that most Ethiopians had never seen before, let alone consumed. Private Chinese companies, such as Golden Roads and Qimo, usually ate only what was available locally. The rice consumed in the contractor’s camp came from China. Local rice eaten in private subcontracting camps was dry and less sticky, complained the private companies’ employees. Not surprisingly, food was a topic of discussion among those who believed they lacked particular foodstuff, such as meat. The private private company on the project, Wuhe Construction, was said to serve only flat round cakes for dinner, without any side dishes. This company seldom served meat. Rumor had it that one day the boss of Wuhe hit nine cows in a traffic accident, three of which died. As Ethiopians do not eat meat from dead animals, the managing director had offered to purchase the cows from the owner, a nearby farmer. However, only one cow would fit into the refrigerator. The other two carcasses were stored in the kitchen next to the fridge, where after a few days they began to rot. Circulating rumors like these served to confirm the pecking order among Chinese companies. From the very beginning of my field research, the employees of RCE discouraged me from visiting Camp 52 of Wuhe Construction. I took their advice. The image I gathered of the camp and the company through gossip was telling enough, especially in terms of their employment conditions as well as the rankings and relations between the companies on the project. (However, I cannot verify that these rumors were accurate.) Now and then Wuhe’s managing director, Lao Zhao, would drive past me, his hands swathed in black leather gloves, resting on the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the horizon. Invariably, he ignored me as I tried to greet or approach him. “He is scared of you. He is afraid that you will bring his bad practices to light.” Fang Lei described Lao Zhao as a “capitalist of the first hour.” You had them in Europe in the early times. You still find them in novels, Russian novels. His methods are merciless, and he is never satisfied. He (p.54) seeks profit unscrupulously. Money. He does not want to lose money at any cost. If he opens his eyes, the only thing he thinks of is money. At night, when he dreams, he dreams of money…. This person, he is very successful in China. [This type of person] is able to use his connections [guanxi] to make other connections through money, in order to make even more profit. (Engineer, male, June 6, 2012) Page 7 of 16 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Preserving Purity Zhang Zhiyi whispered that Wuhe’s manager must be part of the criminal underworld (hei shehui) in China. Most of Zhao’s employees, in particular the foremen on site, came from the same town in Hebei province, resulting in a tight network of guanxi bound together by debt and mutual obligations. Depictions of Lao Zhao as a capitalist of the first order or a member of the underworld illustrate the derogatory attitude of RCE’s staff members toward Wuhe and its employees—an attitude that derived from its present labor practices in Ethiopia but, more importantly, from Wuhe’s background as a peasant unit. The ingrained rural-urban divide that largely explains the management’s discontent with peasant workers was thus transported to Ethiopia. The association with a thuggish past persisted in gossip, for instance, that Lao Zhao and his foremen also beat Ethiopian workers. And “if the boss suppresses his Chinese employees, these people will use the same methods to suppress their local workers. They copy. They will be of one mind,” explained Fang Lei. If you go to the building site of [Lao Zhao], you see that what happens a lot is [Chinese] foremen beat black people. Of course, in this country, if you beat someone the consequences will be severe, especially when the local authorities get involved. But do you know why they have this habit of beating? Because in China these people who beat locals are bosses. They have a lot of money. Whatever the cause, they will just beat you. On the Serdo project [in Afar regional state] there was a company similar to this one, a small construction firm. The boss of that company was a specialist in beating Chinese. After recruiting Chinese staff members from China, he started beating them. The Chinese who got beaten did not dare to demand their salaries when they returned home. They did not know what to do. There was nobody who could sue him and win. His beating was cruel. He beat about twenty Chinese. He took every opportunity to beat them. (Engineer, male, June 6, 2012) The association of money—the possession of a lot of money, especially—with exploitation and physical violence poses troubling questions about private construction enterprises like Lao Zhao’s or the company from Shaanxi on the Serdo project. That said, the condemnation of pure capitalist (or private private) companies was also a way for staff members of RCE to distance themselves from those considered lower-status Chinese as well as the poor image this group was apparently creating. Physical violence had become the (p.55) ultimate symbol of a lack of discipline and self-control, which proved to be of great importance in retaining a professional distance and a certain social aloofness from the other. The project manager grimaced when describing the methods of punishment used by Wuhe’s managing director: “The first time they [his employees] don’t get any food. The second time they don’t get any sleep either. The third time they are beaten.” Why did the project manager refrain from taking action against this malpractice? The reason, one engineer explained, was the dearth of alternatives—few other companies could take over the work. “In China there are enough building crews lined up. If one performs badly, the next one in line can take over the next day. This is not the case in Ethiopia.” There were only limited numbers of Chinese construction companies in Ethiopia, and to invite a new company over from China was too costly and time consuming.

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Preserving Purity It was, ultimately, the Ethiopian laborers who actually managed to keep Lao Zhao in check. Aware of their boss’s anxiety about local legal institutions, they threatened to take their case to court, thereby forcing the general manager to accommodate their demands. As a result, the employment conditions and security of the Ethiopian workers were, relatively speaking, better than those of their Chinese foremen, who lacked a (legal) channel through which to claim their rights. In Ethiopia, Lao Zhao could escape the watchful eye of the Chinese authorities. Even so, the image of Chinese foremen beating Ethiopian workers was as much a myth as it was a daily reality—none of the employees of RCE had actually seen Wuhe’s foremen assaulting Ethiopian workers. Such gossip reflected the divisions within the Chinese community. Middle-level managers typically looked down on the on-site foremen, who were, as managers put it, much like local Ethiopians, unable to act or speak using reason. Physical discipline of workers and a lack of selfcontrol distinguished the Chinese who spent whole days on site with local workers from the contractor’s educated staff and company managers. The latter tried to dissociate themselves from what they saw as inferior status members of the Chinese community. Foremen on-site, however, did not seem to heed their superiors’ concerns; warnings and admonitions were generally met with shrugs. Most foremen did not appear to care about the preoccupations of higher-level managers, who were, although better educated, mostly younger and less experienced, both in work and life.

Company veterans, university graduates, and peasant workers Social divisions persisted not only between but also within companies. From informal conversations with workers who had come to Ethiopia in the late (p.56) 1990s, I gathered that the social composition of the Chinese road-building community in Ethiopia had changed over the years. The first Chinese state-owned enterprise to enter the Ethiopian construction market as a competitive contractor still employed a handful of veterans. Hu Chunfu, a 58-year-old mechanic, was a case in point. Hu had come to Ethiopia in 1998, after having accumulated 20 years of work experience in the road-building sector in China. Hu was assigned a post in his present company when he returned to Beijing in 1977, after being sent to the countryside in Heilongjiang where he worked on a large state farm during the Cultural Revolution. In 1997 he was asked to go on what he liked to call a mission to Ethiopia, leaving his wife and adult son and family back in Beijing. When I first met him, Hu expressed ambivalence about returning to China, a country that, in his words, had become frantic (fengkuang). “I don’t recognize anything anymore every time I go back home. Here [in Ethiopia] life is simple. When I got the chance to return to China after the completion of Phase Two of the ring road [in 2004], I decided to stay [in Ethiopia].” In 2012, however, Hu Chunfu retired and finally went back home. Company veterans like Chunfu, who had served in the work unit for a good part of his life, occasionally looked down upon the new arrivals who hailed from rural areas in China. In particular, the suzhi (quality) of new staff members was a sore spot; lamentably, it fell below that of the pioneers, explained Liang Jun, a 52-year-old site manager. He too had migrated to Ethiopia in 1998: The first Chinese who came here had a high suzhi. Most of them were graduates from Tsinghua4 [University] and other good universities. Now my company employs peasant workers as supervisors. They don’t belong to our company [danwei]. Our first group was of a high level…. The assistant manager of the AA project [the Addis-Adama expressway], for

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Preserving Purity instance, was part of our first batch. Nowadays graduates from Tsinghua do not want to come to Africa anymore. (Site manager, male, October 31, 2011) Scholars have traced this attitude elsewhere. Yan Hairong and Barry Sautman (2010), for instance, noticed similar views among Chinese migrants with government-run agriculture projects in Zambia, who complained about the suzhi of newcomers employed by private entrepreneurs. The authors assert that, in the era of agro-socialism through the late 1980s, agricultural experts received training in social etiquette and intercultural communication, and their relationships with local African communities were more harmonious. In both the Ethiopian and Zambian cases, suzhi, as a measure of distinction between the established team and the newcomers, was not linked to neoliberal principles so much as to moral and socialist-inspired values of (p.57) nonmaterialism, equality, and submission to the collective and the common good. Accusations that Wuhe Construction was a private private enterprise and that its management was exploitative also confirmed the prevalence of moral attitudes associated with socialism, which functioned as a framework for judgments about the other within the Chinese community. The discourse on suzhi furthermore illustrates how widely applicable a concept it actually was, ranging from intangible moral values to social etiquette, and from place of origin to levels of formal education. Even high suzhi, though, was no guarantee against insecurity among the permanent employees of state-owned enterprises, such as Liang Jun, who believed their privileged status was threatened by temporary staff. Liang felt the need to distinguish himself and his status as a real or full staff member. In his opinion, peasant workers lacked this entitlement. Liang’s view was endorsed by electrical engineer Li Lianpo, Liang’s colleague and the only Tsinghua graduate left in the Ethiopian branch of their company. “The two brothers from Hebei; you do know that they are peasant workers, don’t you?” Li asked me one day, pronouncing the word nongmingong with a slight air of contempt. It was the older generation, especially those in their 40s or 50s, who were quick to point out the differences between the temporary project-based staff, the peasant workers, and the permanent employees of the company, whom they referred to as “the people of our work unit” (women danwei de ren). Peasant workers, also called “people recruited from outside” (waizhao de ren), were not seen as part of the work unit, despite the fact that they sometimes worked for a considerable time for the company. Their employment contracts were linked to single projects or overseas branches only. This distinction in employment status mirrors the persistent rural-urban divide in China. The older generation of workers in stateowned enterprises often hailed from urban areas or had lived there for a significant amount of time, whereas the peasant workers came from rural backgrounds. In the first Chinese stateowned enterprise in Ethiopia, this division was internal to the company; on the project in Tigray, the division played out between companies. The number of peasant workers hired by state-owned enterprises was small. Most worked for the private subcontractors to manage and supervise work on the building site. Both groups were, however, conscious of the divide. Several foremen excused themselves with “but I do not have culture” when I tried to ask them questions, implying that I should address my queries to someone else (with culture). “I can’t write, really. I finished fourth grade only. I come from the countryside.” In contrast, Li Lianpo had an urban background, having grown up in the Muslim quarter of Beijing. As an electrical engineering student at Tsinghua University, he had participated in the Tiananmen protests in 1989 and was assigned a low-end job in a textile (p.

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Preserving Purity 58) factory after graduation, a fate that many of his generation suffered. In the mid-1990s Li started working as an electrician and specialized in elevator repair. Before moving to Ethiopia, Li earned CNY 3,000 per month. As the main person responsible for installing street lighting in his company’s projects in Addis Ababa, he now earned CNY 11,000. A higher salary enabled him to pay off the mortgage on a flat he had bought in 2005 for CNY 300,000 in the fifth ring of Beijing, where his wife, four grandparents, and 10-year-old daughter lived. A tiny photograph of his daughter taken in Beijing’s Beihai Park on a winter day hung on his key fob. “When I came to Beijing, the third ring had just been completed,” recalled Liu Binhong. “The third ring was already a hundred kilometers long. Now the sixth ring has already been built. My country develops so fast.” “It is hard to adapt to all these changes,” said Liu Kangping, who had spent 5 years in Ethiopia and managed to convince his brother to join him. He had recommended Liu Binhong to his employer. The two brothers from Hebei were not sons of the same parents, but they came from the same lineage in a county in rural Hebei. They were firstgeneration rural migrants who had left their home village for Beijing in the mid-1990s. Liu Kangping had remodeled flats in high-rise housing estates in Beijing for 10 years before starting a small business in construction materials in Beijing’s Fengtai District. In China he made around CNY 5,000 per month. In Ethiopia he earned CNY 8,000 (all paid in CNY), he told me, admitting that the higher salary was his sole motivation for migrating to Ethiopia, although when I spoke to him again, toward the end of my field research, he raised doubts about whether CNY 3,000 a month was really worth the separation from his family. The younger Liu Binhong had held a thousand and one jobs in Beijing, from that of kitchen assistant to construction worker, and from clerk to taxi driver, before he moved to Ethiopia. The internal division between permanent employees and peasant workers in the company in Addis Ababa was patently visible in spatial practices as well. In the Ring Road Project’s compound there were two tables in the canteen. One was occupied by permanent employees (most of whom had worked with the company in China); the other was used by peasant workers and young permanent staff who had started working for the company in Ethiopia. A significant distance between the tables meant that conversations were limited to those seated together. The daily food consumed by both parties was the same, but the permanent employees shared cigarettes and fruit and melon seeds with each another. In this context, distinctions of suzhi (and wenhua, culture) were based not only on the ruralurban divide but also on generation and employment type. On the one hand, the province of origin was of less importance abroad. Apart from national state-owned enterprises such as Liang and Li’s company, (p.59) smaller state-owned and private companies were place based, and so both high- and low-level managers came from the same province and sometimes the same region in the province. On the other, suzhi was intrinsically linked to a rural or urban origin. Mobility, that is migration to Ethiopia, did not help the migrants to “shed rurality and gain suzhi” (Sun 2009, 638), as the rural-urban inequalities were transported abroad. It was to non-Chinese workers that the community appeared homogenous and uniform. Ermias Ezekiel, who had worked for Chinese companies since 1998, first as a construction blasting manager and now as management assistant, was the only Ethiopian employee granted the authority to sign documents for his Chinese employer. He said that the Chinese had not changed at all. “Back then they looked the same as nowadays,” he said when I interviewed him in the stylish reception room of his company’s head office in Addis Ababa. “They sit in one spot and simply stay there, in a squatting position, with their straw hat and a glass of water with tea

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Preserving Purity leaves in their hand.” “The only thing that has changed,” remarked the Italian resident engineer of the Ring Road Project who had supervised Chinese contractors for many years, “is their English proficiency. The English of each new project manager is higher than that of the previous one.” The Italian engineer’s remark suggests there is a telling difference between older and newer migrants. The generation of Chinese that had migrated to Ethiopia in the late 1990s and decided to stay was shrinking. This group was being replaced by new graduates who were commonly recruited at job fairs organized by universities throughout China, a recruitment method termed “campus recruitment” (xiaoyuan zhaopin). Recruitment at educational institutions occurs after recruitment via job sites on the internet or, more recently, the social medium WeChat—often referred to as “recruitment from society” (shehui zhaopin)—as the most widespread method by which young graduates find employment (Lu 2011). For Chinese state-owned enterprises, as well as for larger private companies, campus recruitment was a cheap and effective method for recruiting a large number of employees who fit a certain profile in a relatively short amount of time. Students were recruited while still in school and could expect to commence work right after graduation. Coming from rural backgrounds themselves, the younger generation seemed to care less about the division between permanent staff and peasant workers. This generation was rather more conscious of a generational divide and occasionally complained about the bad manners of senior colleagues, company veterans and peasant workers alike. Li Yang, who was 27 years old and worked in a state-owned enterprise branch in Addis Ababa, admitted that she was embarrassed by the older generation of Chinese colleagues, whom she described as loud and impolite, in particular when they raised their voice to Ethiopian employees. Her confession and the disapproval (p.60) expressed by other managers of some of their Chinese staff members indicated there was a sensitivity about their self-image and a concern with protecting this image. Trying to keep up a good image of diligence, discipline, and professionalism, younger and older members of the Chinese community attempted to dissociate themselves from what they saw as lower-status members of the group.

Promoting Chineseness The exclusionary rhetoric described above stood in sharp relief to the promotion of unity by the same high-level managers. The advancement of a single and shared identity was crucial in preserving the image of the Chinese community and securing distance from the Ethiopian other. Despite their fierce criticism of foremen on-site, high-level managers and the project manager in particular saw it as their responsibility to remind expatriate staff members about their common origin, objectives, and uniqueness. Consequently, internal differentiation was in tension with a discourse of solidarity, in which kinship terminology (e.g., gege, meaning “elder brothers”), concepts that stressed geographical proximity—“all Chinese here are fellow villagers” (tongxiangren) or various forms of bodily contact—were used to evoke familiarity and comradeship. Sentiments of solidarity that confirmed bonds not only with coworkers but also with the homeland and the family were based on practices and customs shared only by expatriates. These practices had to be carefully maintained and reenacted in order to be effective. Here, I explore three modes in which Chineseness was articulated in daily life: in residential arrangements, forms of conviviality, and giving gifts. Solidarity among Chinese expatriates was expressed through practices of social and physical incorporation as well as simultaneous practices of dissociation from the Ethiopian environment. Inclusion and exclusion, which found expression most clearly in Chinese living arrangements, Page 12 of 16 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Preserving Purity are two sides of the same coin. Ching Kwan Lee (2009, 653; see also Lee 2014) uses the concept of feidi (literally “a flying place”) to describe the residential compounds of Chinese workers in Zambia and Tanzania. She characterizes the feidi as distinct territorial units segregated from their environment by physical as well as sociocultural boundaries. Feidi are the very expression, if not celebration, of Chineseness. This was visible in the cultural paraphernalia, such as the red lanterns and faded Spring Festival couplets and paper decorations on doors that dotted Chinese compounds, but also in their spatial and interior arrangements. The more financial resources a company had, the more material items could be flown or shipped from China. In fact, the degree to which employers did so became a measure of the distinction among the Chinese companies. (p.61) In the case of the road-building project, it was the contractor’s staff who adopted the most Chinese lifestyle of all—consuming rice imported from China, brushing teeth with Chinese toothbrushes and toothpaste, washing clothes with Chinese detergent, and hanging them to dry on hangers shipped from China. The distribution of special rations was a holdover from the socialist days. By contrast, Chinese workers in private companies such as Wuhe and Golden Roads consumed Ethiopian rice purchased in Mekelle. They used toothpaste and detergent bought in Mehoni and threw their wet clothes over a locally purchased laundry line. Furthermore, the employees of the contractor ate Chinese food that their counterparts in private companies did not have access to, including lotus root, soy sauce, golden needle mushrooms, and a broad assortment of tofu. Chineseness was also created by immaterial things. In Camp 48 Chinese employees were summoned to the dining hall by “Nufang de shengming” (Life in full bloom) and “Tiantang nühai” (Girl of heaven), the project manager’s favorite pop songs, which blared from the loudspeakers at breakfast time (6:30 a.m.), when the Ethiopian consultant engineers were still fast asleep, then again at lunch (12 noon) and dinner (6:30 in the evening). Feidi aroused a feeling of familiarity and, alternatively, of alienation from local surroundings. Reminiscent of the traditional, self-contained work unit in China, the feidi, by virtue of their closed and intimate nature, bound employees together and facilitated conviviality. Sharing food, especially, signified proximity and a shared lifestyle, and so was an important component of conviviality (see AbuLughod 1986, 63). Moreover, festive meals and collective entertainment activities, such as karaoke and sports, were a means of producing Chineseness as well as staging Chineseness to the other. A sense of occasion played an important part as well. In spite of repeated complaints about Ethiopian religious holidays, which managers grumbled would impede construction work, the Chinese were keen to celebrate their own national holidays, mostly with a festive meal, including the October First National Holiday, the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Lantern Festival, Tomb Sweeping Day, International Labor Day and, most importantly, the Chinese Spring Festival. During the 2012 Chinese New Year, the contractor staff organized a banquet for the Ethiopian consultant engineers, serving both Chinese and Ethiopian delicacies. Chinese employees were drinking, singing, and laughing while the Ethiopian consultant staff sat quietly around two lazy Susans in a corner of the decorated dining hall. The Chinese staff tried to engage the Ethiopians in the celebrations by making them participate in a quiz and a balloon game, and these activities coaxed some smiles, but overall the consultant engineers remained rather uncomfortable in the Chinese environment. The rest of the evening was filled with fireworks, even though town authorities had explicitly asked the Chinese not to set off too (p.62) many and to stay inside the

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Preserving Purity compound so as not to upset or frighten local residents. However, fireworks simply could not be absent in a spectacle of Chineseness. Chinese identity, especially in its material form, was also maintained by a lively gift exchange between companies, camps, and individuals. Gift giving was a means of cultivating guanxi (social relations) and was thus a crucial part of life on and off the building site. The exchange of often Chinese or China-related objects not only maintained relations between equals but also smoothed out work relations with superiors or inferiors. Gift giving cut across the social and occupational strata that divided the Chinese community. Commodities and immaterial things, such as music, accompanied migrants across borders and connected them to home. Chinese staff members who returned home for the annual holidays were also expected to bring back a plethora of gifts—requested or unrequested—for fellow team members and friends. Depending on the value of items and the status of the recipient, money was given in return, although this was primarily the case among equals. During the period that their colleagues were away, crew members talked excitedly about whatever items they had ordered that they would soon be able to consume upon their colleagues’ return, contrasting this prospective indulgence to the material poverty in which they believed they lived. Prior to the departure of crew members, the team discussed among themselves which items they would ask the others to bring back from China. Often an extra suitcase was required to carry the abundance of gifts. Tack truck driver Du Tianfu came back from China with an entire suitcase reserved just for gifts for his asphalt plant colleagues: four pieces of smoked ham; two packs of dried fish; 500 grams of shrimp sheets to soak in water; three packages of tea leaves; four packs of moon cake; 5 kilos of sesame seeds, cumin, and other seasoning; four pieces of soap; two packs of panty liners for his female colleague; 10 boxes of medicine (Yunnan Baiyao) and herbal plasters; a leather belt for a generator; bean, tomato, eggplant, and crown daisy seeds; eight cartons of Chinese cigarettes; and a new laptop for a colleague working in Bishoftu. Bai Fu, who returned at the same time, had brought a few T-shirts and trousers for two other crew members along with other food items. It was also common practice to bring fruit from China that was not available in Ethiopia, such as pears or pomegranates. Cigarettes, however, were by far the most popular item to exchange. The transportation of commodities by individual migrants served not only to express but also to reproduce Chineseness abroad. Guanxi exchange also took place at the company level. “You should go to China and work with a company there for 6 months,” Chen Delin, manager of Duyin Enterprise, told me. “If we were in China, Golden Roads and my company would be competitors. Here we support each other.” Companies (p.63) usually exchanged food: carp from Lake Hashenge; camel legs and pork; cucumber, celery, coriander, and garlic chives from the vegetable garden; white spirits and other types of liquor—all with the idea that the whole team could enjoy these gifts at lunch or dinner. But guanxi were also selective. Golden Roads, for instance, maintained close ties with Jianghe Construction, another company from northeastern China, whereas Golden Roads had almost no contact or exchange of this sort with Qimo Construction from Fujian, whose crew members were nicknamed the bickering women, an image that corresponds with north-south stereotypes in China. In Ethiopia, too, maintaining ties with Chinese roots either created solidarity or deepened the divisions that existed back home. Again, a sense of occasion often came into play. The physical demands of the project meant that RCE staff sometimes stayed for lunch at subcontractors’ camps, and, in return for lunch, they would offer vegetables, such as peppers and carrots, or seasoning taken (secretly) from their

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Preserving Purity kitchen at Camp 48. And they bought beer. A lunch could also be exchanged for building materials or favors of a more intangible nature. RCE had, for instance, a loader and an excavator stationed in Adiqey to help out small subcontractors who did not have their own machinery. In theory these companies had to pay for borrowing the machines; in practice, the return of material or immaterial favors sufficed. I asked Wang Li, the Chinese manager of the allEthiopian subcontractor, how he had arranged to obtain the loader that was dumping sand for his cement mix next to a box culvert under construction. He grinned: “For a lunch at my place tomorrow.” He was planning to prepare spicy roast chicken, which was his specialty and the favorite dish of his guests, the contractors. Guanxi exchange between companies and individuals creates all sorts of relations of dependence, obligation, friendship, reliance, and trust. Regardless of whether these relations were negative or positive, they all served to facilitate interaction within the Chinese community in southeastern Tigray. However, such relations have to be carefully maintained. The Chinese proverb, “as soon as a person has left, the tea gets cold,” highlights the importance of the preservation of guanxi. Only when the tea is warm is one able to pull guanxi. Their ability to keep Chineseness alive and to reproduce it both materially through the exchange of objects and immaterially by fostering camaraderie translated into the capacity of workers to remain associated with each other and the home front, while at the same time preserving their unity. Cultivating national identity through shared living arrangements, conviviality, and guanxi exchange, among other forms was crucial in maintaining the ethnic categories upon which expertise, authority, and managerial control depended. These categories came to demarcate the distance between ethnic (p.64) groups and so, too, between the managers and the managed, the experts and the novices, the knowledgeable and the ignorant. As the preservation of Chineseness and the protection of a certain Chinese essence from pollution rested on retaining a relative independence or distance from the other, Chinese managers of the higher class came to conceive of their dependence on the host society as neediness and social poverty (see Stoler 1989, 151). On certain occasions low-status Chinese foremen provoked considerable embarrassment in the project managers by muddling ethnic (or racial) categories. One arena that proved particularly problematic in spoiling the image of the Chinese was the sphere of romantic relations—the issue of taking liberties with local women, or tiaoxi, as the letter to the subcontractors called it. It is the specter of interracial sexual intimacy that I turn to in the next chapter. Notes: (1.) Tiaoxi (taking liberties with women) was a serious offense, which, although not punishable by law, could, for instance, lead to expulsion from the army. In this context the term means having sexual intercourse with prostitutes. The fact that the word tiaoxi was used to mean commercial sex shows the strong moral judgment of this activity. (2.) As for the origin of construction materials, water and wooden bars (a tool for setting alignments) were purchased locally. Stone aggregate used for subbase, base course, wearing course, slope protection, and masonry works was mined in local quarries. Steel bars of varying diameters (12–32 mm) for concrete reinforcement were imported from Turkey. Bitumen came from Iran, petrol from Yemen. Cement was purchased locally from a cement factory in Mekelle or, in case supplies ran short, from Addis Ababa. Small building tools (e.g., shovels, chisels, and trowels) were bought in Addis Ababa, Mekelle, or towns along the project road. A large proportion of the construction machinery and technical equipment, from dumpy levels to

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Preserving Purity printers, excavators, asphalt rollers, and their spare parts, typically came from China, although this was not necessarily the case. Whereas Duyin Enterprise had purchased Chinese Xugong asphalt pavers and rollers for this project, when it came to a larger road project in Ghana the company purchased more expensive German machinery. (3.) The Chinese concept of daiyu has many translations, including treatment, salary, status, and rank. (4.) Tsinghua University in Beijing is one of the top universities in China and is especially well known for engineering subjects.

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The Politics of Intimacy

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

The Politics of Intimacy Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords Anxieties about the loss of integrity – the quality of having strong moral principles and the state of being undivided – are compounded by the increased intimacy between Chinese foremen and female members of the local community. Sexual relations, in particular, threaten to annul the carefully maintained distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Instances of sexual intimacy prompt Chinese managers to define notions of race and racial difference, and to reestablish their reputation as morally upright. What happens at night-time is consequential for the daytime encounters on the construction site. Sexual intimacy filters into management–labor relations and challenges the social distance set up between Chinese management and Ethiopian rank-and-file workers, on which the managerial authority and racial disparities of the corporate hierarchy depend. Keywords:   Sex, race, ethnicity, reputation, marriage, social distance

In 2011, I heard a tale that I was told again by another Chinese man in 2017. A branch office of a Chinese construction company in Addis Ababa once employed an Ethiopian secretary who had asked one of her Chinese managers, so the story went, what vaccination he had taken before coming to Ethiopia. “Vaccination?” the Chinese manager replied. “We are vaccinated against yellow fever.” “No, not that kind of vaccination,” the secretary countered with a smile. All the Chinese men she met seemed to remain chaste. Did they not long for sexual gratification? Surely, they must have had an injection that mitigates their sexual drives and desires, she reasoned. The image of Chinese chastity conveyed by the story contains a message, not only for the Ethiopian listener or the European anthropologist, but also for the Chinese migrant himself. The tale at once boosts a sense of moral superiority vis-à-vis the sexualized African man and the libertine Western expatriate, and offers a moral lesson, calling on Chinese migrant men to live up to their favorable reputation, if not in private then certainly in public. More implicitly, the story, and its continued circulation, responds to concerns about the loss of integrity.

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The Politics of Intimacy In this chapter, I discuss Chinese perceptions of race in the face of increased instances of sexual intimacy between Chinese men and Ethiopian women at the building site that have prompted and provoked Chinese managers to define and refine notions of race and racial difference. Growing sexual intimacy, and the resulting increased racial intimacy, are relevant to the extent that they filter into management-labor relations on the building site, which is the focus of the next chapters. Indeed, nighttime encounters between Chinese and Ethiopians both reflect and affect daytime relations between Chinese managers and Ethiopian workers. For one thing, Chinese-Ethiopian sexual encounters challenged the social distance set up between expatriate managers and Ethiopian laborers on which Chinese managerial authority and racial disparities in employment conditions depended. To make sense of processes of racial differentiation on and off the construction site in Tigray I propose to use the notion of distance. Thinking (p.66) in terms of distance—in the literal as well as metaphorical sense—sheds light on the sustained, if often unsuccessful, efforts of Chinese managers to maintain racial purity in the face of sexual intimacy, ranging from prostitution to marriage, between Chinese foremen and Ethiopian women. In this context, distance is relevant. As I have shown in the previous chapter, to protect the image of the honest and hardworking Chinese man, high-level managers attempted to decrease the distances that divided the Chinese. Chinese managers also sought to maintain, if not extend, the distance between themselves and the Ethiopian other; efforts that are reminiscent of the internal orientalism of Chinese ethnic minorities, such as the Tibetans and Miao (Gladney 1996; Litzinger 2000; Yeh 2013), with an eye to positioning the Chinese national subject as powerful and progressive (Gladney 1994). In the context of China’s rise (jueqi) in the world today, the anxious nationalism that marked the opening-up period of the 1980s and 1990s, when China was seeking to restore a national image gravely damaged by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), has made way for a proud patriotism, projected onto not only Ethiopia but also, and arguably more importantly, the West. In this project the Chinese national (or racial) subject relies on the other as the embodiment of “absolute otherness” (Mbembe 2001, 2), be they Tibetan or Ethiopian, to confirm national (or racial) pride and prowess.

A note on Chinese racial ideologies While the Chinese state has remained silent about matters of race in its policies toward African countries, cautious of jeopardizing the explicitly pro-African and anti-racist diplomacy that legitimizes its activities across the continent, the Chinese migrants themselves were vocal about racial issues that concerned them personally. The assertion of difference, with multiple references to perceived bodily features, is expressed most acutely in how people perceive, talk, or gossip about and deal with interracial sexual transgressions, and the fears these perceived offenses arouse. Ideas about sexuality and gender, moreover, provide a medium through which people express racial differences (Hillman and Henfry 2006; Schein 1997). Chinese racial ideologies and notions of blackness and whiteness in Ethiopia are inspired by perceptions of race in China. Against the background of a fluid spectrum, rather than absolute pseudo-biological dichotomies, skin color, alongside other physical features, intersects with spatial and socioeconomic hierarchies (see Fennell 2013; Sautman and Yan 2016). It is beyond the scope of this book to go into detail on Chinese past and present notions of race. Instead, I focus on distance, which is a central element in Chinese racial ideologies, tracing its origins back to Chinese conceptions of (p.67) the world as a cosmological order composed of a white (or yellow) imperial core, from which circles radiated, each representing, in descending order, a Page 2 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy different civilization. The farther a civilization was located from the center, the lower the status of its members and the darker their perceived complexion. The dark-skinned peoples inhabiting the borders of the known world— the kunlun—were feared and detested (Dikötter 1992). This model, though contested, has long provided a popular frame of reference for the explanation of physiological difference in China. One Chinese engineer took inspiration from this model to explain differences among Ethiopians. He asserted that residents of Addis Ababa have obtained a higher level of civilization (wenhua chengdu) than citizens in the peripheral regions of the country, concluding that the farther people lived from the capital, the more barbaric (yeman) they were. This highway engineer was based on a road project on the southwestern border of Ethiopia that was home to the Nyangatom, an agro-pastoralist people who belong to the same ethnic cluster as the Turkana in Kenya and the Toposa in South Sudan. He took their dark skin and allegedly violent temperament, judged by their use of machine guns and incidents of aggression involving Chinese workers, as evidence of their barbaric nature. This engineer, like many of his contemporaries, takes race to indicate or measure the degree of civilization: racial distance is seen to be synonymous with social distance. The physicalizing of class or social status has been especially pronounced since the economic reforms, when color consciousness became heightened in mainland China because of the influx of Western popular culture and the increased interactions between rural and urban citizens as a result of mass migration to the cities. During this time, skin color came to be viewed as a marker of distinction and a white complexion as an object of aspiration. Whereas the white skin of urban middle-class singletons indexed their privilege, the dark skin of the laboring poor, the result of their time toiling in the sun, symbolized disadvantage. While prolonged mobility—physical as well as social —has reduced discrimination based on skin pigmentation and other physiological features, the divisions created by these features persist and have been transported to Ethiopia. Discussions about complexion in contemporary China are often couched in terms of suzhi, which encompasses ascribed and achieved characteristics, such as physical features, social etiquette, and educational attainment, and is commonly mapped onto rural-urban divisions (Anagnost 2004; Kipnis 2006; Murphy 2004; H. Yan 2003). Many scholars have, however, underestimated the visual dimension of suzhi. Judgments about a person’s suzhi are often made swiftly and are based on their dress, complexion, and other physical features. Individuals of a high suzhi are considered to have fairer skin. It is then a small step away from arguing that Ethiopians have a lower suzhi and (p.68) connecting this to the underdevelopment of the African continent in general and the inferiority of blackness. Suzhi, in contrast to the absolute notions of skin color found in the West, is malleable. For this reason, distance matters. The relative fluidity of suzhi, and race, for that matter, can be perceived as threatening and can arouse a fear of the loss of racial integrity. While dark and light contrasts operate to a certain extent independently of national belonging, they do respect national boundaries. Racial sentiments are also nationalist in the context of Chinese-Ethiopian encounters. The fusion of race and nation in Chinese racial ideologies reaches back to the late Qing period, when the concept of a superior Han race emerged from the context of opposition to both foreign powers and the ruling Manchus. While reformers such as Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Kang Youwei (1858–1927) perceived race to be a biological extension of the lineage (zu) encompassing all people dwelling on Chinese soil, revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) excluded ethnic minorities—for example, the Manchus, Mongols, and

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The Politics of Intimacy Tibetans—from what was from then on called the Han minzu. Meaning “people-lineage,” the term minzu describes the nation as a racialized community linked by descent (Dikötter 2008; Sautman 1997). Importantly, the Chinese in the diaspora were also seen as tied to the fatherland by blood and they came to represent the nation overseas. The same holds true today, contributing to the heightened stakes of the preservation of Chineseness in Ethiopia.

Sexual intimacy As touched upon in the previous chapter, sexual liaisons between Chinese men and Ethiopian women did not go uncriticized. High level managers in particular were concerned about sexual intimacy and sought to retain their integrity in the double sense of the word—as having strong moral principles and as the state of being undivided. Chinese construction companies employed mostly men. “Where the road builders go, the bar ladies go,” remarked an Ethiopian surveyor once, hinting at the ubiquity of prostitution in the vicinity of building sites. Both Chinese and Ethiopians involved in road construction made use of services offered by sex workers in towns along the project road. Chinese men usually went in small groups after celebratory dinners and drinks. Some Chinese men established intimate bonds with, or even married, Ethiopian women. However, interracial marriages frequently went unrecognized, particularly in cases where the brides were under the legal marriage age of 18 years in Ethiopia, and the grooms were already married in China. Chinese men commonly concealed their marital status on both sides, which occasionally led to painful confrontations. (p.69) In these circumstances, sexual intimacy, in whatever form, is affected by a tension between sexual need or genuine affection, on the one hand, and the moral expectation to retain distance, and thereby express loyalty to the family at home, on the other. The case of foreman Liu, who married Aster, a 17-year-old woman employed as a cleaner by his company, a private enterprise from Fujian, may illustrate the point. He truly loved Aster, Liu told me. His eyes gleamed. Having left his home village in Anhui Province in the late 1980s, Liu belonged to the first generation of peasant workers who moved to the cities in reform-era China. He had “built everything in Fujian,” the coastal province opposite Taiwan, he told me as he flicked away his cigarette butt. I accompanied Liu on-site where he was supervising masonry work. “Tolo, tolo” (“quick, quick,” in Amharic), he interrupted himself occasionally, turning to the Ethiopian laborers. In 2008 Liu left for Ethiopia with the prospect of earning a salary that was more than twice the amount he was earning at home. Owing to the slowdown in China’s construction industry, moving to Africa has become an attractive alternative for workers like Liu. Liu always beamed. While talking, he gesticulated exuberantly, especially when he spoke in the pidgin language that consisted of a mixture of Chinese, English, and Amharic. Liu was one of the most proficient among his expatriate colleagues in this novel vernacular. When local men and women came to ask for jobs, he would shout a heartfelt “labor yellem, labor yellem!” (we have no work!), or “labor gou le!” (We have enough laborers!). Liu’s Chinese wife had died, and he married Aster at New Year in 2012 at the company premises in a small mountain town along the project road. Adhering to Chinese tradition, Liu bought Aster a red wedding dress. The color red promised happiness and good fortune. Early in the morning, Liu drove to her parental house to fetch Aster and her relatives. The bride’s family, however, did not seem to approve of the union, as only Aster’s elder sister was present during the festivities. Colleagues set off firecrackers and prepared a Chinese-style banquet with plenty of alcohol. A few months went by as Liu and Aster moved to the other end of the project road, where they occupied the room of the mixed couple Chen and Meta, whom we will meet below.

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The Politics of Intimacy I spoke to Liu again in July 2012, when he was desperate to return home. He found himself in a quandary. One thing was clear: he could not take Aster to China. Their marriage was legally void, and Aster was unlikely to obtain a residence permit. He was anxious, too, about xenophobic sentiments. I was with an engineer of the project management, who inquired why Liu was not planning to stay with her. Dodging the question, Liu looked down at his white canvas shoes and continued with a thin smile: “But … I know what I will do with my last Ethiopian birr. I will take my wife to town and buy fancy dresses for her.” As we left Liu to attend to the construction of the base (p.70) course, the engineer of the project management sighed. “These men don’t think about the consequences of their actions. But what can we do about it?” His company attempts to prevent these situations from happening, but, as I elaborate further on, their efforts have proved futile. “It’s deplorable that the law in our country is unable to protect these women,” one Ethiopian work inspector said. “This woman’s life is destroyed. She may never be able to find another husband.” The Ethiopian inspector told me that cases like that of Liu and Aster make him furious. “Chinese men don’t think. Not for a moment do they empathize with these women. They simply use them as objects.” The inspector was not only concerned about Aster personally but also disturbed by the infringements on Ethiopian respectability by promiscuous Chinese men, damning their irresponsible and inexcusable behavior. His irate reaction can also be interpreted as reflecting masculine claims to exclusive sexual rights over “their” women, comparable with Chinese men’s discontent over Chinese women marrying African men. Surely, Chinese men reasoned, these women would be treated badly and suffer hardships. In these instances, racial matters intersect with issues of gender and sexual appropriation. Liu’s story is similar to that of other Chinese men I spoke to or read about. Few of them can or “dare” to take their African spouses back home and face a confrontation with their relatives and racist sentiments in China. By doing so, Liu would risk losing face, which many Chinese men are intent on preserving, if not in Africa, then most certainly in China. A few months later Liu went back to China—relieved and elated—leaving Aster behind.1 Liu got away with his relationship with Aster. Other company managers were much less tolerant toward sexual intimacy between Chinese staff and Ethiopian women. When chef Zhao of the asphalt paving team was caught in the act in his kitchen, he was promptly transferred to Ghana, where the enterprise from Shandong had just commenced a new highway project. Zhao had purportedly paid kitchen assistant Beshadu ETB 1000 per month to provide sexual services. Yet Zhao’s affair with Beshadu went beyond a search for sexual satisfaction, claimed his colleagues, who assured me that Zhao had been madly in love with his assistant. After his departure to Ghana, Beshadu continued working for the Chinese company. (p.71) Even if the disclosure of sexual intimacy was likely to lead to a transfer of the Chinese staff member in question, it seldom led to dismissal or repatriation. There was only one such case in Tigray, when logistics agent Wang, employed by the asphalt producer from Liaoning, invited sex workers to the compound during the rainy season, when most of his Chinese colleagues had left for their annual break in China. During this period, Wang was said to have slept with several Ethiopian women, including the company’s kitchen assistant, Sebele. When the asphalt plant team returned from the summer holidays, they were displeased with the liberties taken by their Ethiopian female personnel, who walked freely into their bedrooms, breaching the carefully cultivated physical distances within the compound. Disturbed by this unwanted change in their behavior, the crew dismissed their two Ethiopian female employees. A

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The Politics of Intimacy few days later, Sebele returned and announced that she was pregnant by Wang, demanding ETB 50,000 in damages. Should the logistics agent decline to pay, she would take the case to court. None of the Chinese knew for sure whether the woman was actually pregnant and what part their crew member had played in the incident, but after bargaining Wang was willing to pay ETB 35,000. He was sent back to China the following month and dismissed. When managers believed that sexual intimacy had gotten out of hand— when it was prolonged or affected colleagues, as in the case of Wang— they intervened by enforcing distance. In the past, the frequent rotation of road-building crews largely prevented intimacy between Chinese staff and members of the local community. The workers who took part in the construction of the China Road in Amhara between 1975 and 1983 were subject to strict curfews. Informal, let alone intimate, contact was shunned. One project manager, who came to Ethiopia in 1998 to construct the Addis Ababa Ring Road, recalled that even then his superior patrolled the Chinese dormitories in the evenings to see whether everyone was in their rooms by 10 o’clock. He laughed, chuckling that he would not dare to impose such a curfew nowadays. Intermarriage was then, as it is now, considered shameful, not just for the individual concerned. It was believed that mixed-race marriage harmed the reputation of the community at large. Yet, with the growing number of Chinese migrants in Ethiopia, and their relative freedom in after-work hours, this situation was changing. The more individuals and companies there were, the harder they were to control—a problem that one respondent described using the Chinese proverb renduokouzha (many people, many voices). With the expansion of people and voices, Chinese integrity had become increasingly at risk.

(p.72) “China babies” Chinese anxieties about the loss of racial integrity were condensed in the situation of childbirth. The symbol of increased proximity and the tangible product of sexual intimacy between Chinese men and Ethiopian women, biracial children were the object of ridicule. In hushed tones, an Ethiopian friend told me that “children with needle-eyes” had been spotted in the Addis Ababa suburb of Wollo Sefer, near the Ethio-China Friendship Avenue. In Tigray, too, rumor had it that a growing number of what were known as China babies had been observed in the vicinity of construction sites. The category of China babies was broad and had come to encompass not only children of mixed descent but also fair-skinned children, especially boys who were either orphans or had been abandoned by their Ethiopian fathers. (Whereas fair skin is valued for girls, boys with a particularly light skin are viewed as an oddity.) The China baby in Tigray, much like the métissage in the Dutch East Indies, as described by Ann Laura Stoler (2009), has come to embody not only racial ambiguity but also racial proximity. “Come! Look! China baby!” yelled a friendly female voice as I was walking down the street one afternoon. At the doorpost of one of the houses stood a woman with a baby in her arms, gesticulating that I come inside. In the dark of the room she showed me her baby girl, looking at me with expectant eyes. The father, she explained, was a Chinese man who resided in the compound a few hundred meters out of town. He had not accepted responsibility for his daughter. While some Chinese men rose to their paternal responsibilities, many others did not. China babies commonly grew up in their mothers’ environment and were thereby kept at a safe distance. There was, however, one exception. One Chinese compound housed a mixed couple with their 4-month-old baby girl, Zena. Zena’s mother, Meta, came from Lideta, a poor district in Addis Ababa, and Zena’s father, Chen, from Fujian. “Destiny,” Chen smiled in response to my question about how the two had met. I sat down with the couple in the Ethiopian workers’ quarters, a corrugated iron building that was dark and dusty inside, in contrast to the bright and Page 6 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy airy Chinese section of the compound. The Chinese and Ethiopian quarters were segregated by distance, and, although Chen and Meta had been allocated a room in the Chinese part, they spent their evening hours in the Ethiopian quarters, as both Meta and Chen felt more comfortable there. Meta, dressed in denim dungarees and wearing her long curly hair loose, lounged comfortably on a bed arranged in the corner of the common room; Zena, wrapped in colorful quilts, was sleeping next to her mother. Chen sat on a little stool in his filthy work gear. “I’m a lucky man. I’m so happy.” Chen said that he left China “on the verge of death.” His Chinese wife, an (p.73) obsessive Mahjong gambler, repeatedly made him lose face. He said, “I was extremely angry with her. She gambled day in day out. She gambled away all my earnings.” In China Chen ran an automobile workshop. Through a friend he learned about the opportunity to move to Africa for work. Since setting foot in Ethiopia, he had not gone back. Chen was planning to resign, he said, even if his company had, in spite of criticism by their Chinese contractor, been accommodating in providing a space for his family. Meta was indispensable. She acted as an intermediary in conflicts between Chinese managers and Ethiopian workers and cooked for the local employees while a close female friend looked after Zena. Chen managed the water supply and distribution for his company. Chen and Meta were widely known in the area. Their child roused even more curiosity. What did she look like? Did she look Ethiopian? Did she look Chinese? Unabashed nosiness abounded. Chinese and Ethiopians alike agreed upon the fact that the baby girl looked “like a real Chinese.” Whereas the father was happy that his daughter “looked really Chinese,” Meta admitted, in private, that at first she had felt unease at her daughter’s Chinese looks, anxious that her relatives would not accept Zena or that people would not believe that she was hers. The cacophony of commentary on baby Zena reveals at once the instability of racial identity and its intractability. A biracial child can be “very white,” and, as I will show in the following section, an Ethiopian woman may be “not very black,” yet neither the child nor the woman can, by implication, be Chinese, or white for that matter. Skin tone is carefully measured along a continuum that runs from black to white. The distance to one or the other color matters to the extent that it destabilizes racial integrity. Hybridity born out of interracial encounters unsettles established racial distances. Many Chinese contend that “mixed-race children always look like Africans,” having lost their Chinese features, except perhaps their “small eyes.” Zena had not lost these features and resembled a Chinese baby. “She might reveal some Ethiopian traits when she grows up,” concluded a Chinese man, unsatisfied with the fact that a baby born to an African woman could look “so Chinese.” “Her skin tone might become darker as she grows older,” suggested others. Resemblance, albeit ambivalent as “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 1997, 153), was to be praised. From the vantage point of the Chinese, racial instabilities notwithstanding, being very white could and should be taken as a compliment; this reflects global racial hierarchies, as I show in the following section.

(p.74) Racial spectra Mixed couples like Chen and Meta are wrapped in a cloak of mystery, as they embody the instability of racial distances. “What is it like to marry an African woman?” was a question raised on the Zhihu website. One reply included an image of a mixed-race couple. The comments posted in response to the photograph reveal a preoccupation with skin color and the need to define and refine the color distance (rather than color line) between “us” and “them”: 1 (male): She is quite pretty. Page 7 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy 2 (female): Very pretty. 3 (m): This woman must have white parentage. 4 (m): This black sister [heimei] is pretty. 5 (m): Very pretty. 6 (m): … 7 (m): This sister is quite pretty. She looks very young. 8 (m): A fresh flower sticking in cow dung … 9 (f): Not bad, quite pretty. 10 (f): This sister is whiter than many Chinese sisters. 11 (m): Very pretty. Africa, here I come! 12 (m): Fuck me [wocao]. The man is an old pimpled bull, the woman is beautiful! 13 (f): She is not very black. 14 (m): Very pretty. I would like to know which country she’s from. 15 (m): At first glance, I thought this photo was made when Lin Yongjian went on holidays to Africa … 16 (f): I think this is an Ethiopian [woman]. 17 (m): Really pretty. 18 (m): Just tell us that she is a mixed blood. 19 (m): So pretty. 20 (m): Young, pretty. 21 (m): Wow, too pretty. You are fooling us. Africans can be pretty after all. 22 (m): She is fake. 23 (m): It must be a mixed-blood. No matter how beautiful Africans are, from an esthetic point of view [shenmeiguan], Chinese will not be attracted to them. 24 (m): Wow, so pretty! I also want to go there! 25 (m): Lolita. The woman is not bad. The comments about the woman’s complexion cover a spectrum between black and white, with interstitial tones of “not so black” or “whiter than some Chinese sisters.” Chinese construe racial identity not so much in terms of discursive binaries (e.g., black/white) as by definitions of distance to (p.75) the other. Racial distinctions are far from the absolutes often presented in Page 8 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy Western racial ideologies. One respondent suggests that the woman comes from Ethiopia. Exclamations such as “Africa, here I come!” correspond with the view of Africa as a place of unfettered sexual opportunities. Reproducing the African ideal of beauty, Chinese men agreed that the “coffee color” (kafeise) of Ethiopian women makes them the most attractive of all women from sub-Saharan Africa. In the same way Ethiopians themselves define complexion along a continuum, ranging from red or light skinned (Am. qey), to light brown (Am. t’eyimdama), brown (Am. t’eyim), and black (Am. tiqur). The term tiqur has a foreign origin and a relatively neutral connotation and has replaced the traditional term shanqila (dark skinned). In the imperial era until the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974, the shanqila came from what was seen as the less developed south of the empire, and they served the aristocracy. Much as in Mao’s China, racial (and spatial) hierarchies were discarded by the socialist regime of the Derg (1974–1987), and they have been contested more recently by many Ethiopians, who argue that there are as many blacks (Am. tiquroch) in the north as there are reds (Am. qeyo) in the south of the country. Even if light skin is preferred, especially in women—there is a saying that light skin is beautiful irrespective of facial features (Am. qey sew melk ayfejim)—many Ethiopians assert that black can be equally pleasing, for delicate features make a dark-skinned person even more beautiful, thereby rejecting a direct connection between physiological features and spatial and socioeconomic hierarchies. The image on Zhihu destabilizes common sense by uniting bodies that are expected to remain separate. In trying to come to grips with the couple, the greedy eyes of the virtual audience are absorbed by complexion. The woman has an existential deviation forced onto her body, as Fanon (1986) would have it, which cannot be Chinese, for it is too black; yet it is not fully African either, as it has been in intimate contact with white flesh. The Chinese audience, it appears, has to prove that the woman on the photograph is “not quite black” or even “fake.” How could she otherwise be involved with a Chinese man? Wholehearted compliments of the African woman are pitted against criticism of the Chinese man, who is scorned for his ugliness—probably owing to his dark complexion and therefore his assumed low status. The online commentary thus reveals not only the distance between “us” and “them” but also the contested social distance among “us.” The relative fluidity of race, combined with class insecurity experienced by migrant men, is fertile ground for preoccupation with racial distance. Migrants fear that the African sun will burn their skin as black as that of Indians or even Africans. The parameters employed to describe and disparage migrant workers in China (p.76) are conspicuously similar to those used to draw external as well as internal distance. To have their complexion compared with that of Ethiopians is a dire affront, and Chinese managers sometimes did this to provoke or criticize their compatriot subordinates. In the online commentary, the Chinese man is, by means of harsh criticism, punished for closing distances that ought to be maintained. It was not so much the offspring of interracial unions, such as baby girl Zena, or the Ethiopian wives and mistresses, such as Aster and Meta, who were blamed for closing distance as the Chinese men themselves.

Racial distancing Rhetorical practices play a key role in construing racial differences. Importantly, they serve to erect and enforce the epistemic distance between “us” (Chinese) and “them” (Ethiopians or Africans), while concealing disparities and divisions among “us.” Representations of the Ethiopian other, much like imaginaries of the internal other embodied by China’s ethnic minorities (see Gladney 1994; Schein 1997), work to position the Chinese masculine national Page 9 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy subject. At once an individual and a national project of self-positioning (Wang 1993), the rendering of racial distances through popular narratives is characterized by the entanglement of the politics of race and sexuality. Racial distances are frequently defined with reference to gender roles and the moral connotations attached to them (Hillman and Henfry 2006). In March 2016, an article given the various headlines of “Chinese Man Spends CNY 1000 to Marry African Woman,” “African Women Want to Marry Chinese Men,” and “No More Worries about Buying a House” went viral on Chinese social media.2 Portraying the marriages of two Chinese men and African women, the story speaks of the promises and hazards of mixed-race unions. The narrative adopted by the author exemplifies popular Chinese discourse on Africa and Africans in that it emphasizes, if not increases, the distance between “us” and “them.” Whereas the Chinese male protagonists seem to be building bridges, the subtext, reinforced by the author’s tone and the use of the generic and essentializing term of heiren, meaning “black person,” suggests otherwise, by pointing out, in idioms of gender and morality, the unbridgeable differences between husband and (p.77) wife. As such, the story reproduces rather than challenges dominant racial and gender ideologies. Zhang Feng is one of the protagonists of the article. His Tanzanian wife, introduced to the reader as an authentic aboriginal (didao de tuzhu), was employed at the medical post of Zhang’s construction company when he met her. The two allegedly “fooled around” for a while, and, owing to his talent for languages and his sincere but candid character, the couple came together. Initially, Zhang Feng had not thought of marrying an African woman, yet he describes his feeling of loneliness as being like “a nest of poisonous insects that were gnawing at his heart.” Whereas in China Zhang had an active social life—he liked to go out for drinks with his friends and “hum folk tunes” at karaoke—in Tanzania it was as if “he did not know how to pass the days anymore.” One of the pirated versions of the article cut Zhang Feng’s motivation short, saying that he realized he had to get married sooner or later and went off to look for an African bride. The Chinese narrator depicts Zhang Feng as courageous yet ignorant for failing to consider the family background of the woman he was about to marry. His prospective Tanzanian bride, he discovered upon proposing, hailed from a single-parent family. The narrator’s commentary speaks to the widespread view that Chinese men who enter marriages with African women do so impulsively and passionately, giving little thought to the consequences. Shy and timid, Zhang’s Tanzanian wife is reportedly hiding in another room during the interview, while Zhang praises her for being xianhui (wise and kind), an adjective that describes the character of traditional Chinese wives, as well as her good temper and skill in cleaning the house. This sort of commentary draws on traditional Chinese norms of masculinity and femininity—the former representing initiative and the public sphere, the latter passiveness and the domestic sphere, captured by the Chinese catchphrase “men are breadwinners, women are homemakers” (nanzhuwai, nüzhunei). From a Chinese perspective, the African continent continues to represent the paramount site of racial otherness (Pierre 2013). Popular narratives of Africa or Africans, as Achille Mbembe (2001) elucidates in his critique of Western discourses on Africa, are often a pretext for a comment about something or someone else. The titles of the various plagiarized versions of the article betray the real message, which is a critique of Chinese women, who have become expensive, requiring a house and a fat bank account. The portrayal of the African mistress or wife is thus an implicit criticism of Chinese women, who are seen as spoiled by prosperity. The

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The Politics of Intimacy favorable characteristic of xianhui, which modern Chinese women are viewed to have lost, can be (re)found in their African counterparts. (p.78) Ma Cheng from Wenzhou married the “African” Mary, who was, in fact, an Aruban tour guide he had met on a trip to the Caribbean island. The couple settled in Tanzania, one of the African countries to which Ma transported goods from China. Ma was “shocked” to learn that he was required to offer his parents-in-law a cow as a form of bride price.3 He reportedly appeared with the cow, which cost him a “mere” CNY 1,000, at Mary’s parental home (the reader is left to guess where the event took place). African mothers-in-law, Ma asserts, look favorably on Chinese men, as do their daughters. “A lot of African women have never been to China. In their eyes, China is like heaven.” Note that male dominance, or sexual control, is linked to national superiority. In these narratives Chinese men act as envoys of power and progress, representing China’s growing influence. Whereas Chinese men are reported to find happiness in mixed-raced unions, Chinese women are seen as suffering hardships, as African husbands do not “even” provide a house upon marriage. The headline of another popular article is illustrative: “Beijing Woman Who Marries African Peasant Suffers Hardships; [She] Does Not Have a House and Sleeps under a Tree” (2016). By this account, African men fail to assert “proper” masculinity. Chinese men such as Zhang and Ma, it appears from these descriptions, gain strength by setting themselves off against African women, who are granted little or no agency. The African female body, then, becomes a foil for fantasies of masculine control. Much like the oriental woman in Western orientalist literature, the African female subject in this article and comparable accounts never speaks herself (Said 2003; Spivak 1999). Rather, he (the husband or the lover) speaks for and represents her. However, in contrast with the sensual, and at times erotic, portrayal of the oriental women in Western literature, this piece and the protagonists in it remain prudish throughout. The qualities of being a good wife and a caring mother, rather than sexual attractiveness, makes African women appealing alternatives to their importunate and avaricious Chinese counterparts. The image of chastity not only belies the ubiquity of prostitution in China (Osburg 2013; Zheng 2009), it is also at odds with some of the narratives I heard from Chinese men in Ethiopia, in which the sensuous extravagance of Ethiopian women was acclaimed with enthusiasm. In Africa, the lonely Chinese soul, plagued by poisonous insects, finds not only comfort but also sexual experiences unobtainable in China. Even so, the image of chastity is held high and pitted against the Ethiopian male, who is seen as unable to control his sexual libido. The Ethiopian female, then, becomes a symbol of fecundity. Praised for their diligence and docility as mistresses and wives, Ethiopian women are pitied for their inferior position in Ethiopian society; (p.79) they are seen as living under the thrall of lazy husbands, which indicates the backwardness of the country. The rhetorical project of racial distancing is a work in progress, as the span between “us” and “them” is tested by the Zhang Fengs and Ma Chengs of the Chinese migrant community. It is the custodians of distance, the high-level managers, who attempt to keep those who violate sacred boundaries in check.

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The Politics of Intimacy Custodians of distance Whether sexual liaisons between Chinese men and Ethiopian women take the form of visits to a brothel, passionate flings, romantic affairs, or lasting marriages, they were all denounced by the project managers for impinging on the image of the Chinese. Betraying the loose sexual morals of Chinese men, sexual affairs, in particular long-lasting and thus more visible intimate encounters, were a bone of contention. Tensions over what low-ranking expatriate staff did by night were closely tied to the daytime structures of the corporate hierarchy as well as the psychological premises on which Chinese authority rested. The preservation of Chinese integrity was founded on retaining relative distance and independence from the other. Although the company managers feared transgressions in both directions, that is, Ethiopians entering the ranks of Chineseness, if at all possible, and Chinese “going native,” only the latter bore the brunt of cautionary admonishments and, at times, fierce criticism. That Chinese men in his company took liberties with Ethiopian women was strongly disputed by the project manager, who ardently denied that his employees engaged in commercial sex. He was, however, quick to admit that prostitution was endemic in the subcontractors’ camps. Whereas he believed that his own staff retained Chineseness in its purest form, the employees of subcontractors symbolized impurity and menace by engaging in intimate relations with members of the local community. Among the road-building crews, interior frontiers were drawn to distinguish between what was pure and what was less so and to separate the so-called center from the margins. Guarding sexual norms, including intraracial intercourse, corporate managers attempted to control and regulate their employees’ sexuality and sentiments, going so far as to arrange blind dates between Chinese engineers in Ethiopia and female employees of the company in China during the annual holidays. In doing this, they, too, were involved—in both negative and positive ways—in reinforcing racial distance. Some high-ranking Chinese managers were unforgiving when it came to the behavior of their foremen. The Chinese assistant manager of Qimo Construction, who referred to his Chinese foremen and truck drivers as (p.80) “garbage” (laji), expounded the difficulties he faced in managing his expatriate staff: “My employees are just peasants. They don’t have any knowledge about culture. They are like our local [Ethiopian] laborers: peasant workers. They shout at laborers. They don’t have suzhi. I try to educate them about manners, but mostly to no avail.” Dissatisfied with the largely meatless Chinese-style meals offered by their company, the “garbage” regularly visited farmsteads at lunchtime for chicken soup or spicy sautéed goat meat prepared by local women. When the assistant manager caught the foremen enjoying a meal with Ethiopians, as he once did when I accompanied them, he angrily summoned his employees back to work. Sharing food like this symbolized the proximity between the sharers and thus threatened to annul the physical and social distance between Chinese and Ethiopians. Such sharing also signified the failure of the Chinese to contain their appetites, as they forsook their native cuisine for local food. More importantly, it was feared that social proximity at lunchtime would evolve into other, more intimate forms of interaction at nighttime. Why are high-status managers preoccupied with preventing their low-status counterparts from closing racial distances? Constructing an image of civilized, chaste, and hardworking Chinese was crucial to maintaining the racial distance upon which symbolic authority is predicated. Racial categories came to demarcate the distance between social groups and so, too, the distance between the modern and the “to be modernized,” the experts and the novices, the knowledgeable and the ignorant. Preserving racial integrity rested on retaining relative Page 12 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy independence from the morally suspect other. Protecting the image of the Chinese from moral damage also implied retaining its wholeness and purity, whether moral, cultural, economic, or racial, as the individuals at the margins put the undivided whole at risk. “The idea of society is a powerful image,” Mary Douglas (2002, 141) says in Purity and Danger. “It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action. This image has form; it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. Its outlines contain power to reward conformity and repulse attack.” It is the energy in society’s margins that the center tries to contain in order to maintain conformity, or purity, in situations in which the instability of external boundaries endangers the internal structure. The politics of distance and the sustained efforts of “putting the other at bay” thus go back to the very essence of the formation and dissolution of social groups in situations in which integrity, as in moral purity and unity, are at risk. Integrity is vested in what Douglas refers to as purity, which exists in a delicate balance with polluting forces, or danger, which threatens as much from within as from without. The politics of distance, as I have shown, implies not only the racializa-tion of sexual intimacy but also the sexualization of the racialized subject. (p.81) Whereas perceptions of, and engagement in, sexual intimacy with the racial other prompted the Chinese to articulate racial differences, these very differences are often construed with reference to gender roles and the moral connotations attached to these roles. Norms of masculinity and femininity, and the success or the failure to live up to these standards, indicate racial belonging or displacement. Distance matters in the context in which racial difference is defined along a continuum, rather than in simple binary terms. Racial instability, combined with class insecurity, explain anxieties about the loss of integrity. Distances shift, as they are tested and contested. The relative flexibility of race accounts for the constant redefinition of what distinguishes “us” from “them” in terms of bodily features, such as complexion. Typically, racial parameters that help draw the external distances between “us” (Chinese) and “them” (Ethiopians) at the same time demarcate the internal frontiers between “us” (managers) and “them” (foremen). This accounts for their contested nature; and not only on the ground. The politics of distance has wider implications that go beyond everyday encounters with the racial other. This is especially true at a time when global hierarchies and Western hegemony are being challenged by China’s economic and cultural expansion, and political clout. However, in order to confirm its shifting place in the world, the Chinese national subject needs others (whether they are Tibetan or Ethiopian) to confirm its newly acquired position and prowess. Notes: (1.) Most of the Ethiopian women in these unions were not just after the money, as Ethiopian men somewhat indignantly claimed. The women found in Chinese men qualities that their Ethiopian counterparts failed to offer, including not only opportunities for social advancement but also attention and care. These relationships are reminiscent of what Mark Hunter has called provider love (2010, 15–16), in which feelings of intimacy and material support are combined (Cole 2010). Ethiopian women were reluctant to share affection without receiving financial support in return, as they do not have the same ability to earn money as young men (Mains 2013). (2.) Owing to the widespread practice of copying-and-pasting on Chinese social media, it can be hard to trace the original source of articles. This article most likely first appeared in print as “Feizhou nüren zui xiang jia Zhongguo nanren: 1,000 yuan qu Feizhou laopo” [“African women Page 13 of 14 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

The Politics of Intimacy really like to marry Chinese men: For 1,000 yuan you can marry an African wife”], Guangzhou Ribao, September 23, 2013. (3.) The author of the article does not explain whether the parents followed Aruban or Tanzanian marriage customs, as she essentializes both as “African” customs.

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords Whereas Chinese road builders are modest about improving their own lives, they are confident about their ability to transform the lives of Ethiopian others. This chapter discusses Chinese management’s attempts to fashion young Ethiopian men into industrious laborers, modeling them on the self-sacrificing worker subject that helped realize China’s economic miracle throughout the 1990s and 2000s. What Ethiopian laborers lack, in Chinese managers’ eyes, is a sense of urgency and a drive to develop the self. Yet their attempts to fashion Ethiopians into committed laborers are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, management seeks to enhance the productivity of the local workforce and speed up the building works. On the other hand, they have a fundamental interest in upholding the image of the Ethiopian worker as indolent, for it confirms Chinese moral superiority and justifies wage differentials and inequalities in employment security. Keywords:   Labor, peasant worker, discipline, hard work, sacrifice, self-development

Yesu s’af s’af gei ni money money? Yesu no gei ni money! Sira gei ni money money. Does Jesus write [on the timesheet] and give you money? Jesus does not give you money! Work gives you money. —Chinese foreman, male, June 19, 2012 As he was trying to bring his Ethiopian workers into line, Li Hongde lost his temper. It was Saint Michael’s Day. Only half of his crew had shown up for work, and the cleaning of the base course in preparation for the application of the prime coat had to be carried out with fewer hands. Li expressed his displeasure by referring to Jesus, who represented the faith of his workers and in his eyes accounted for the lack of discipline and lax work attitude. His angry words can be read as an accusation of irrationality—believing in Jesus rather than money. However, Li Hongde could only accommodate the situation. His harangue, directed at the workers who were present at work, was an attempt to teach what he saw as the essence of labor: the submission of the Page 1 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers individual to production. Jesus was an unnecessary distraction from what really counted in life: productivity and the development of the self and society. Li himself had once been a factory worker in a chemical plant in Dalian in northern China. When the factory no longer met environmental standards and had to shut its doors, he lost his job. After having worked as a bus driver for a few years, he moved to Ethiopia in 2009. His convictions and ideas about labor derived from his past experiences as well as his motivations to leave for Ethiopia, which were chiefly financial. Li was hoping to buy a house in Dalian. In this chapter I discuss Chinese managers’ attempts to fashion young Ethiopian men into industrious laborers, a project that resembles the formation of the Chinese worker subject in the reform period, when China shifted from a planned to a market-based economy. Indeed, expatriate managers sought to model Ethiopian laborers, who were seen as lacking particular virtues crucial to industrial production, on the worker subject that had (p.83) driven Chinese economic growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s: workers who were humble, diligent, dexterous, self-motivated, and keen to improve their life. This was the peasant worker who had helped to realize the South China miracle (Lee 1998) and who had played a principal role in developing the country into the world’s factory (Pun 2005; Pun and Lu 2010a). As members or children of the first generation of peasant workers, Chinese workers in Ethiopia had contributed to rapid economic growth at home; consequently, they believed their efforts at disciplining the Ethiopian worker into a modern and efficient workforce were justified by the expertise they themselves had gained from experience. Chinese managers’ concerted efforts met with little response. Ethiopian laborers remained intractable. What they lacked, in the managers’ eyes, was a sense of urgency and an urge toward self-development. Viewing Ethiopian workers as indolent, inert, unable to pick up things quickly, expatriate managers failed to understand that what they perceived as innate character traits of Ethiopians were part of a reaction against managerial caprice, as I show in the next chapter. The attempt to remake young Ethiopians into committed workers proved to be a double-edged sword. In reality, managers had a fundamental interest in upholding the image of the Ethiopian worker as indolent. On the one hand, Chinese managers sought to change the workers and their attitude to increase productivity—the very foundation that warranted the Chinese presence in Ethiopia. Chinese companies won contracts precisely because they carried out projects for low fees and were known to work fast. On the other hand, the portrayal of Ethiopian workers and their work ethos as irrational and backward in contrast with the Chinese managers’ supposedly rational and modern approach to labor legitimized the chasm between the two in terms of labor practices, as it was held to confirm the symbolic authority and exclusive expertise of the expatriate managers.

Labor The number of Ethiopian laborers at the project of research amounted to 700 to 800 at the peak of the construction work in March 2012, a number that fluctuated according to changing demand. They were mostly men. About one-fifth of the workforce (my estimate) had previously worked for one of the Chinese employers on projects in adjacent regions and had accompanied them to Tigray. The remainder of the workers came from weredas along or in the vicinity of the project road. In Ethiopia, construction work is considered low-end employment. The view that menial work on the building site is dirty resonates with a long-standing stigma on craft work (Mains 2012a). What is more, engagement in this type of work was visible to the public. Road (p.84) construction sites were not only widely accessible. Worse, they attracted a lot of Page 2 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers spectators, which made workers susceptible to rumor. Those who hailed from regions farther afield were to a certain degree protected from whispers and the potential shame experienced from gossip, and moving to a new place for work could be employed as a strategy. In the face of a dearth of employment opportunities, few in rural southeastern Tigray could afford to reject menial labor. Most unskilled workers were young men between the ages of 15 and 25 years. Some of them had dropped out of school to take up employment with Chinese companies, keen to get ahead in life and gain some independence. Many of them sought to relieve family members of the need to support them. Prior to joining the Chinese workforce, they had been “moving around” to make ends meet, engaging in various trades and brokering activities (cf. Di Nunzio 2017). In Tigray, agricultural income is typically supplemented with nonfarm income gained from participation in waged activity (Vandercasteelen 2011), including skilled work such as building, thatching, and haircutting; various forms of self-employment, such as rearing livestock and making handicrafts; or selling food, firewood, charcoal, US Aid–distributed products like oil and wheat flour, and, at the time of the road project, goods stolen from the Chinese, such as construction materials and luxury consumer items. Construction work was like these other activities, valued for its potential to supplement household income. When they were working for the Chinese companies, Ethiopian laborers, disappointed with their low pay, typically continued pursuing other activities—especially brokering—as much as time allowed. Chinese employers rarely engaged in active labor recruitment. Men and women in search of work consulted foremen on the building site about employment opportunities or simply presented themselves at the gates of the Chinese camps. Only at the beginning of the project, or when a new company joined in, did Chinese employers make a conscious effort to recruit local workers. This was, for instance, the case when Lide Enterprise commenced ditch construction in the mountain section. The limited number of workers available in Adiqey town, where the Fujianese company was based, were already employed by one of the other subcontractors. The human resource manager of Lide Construction had learned via hearsay that laborers in the area close to Gashena in Amhara regional state were willing to work for ETB 14 per day, in contrast with the ETB 25 or more per day that laborers from Adiqey demanded. The next day he and the accountant left in an Isuzu truck for northern Amhara to recruit new workers. If Chinese employers were in need of particular types of skilled labor, they commonly relied on the social networks of local foremen. (p.85) Language with respect to laborers, and employers, for that matter, was indicative of management-labor relations. Struggling to pronounce the syllable “er” at the end of the English word, Chinese referred to a local worker as “labor”—as in, for instance, the admonitions yi ge labor come le (let one laborer come) or two labor go (let two laborers go). In Mandarin local workers were called black laborer (heigong), little laborer (xiaogong), little black (xiaohei), and, occasionally, black ghosts (heigui, sometimes translated as “nigger”). Ethiopians, perceived to represent the infancy of human spirit, were belittled in forms of address, not unlike the practices of English settlers, who called their African colonial subjects, regardless of age, “boy” (e.g., houseboy, office boy) or of their Francophone counterparts who deployed the pronoun designated for children, tu, when addressing Africans (Mamdani 1996, 4). Xiao signifies “little” or “small” in Mandarin, and in forms of address it is commonly used for minors or adults who are seen as immature. The form of address “little black(s)” was often used for Ethiopian men, whether in the absence or presence of the Ethiopians themselves. The infantilizing of Africans in

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers naming practices was one of the devices that produced a distance between “us” (Chinese) and “them” (Africans) and reinforced Chinese authority and expertise. In official Chinese documents an Ethiopian worker was called a “manual laborer” (ligong) or “temporary worker” (linshigong). These terms are also used in the Chinese labor market and commonly referred to rural migrant workers, who make up the bulk of precarious labor. Whereas in China heigong means a worker with illegal status, in Ethiopia hei (black) referred to skin color. Female workers, who were called “black sister” (heimei) or “little sister” (xiaomei), were commonly employed as kitchen assistants or cleaning personnel. Operators, masons, and other skilled workers were, without exception, men. On-site, female workers collected small stones for masonry work and carried jerry cans with water back and forth to keep the cement mix wet or to spray water over layers of backfill material before compaction. Ethiopian workers referred to their Chinese managers by their family names, preceded by the English title mister (e.g., Mr. Liu, Mr. Wang). They also used this title among themselves when referring to their managers. That said, the use of the courtesy title did not always indicate respect for expatriate superiors. Workers often pronounced it in a witty way, so that the “mister” could be perceived as questioning, rather than affirming, the manager’s status and authority. Clad in baggy trousers, short-sleeved shirts, filthy sweaters or jackets, and plastic sandals or canvas shoes, Ethiopian workers wore outfits similar to those of the Chinese foremen. Chinese employers failed to provide work clothing, gloves, hard hats, or boots with soles suitable for treading on hot tarmac. This became a bone of contention, particularly between Chinese (p.86) managers and Ethiopian consultant engineers, who interpreted the lack of health and safety measures as a sign of disrespect toward the local workforce and Ethiopians in general. The situation was not very different in Addis Ababa, where these practices were subject to fiercer critique. The only safety helmet I once spotted on the construction site was used for carrying water to sprinkle cement; at the asphalt plant compound, helmets were stored away, to prevent them being stolen. “Surely in their country they [the Chinese] keep to safety prescriptions. They just do not want to spend money on Africa,” remarked an Ethiopian consultant engineer somewhat caustically. Ethiopian workers often expressed dissatisfaction with their Chinese employers. The turnover rate among local employees was high. Within half a year, for instance, Golden Roads recruited three new kitchen assistants and three cleaners. The first kitchen assistant saved enough money to pay a migrant agency the brokerage fee that would facilitate her move to the Gulf to take up employment there as a domestic worker. The second kitchen assistant left in distress; understandably so after the Chinese chef kicked her in the buttocks in a moment of rage. She, too, had plans to move to the Middle East. The first cleaner found a better-paying job with another Chinese enterprise. Her successor was fired on suspicion of theft. The replacement rate among male workers at the asphalt plant was equally high. Apart from a core group of four laborers who had moved with the company from a previous project in Afar Regional State and three local workers from Mehoni who had stayed on since the beginning of the project, the remaining workers came and went. Of note, though, is the fact that Chinese companies themselves paved the way for this high worker turnover. The labor regime adopted by Chinese companies was based on highly flexible and temporary employment, and the casual nature of labor was epitomized by the idea that local employees were simply replaceable. In common practice, when a worker did not act according to the rules, his Chinese manager would say, sigh, or shout, “Huan yi ge!” (Replace one!). The Page 4 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers social distance between expatriate managers and Ethiopian laborers, reinforced by language barriers and cultural differences, invariably led to a certain depersonalization of the laborer. Ethiopian manager-labor relations, by contrast, are often based on mutual trust and investment, facilitated by practices of reciprocity. “If I were foreman, I would treat the workers as my friends,” explained an Ethiopian engineer, criticizing Chinese managers for failing to live up to the behavior expected of managers or bosses (see Giese 2013; Giese and Thiel 2011, 2014; Nielsen 2012 for similar observations in other parts of Africa). Arbitrary layoffs were so common that they became the first and overriding reason for local workers to lodge lawsuits against their Chinese employers, as I show further on in this book. The Chinese attitude toward local workers stood in sharp contrast with the job security of the managers themselves, especially those working for (p.87) Chinese state-owned enterprises. If a Chinese employee misbehaved, in the eyes of his superior, a certain amount of money could be deducted from his salary, or, in difficult cases, the person in question would be transferred to another project in another African country. In response to the casual Chinese labor practices of hiring and firing, some local workers took their contractual obligations less than seriously. It was common to hear huan yi ge! and yi ge labor pao le! (a laborer has run away!). (In this case, labor referred to an Ethiopian worker.) The competition between Chinese employers triggered job mobility among Ethiopian workers, who exploited the Chinese competition for labor to drive up the wages they offered. Workers left one company for another if the salary was not adequate and another company offered better pay. Indeed, the local workforce, as I show in the next chapter, became more and more adept at appropriating ideas promulgated by their expatriate managers and using those ideas against them.

The color glass ceiling Labor in both state-owned and privately owned Chinese enterprises was segregated along racial lines, resembling the color bar in colonial and postcolonial labor regimes in Africa, in which black Africans were denied the rights and opportunities of white employees (Burawoy 1972, 2009). Ethiopian laborers were relegated to the bottom of the employment ladder. This racial segregation limited promotion opportunities for Ethiopians. Chinese enterprises held on to an all-expatriate management, with the result that no Ethiopians exercised authority over Chinese. Menial labor was carried out by Ethiopian workers, whereas the high-end jobs that entailed supervision and mental work were reserved for the Chinese, irrespective of their skill and work experience. In practice, Ethiopian engineers frequently proved to be more capable than their younger and less experienced Chinese counterparts. This racial division of labor had repercussions in everything from employment contracts and welfare benefits to mundane matters such as food and transportation. Taken as a whole, the discrepancies were profound, if rarely contested. Chinese expatriates signed their contract agreements in China; these contracts included specific terms and conditions that fell under the Chinese juridical system. If local employees signed labor contracts at all, these agreements were subject to Ethiopian law. Chinese employees received allowances on top of their salaries; local employees did not. Chinese and Ethiopian workers were subject to separate sets of disciplinary rules with respect to their behavior at work. Daily meals were provided only to Chinese employees, as were housing, medicine, water and refreshments, and toiletries. Pickups and truck cabins were reserved for Chinese passengers; Ethiopian workers were required to stand in the back. In short, racial (p.88) segregation was visible in organizational and contractual arrangements, going as far as everyday spatial practices.

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers One of the most prominent aspects in which the separation in labor relations was expressed was the wage system. Pay scales for Ethiopians were distinct from wage payment arrangements for Chinese employees, who received their salaries in CNY or partly in USD in bank accounts in China. The wages of Ethiopian laborers were calculated in days of work and distributed in cash —a stack of bank notes held together with a rubber band. At the time of research wages ranged from ETB 15 to 35 per day for non-skilled workers and between ETB 30 and 80 for skilled workers such as loader operators, drivers, and masons.1 In Ethiopia wage levels vary per region and fluctuate, because of the depreciation of the Ethiopian birr as well as workers’ demands for higher wages. In Mille, Afar Regional State, Golden Roads Enterprise paid unskilled laborers no more than ETB 20 per day in 2010. In Mehoni most laborers earned between ETB 25 and 30. Bargaining about wages was common, and labor protests frequently forced managers to raise wages. When the Chinese started road construction in Addis Ababa in the late 1990s, they paid ETB 5–6 per worker per day. The exact amount of ETB differed among workers and depended on their loyalty, years of service, and work performance, often coming down to their obedience to managers and the effort they put into the work at hand. Wages were also gendered. Female workers earned significantly less, between ETB 11 and 20 per day. Highly skilled grader operators in much demand received the highest salaries. Ahmed Mohammed, for instance, earned ETB 10,000 per month as a grader operator for Jianghe and became one of the best-paid Ethiopians on the project. Wages were spent on basic necessities, such as rent, food, and clothing, or saved to realize an aspiration popular among less privileged Ethiopians, to migrate to one of the Gulf States for work. At the start of the road project, the contractor indicated that there were guidelines for local wage levels. In practice, Chinese companies decided on the wage scale independently, based on their previous experience and wage levels of fellow subcontractors. Salaries paid by Chinese companies to Ethiopian employees typically were a bone of contention. The Ethiopian workers did not consider them to be proper wages.2 To work for China House, as some local workers pejoratively referred to their employers, was described as a free service and classified as exploitation. “Our salaries are too low. That’s because the Chinese do not fear God,” one local worker reasoned. In the eyes of many Ethiopian laborers, most of (p.89) whom were Orthodox Christians, the Chinese lacked the proper attitude of “loving fear” for God, that is, to feel deep affection for God, while fearing His total power (Malara and Boylston 2016). They took Chinese managers’ lack of deference to the divine to explain their negligence of deference more generally, that is, to put the needs and desires of others before one’s own or, at the very least, consider another’s needs and desires. “One injera (Ethiopian flatbread) costs 8 ETB nowadays,” a worker from Alamata explained. “Say they [the workers] spend 6 ETB on breakfast and 8 ETB on both lunch and dinner. They have 6 ETB left on a daily salary of 30 ETB. And I am talking only about food.” Chinese management, in other words, provided wages that were not enough to subsist on. For ETB 6 one could get a pint of yoghurt, a cup of milk with a bread roll, or full, a local dish consisting of white bread for dipping in a sauce made from bean powder and pepper in a regular breakfast house in Mehoni. For meals in restaurants, one spends ETB 10 or more. When laborers had no family members living in town, they bought loose injera and prepared something on the side themselves or sprinkled the injera with sugar.

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers According to Yared Terefe, who worked for RCE, wages constituted the main problem between the Chinese and the Ethiopian workforce. “If the salary is too low, you cannot command respect. A worker will think about ways to increase his income the whole day. Especially the guards. They are the backbone of the company. If you cannot trust even them …” Yared himself was the only Ethiopian who lived in the Chinese compound. Having been brought over from a finished road project near Addis Ababa to Mehoni by engineer Zhang, who trusted him, Yared earned more than other Ethiopian workers and received Chinese meals, brought to his room by the chef in a takeaway box. Yared concurred that his coworkers looked askance at him for consuming what the Chinese ate, thereby skirting fasting rules of the Orthodox Church.3 He did not mind the judgements of his fellow workers too much, Yared confided. An Amhara from Addis Ababa with a college degree, he felt an outsider in many respects anyway. By mid-2012, however, he was contemplating returning to Addis Ababa. Despite the perks that came with his job, he was not satisfied with the salary. Similar to the failure to provide safety equipment, low salaries had become a symbol of Chinese disrespect of Ethiopian workers and the Ethiopian community at large. Not surprisingly, conflict between Chinese (p.90) and Ethiopians commonly came to a climax on payday, the fifth day of each month. Although Chinese wage-payment arrangements varied between state-owned and private companies, the treatment of the Ethiopian workforce was comparable across the board. The remnants of a socialist ethos that applied to employment conditions for Chinese staff members of state-owned enterprises did not apply to Ethiopian workers. Chinese employers assumed a laissez-faire stance where local employment was concerned, given their reputation for docking wages as a disciplinary method and failing to provide social wages. And yet, despite repeated complaints about the wages provided by the Chinese employers, they were not significantly lower than those offered by local companies for comparable jobs. The wages of unskilled laborers, for instance, were equivalent to those of lower-level civil servants and were higher than wages earned by service workers in bars and hotels. At the time of my research, there was no set minimum wage in Ethiopia, although some government institutions set their own minimum wages. Public-sector employees, the largest group of wage earners in Ethiopia, earned a minimum wage of ETB 420 per month, and employees in the banking and insurance sector earned ETB 336. The poverty datum income level was circa ETB 315 per month at the time of research (Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor 2017). The wages offered by the Chinese companies were higher than these minimums. Moreover, they were adjusted regularly. The daily wages of unskilled and semiskilled laborers rose by ETB 5–15 (depending on the company and the type of employment) in the months between my arrival on the project in December 2011 and my departure in September 2012. “The Chinese have driven up salaries,” protested a manager of an Ethiopian subcontractor to me once, with annoyance. “Before the Chinese came here wage laborers were much cheaper. They must have been around 17 ETB.” Yet it was in reality the local laborers who had managed to drive up wage levels themselves, mainly by using their labor mobility to demand higher wages, as I will show in the next chapter. Wages paid were also contested by the Chinese employees. At the time of my research, most of them were unaware that they could withdraw money by UnionPay at ATMs in major Ethiopian cities. Usually they used their allowances received in ETB, popularly known as xilifei (washing and tidying up money), for their personal expenses or they borrowed cash from the company Page 7 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers manager. Borrowing from managers could be tricky. Lao Zhao, the managing director of Wuhe, for instance, conveniently held onto the CNY 1 to ETB 1 exchange rate that had applied when he first arrived in Ethiopia in 2007, in spite of the depreciation of the Ethiopian birr—in 2012 (p. 91) CNY 1 was worth around ETB 3.5. The Chinese employees of Wuhe meanwhile found other ways to come by funds. The young female interpreter, who occasionally traveled to Mekelle to purchase spare parts and food, had discovered UnionPay at Dashen Bank in the city and would lend colleagues money from her own bank account. Or she bought them Nyala Premium or Marlboro cigarettes in exchange for favors. Others were rumored to trade in eggs and other local products to earn a bit of cash. Pay irregularities prompted employees to have family members in China check the balance of migrants’ bank accounts, especially employees who worked for private companies. Wage payments were often overdue or not paid at all over several months. The managing director of Golden Roads had made a contractual arrangement with most of his Chinese employees that payments for the first 6 months of the contract would be postponed: it was not until after this period that the deferred salary was gradually paid in addition to the regular monthly income. The director’s explanation was that the company needed the money as a deposit against potential hazards during the start-up phase. Most crew members were unaware of this clause when they signed their contracts. Employment agreements set up by the contractor were meant to be given to the subcontractors’ employees in the original document, but, in practice, managing directors of private subcontractors often fiddled with the contracts, adding or changing clauses to their own benefit. So, for instance, the percentage of the regular wage earned during holidays in China was significantly reduced for the employees of Golden Roads Enterprise—a practice that the main contractor seemed to be either unaware of or to tolerate. Wage levels, while fervently discussed among Chinese employees, were rarely raised in conversations with local subordinates. Sometimes Ethiopian workers speculated about how much their managers earned. The wages paid to their fellow Ethiopians, though, were of greater interest. The Chinese wage levels were frankly unattainable. From the Chinese perspective, racial differences, intertwined with a hierarchical structure of employment (e.g., between menial and mental work), justified the disparity in wage, and secrecy over the level of wages paid contributed to the persistence of this dualism in employment arrangements. How was the dualism behind these discriminatory employment conditions justified by Chinese managers? And how was it maintained? Before taking a closer look at Chinese perceptions of Ethiopian laborers and their justifications of the racial disparities in the corporate hierarchy, I discuss the socioeconomic and historical context of Chinese views of work and labor practices.

(p.92) Dagongren and the Chinese construction industry Chinese low- and middle-level managers commonly compared Ethiopian workers with their counterparts in the domestic building industry, modeling them after the first generation of workers (dagongren, or nongmingong, “peasant workers”)4 in mainland China who left the countryside for the city in the 1980s and 1990s, a time in which the demand for cheap labor increased in the rapidly growing cities and industries in coastal regions and triggered the mass migration of rural citizens to the cities (Fan 2002; Pun and Lu 2010a; Solinger 1999). In prereform China employment was allocated by the state, and job mobility was low. This changed when market principles were introduced into the labor market over the 1990s. Consequently, the established urban proletariat of factory workers (gongren) who had been protected by the socialist contract providing cradle-to-grave welfare benefits saw their privileged status threatened by the influx of migrants from the countryside (Lee 2002; Solinger 1999). The

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers transition to what the government called market socialism was, however, characterized by an absence of legal regulations and state control, especially in the expanding non-state sector. At least initially, attempts by the Chinese government to retain its regulatory power by introducing rule by law proved to be of limited success (Lee 2007). The legal system discriminated against rural migrants, effectively rendering them second-class citizens (Solinger 1999; Xiang 2005; L. Zhang 2001).5 Dagongren faced tough employment conditions, such as substandard wages, long working days, disciplinary abuse and violence, and a pervasive lack of legal protection. Excluded from the more prestigious and desirable jobs that were reserved for permanent urban residents by the Chinese household registration system, dagongren were relegated to the bottom of the system, taking dirty, dangerous, and low-paying jobs (Driessen 2018; Fan 2002; Lee 1998; Pun 2005; Solinger 1999). When the state sector started employing migrants from the countryside they were mainly taken on as contract workers, which denied them the benefits to which permanent staff members were entitled. This form of discrimination still exists, as it does in Chinese state-owned companies in Ethiopia. The two brothers from Hebei Province, introduced in Chapter 2, for instance, belonged to this category. Employed under temporary, project-based contracts, they received their income, which (p.93) was significantly lower than that of their colleagues who were full employees of the company, entirely in CNY, and they were not entitled to social benefits. During the reform period about one-third of all rural migrants in China worked in the construction sector (Pun and Lu 2010b, 144), in which they were either linked to state firms or employed by construction gangs composed of rural migrants. (This percentage is, however, dwindling as a result of the slowdown of the construction industry.) By the mid-1980s fully onethird of the workforce of state construction firms consisted of peasant workers (Solinger 1999, 210–15). The multilevel subcontracting system that came into existence with the rapid growth of the sector has contributed to the exploitation of peasant workers. In mainland China, large construction consortia—in road-building, mostly national state-owned enterprises—control the market through their close ties with property developers and local governments. These stateowned enterprises outsource the actual building work to several so-called big contractors (dabao), which provide building materials and labor.6 These big contractors in turn rely on subcontractors, called xiaobao (small contractor) or qingbao (cleanup contractors), for supplying labor, and they not only recruit laborers but also manage daily work on site and arrange wage payments after the completion of a project. Sometimes these subcontractors turn to labor-use facilitators (daigong) or labor bosses, who use kin and village networks to recruit workers (Solinger 1999, 149). During the transition period of the 1990s, especially, nonindustrial social relations and kin networks facilitated the recruitment of rural migrants. A common practice was for daigong to recruit a certain number of people, depending on the size of the project, just after the Chinese Spring Festival. The workers would then be paid at the end of the project or by the next Chinese New Year. Relations between labor bosses and peasant workers were based on trust and mutual social obligations. With many relatives in the home village, it was difficult for labor bosses to eschew their responsibilities. A number of privately owned Chinese construction companies in Ethiopia have grown out of daigong arrangements. Their employees typically all come from the same county or region. In this multilevel subcontracting system, which came to inspire Chinese practices in Ethiopia, risks are easily transferred down the chain. Chinese subcontractors in southeastern Tigray routinely outsourced jobs that were potentially hazardous, preferably to Ethiopian

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers subcontractors. Wuhe, for instance, hired a local company to ferry asphalt aggregate by dump truck from the quarry at kilometer 102, in the mountains, to the asphalt plant of (p.94) Golden Roads. Needless to say, the greater the distance and the windier the road, the greater was the risk of traffic accidents and ch’ifch’e—petrol theft, usually by local drivers.7 Wuhe therefore strategically, if somewhat slyly, made sure that the Ethiopian company was responsible for vehicle damage and the purchase of its own petrol, so that if an accident or ch’ifch’e occurred, the Chinese company would not have to pay. Wuhe’s savvy strategies mirrored, and were indeed partially based on, practices in China. Soon, rural building teams gained a competitive edge over their urban counterparts in a then rapidly urbanizing China. Whereas their wages were comparable with urban construction workers, rural work gangs worked longer days and enjoyed fewer rest days (Solinger 1999, 210– 15). However, as the labor subcontracting system matured in the late 1990s, the rural workforce was left without state or social protection. Many casual workers did not receive regular payments, neither did they sign employment contracts, as was required by the Labor Law promulgated in 1995 (Pun and Lu 2010b, 150). Exploitation was rife (Solinger 1999, 214–15). The inferior status of rural migrants in China’s cities came to legitimize the widespread exploitation of their labor. Dagong has come to symbolize the process of turning peasants into working subjects of capitalist bosses (Pun 2005, 12). The term dagong is associated with the commodification of labor— with labor that can be dismissed at will and replaced by anyone who is willing to sell their labor for a lower price. While dagong stands for extremely flexible terms of employment, dagongren refers to those who willingly subject themselves to capitalist production (H. Yan 2008, 189). The formation of industrial selves was seen as a process of self-submission and self-sacrifice under stringent managerial supervision. Self-submission, furthermore, was part of a transformative process. First-generation peasant migrants have been portrayed as dirty, uneducated, and of low suzhi (quality) and wenhua (culture) and are compared unfavorably with permanent urban residents, to whom the contrary characteristics were ascribed. Only through unconditional submission and sacrifice could peasant workers be saved and elevated to become more civilized beings, citizens with suzhi and wenhua. Ethiopians were expected to undergo a similar transformative process under Chinese discipline. More recently, migrant workers in China have become aware of their rights and more articulate in defending these rights. By filing petitions and lawsuits for collective labor arbitration, mediation, and litigation, they have managed to improve their employment conditions (Lee 2007). Nevertheless, Chinese managers modeled Ethiopian workers on the first-generation rural (p.95) migrant. They saw Ethiopia as being at a stage of development in which the country could not afford high labor standards. In their eyes, continued economic growth would gradually generate better labor conditions and higher wages, as it had in mainland China. Yet in this phase, they held, Ethiopians had to simply suck it up. Only workers who acquiesce to principles of profit maximization, comply with the demands of management, and are willing to make sacrifices, could lift Ethiopia out of poverty. Most Chinese foremen on site, commonly called “head of workers” (gongzhang), had been peasant workers in China, especially in the building sector. Thus, foreman Liu from Anhui, who married Aster, was joined in Ethiopia by two brothers and a nephew. His younger brother lao si (fourth child) and lao wu (fifth child), and the latter’s 18-year-old son all worked for Qimo Construction in Ethiopia. Liu himself was the lao san (third child). Lao da, the eldest child, was Page 10 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers head of their home village in Fuyang Prefecture in Anhui and had responsibilities there. Lao er (the second child) also lived in China. As mentioned, recruitment through kin-based or acquaintance-based networks was common in privately owned companies. These networks enhanced cohesion among the workers and prevented them from quitting their job easily, even in the face of wage arrears. Chinese foremen like Liu did not hesitate to roll up their sleeves and work alongside Ethiopian laborers to demonstrate techniques or simply to kill time. Even so, a peculiar role reversal occurred once peasant workers from China had become managers in secure positions far away from home. Their racial background protected their status in the company hierarchy. What is more, they were considered wealthy men in the eyes of local people, even if the years that Liu and his brothers had spent in the burning sun on construction sites were written on their faces and hands and distinguished them from Chinese middle-level managers. Foreman Liu and his colleagues were dressed in overalls with camouflage print they had bought in local shops, and they wore sturdy, locally produced black leather police shoes purchased in Mekelle. By contrast, educated engineers of different specializations sported ironed, light-colored shirts and dark trousers. They were usually the children of first-generation peasant workers and the first generation in their families to have enjoyed a higher education. Nonetheless, many of these engineers had inherited their parents’ puritan work attitude. What both generations harbored was an intense desire for upward mobility. If they could not enjoy the fruits of social mobility themselves, then at least their offspring would. What Chinese managers had not counted on was that Ethiopian laborers would prove to be much more articulate than the first-generation rural Chinese migrants, showing neither the respect nor the awe of their expatriate employers that Chinese peasant workers had shown to their urban (p.96) managers in China’s early reform period. Class differences on construction sites in China were ingrained in the history of inequality between city and countryside that is deeply rooted in state ideology and administrative policies, such as in the institution of the household registration (hukou), which divides Chinese society into citizens with a rural hukou and those with an urban hukou. Ethiopian society is equally characterized by a rural-urban divide, but as outsiders and newcomers, the Chinese had no place in this hierarchy. They had yet to establish their authority—a process that the Ethiopian workforce actively and successfully resisted.

Ethiopian workers In contrast with Chinese managers’ expectations, the process of turning young Ethiopian men into industrious workers did not happen very smoothly. The more time the managers spent in Ethiopia, the more disheartened they appeared to become. In their eyes Ethiopian workers not only remained indolent, they grew increasingly rebellious. What expatriate managers failed to recognize was that the attitude of the Ethiopian laborers was in part a response to Chinese labor practices. Instead, they scapegoated Ethiopian laborers and their dispositions to account for the low productivity levels and rising production costs, which were in fact the outcome of a combination of factors, chiefly related to poor management. Where exactly did the Ethiopian worker fail in the managers’ eyes? Local workers were usually described in terms of what they did not have, rather than what they had. Chinese views of Ethiopians constitute a familiar, if disconcerting, parallel with Western narratives of the primitive man (see Kuper 2005; Ellingson 2001). In Chinese eyes, progress entailed the advance of rationality, and rationality was exactly what Ethiopian workers were held to be short of. Rather than respecting money, as Li Hongde had it, they revered Jesus. Worse still, Ethiopians Page 11 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers were seen to be not even willing to progress. The main problem, then, was their lack of aspiration to develop the self—a virtue fostered by many Chinese. “In Ethiopia rich people work hard, but poor people who get one birr per day by begging only think about how they will spend that one birr, not about how they will earn two birr the next day,” explained a Chinese manager once, characterizing the unwillingness of Ethiopians to develop and thereby improve their lives. When I asked engineer Peng Gaofei to name the differences between the Ethiopian worker and the Chinese worker he said: If you promote a Chinese worker and give him a higher salary, he feels that he has prospects for development. He will work even harder. But a local worker, if you give him promotion and raise his salary, the first thing he will think is: “If my abilities are that high, then my salary does not fit my abilities, (p.97) you should give me more salary or a better position. But you cannot give me this.” He chooses to go to another place to work. This is the main difference between a Chinese and a local worker. (Civil engineer, male, May 31, 2012) Peng identifies the ability and desire to improve the self as the main difference between a Chinese and an Ethiopian worker. He describes male Ethiopian workers as demanding and greedy. Monetary rewards, Peng believed, had a reverse effect on Ethiopian laborers. He also touched on what he saw as arrogance of local workers—of believing that they knew better than their supervisor. Chinese workers, instead, subordinate themselves to their superiors. They work hard to be able to reap the fruits of their productivity. And, after having tasted these benefits, they are driven to work even harder. This attitude is indeed the foundation of the productivist promise that informed and inspired Chinese managers like Peng. The supposed lack in Ethiopian laborers of an urge to develop the self resulted in what Chinese managers viewed as their irrational attitude toward productivity and wealth creation. Ethiopian laborers responded poorly to monetary incentives, Chinese managers muttered, being unwilling to work night shifts or extra hours even when they were paid two or three times their regular salaries. Veteran Hu Chunfu explained: When we first came to Addis Ababa [in 1997], there was nothing. There were hardly any roads. In the beginning we worked very hard: 10 to 11 hours per day. But the Ethiopians did not want to work overtime. They were not used to it. Now we have taught them what overtime is. It is slightly better now. (Mechanic, male, September 7, 2011) Hu construed the unwillingness to subject oneself to the production process and profit maximization as backward. In his eyes this willingness was something that could be cultivated and thus acquired over time. And yet there were critical impediments, one of which was devotion to religion. Li Hongde’s message, as quoted at the opening of this chapter, was that it was not Jesus but money earned through hard work that provides a livelihood. He viewed religion as producing contentment and saw satisfaction with life as interfering with the ambition to improve the self. Management moreover associated religious beliefs and practices with absenteeism. Ethiopian workers tended to stay away from work on religious holidays, which sparked conflict.

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers “Does God give you money? Does God give you a house? Does God give you food?” the mechanic Chen Delin teased his workers during the Chinese Spring Festival. He turned to me, saying, “Look, we continue working on holidays.” “You work, but the people in China don’t,” joked one of the Ethiopian laborers from a distance. Chen flashed an annoyed look at the worker and changed the topic. The day before Chinese New Year in 2012, the asphalt machinery was transferred from Alamata, where (p.98) the town section had been finished the night before, to kilometer 58 at the start of the mountain section. The machinery was being checked for faults and cleaned by local workers. After the company manager, Chen Delin, was finished, we sat down on one of the green Xugong asphalt machines under a yellow awning. Every now and then he received text messages from family and friends in China on his phone. Chen explained that the most difficult aspect of working in Ethiopia was not only the distance from kin but also the “obstacles in thinking and communication” (sixiang jiaoliu zhang’ai). “Everybody loves money, true or not? But if they have a holiday, you give them twice or three times as much salary, they still go to ‘God House.’” The fact that laborers were not willing to work on holidays or at night for a higher reward was met with disbelief. The Chinese, by contrast, contended that they willingly sacrificed holidays for the opportunity to develop and earn additional income. The other problem with Ethiopian workers, according to the Chinese managers, was their inability “to comprehend a problem.” Development of the self was linked to competence and the willingness to learn. “If you explain a problem to a Chinese worker, if you do it once, you don’t have to explain it twice. Locals are different.” The Chinese foremen complained that they had to demonstrate certain building techniques many times. “You teach them [Ethiopians] bar binding one day, and they have forgotten it the next day. You have to teach them over and over again.” Because of their inability, or simply their lack of commitment to developing skills, Ethiopian workers were held to be inefficient. “If you tell your Chinese workers what they have to do, they will do it themselves. Here you have to go through a lot of trouble [feixin],” a Chinese engineer explained. “The efficiency level is very low [xiaolü di]. Locals are much less effective workers. They are not accustomed to working hard.” Whereas the Chinese worker was viewed as independent and self-motivated, the Ethiopian worker was construed as dependent and unmotivated. Notably, this engineer approached efficiency as a characteristic based on the Ethiopian worker’s effort alone. Lack of self-restraint was mentioned as another inferior character trait of Ethiopian workers. Comparing Chinese with African workers, the Chinese referred again and again to the difference between the rational and self-controlled Chinese worker and the emotional and impulsive Ethiopian worker. Wildcat strikes, sit-downs, and work stoppages were taken as examples of the inability of Ethiopians to control their feelings. I asked Peng Gaofei how he responded to labor strikes: To start with, we treat people with reason [yi li fu ren]. You tell them [local workers] that their demands are unreasonable. Second, you tell them that what they did is illegal. Third, you tell them that they have violated the guiding principles, rules, and requirements of the company. Fourth, you (p.99) give [them] a very good option: to go back to their [former] position and continue working…. We need people who perform and we need effective people…. We will not punitively deduct money from your salaries to exploit the labor force. We judge appropriately, according to the nature of your work, we set a wage limit according to the level of your labor. It does not work like: you see someone else’s salary is high, and you would like to earn the same high salary, because somebody else is more

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers diligent. So, if you persist, and initiate a strike, then sorry, we can only ask you to go and work somewhere else and find a salary that suits your demands. (Civil engineer, male, May 31, 2012) Peng’s tone—confident and authoritative—is striking, given his age (25). The wording he uses in his judgment of Ethiopian workers reflects the views of seasoned managers. Pitting the notion of the rational, reasonable manager against the irrational, ostensibly mindless laborer, Chinese staff often complained that “they don’t speak rationally.” Absenteeism was another sore spot. “Some workers only come to work to let the foreman tick off their names,” sneered one RCE engineer. Sneaking away from work was seen as an evil habit of Ethiopian workers that was linked to their indolence, religious faith, or melancholic disposition. When in August 2012 Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died, flags were hung at half-staff from electricity poles. Meles Zenawi’s portrait was placed on advertisement boards, shop fronts, car windows, and the side mirrors of trucks and pickups. Young men walked around selling posters of the deceased leader. Throughout the 2 weeks of national mourning, laborers frequently stayed away from work. The ceremonies surrounding the death of Meles Zenawi took a long time—too long, according to the Chinese. “One day one worker stays away, the other day another worker stays away, the next day again another worker asks if he can go to town,” explained Li Hongde. “If a public figure dies in China, people mourn for, at most, three days. Then they go back to work. Chinese have to work. They have to make money to buy food.” Once again, economically rational Chinese were contrasted with irresponsible Ethiopians, who were seen to be not only emotional but also lazy as far as sensible labor practices were concerned. Chinese managers routinely charged Ethiopian workers with being lan, landuo, or lansan—all meaning “lazy.” They explained this indolence as either deriving from the laborers’ lack of familiarity with an industrious environment like that of China today or simply as part of their natural disposition. This persistent assumption that the workers were lazy is reminiscent of what Michael Burawoy (1972, 250–56) identifies as the myth of worker indolence, the (false) belief of managers and authorities that African workers are somewhat lazier than other workers, a conviction used to justify the introduction of disciplinary measures or to implement government policies. This myth scapegoats African workers for unmet targets and diverts attention (p.100) from other causes of low productivity. More importantly, it upholds the color glass ceiling. On the road construction site in southeastern Tigray, many factors contributed to inefficiency in the construction process, such as inexperienced expatriate managers, poor logistics, idle or dysfunctional machinery, financial shortages, delays in the transport of building materials, and so forth, causes for which company managers normally bear sole responsibility. Even so, Ethiopian workers were blamed for this unproductivity and inefficiency. Remarkably, some Ethiopian consultant engineers also endorsed the myth of worker indolence. They explained indolence, however, not as innate to Ethiopian people or society but as the result of environmental and material conditions. “It is true; Ethiopians are a bit lazy. That is because of the climate. It is not warm here, and it is not cold either. You don’t need a roof over your head. You can just sleep in the open air. There is no need for Ethiopians to become creative.” The climate was also the reason why, Tesfay Adane explained, the excavator was not invented in Africa. Originally designed to dig and transport snow, the machine, according to him, could only have been invented in the Northern Hemisphere. Despite external or mitigating factors, as far as

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Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers the Chinese were concerned, what contributed to the lifestyle and attitude of Ethiopians was solely their innate disposition. Chinese managers regarded Ethiopian workers with distrust. Local laborers will work only when they are compelled to do so, they reasoned— or as Li Hongde expressed it in pidgin, “China look look, sira alle. China no look look, sira yellem” (if a Chinese is watching, the work is carried out. If there is no Chinese to watch, there is no work being carried out). In the eyes of Chinese managers, Ethiopian laborers lacked the inner motivation to work hard and to carry out work well; this lingering suspicion also meant the Chinese managers were hesitant to transfer responsibility. Labor discipline was often cast in moral terms. Managers expected workers to take initiative and bear risks in the name of development, an idea that is widespread in today’s China, where market reforms have created a paradox in which the pursuit of private interests and profit coexist with state-imposed limits on individual expression (Ong and Li 2008). The process of privatization, promoted with slogans such as “to be rich is glorious” (fuyu guangrong), was a deliberate shift in governing strategy to set Chinese citizens free to become “entrepreneurs of the self” (2). Self-promotion was seen as going hand-in-hand with the improvement of personal attributes, such as self-discipline. Rapid economic growth could be sustained only by the constant advancement of the self through collective asceticism (Lee 2017; Rofel 1999). Pointing to the collective benefits of the road and the duty of Ethiopian laborers to contribute to national development, Chinese managers construed (p.101) working hard as a moral obligation, linking underdevelopment in Ethiopia to the failure of Ethiopian men. Ethiopian women, who bore the brunt of the heavy labor, carrying water and firewood over great distances, were occasionally seen as examples of hard workers. What Chinese managers perceived as grave gender inequality was, for them, yet another sign of Ethiopian backwardness, pitted against a modern, supposedly gender-equal China. Regardless of managerial perceptions, high-minded ideas about transforming Ethiopian workers largely failed to materialize, except, perhaps, for the implementation of a 7-day work week and the alteration of meal patterns from two irregular meals to three meals at fixed times. Most other disciplinary methods backfired. In their firm and at times naïve conviction that Ethiopian workers could and should be transformed through strict labor discipline, Chinese managers occasionally crossed legal boundaries. For that, they were reprimanded, as I show in the next two chapters.

Upholding the us/them dualism My wife does not like me being here; of course she does not like it! Living in two different places. She often calls me asking when I [will] come back. But if I go back I will definitely return [to Ethiopia]. But her way of thinking is different from mine. I have become used to my life here and my buddies [huoban], I mean my Ethiopian workers. I have meanwhile become affectionate toward them, because we have been together for a long time. I understand their mood and natural dispositions [piqi bingxing]. And I understand their customs. In fact, they are very hardworking [qinlao], very hardworking. On the condition that we understand each other, they support our work. Especially him [pointing at one of the workers, sitting on a stool a few meters away, listening silently]. I brought him here from Dessie [in Amhara region]. He always listens to me. Although he is a bit stupid, it doesn’t matter. It is all about the work. You have to be thorough. If he has things he does not understand, he can learn slowly. It is the language. At first we couldn’t communicate. Page 15 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers But after a while, we could understand each other. I only have to give directions with my right hand, and he already understands. (Mechanic, male, June 18, 2012) The ease with which mechanic Huang De interacted with Ethiopian workers was different from that of his colleagues who came fresh from university. His words reveal a certain cultural relativism—Huang effectively refutes the judgments of fellow Chinese by explaining that his workers are industrious in their own way. Even so, a moment later, he affirms the classic dualism discussed. With the expression ta de tounao ben yi dian (his brains are a bit stupid), Huang’s implied avoidance of value judgments, the willingness to perceive Ethiopians workers in their own right, is negated. His rhetoric is revealing in another respect. By maintaining the us/them dualism, managers attempted (p.102) to remain aloof from the Ethiopian workforce. Laborers were often referred to as stupid (ben), especially by the older generation of Chinese migrants to which Huang belonged. They made these statements without reservation. Chinese migrants lacked the political correctness that the colonial conscience has produced in Western intellectual thinking and in talking about Africa and Africans. The ambiguous attitude of Huang De was common among the low-level managers and on-site foremen who were on relatively close terms with Ethiopian laborers. Managers, who sometimes developed close bonds with Ethiopians, at the same time sought to maintain the absolute distinction between themselves and the other. This tension can be heard in Huang’s paternalistic tone (e.g., “I brought him here from Dessie”; “he always listens to me”) that is reminiscent of past colonial discourses and that reinforces a sense of control of the other (Fabian 2000, 7). Huang’s notion of his relationship to Ethiopia, however, was colored by notions of generosity. Although obtaining a higher salary was the main reason for his move to the country in 2010—he intended to buy a flat for his adult son—he insisted that he also wanted to “give something to Africa” by transferring his expertise with generators, in particular. “Africa is quite backward. The technology here is inferior.” The 48-year-old repairman was one of the few Chinese I met who raised the topic of knowledge transfer, which was generally not perceived as a moral duty at the time of my research, contrary to Euro-American ideas on development assistance in Africa. This has changed more recently, as China is shifting toward making new norms and the Chinese feel compelled to retain robust relations with Africans through good practice. Huang De grew up in Heihe, close to Russia, where he was involved in the border trade before he moved from the very north to the very south of China, Hainan. One of four sons of workers on a large state farm that cultivated soybeans and wheat, Huang finished school and began working in a factory that made machinery for the agricultural sector. After he moved to Hainan in his early thirties, Huang met his wife, who comes from the same province. The couple had a son and daughter—the former works in Hainan, the second attends school in Anda, Heilongjiang, and is being raised by her grandparents. Despite the strong ultraviolet rays of the African sun—“people my age are already old fellows”—Huang was one of the few Chinese workers I met who could imagine himself working in Ethiopia until his retirement. Huang’s gesture of knowledge transfer was noble, yet, at the same time, he benefitted from his exclusive access to professional knowledge and expertise, and he attempted to retain this position. Huang De’s statement about his Ethiopian workers being a bit stupid and slow is reminiscent of the tone in which urban residents addressed peasant workers back home. Huang’s views, then, echo post-reform China’s dualism (p.103) between established urbanites and rural newcomers. Page 16 of 17 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Fashioning Ethiopian Laborers This type of us/them dualism derives from the desire of one group to distinguish itself from the other, as its own position is precarious (the Chinese in Tigray constituted a small minority) or threatened (by the influx of rural migrants). The Chinese in Ethiopia struggled to hold on to their standards, in particular those related to work attitudes and labor discipline, and to put forward their own ideas. The us/them dualism, which is reflected in notions of smart versus stupid, fast versus slow, and culture versus barbarism or vulgarity, was essential for justifying disparities in wage scales and social wages, in promotion opportunities, arrangements for free time, and access to professional knowledge. By positioning themselves as teachers with exclusive knowledge of modernity and development, Chinese managers justified their decisions, established their authority, and advanced their principles. As I show in the next chapter, this attempt was met with active resistance by local workers, often triumphantly so. Notes: (1.) These are approximations. Wage levels fluctuated heavily and differed between the Chinese companies on the project. (2.) For similar observations in Mozambique, see Nielsen (2012); and in Tanzania, see Lee (2009). (3.) Tom Boylston (2018) demonstrates the importance of fasting in Ethiopia as a means by which Orthodox Christians participate in the ritual order. There are many fasting days in Ethiopia. However, not everyone adheres to all of the fasts. Most residents in the Raya region keep, at the very minimum, to the Wednesday and Friday fasts and the Great Lent Fast before Easter, or Fasika. Importantly, fasting signified group membership, affording a moral distinction between those who fast and those who fail to restrain their appetites, which explained the askance looks at Yared. (4.) Dagongren emphasizes the type of employment, whereas nongmingong underlines the workers’ rural background. (5.) Discrimination was mainly based on (or justified by) the household registration (hukou) system, which was interwoven with the distribution of social services, such as medical services, education, and housing. (6.) Golden Roads was a dabao contractor in Mille. The company was responsible for purchasing bitumen and other raw materials as well as for carrying out the work. In Mehoni the main stateowned enterprise contractor, RCE, kept the provision of materials in its own hands. (7.) Ch’ifch’e was a word that Ethiopian workers used secretively. It circulated on Chinese-run construction sites across Ethiopia. The Chinese I met were not aware of this word. They did, however, complain about the prevalence of petrol theft.

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Inspiring Indiscipline

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Inspiring Indiscipline Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords On the construction site the enforcement of labor discipline is mostly based on personal whim. Rules are made up on the spot and punishments depend on the mood or the goodwill of individual Chinese foremen. This type of labor regime leads to a loss of managerial credibility and inspires indiscipline on the part of Ethiopian workers. Subversion can be subtle, expressed with humor and through play, but transgressions can also evolve into open defiance, such as work stoppages and labor strikes. Voting with their feet is yet another strategy that Ethiopian laborers employ to play one Chinese enterprise off against the other, forcing management to increase wages and improve employment conditions in the process. Taken together, these subversive acts challenge Chinese managers, so much so that they are disciplined by their own workers. Keywords:   Labor, discipline, management, resistance, transgression, strike

On a September afternoon, Guo Yunli and I met for an interview at Kaldi’s Coffee in Bole, Addis Ababa. We both ordered a cappuccino. Guo instructed his driver to wait for his call when we were finished. After the interview, we ordered a green tea—a drink that had appeared on the menu because of the growing number of Chinese patronizing the coffee house chain—and papaya juice. When we were about to settle the bill, the waitress returned to set another bill on our table. “From the gentleman outside,” she said, pointing at the terrace. When she noticed our confusion, she clarified, “From your driver,” and walked away. Guo’s driver, who was chatting with a friend out on the terrace, had ordered himself a macchiato and a Black Forest cake for ETB 19.50.1 Guo was startled. After paying both bills he walked over to his driver, stammering that he would talk to his boss about this, and saying to me under his breath, “They are all like this.” After this incident, which took place in the first month of my field research, I began to recognize the subtle power that Ethiopian staff had over their expatriate employers. Guo’s driver had effectively forced his superior to break protocol and act according to his wishes. As it turned out,

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Inspiring Indiscipline this incident was illustrative of relations between Ethiopian workers and Chinese managers, in which the former constantly challenged the authority of the latter, with considerable success. Provocations like these were relatively easy to make, as the Ethiopian subordinates were familiar with a social environment that supported them rather than the Chinese outsiders. Indeed, the Ethiopian waitress played along with the driver’s game. In this chapter I explore the dynamics of manager-labor relations by examining other such telling incidents. These events function as what Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) has termed the “diagnostics of power.” They indicate that power—both dominant and defiant power—is at play. My focus is on the disciplinary methods that the Chinese managers used to fashion laborers into compliant and diligent working bodies, as well as the workers’ responses (p.105) to these often erratic methods. I approach power in manager-labor relations as dialectic and processual (Ortner 1995) and try to go beyond the binary categories of dominance versus resistance, and hegemony versus counter-hegemony that are commonly used to describe power relations (Mbembe 1992). One of the reasons why the situation on the ground defies easy categorizing is that the expatriate managers and Ethiopian laborers were utterly dependent on one another. Although the Chinese employers controlled the means of production, so to say, they were unfamiliar with local practices, which necessitated their heavy reliance on the cooperation of the Ethiopians for access to labor, resources, and political channels. Expatriate managers and local workers were in constant critical, and at times dramatic, dialogue in which it was unclear who was subordinate to whom. The enforcement of labor discipline was often based on personal whim. Rules were arbitrarily made up on the spot, and punishments depended on the mood and the hostility or goodwill of individual managers. Over time, the lack of clear-cut regulations and consistency over their enforcement resulted in Chinese superiors losing credibility. Efforts to discipline laborers proved counterproductive and led to the more or less subtle defiance of order and discipline. Indeed, Ethiopian workers became skilled at resisting managerial caprice, so much so that, at times, they were able to discipline their expatriate employers and to improve their own employment conditions. Local discontent with expatriate managers was often expressed openly. What James Scott (1990) terms the hidden transcript, the discourse of subordinates that takes place offstage, was less hidden in this case. In everyday Chinese-Ethiopian encounters the hidden and the public transcript—open interaction between the dominant and the dominated—seemed to merge, in part, because the gravity of the criticism got lost in translation due to communication barriers but, more importantly, because the managers lacked the authority or political clout to suppress defiance and subdue critique. The vignette of Guo Yunli and his driver shows that Chinese managers were subjected to ridicule, even in public. Most of the workers’ provocations, however, took place on-site, ranging from the subtle transgression of company rules and regulations to organized actions, such as strikes and work stoppages. Subtle subversions of managerial authority, such as charging one’s macchiato and Black Forest cake to the boss, were of course largely symbolic. They nevertheless contributed, together with more extravagant collective actions, to weakening the managers’ authority and improving labor conditions in the process. Although instances like the one in Kaldi’s Coffee occurred on a regular basis, they continued to take the Chinese managers by surprise. Given their firm belief in the philanthropic nature of their activities in Africa, the Chinese remained puzzled about what they saw as the rank ingratitude of the Ethiopians.

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Inspiring Indiscipline (p.106) Enforcing discipline on the building site The Chinese managers regarded Ethiopian labor with a substantial degree of suspicion. Local workers only work when compelled to do so, Chinese foremen argued: “As soon as you look away, they stop working.” Only under managerial supervision would laborers refrain from shirking. Continual surveillance was therefore the first and foremost disciplinary method that the Chinese managers exercised, yet they proved to be unsuccessful in achieving surveillance in the Foucauldian sense of the word—in transferring managerial power and discipline onto the worker’s body (Foucault 1991). Employers opted for a hands-on approach instead. Chinese foremen remained on-site for the whole day, and the Ethiopians were given little responsibility unless they had both proven expertise and unconditional loyalty to their Chinese managers. When mere monitoring proved ineffective, the Chinese managers raised their voices or even shouted at the workers. Associating labor discipline with speed, the laborers were summoned with “tolo, tolo!” Language barriers, combined with the sheer volume of noise on construction sites, worked to reduce communication to one-word commands: Mekina! (Car!); Wuha! (Water!); Give! or Give le! (the Mandarin interjection le was used in this case as a modal particle to intensify the preceding word); Come! or Come le!; Yazu! (Bring!); Gebbeň? (Understood?); and Ahun! (Now!). Conversations between Chinese foremen and Ethiopian laborers were short and sharp. Sentences in pidgin were usually made up of one of the aforementioned verbs preceded by a simple noun, such as: “Siminto give le!” (Give me the cement!), “Mekina go!” (Go by car!), “Akafa yazu!” (Bring me the spade!), “Mister Liu, me come!” (Mr. Liu, I am coming), “Money give le!” and so forth. Articles (e.g., a, an, the) were excised from sentence structures, as were adverbs and adjectives, any of which would have helped to nuance speech and make the requests more reasonable, if not politer. It was inevitable, then, that miscommunication abounded. In cases of outright disobedience, shirking, or theft, the Chinese managers used deduction from wages as a means of discipline. Penalties, rarely exceeding ETB 200—a good 8 days’ worth of income—were deducted from monthly wages. By contrast, regular fines were uncommon. The managers had learned from experience that Ethiopians had few savings; they did not have the money to pay fines. Wage deductions provoked quarrels on payday, for they often arrived unannounced. In fact, the lack of (comprehensible) communication between workers and the foreman meant that the Ethiopians were often unaware of the fact they had been or were to be punished. They would discover such was the case when counting their bank notes on payday. Naturally, any shortfall was upsetting. At the asphalt (p.107) plant of Golden Roads enterprise, the accountant, occasionally in consultation with the general manager, decided on the amount of money that would be added to, or deducted from, monthly salaries, a decision mainly based on personal whim. There were no standard or project-wide rules on wage deductions and other disciplinary measures. A more stringent yet frequently applied method of punishment was dismissal. In August 2012, the front gate of the asphalt plant camp of Golden Roads disappeared. The wooden board with STOP written on it had been torn off and left on the ground. The asphalt plant crew was annoyed. Taking away the front gate meant inviting others in to steal. It left them in a weak position, not so much financially—the gate could easily be replaced—as symbolically, evoking vulnerability and helplessness. Manager Liu Deye was determined to punish the suspects. He dismissed two of the three security men who had been at work the night of the theft. Both guards had joined Golden Roads less than a month before the incident. One man had been instructed to keep an eye on the diesel station in the shed next to the asphalt plant, the other to

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Inspiring Indiscipline watch the bitumen drums in the surrounding area. Two new guards were installed the next morning, even before the two existing security guards were finally called to the office. The men walked in quietly. Accountant Gu asked them to sign a termination of contract statement and handed over the outstanding wage. She gesticulated for the men to count the bank notes and confirm the amount was correct. The men counted the days on their time sheets and discovered that the sum they had been given was short by ETB 100, and they expressed their discontent to foreman Worku. Accountant Gu, it turned out, had deducted ETB 100 from each man’s wage. “When the first thing is stolen, we deduct 50 ETB from the guard’s wage,” she explained to me after the event, “if a second object gets stolen, we deduct 100 ETB; with a third object 150 ETB. I could have deducted even more. One drum costs 100 ETB.” (Bitumen drums were one of the items that got stolen most frequently from the asphalt plant.) Worku tried to bargain with Gu to reduce the wage deduction to ETB 50 per person, warning her that the men might turn around and go to court. Gu persisted, “Okay, ahun money. No okay, police go. Ahun, go le!” (If you think it is okay, take your money. If you do not think it is okay, then go to the police. Now, go!) The two walked out of the office empty handed and visibly upset, to be greeted soon after by the surly dogs. The security men wandered around the asphalt plant for a while before finally leaving the premises. It should be noted that, despite having never signed proper employment contracts to begin with, the Ethiopian employees of Golden Roads were asked to sign a termination of contract statement upon their withdrawal or dismissal. The statement, in Mandarin and English, was drawn up by the project department in an attempt to formalize employment procedures and (p.108) to protect Chinese subcontracting companies in the wereda courts. After signing the statement, workers could no longer claim outstanding salaries, compensation of any sort, or severance payments. The statement read as follows:

I,the undersigned,worked in [company name] as … But now I want to terminate my contract of employment on my own will.I have received my wage,severance pay,all the other payment and certificate.I have no any employment relation with [company name] from today.2

The Ethiopian employees did not understand either of the two languages in which this was written, and neither, for that matter, did the Ethiopian foreman, Worku Lebna, who acted as the interpreter. The workers were often unaware of the fact that they had ended their work relationship with Golden Roads after signing this piece of paper with their name and fingerprint. To set an example, only the main contractor drew up employment contracts following the provisions laid out in the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation (The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 42/1993 and 377/2003). Even so, these good practices failed to trickle down, or trickled down slowly. Subcontractors like Golden Roads, Wuhe, and Qimo, which employed most of the local workers on the road project, would have benefitted most from improved administrative procedures. RCE employed Alex3 from Inner Mongolia, who had received an undergraduate degree in business English, to deal with legal matters. Below is an example of a notice of dismissal drawn up by him.4

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Inspiring Indiscipline

[Company name] Ref. No. [company name]/ (E) 05/2012 Date: 2012-1-15 To: Desalean Dawit Sub: Termination of Contract of Employment It is recalled that you have been employed as a driver in this office from Nov-26-2010. Now you are kindly to informed that since you had seriously accident you drive the Nissan vehicle Plate No. 45571 without any permission even drink alcohol during his driving and carry some people who not belong to the company and make the company vehicle badly damaged, meanwhile, you still lost one (p.109) Nissan spare tyre and one jack, this office has decided to terminate the Contract of Employment between you and the Company based on (c), (g), (h), (j) Sub-Article (1) of Article 27 of Labour Proclamation No. 377/2003 (as amended). This termination is effective as of Jan-15-2012. Please report as soon as possible to the Administration Office for your final payoff and go through other procedures. If you fail to come to collect this letter, it shall be posted on the notice board of the Company. Furthermore, because your own problem make the company vehicle damaged seriously and lost other above mentioned property, The Company hereby will request and accuse you to compensate the loss you made to the company and punished by the local law. [signed] Head of the Administrative Office Alamata-Moheni-Hiwane Road Upgrading Project

These statements by the contractor were, if necessary, translated by Selam Mehret, who worked in Alex’s office and helped with interpreting and translating and dealing with legal cases. Some changes to the administrative procedures of Chinese subcontracting companies like Golden Roads were eventually made in response to the mounting expense of court fees and pressure exerted by the town administrations. The form below was drawn up by the project department in an attempt to standardize methods of penalizing Ethiopian laborers and to protect subcontractors in court. When filled out and signed by the respective parties, the document counted as legal evidence. By law, a worker could be dismissed only when the employer was able to prove that the worker had violated regulations three times. Three signed “Warning, Penal Sum, Termination Information” [sic] forms, which RCE had put up and distributed to its subcontractors, were required as evidence. However, the advanced administrative procedures were not always implemented as intended. Golden Roads was given a lesson by its experience in court, albeit the wrong lesson. After a lawsuit following a labor strike in early 2012, which I discuss in detail in the next chapter, the company made new employees sign three copies of the form before their employment began.

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Inspiring Indiscipline Should the workers then decide to sue their Chinese employer, the signed forms could be used against them.

(p.110) 警告、罚款、解雇通知单5 Warning, Penal Sum, Termination Information 日期： Date: 一、雇员基本情况： Circis of Employee: 姓名： Name: 工号： No: 工种： Occupation: 工段： Site: 日工资： Daily salary: 二、违反劳动纪律条款，在序号前划 “✔” Disobey The Labor Discipline Item, Write “✔” Before NO. 01、迟到 早退 Lateness    Leave early 02、工作时间睡觉、闲谈。 Work time sleeping, chat about. 03、无故或不经允许缺勤。 No cause or absence from duty without admission. 04、工作时间离开工作岗位华工作地点。 Leaving the work post or work the location during work time. 05、怠慢工作。 Neglect the work. 06、不服从工作班次或工作时间安排。 Disobedience work number or work time arrangement. 07、不遵守工长指令。 Page 6 of 22 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Inspiring Indiscipline Do not obey the foreman. 08、在工作时间、地点与工长争吵，或指责、辱骂甚至侮辱、伤害工长。 Quarrelling, blame, insult, humiliate or beating foreman at work time, work place. (p.111) 09、不正确使用交其使用的工具、仪器、设备。 Inaccuracy uses the tool, instrument, equipments which the foreman hands over. 10、在工作中有欺诈行为。 Cheating in work. 11、盗窃雇主的财产或资金。 Steal the properties or fund of employer. 12、因为雇员的行为或疏忽，对雇主或与雇主有联系的一方的财产造成损害。 Properties of employer or have connection with employer been damaged because of in the mood for behavior or negligence. 13、在工作地点故意进行危害生命或财产安全的行为。 The behavior of endangering life or properties intentionally at work place. 14、在雇主人身或财务受到威胁或伤害时，拒绝给予帮助。 Refuse give help when employer Human body or properties suffer threat or disservices. 15、当法律或雇主因为善意的原因要求体检时，拒绝体检。 Be law or employers request to be check-up because the good faith reason, refuse it. 16、拒绝遵守安全，意外防护规定和采取必要的安全防范措施。 Refuse to obey safety, accident protection and adopt the necessary safety measure. 17、工作时间喝酒或酒后工作。 Drinking at work time or working after the wine. 18、因身体壮况不能坚持正常出勤和工作。 He/She can’t insist normal on duty with work because of the body condition. 19、组织或参与非法罢工。 Organizes or participate the illegal strike. 20、其他理由 Other Reason __________________________________________________ 三、处理办法，只填适用空格并在序号前划 “✔”   Handle way, Fill the suitable for use blank space and Write “✔” Before S/N. 1、 你被正式提出警告。 You were put forward the warning formally. 2、 罚款______天工资，数额为______。 Penal sum ______days salary/D, Amount _______. (p.112) 3、 你被降低工资_____________。 You were lowered the salary ______________. 4、 从即日起你被停工 ______ 天，无工资。 From this day you are stopped work for _______ days, withouth the salary. 5、 从即日起你被解雇。 From this day you are fired. 四、劳动工具、仪器及其它物品归还情况，如未归还，建议扣款数额为_____。 The circumstance of returning Labor tool, instrument and other products, if have no to return, suggest to deduct the salaray ______ Birr. 中方工长签字 日期

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Inspiring Indiscipline Signature by foreman: ___________________________ Date: _____________ 雇员签字 日期 Signature by employee: __________________________ Date: _____________ 人事部签字 日期 Signature by Ministry of Personnel: _______________ Date: _____________

The original document, which included a translation in Amharic, taken from the English version, is an example of how misunderstandings might come about. “Neglect the work” (provision 5) was surely not an exhortation but a warning. The same is true for “do not obey the foreman” (provision 6). And workers were not to take up work after consuming wine—a pricey beverage that was rarely consumed by laborers. The lofty title “Ministry of Personnel” was also misleading—the “ministry” was the human resources office. The document offers insight not only into the rules and regulations on labor discipline but also into the prevailing forms of labor indiscipline. Arriving late at work and leaving early or without permission were the most frequent forms of defiance. Dozing or chatting between tasks or while waiting for equipment or construction materials to arrive was common practice, as was shirking. Reflecting a hierarchical labor organization, the form shows that Chinese employers required absolute submission to the foreman’s orders (provisions 3, 7, and 8). The document also mirrors the importance that the Chinese managers attached to the order of tasks in the labor process and the work time schedule (see provisions 1 and 6). The laborers liked to thwart the time schedule of the Chinese managers as a form of subversion. This practice became so common that the foremen were forced to give their workers some leeway. (p.113) A number of provisions protected the employer’s property (provisions 9, 11, 12, and 13). Chinese managers were commonly of the opinion that equipment and machinery was not safe in the hands of the Ethiopians; indeed, the safety of property was emphasized over the safety of human beings (provisions 13 and 14). Of the disciplinary methods mentioned, the most common was wage deduction, not least because workers who were suspended were likely to stay away and never return. Wage deductions also served the employers’ interests, as the Chinese lacked the authority and the means to force workers to pay compensation for lost or damaged items.

Disciplining Chinese colleagues The Chinese managers’ attempt to maintain law and order, as I have demonstrated, was directed not just at the Ethiopian workforce but also at members of the Chinese community. To protect the image of educated, disciplined, and diligent Chinese engineers, project managers tried to control the low-status members of the Chinese migrant community, or what Qimo’s manager denigratingly referred to as the trash: those who were needy and uneducated, those with a dark skin and a rough character, who lacked wenhua and had a lower suzhi (cf. Stoler 2009, 1997, 1989). Management did so by implementing and enforcing a quasi-legal system that was separate from its Ethiopian counterpart and that RCE had created specifically for disciplining Chinese subordinates.

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Inspiring Indiscipline According to a notice from the project department that was announced to all subcontractors in September 2011, Chinese employees who were found drinking during work hours or who created incidents (nao shi) after having consumed alcohol would be fined ETB 500–1,000 and summoned to the judicial authorities. The managers appeared to realize that this threat would be effective, given the widespread antipathy of the Chinese staff toward the local legal authorities. If and when employees were caught a second time, they would receive a penalty between ETB 1,000 and 2,000 and would be required to step down from work for a full week. When Chinese individuals were caught a third time drinking or “stirring up emotions and acting illegally” (ruo chu fan falü) after consuming alcohol, the previous month’s wage would be deducted, and they would be sent back to China. There was, however, no such incident during the time of research, nor had my interlocutors heard of such an incident. By striking contrast, an Ethiopian worker caught drinking during working hours was simply ignored or served with a warning. The discipline and punishment of Chinese employees turned out to be more effective than that directed at Ethiopian workers, not necessarily because the punishments were more stringent but because the project managers exerted a (p.114) much higher degree of authority over the expatriate staff. The company’s command and control methods rendered the Chinese workers dependent on their employer. As their sole caretaker and provider of housing, transport, and food, the employer effectively presided over the lives of its expatriate employees in Ethiopia. The added vulnerability of some Chinese workers, such as those employed by private subcontracting companies, exacerbated their dependency on the employer. The complex relationship between the company managers and Chinese employees was marked by a deep-rooted paternalism that took several forms. One was the company’s retention of personal identification documents, such as passports, which had to be handed over to the main contractor’s head office in Addis Ababa upon an individual’s arrival in Ethiopia, to be reclaimed prior to the employee’s flight out. By retaining passports and work permits, the contractor raised the stakes on the job. Holding onto passports was also an effective means of keeping defiant employees in check. The project manager, I noticed, was the only one who carried his travel documents with him. When I asked the Chinese staff of RCE why they did not carry their passport, they told me the following story. In the past a Chinese man who had come from another African country was traveling via Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa back to China. When customs officials caught the man with ivory in his suitcase, he was promptly sent to jail. He allegedly spent seven years in an Ethiopian prison without anyone’s knowledge—neither the company nor his family members were aware of his whereabouts—where he ultimately died. Needless to say, this story struck fear in its audience. Incidentally, this is precisely the response that serves the company’s interest. Retaining control over passports and resident permits allowed the contractor to maintain the notion that it would look after and take charge of its employees were something bad to happen. In practice, the retention of these documents meant the company could also regulate and, more importantly, curtail their employees’ movements. At the time of research, a story circulated about two Chinese employees of Wuhe, who had allegedly “escaped” from their employer, Old Zhao, to “flee” to Addis Ababa. Once in the capital, they went to the Chinese embassy, asking to be repatriated to China. The main reason was that Old Zhao was several months late in paying their wage. The embassy subsequently contacted RCE, and negotiations with the project

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Inspiring Indiscipline manager started. Over the course of two weeks, the two men purportedly slept on the streets of Addis Ababa, begging for food. In the end, Old Zhao was pressurized by the project manager to pay for their flights back to China. Yet another employee of Wuhe was once found at the top of the 30-meter-high tower of the asphalt plant (where the asphalt is stored in rotating silos that keep the asphalt heated during production), drunk and shaken, mumbling that he wanted to throw himself off the (p.115) structure. He had asked his boss to let him return to China. Old Zhao refused to let him go. The asphalt plant crew managed to talk the man out of killing himself and offered him dinner and a bed for the night. He returned to work the following day. These stories illustrate not only the poor practices of some Chinese private private companies in Ethiopia but also the absolute dependence of the Chinese employees on their employers. Without the approval of both RCE and its respective subcontracting company, Chinese employees could not leave the country. Chinese companies, and the main contractor in particular, attempted to control not only the mobility but also the behavior of the Chinese employees through a quasi-legal system it set up in an attempt to restore the reputation of the Chinese community and maintain the us/them boundaries that kept the managers and the managed in their proper places in the corporate hierarchy. On June 11, 2011, Golden Roads received a letter from the project department: On June 10, 2011, two o’clock, one of the project department’s technical staff members visited [Golden Roads’] asphalt plant to check the state of the plant facilities and discovered that only the head of station was at work at the plant. Some of the rest of the staff members were playing card games, others were sleeping. The mineral powder vehicle was standing in the compound, as well as the dump trucks, of which 12 were standing in the compound. They must have been standing there for at least 3 days. At present we are in the best period of the year to carry out building work, prior to the rainy season. All the subcontractors on the project are working very hard, but only [this company’s] attitude is negative [taidu xiaoji]. You do not show discipline [wu zuzhi jilüxing] in tackling the abovementioned situation. After investigation, the project manager has decided to fine [Golden Roads] 10,000 ETB, and at the same time the company will bear the costs of the idle trucks. According to two staff members of Golden Roads, the project manager had contacted the CEO of Golden Roads in China, who, in turn, decided to deduct USD 1,000 from the salaries of all eight staff members except Liu Deye. For most team members this penalty amounted to 120 percent of their monthly wage and was a step that would be impossible for the employer to take in China, at least legally, the two men agreed. Whereas Golden Roads’ CEO decided to dock wages merely to fill his own pockets, the penalties imposed by RCE’s project managers were part of its “civilizing mission” to sanitize the image of the Chinese, who should not be seen lazing about the compound at the annual peak of the building work. Either way, the punishment proved effective. It was a year before the crew dared to bring out the cards again. The punishment meted out by Golden Road’s CEO shows that discipline was based on personal whim, much as it was when the Ethiopians were punished. The effectiveness of disciplinary measures, however, differed. Whereas Ethiopian workers had the law, or the (p.116) legal authorities, on their side, the Chinese employees found themselves at the mercy of the management. For them, working conditions and the degree to which they were able to improve them varied greatly and depended, owing to the lack of support networks and legal protection in Ethiopia, on the goodwill of enterprise managers.

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Inspiring Indiscipline Indiscipline on the building site Chinese employees may have been effectively restrained by punitive measures, but Ethiopian workers were not. Indeed, their responses to their managers’ attempts to rein them in showed both creativity and gumption. Their subversive acts ranged from subtle transgressions of company regulations to collective acts, such as go-slows, sit-downs, and labor strikes. Whereas these transgressions did not directly challenge expatriate managerial authority, such actions were specifically aimed at pressing for the improvement of labor conditions, such as higher wages and better contracts. Nevertheless, publicly undermining the basis of the Chinese manager’s claim to expertise and authority meant that even subtle transgressions were not entirely innocent. Indeed, instances of open defiance that went unanswered often led to further acts of daring. Certainly, the accumulation of subversive acts put managerial authority in question, and not just on a symbolic level. Subtle transgressions included deliberately slowing down the pace of work, speaking up or laughing loudly, leaving the construction site without permission, chewing khat, or just walking around with khat. Khat has a legally ambiguous, or “quasilegal” status (Carrier and Klantschnig 2017), yet its consumption is prohibited prior to driving. Some Ethiopian drivers of the Chinese deliberately left khat in see-through bags on the dashboard or next to the gear lever. Other subversive acts included speeding, playing loud music, singing, or tapping on the steering wheel to the beat of ethnic music. Ethiopian laborers liked to infringe upon the comfort zones of their Chinese foremen, for instance, by resting a hand or an arm on his shoulder or leaning against him—an act that signifies companionship among Ethiopians of equal status and seniority but that was disliked by Chinese managers, who interpreted the gesture as a sign of laziness. Alternatively, laborers fumbled with their foreman’s work outfit, or the cell phone cover attached to his belt, pretending to steal the device. This patterned playful behavior, to which Chinese managers pretended to take no offence, is akin to what Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1940) defined as joking relationships. The peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism characteristic of joking relationships also permeated everyday encounters between Ethiopians and Chinese on the construction site. The “permitted disrespect” (196) central to joking relationships caused laughter (p.117) or chuckling, but it could just as easily result in tension when boundaries were breached. Occasionally, Chinese managers reciprocated teasing by using ludic disciplinary measures, such as stone- and sandthrowing, gesturing as if one intends to hit a worker, or slapping him semi-affectionately on the back of the head. Given the lack of mutual linguistic and cultural competence, the interactive humor between Ethiopians and Chinese on the construction site remained largely non-verbal and action-based. The absence of regular means of expression proved to be fertile ground for humorous interaction. Amanda Wise (2016) shows that workers often deploy interactive humor to negotiate labor relations in a multi-ethnic work setting. As social settings of forced and formalized encounters with strangers, Chinese building sites in Ethiopia are potential sites for conflict, not least given the significant power differentials that structure them. On the other hand, they are spaces of consensus and compromise that enable work to be carried out. While joking cultures in workplaces facilitate laborers’ self-differentiation from and antagonism to management (Collinson 1988), they also work to “let off steam.” Michael Burawoy (1979) demonstrates how racial prejudice between black workers and the white management in a Chicago factory is articulated through shop-floor jokes. The production process inevitably demands a degree of worker collaboration based on consent. Overt racial strife, then, is diluted in humor.

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Inspiring Indiscipline The abovementioned modes of transgressions were chiefly individual acts. Subtle transgressions were also undertaken by groups of workers. One morning when rain started pouring down, laborers on the building site of the Addis Ababa Ring Road Project (Phase III) gathered under the piers of the Tinishu Akaki Bridge, which was under construction at the time. The workers formed a large circle and started performing traditional dances, while singing, clapping, and laughing, elated at the break from work. The Chinese, meanwhile, were hiding from the rain in the cabin of an Isuzu. Expressive activities such as singing, drumming, dancing, and laughing— which the Chinese managers ascribed to the exuberant character of the African—were seen as signs of a lack of dedication to work. The dramatic performance under the Tinishu Akaki Bridge is reminiscent of the grotesque and theatrical forms of resistance that Achille Mbembe (1992, see also Bakhtin 2009) locates in the African postcolony. That rainy morning, everyone on the building site, Ethiopians and Chinese alike, knew exactly what was being enacted—the Ethiopian road workers were not only expressing their joy in singing and dancing but also subverting Chinese labor discipline. Many subversive acts contained a strong visual element, such as the khat placed next to the gear lever or the beer bottles in the door compartment. Another visual and largely symbolic act of transgression was decorating Chinese company vehicles. Ethiopian workers attached stickers to (p.118) car windows and had painted slogans—often love themed, such as “Love is God” or “Love wins”—in white paint on the dump trucks of Duyin Enterprise. Workers were also fond of philosophical quotes like “Time is glass.” Car beautification was a popular practice in Ethiopia. Drivers who possessed their own (or a friend’s or a family member’s) car or minibus, or who drove a rented vehicle for long periods, typically invested time and money on beautifying the inside and outside of their vehicles, draping dashboards with pink, green, red, or yellow velvet, and covering cabin ceilings with colorful cloth and fringe, flowers, and other kinds of kitsch. Similarly, posters of the Virgin Mary or scantily clad Britneys or Madonnas were displayed above bunk beds at the back of cabins. Wooden Orthodox crosses or plastic items, such as eagles or lions, hung from rearview mirrors, swinging back and forth anytime the vehicle was in motion. Once I spotted a Chinese lantern hung this way. The truck cabin was typically a space appropriated through what Michel de Certeau (1988, xiv) describes as “ways of operating” that consist of the innumerable quotidian practices by means of which users or consumers appropriate spaces produced by more dominant others. The cabin was not only home to the controls; it was a place that served the workers’ needs and interests, be they shirking, napping, meeting friends, chatting, or chewing khat—all of which were subversive acts when performed during working hours. Moreover, although the Chinese built the road and owned the vehicles, it was the Ethiopian drivers who took advantage of the mobility afforded by the road and company vehicles. The driver, after all, was in the driver’s seat, meaning that Ethiopian drivers exercised control by using the car or truck for their own purposes, such as escorting friends, at least within whatever range of freedom they were allotted. Although the decorations inside the vehicles were largely meant to satisfy the driver, the decorations on the outside appeared to be visual statements aimed at teasing and at testing the authority of the vehicle’s Chinese owner. The beautification of company vehicles was one ingenious way of appropriating things that were not one’s own. Two weeks after the funeral of Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, He Shengli, the vehicle and personnel manager of RCE, lost patience with the liberties Ethiopian drivers took in decorating the company’s vehicles. Nicknamed “the doctor,” as the surly yet sympathetic man had worked in a Shanghai hospital

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Inspiring Indiscipline before relocating to Ethiopia in search of peace after a burnout, he furiously tore off all posters and stickers featuring the deceased politician from the windscreens, mirrors, and rear windows of the company cars. In addition to playing with visual signification, Ethiopian workers also manipulated language to subvert Chinese authority (cf. Fabian 1986; Gal 1993; Wedeen 1999). One concept subject to such manipulation was madamu. (p.119) A word with origins in either the English or the Russian word “madam” (those who used it did not agree on its origin), madamu could be used to address women. Expressed, however, with a certain intonation, the word suggested “lady of pleasure.” Both Ethiopians and Chinese rarely used the word among members of their own group. Madamu gained currency only in the pidgin language that had developed from interactions between Chinese and Ethiopians. Being called madamu was not a compliment. It was an outright insult. Chinese called local women madamu, especially those who had sexual relationships with (Chinese) men. In turn, Ethiopians used the word to address their female Chinese superiors as a mode of defiance. Joking was yet another subtle form of subversion. Jokes, of course, depend on the shared experience of the teller and the audience to be effective (Wedeen 1999). On and off Chinese-run construction sites in Ethiopia jokes circulated within one ethnic group and portrayed the other as a homogenous collective, zooming in on unfavorable stereotypical features. Positioning the other as morally inferior, these jokes served as a cultural and moral critique (e.g., Apte 1985; Constable 1997; Davies 2000). Nicole Constable (1997) demonstrates, in the context of Filipina domestic workers and their Chinese employers, that jokers assert their ability to outwit and claim symbolic superiority over their superiors, even if only for the duration of the joke and its effect. And, although the content of a joke often appears to reinforce the status quo, the laughter it evokes in public or in the presence of superiors—commonly both the subject matter and target of the joke—can be understood as an expression of subtle subversion (175–76). In Ethiopia the language barrier actually made it safe for native workers to exchange jokes about the Chinese managers in the presence of the other. The demonstrative laughter that followed the jokes led the Chinese to guess that they were the topic of discussion, and yet they were oblivious as to how. Like rumors, jokes touched on banal stereotypes, such as Asian slit eyes: In Ethiopia we should not drink while driving. In China they should not laugh while driving. (Ethiopian surveyor, June 29, 2012) In Arba Minch, a city in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region, I briefly stayed with a Gamo family before traveling south to visit a road building project close to the South-Sudanese border in the summer of 2017.6 At one of the coffee ceremonies in the garden under the acacia tree, the female head of the family remarked that the Chinese had forgotten to visit a traditional Gamo healer. She smiled. Many Gamo men and women have (p.120) round burn marks on their temples. The marks are applied with a burning hot stick, which the healer places next to the eyes of newborns to open their eyes and make them healthy, or at least so the Gamo think (or thought, as many consider the practice old-fashioned). This curing practice is

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Inspiring Indiscipline also used for other ailing or malformed body parts. The female family head referred to what she suggested were the misshapen, not fully open, eyes of the Chinese. Certain food items that were thought to be consumed by Chinese are taboo among Ethiopian Christians and Muslims, including pork, as well as the flesh of dogs, donkeys, ducks, and snakes. However, apart from pigs and some wild fowl such as pigeons, Chinese workers largely refrained from eating these animals, aware as they were that Ethiopians rejected such practices. The Chinese eat everything of a pig, except its sound. (Ethiopian materials inspector, February, 22 2012) The Chinese eat everything, except for the airplane in the sky and the ship on the water. (Ethiopian driver of a Chinese company, October 13, 2011) What if Adam and Eve were Chinese? They would have eaten the snake instead of the apple. (Ethiopian purchase manager of a Chinese company, September 12, 2011) One day the police in Mehoni received a phone call from a local farmer, who claimed he had seen a Chinese engineer eat an insect, whereupon he had fallen to the ground and died. The police visited the place where the incident allegedly had taken place to discover that the man had phoned in a false tip. Jokes about food that is considered taboo suggest the impurity or barbarity of the consumer (Douglas 2004 [1966]). The riddle about Adam and Eve is a particularly striking metaphor in this respect, with its implied critique of Chinese negligence of deference to religious authority. What is more, many Ethiopians believe in the special powers of the serpent. Venerated as a symbol of fertility, snakes figure prominently in Ethiopian myths of origin (Levine 2000, 49–50). The act of eating one, then, appears to be even more appalling and morally dubious. Another theme of ethnic jokes was the categorical distinction drawn between ferenj (stranger or foreigner) and China (Chinese). A landlady in Addis Ababa is looking for a renter and asks a broker to help her find one. “I don’t care if it is an Ethiopian or a foreigner, but I don’t want Somalis or Sudanese,” she says to the broker. Not much later he comes back with a Chinese. The landlady’s face grows gloomy when she sees the Chinese. “What did I say? I want foreigners, not Chinese!” (Ethiopian journalist and writer, October 8, 2011) This joke construes Chinese as fundamentally different from other foreigners. Moreover, it suggests that Chinese are inhuman or “beasts,” as an Ethiopian (p.121) inspector provocatively pointed out. When I asked him why he regarded the Chinese as beasts, he alluded to their food habits—“people who eat dog cannot be human”—and the absence of the expression of emotions: “They did not even cry when that Chinese man lost his life in the car accident in the mountains.” In Mehoni people gather in great numbers to mourn the death of a relative or a neighbor at the deceased person’s home. Public and collective display of sorrow is appropriate. The absence of grief and a social gathering made the Chinese, in the eyes of the inspector,

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Inspiring Indiscipline morally suspect. Funerals in Ethiopia are profoundly social events that serve to reconstitute moral hierarchies (Boylston 2018, 103–18). The deceased Chinese man, by implication, could not have been of particularly high standing, neither did his fellow workers pay suitable respect to him and his family. Through their social commentary, the inspector and the jokers above challenge the image of the developed, sophisticated, and morally superior Chinese. Many subtle acts of transgression were reminiscent of what James Scott (1985) referred to as everyday forms of resistance, that is, small-scale and unorganized acts that occurred on a daily basis. But were they weapons of the weak? In contrast to the landowners described by Scott, the superiors in this case were outsiders who did not speak the language and who were unfamiliar with local systems of signification and local conduct. Chinese employers did possess the means of production, but they were heavily reliant on the road authorities for capital and on the local community for labor and resources; in sum, Chinese lacked political clout in the region. This power asymmetry can be seen in the offensive, rather than defensive, forms of transgression against the Chinese. The dynamic between the expatriate enterprise managers and the local workforce, and the subversive acts that followed from this interaction, were of a different nature from that described by Scott and other researchers who have studied worker transgression and protest in industrial settings (e.g., Lee 1998; Mills 2005; Ong 1987; Pun 2005; Turner 1999). Although they were small scale and largely unorganized, subtle acts of transgression by Ethiopians were more daring and more visible than what James Scott describes as the “weapons of the weak.” Moreover, ostensibly innocent subversive acts were paralleled by overt forms of subversion, such as labor stoppages, protests, and strikes, which were directly aimed at improving labor conditions.

Labor protests Despite being relatively unfamiliar with pure contractual employment, Ethiopian laborers were remarkably successful in their efforts to better their working lives. Trade unions or other forms of supportive structures that would have protected workers from managerial caprice did not exist (p.122) in southeastern Tigray at the time of research, which meant the Ethiopian workers had to take matters into their own hands. Occasionally, they engaged in overt work actions, such as strikes. This form of defiance was explicitly aimed at improving employment conditions and was certainly more perilous, but it was also less frequent, because participants would risk sanctions, such as severe wage deductions or dismissals. To minimize (or share) such perils, protests usually involved substantial groups of workers. Other collective forms of defiance such as sit-downs and go-slows were more common, as they could not easily be sanctioned by the managers. Skilled employees, such as surveyors and machine operators, who had gained some work experience with Ethiopian contractors or consultant companies, were often those who took the lead. It is important to note that demands for higher wages or better treatment in general sprang from a search for justice and respect, not from financial needs alone. Acts of protest, in other words, were informed by an explicit class as well as racial consciousness. Low wages were, for laborers, a sign of disrespect and a violation of their dignity; workers did not feel properly rewarded for the labor they carried out. The potential gains of work actions were nonetheless carefully calculated, as were the potential hazards involved. Most laborers were conscious of what they could get away with and how far they could go. In fact, the Ethiopians were well ahead of the game: acts of protest not only formed but also transformed labor relations between laborers and managers, mostly to the advantage of the former.

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Inspiring Indiscipline Labor protests occurred almost every other week at the peak of construction work in early 2012. Disputes were, however, limited to single companies. No project-wide protests occurred during or after my field research. Protests took place chiefly in compounds or on the building site. Seldom were they taken to the streets in surrounding settlements. In fact, there appeared to be no urgency to make workers’ discontent public, perhaps because in most cases the public was already aware of such discontent. Many members of the local community were connected to the laborers through kin or neighborhood networks and proved supportive of their relations. Authorities and ordinary people were aware of the employment conditions of local workers, not least as the work was carried out in public spaces. Yet another factor was also at play. Although labor protests directly affected only segments of the workforce, its participants set an example for others. Disputes or strikes often triggered collective action at different points along the project road to the point that the similarities between incidents of worker protest suggested mimicry. Even so, the impact of the protests overall remained local, solely affecting the labor conditions of the company where the dispute occurred. Why did worker protests remain relatively small-scale, isolated, and contained? For one thing, the physical distances between building sites and (p.123) living zones hampered the ability of workers to gather. Furthermore, the sheer length of the project made the transmission of information slow and selective, and it was easily lost from one settlement to the next. When a Chinese employee of Jianghe Construction died in a car crash in the mountains at kilometer 97, just before the Chinese New Year in 2012, for instance, it took 3 days for the news to arrive at the asphalt plant at kilometer 52. Different Chinese companies were commissioned to construct different sections of the road, which meant that workplaces also remained local. Moreover, a 7day workweek and the lack of holidays prevented workers from traveling. Other reasons why disputes remained contained included the sheer number of Chinese companies involved in the project and the respective disparities in their practices. Each company set its own wage levels and established its own worker policies, engendering a variety of labor conditions that resulted in the lack of a common imperative to fight for and employer to fight against. Labor disputes, then, rarely crossed company borders. What did involve several companies was the practice of voting with their feet, a popular form of labor resistance. Workers played Chinese companies against one another by deserting one company and moving to another for a wage boost. Switching employers was a popular strategy used to improve working conditions and gain rewards; certainly, it increased competition between subcontractors. In the beginning of June 2012, for instance, Wuhe Construction proceeded with ditch work between kilometer 70 and 78 and approached the building site of another subcontractor around kilometer 80. Up until then, there had been a significant distance between the sites and the companies. Workers of Wuhe lived in Mehoni, and laborers of the allEthiopian company directed by a Chinese manager lived in a compound near Adiqey. As the laborers worked all day and ate their lunch on-site, there had been little or no contact between them. But, as they approached the vicinity of another company, the laborers began interacting during working hours and started comparing wages. Although salaries did not differ significantly —Wuhe paid workers around ETB 20 per day, and laborers from the other company earned ETB 25 per day—workers of the all-Ethiopian company enjoyed additional benefits. When the workers performed well, they were offered the opportunity to develop skills in certain trades, such as masonry or bar binding. Moreover, the company started work later in the day and finished earlier.

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Inspiring Indiscipline Not surprisingly, once Wuhe’s laborers learned about this, they staged a spontaneous strike, demanding an immediate pay rise. If the employer did not listen to their demands, they threatened, they would desert Wuhe for the other company. The strike lasted 4 days, after which almost half of Wuhe’s workforce resigned. Old Zhao was enraged. The labor protest resulted in a fight between him and the manager of the all-Ethiopian company over (p.124) salaries of the Ethiopian workers—the one accusing the other of failing to keep to the wage levels set by the contractor. In the end, the dispute was resolved with the intervention and mediation of the project manager. Old Zhao, however, was forced to raise the wages of his Ethiopian workers in order to retain them. Incidents like this show how the Chinese employers were forced to give in to the workers’ demands and adjust wage levels, especially in places like Adiqey, where there was a relative shortage of labor.

Confrontations with local residents “They think the road is Chinese!” Project manager Gu had been fiddling with the sleeve of his jacket while waiting for his chance to speak up. He decided to interrupt the reporter from Mekelle FM, who was interviewing the resident engineer about the road project under his supervision. “The locals use picks to damage the asphalt. They ruin our [culvert] pipes by throwing them down the slope.” The reporter and his crew looked somewhat confused, as did the resident engineer, who had been speaking placidly about recent progress made by the Chinese contractor.7 The radio crew from Mekelle was standing in the car park in front of the resident engineer’s office, where I was going through monthly progress reports. The project manager wanted to draw attention to the harm done to the Chinese by the local community and workforce. “Some of the locals are reasonable. Others are not. We [the Chinese contractor] listen to the reasonable suggestions. We gave them a central reservation for the town section. They wanted a bicycle lane and even a square with a fountain. But that’s not in the contract!” Gu used this opportunity to give voice to what he saw as injustice inflicted on the Chinese, until the resident engineer managed to interfere, suggesting that they all go and have a look at the construction work. Chinese management felt they had been backed against a wall as defiance came at them from all sides. Not only their own workers but also residents who lived or who farmed plots along the project road were engaged in what seemed to be a collective effort to defy the Chinese. The project manager’s rage illustrates his indignation with the attitudes of local residents who meddled with the construction work. Chinese workers called these residents “peasant consultants” (nongmin jianli)—“peasant” indicating the complainant’s rural origin and “consultant” meaning the person in question was espousing some kind of expertise. The phrase was of course a slur. It suggested that locals had no business interfering in road-related (p.125) issues, which, from the Chinese vantage point, belonged to the domain of the engineer and the engineer alone. Nonetheless, local residents’ defiance against Chinese employers, the Ethiopian Roads Authority, or the road in a more abstract sense, was becoming increasingly common. Defiance by local residents took the form of vandalism or theft and served to enhance the locale. In early 2012 the owner of Hotel Raya connected the waste pipe of his toilet to the road ditch under construction. The police were called in. A wealthy businessman and an authority in the region, the hotel owner was given a verbal warning by police. The man removed the pipe to reinstall it two days later. In that respect, the hotelier was not only creative but persistent. He was not alone.

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Inspiring Indiscipline From the day that base-course material was dumped on the road section running through Mehoni, it was subject to (re)appropriation by town residents. For one thing, the material was perfect in size and plasticity for casting concrete floors. Some residents used the material for levelling their front or back yards. Women and children knelt down to put the stones, mostly by hand, in sacks or buckets. Men shoveled the material onto mule carts. An Orthodox Christian priest ordered several cartloads to be delivered to the Haile Selassie Church, which was under construction. Cement, large stones taken from the sub-base material of the road and base course aggregate from the road building project were all appropriated for the church. Sometimes a Chinese would step out of his car and pull the carts to the ground to save the material, but such efforts were largely in vain. Larger masonry stones used for the construction of culverts and ditches in the mountains were collected by local residents, who subsequently arranged the stones in neat piles a few meters away from their original sites. “As soon as the stones are piled up neatly,” one Chinese engineer laughed, “we Chinese are not allowed to touch the stones anymore.” Masonry stones were used for partitions, sheds, or chapels along the road. Local commandeering of material designated for road construction not only abounded, it was practiced freely and openly, regardless of what measures Chinese took to prevent the theft from happening. In the eyes of the Chinese, the police and officials instigated acts of sabotage. Rather than supporting corporate hegemony, the local state apparatus appeared to support the Ethiopian workforce. People have a tendency to claim the physical environment in which they live and transform it to their own ends (e.g., Campbell 2012; Dalakoglou 2010, 2017; Larkin 2008; Mrázek 2002). Not surprisingly, concern over the ownership of, and entitlement to, resources was a driving factor in local subversion. These confrontations touched on more deeply rooted moral criticism. Local residents held protectionist sentiments about resources that were extracted from their area nearby the road. The Chinese, on the other (p.126) hand, asserted ownership over resources their companies had processed in quarries or imported from abroad. The resources were to be used for the construction of the road, not for the houses and church along it. The reverse scenario, in which locals prevented the Chinese from using their material for certain purposes, also occurred. When local residents got wind of Chinese plans to use crushed stone from the quarry at kilometer 36 for finishing off the verges of a road project in Amhara regional state, they organized a sit-in at the quarry and halted the dump-trucks to prevent them from ferrying the material to Amhara, the long-time antagonistic neighbor. In this incident local protectionism intersected with regional and ethnic rivalry. The majority of conflicts with local residents in Tigray, however, concerned so-called right-of-way issues that arose from the annexation of property to make way for the road. It was the responsibility of the federal authority to compensate citizens for buildings and crops and to prompt them to clear their farm land and pull down their houses. Unsurprisingly, site clearance was a protracted and cumbersome process that, almost as a rule, continued during the construction work. The Ethiopian Roads Authority, however critical to the process, was not present on site. It fell to Chinese to deal with the protests and threats that arose from right-ofway issues. On the final section of the project road newly constructed culvert outlets were repeatedly damaged by local residents. When hostilities increased, project manager Gu assigned surveyor De Shanwen, a soft-spoken man in his 30s with excellent social skills, as a full-time right-of-way agent. I once accompanied De on his visit to kilometer 87 where an old woman threatened to Page 18 of 22 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 07 May 2021

Inspiring Indiscipline throw herself into an excavation ditch four meters deep were the Chinese to proceed with the construction of a pipe culvert outlet below her house. The woman’s house was perched on a steep slope, separated from the excavation by little more than a narrow cactus hedge. The building work on the culvert outlet was temporarily postponed. This was just one of many incidents. De Shanwen’s counterpart was Addisu Abush, the right-of-way agent employed by the road authorities who resided in the consultant engineers’ camp. Addisu’s job was to calculate compensations for the annexation of vegetation, agricultural crops, and immovable property. Given that land in Ethiopia is state-owned, farmers are only compensated for vegetation and built structures. Addisu knew the compensation sums by heart: ETB 900 for a Wanza tree, ETB 600 for a eucalyptus tree, ETB 400 for a Konkurra tree, ETB 500 for a mature banana tree, ETB 200 for a young banana tree, ETB 800 for a kuntal (equivalent to 100 kilos) of barley, ETB 500 for a kuntal of maize (as of 2012). A field of teff, the most laborious crop to grow, would yield a local farmer the highest sum: ETB 1,200 per kuntal. The compensation figures for trees and agricultural produce were revised each year. The price of teff (p.127) had risen steadily, from ETB 800 per kuntal five years ago to ETB 950 and 1,150, respectively, in the previous two years. Addisu regretted that the loss of cactus plants was not compensated. Cactus leaves were used as fodder for cows. Farmers would pierce the round leaves of the paddle cactus to jerk them from their stems, and collect them on a mule cart to distribute them to cattle. What is more, cactus fruit, locally known as beles, comprised an important part of the diet of local residents from June through August. The annexation of structures, such as houses, sheds, or separations, was subject to fiercer debate, not least as compensation was calculated in building material and hours of labor, rather than in type and size of structure. “As soon as we touch property with just a finger, people demand huge compensations.” Whenever I saw Addisu along the road, he was either busy with a measuring tape, or engaged in heated discussions with residents. Although he had the final say, he wanted to stay on good terms with his local committee members, who came from the wereda and leaned towards protecting the interests of residents. Compensation agreements were yet another site in which central and local state interests clashed. In order to eke out more compensation money from the federal government, residents sometimes built new houses within right-of-way borders—the area reserved for the road, with an additional three meters on each side—after having pulled down their old homes, for which they had, in most cases, already received compensation. Occasionally local residents gain the upper hand. I had long been curious about the narrow and bumpy road section at Karakore, a small town along the road to Addis Ababa between Dessie and Kombolcha, each time I sat on the bus back to the capital. Laboratory technician Abel Tamrat told me that on this section the villagers had won out over the road authorities and the foreign contractor. The Spanish construction consortium Dragados had upgraded this road stretch some ten years ago. Karakore’s residents had refused to pull down their houses, despite having received financial compensation, Abel believed. It took a long time and repeated efforts to convince Karakore’s inhabitants, until Dragados gave in and decided to skip the construction of the one-and-a-half-kilometers long section. Instead, they carried out some patch work on the existing asphalt layer. Abel Tamrat told me about Karakore when Adiqey residents were holding up the asphalt works at kilometer 86. He foresaw a similar scenario happening in Adiqey; yet his concerns turned out

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Inspiring Indiscipline to be unfounded. The residents of Adiqey had staged repeated protests against the construction work, beginning in 2010, when they objected to the elevation—the “vertical alignment,” in engineers’ terminology—of the road, which ran through the center of their settlement. Essentially, the issue was a disagreement about whether Adiqey was a village or a town. The original designs had designated the (p.128) settlement a village, and the road alignment was designed accordingly. As per the design specifications for DS-4 roads, the vertical alignment of a section running through a rural settlement did not have to take into account the elevation of the adjacent village structures. When crossing a town, however, the alignment had to be adjusted to the settlement’s structures. The population of Adiqey had grown significantly after 2007, when the contract documents had been drawn up and the settlement designated as a village— or literally as “village and town,” a term that proved even more confusing. Adiqey was situated on a slope. Initially, the road had been built such that its surface was as much as 1.06 meters lower or higher than the village (or town) structures on both sides of the road. Because of this awkward elevation, residents argued, traffic was less likely to stop and make use of Adiqey’s bars, restaurants, and shops. Inhabitants demanded that the elevation be revised. Many heated discussions ensued in which regional government officials from Mekelle, wereda administrators from Adigudem, and the governing body of the regional seat in Bahir Seba, as well as many others, all took part. The Ethiopian Roads Authority laid the blame with the Chinese contractor for its failure to take into consideration the “social acceptance” of the road’s design. “The road should not float above the people,” a representative of the Ethiopian Roads Authority remarked in a meeting with the contractor and consultant. “But how do we know what the people want? Local people don’t even know themselves what they want. They may agree today. Tomorrow they will ask for a design change,” protested project manager Gu. After protracted debates, the issue was resolved by presenting five different design plans from which the village (or town) committee was to select one. The Chinese contractor promised to redo the construction accordingly. The Ethiopian Roads Authority, however, refused to compensate the Chinese contractor for the revision of the Adiqey section, arguing that the project was a design-and-build project in which payment had been made in lump-sum fashion, and, further, that the contractor should have taken design revisions into account beforehand. Indeed, this incident testifies the leverage of the Ethiopian Roads Authority vis-à-vis Chinese contractors, not only before but also after project procurement. They made sure that the Chinese pay for the losses incurred on construction projects. On my final day in Tigray, residents of Adiqey had blocked the road again. They sat down in front of the base-course paver, preventing Jianghe enterprise from continuing the base-course works. Residents demanded cover stones for the new U-shaped ditches along the section that led through their settlement. The towns of Alamata, Kukufto, and Mehoni, they knew, all had their ditches covered entirely. It turned out that the contractor and the consultant had agreed on a design change in Adiqey to save costs. Only a few (p.129) cover stones were to be placed at official crossings. Adiqey’s residents had gotten wind of this secret deal, which disadvantaged them. They held the contractor accountable and enforced it to comply with the original design. Infrastructures are sites of power and contestation (e.g., Anand 2017; Dalakoglou 2017; Larkin 2008). In Ethiopia, as elsewhere, it is through public works that relations between citizens and the state—the mengist—are articulated (Mains 2012b; see also Abbink 2012). Roads are actively claimed by its users and other people who are invested in them, as the events in Adiqey and Karakore show. Ordinary residents contested the uneven distribution of access. For one thing,

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Inspiring Indiscipline the road and its construction were met with ambivalence (cf. Harvey and Knox 2015; Dalakoglou 2017). While roads are welcomed for the promise of progress they hold (Mains 2012b), they are equally viewed as potential threats to the community autarky (Flower 2004; Pina-Cabral 1987). In response to state encroachment, residents typically attempt to (re)assert ownership. The protection of ownership can be staged collectively, such as in Adiqey, as well as enacted individually. In the mountain section, local residents claimed ownership by planting cactus hedges to demarcate farmlands or by building structures within right-of-way boundaries to appropriate their property. To the chagrin of the Chinese contractor, residents successfully assumed their role as “peasant consultants.” They were as triumphant as local laborers in challenging Chinese authority.

Stronger than the weak Local resistance went beyond what James Scott (1985) has called the weapons of the weak, or what Michel de Certeau (1988) describes as the tactics of everyday life—“the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’” (xiv–xv). Everyday tactics, as de Certeau defines them, are fragmentary actions or “art[s] of the weak” (35) that take place in the other’s space or disciplinary grid. More or less subtle forms of defiance of managerial authority by Ethiopian workers, then, corresponded to strategies—calculated acts aimed against a known antagonist— rather than tactics. Whereas de Certeau’s strategists mainly operate outside the grid in exterior spaces (xix), Ethiopian workers, familiar as they were with the social environment surrounding the construction site in contrast to their Chinese employers, navigated with cunning both outside and inside the grid in external and internal spaces. They proved to be successful in forcing the expatriate managers to abide by their terms, thus challenging the disciplinary grid from outside. More often, though, they provoked the managers from within, by using the same discursive tools and methods that their expatriate employers used to discipline them. (p.130) Put differently, Ethiopian workers challenged the authority of the Chinese managers by appropriating ideas and concepts that management had introduced itself and using these against management. This was done in a fashion similar to the dynamics described by Jean and John Comaroff (1986) in their analysis of the Evangelist missionary project in South Africa. Evangelist missionaries proved to be very successful in restructuring the conceptual universe of native Africans, thus laying the foundation for their integration as waged workers into the capitalist mode of production (see also Comaroff 1985). The practices instilled by the mission, however, came to support a new order that exposed the missionaries’ own contradictions. As a result, the emergence of the language of protest based on concepts of individual freedom— concepts that had been introduced by the mission in the first place—came to shake the very foundation of the mission (Comaroff and Comaroff 1986, 2). Similar dynamics occurred on Chinese-run construction sites in Tigray. It was Chinese employers who promoted the idea of casual wage labor, but it was Ethiopian workers who adopted that idea to trigger competition between Chinese companies. By ascribing to high job mobility and by voting with their feet, Ethiopian laborers were able to play one Chinese employer against another, thereby increasing their power to demand higher wages and better employment conditions. In a similar vein, the Ethiopian workers tested their managers on the contractual terms of employment that the employers had introduced in the first place. In fact, the local workers gradually became even better versed in articulating these terms than their managers, as I elaborate in the next chapter.

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Inspiring Indiscipline The most common response of the Chinese managers to defiance was either silence or compromise. Often the Chinese were at a disadvantage in the situation. For one thing, the Chinese lacked the authority or the support of local authorities to intervene, which meant that the best solution, from their perspective, was simply to swallow their anger and remain silent. At least this way they could save face, safeguard their credibility, or prevent more harm from befalling their reputation. Especially toward the end of the project, the Chinese managers were compelled to give way regarding working times, overtime payments, advance payments on salaries, and medical expense coverage. The Ethiopian workers were thus well aware of the inability of their foreign managers to control them fully and so became skilled at trying the patience of their managers and the rigidness of company rules, individually and collectively. On the religious holiday Epiphany, site engineer Zhang Guannan spotted his personal driver, who had called in sick that day, on the street in Alamata, drinking coffee and chatting with friends. The man waved to his Chinese employer as he passed by. Zhang smiled wryly. There was (p.131) nothing he could do. Situations like these seemed innocent enough. In the next chapter, however, I show how the consequences of accumulated acts of defiance, especially when local workers received the support of civic and legal authorities, were far more significant than they appeared at first glance. Notes: (1.) This sum represented more than half the driver’s daily wage of ETB 30. (2.) Punctuation and spelling are reproduced as they were in the original statement. (3.) Alex insisted I call him by his English name (here, however, it is a pseudonym). (4.) Layout and spelling are in original. (5.) Layout and spelling are in original. (6.) The Gamo are an ethnic group that resides in the Southern Nations, Nationality, and Peoples’ Region of southwestern Ethiopia. More than 1 million Ethiopians identify themselves as Gamo, according to the 2007 national census (Central Statistical Agency of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 2007). (7.) The radio interview was carried out in Amharic, as the resident engineer was an Amhara from Addis Ababa. The Chinese project manager interrupted the interview in English.

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Entangled in Lawsuits

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Entangled in Lawsuits Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords In the courtroom, Ethiopian workers have proved even more successful in challenging Chinese management and the power hierarchies that lend them authority. To the consternation of their Chinese employers, the damages awarded to Ethiopian laborers in the courts keep rising. The wereda courts, the lowest-level state courts in Ethiopia, have come to play a principal role in negotiating the employment conditions of Ethiopian laborers. Judges make Ethiopian workers aware of their rights and remind Chinese employers of their obligations regarding contractual procedures, wage levels, and recruitment and dismissal practices. Together with professional writers and law student interns, the wereda courts enhance the leverage of the Ethiopian workforce over Chinese managers. Lost legal battles frustrate the managers; the unconditional support of the authorities for the local workforce goes against their idea of the local state’s role as bolstering economic growth by supporting foreign investment. Keywords:   Court, law, legal disputes, Ethiopian agency, employment conditions, contract

Liu Deye sped through town in his four-wheel drive, the car brushing past the cows that plodded over the freshly laid asphalt. His eyes were fixed on the road, his hands clamped around the steering wheel. Every time someone stepped out in front of him he gave an angry blow on the horn and cursed. Liu and I had just come from a court hearing in which two former Ethiopian workers had sued his company. The two workers had been dismissed in the aftermath of a strike. Liu Deye, however, still did not know what he had been charged with. The court summons and the copy of the complaint, which the former employees had brought to the asphalt plant the week before, had been drawn up in Tigrinya. Moreover, Liu had not understood what had been said in the court hearing. He used the sleeve of his camouflage jacket to wipe sweat off his forehead and spoke up suddenly: “Please tell the New York Times how much we suffer in Africa, when you get back home.” Liu remained silent until we arrived at the compound of Golden Roads, where he disappeared into his room.

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Entangled in Lawsuits Since the beginning of the road project, the number of lawsuits filed by Ethiopian workers against Chinese employers had surged. In Raya Azebo Wereda Court in Mehoni the number of lawsuits involving Chinese companies had gone up steadily. A combination of disrespect for or ignorance of Ethiopian labor regulations and mounting pressure to keep financial losses to a minimum meant that the Chinese companies routinely sidestepped legal procedures. Ethiopian workers were dismissed at will and wages docked capriciously. Employment contracts were rare, as were rest days for the workers. As the road project advanced, however, the Chinese employers came to pay for their neglect of workers’ rights. Ethiopian laborers used a variety of methods, some subtle, some less so, to keep their Chinese managers in check and to improve wage levels, employment conditions, and contractual procedures. They did so either on their own accord, as discussed in the previous chapter, or with the assistance of local state institutions, such as the courts and wereda or kebele administrations, as I will explore in this chapter. (p.133) By demanding respect for Ethiopian labor law, the wereda courts, the lowest-level state courts in Ethiopia, came to play a crucial role in negotiating workers’ conditions. In the courtroom local judges raised the laborers’ awareness of their rights, as testified by the surge of lawsuits filed by the workers against their Chinese employers. Together with legal brokers, such as professional writers and law student interns, the wedera courts effectively came to mediate relations between the local workforce and expatriate management, and relations between Ethiopians and Chinese more generally, often in favor of the former.1 To the consternation of the Chinese employers, the damages awarded to Ethiopians in court kept rising. The Chinese managers failed to understand, or were reluctant to admit, the origins of the Ethiopian laborers’ perceived ingratitude or the assistance local workers received from courts and town administrations. The attitude of local state institutions went against their ideas of the developmental state and its role in stimulating economic growth. In mainland China, construction consortia often form strong coalitions with municipal and county governments (L. Zhang 2010). The latter are expected to create a favorable business environment, to mediate relations with the local workers, and, in some cases, to assist with labor recruitment and surveillance (Kim 2013). Legal and civic authorities in southeastern Tigray, however, did not appear to be prepared to support Chinese enterprises in their ventures. On the contrary, Chinese employers found that they were hamstrung, and their attempts at assisting development routinely curtailed.

Victims of the law It was Berihun Desta, a young lawyer employed by the Ethiopian Roads Authority, who made me realize that the Chinese had become the victims of their own laborers or, perhaps, of their own practices. One morning in March 2012 I escorted him, together with a consultant engineer, to Mekelle airport via the old Italian-built route through the mountains. Berihun had stayed in the consultant compound for a week to settle two court cases. As a lawyer for the Ethiopian Roads Authority, he dealt chiefly with right-of-way cases; that is, cases regarding compensation for the annexation of private property, such as crops and houses, to make way for the road. He had come to Mehoni, where the consultant and contractor’s compounds were situated, to finalize what he called “unfair cases.” Some Tigrayans, in his eyes, were claiming (p.134) unreasonably high compensation. They often disagreed with the amount of money offered by the Ethiopian Roads Authority for a house, a tree, or a fence that had to make way for the road and would submit their case to the zonal court in Maychew. This then required Berihun to come in person from Addis Ababa. He talked about one case he had dealt with, in which a local resident

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Entangled in Lawsuits had asked for ETB 75,000 for, in Berihun’s words, “a pile of stones” (not yet cemented) that was just 7 meters long and barely 1 meter high. “A 20-meter-long cemented wall would not come near this amount of money.” “But the Ethiopian Roads Authority usually wins,” he added placidly. We wound up and down steep slopes, looking out over barley fields. The mountains were much greener than the plain along the first section of the project road. It was evident to Berihun that the Chinese were involved in a great number of labor cases dealt with by the local courts, and this struck him as a problem. “The Ethiopian Roads Authority normally supports the victim. If laborers are being mistreated, we stand behind the laborers.” But in this case, he explained, the Chinese had become victims. “Why?” I asked. “Local courts often rule in favor of locals. They know that the Chinese do not obey the law…. We strongly advise the Chinese to observe the Ethiopian labor law. The contractor is not the problem. It is the subcontractors that do not listen.” He did not blame the Chinese. “Here [in Tigray] the courts have become biased to the extent that the judges do not keep strictly to the Ethiopian law anymore…. They look in one direction.” It was not rare for contractors to be summoned to court, yet the number of cases in this region was exceptionally high. The situation was complex. On the one hand, there was a clash between national and individual interests. This was clear from the right-of-way case described by Berihun. “If one has to choose between the road and his farmland everybody would make the same choice,” a Chinese engineer put it. Conflicting state and local interests are common in road construction in Ethiopia, China, and elsewhere. However, in this case, clashing interests were intensified by regionalism and ethnic sentiments. Familiar with the process of litigation, which has a long tradition in the Ethiopian highlands (see Levine 1965), residents from the region did not hesitate to defend their interests against the federal state and the expatriate employers. They expected the state to act in their favor. The ruling party originates from Tigray after all. Whereas Berihun and his colleagues were Amharas, the government and the Ethiopian Roads Authority’s board of directors were largely of Tigrayan origin—a difference that arguably accounted for the fact that the claims of Tigrayans were particularly high. “The Ethiopian Roads Authority is scared of the people in this region,” the chief surveyor of the Ethiopian consultant once remarked. (p.135) The fiscal losses suffered by the Chinese subcontractors varied. Among the Chinese subcontractors on the project, Qimo Construction had been receiving the highest fines in court. This Fujian private company had lost about ETB 1 million during the first year of the project alone. “In the beginning our company did not have a clue about Ethiopian labor law,” admitted Li Hang, Qimo’s interpreter and assistant manager. We sat down at one of the wobbly wooden tables in the dining hall of the company’s compound at kilometer 14 when she spoke up. It was just after the usual lunch time. All the other employees had left for an afternoon nap. Chickens pecked about our feet in search of scraps. “But we have learned our lesson. Ethiopia is a democracy. Local people are keen on going to court. They think we Chinese have a lot of money. They only need three witnesses, and [they] win their case. Ethiopians defend Ethiopians.” Qimo’s executive director had initially refrained from hiring a lawyer, afraid that the commission fees would cost more than the potential damages awarded to complainants by the court. Lawyers who spoke Tigrinya, the language used in courts in Tigray,2 could ask for anywhere between ETB 5,000 and 7,000 in fees per case. That was steep enough. In addition, the lawyers were also Tigrayan, which meant the Chinese largely distrusted them. Even so, as the number of charges against the subcontractor increased, the executive director realized that he had no

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Entangled in Lawsuits option but to hire a lawyer. From then on Qimo employed a part-time lawyer. The young Tigrayan man had come fresh from Khartoum, where he had completed a graduate degree in law. He was fluent in English and the only person to appear on the building site wearing a suit. After our belated lunch, Li Hang showed me around Camp 14, which was situated next to Ta’a village on the flat section, between Alamata and Kukufto. The courtyard was situated in front of a row of prefabricated houses, which had been transferred from Camp 86 to push forward the building work at the Alamata section. It was filled with scrap metal, broken concrete pipes, bent steel bars, and dump trucks awaiting repair. A corrugated iron structure accommodated the kitchen and the dining room. The toilets in the back corner of the compound were surrounded by bright yellow meadow flowers. Li Hang slept in the women’s bedroom at the far end. On the white wall of Li Hang’s bedroom hung a list of unfinished court cases: the first column containing the names of individuals who had sued the company, grouped by occupation (e.g., ordinary laborer, mason, excavator operator); the second column showing the names of potential witnesses; and the third column listing claims made, most of which exceeded ETB 10,000. Next to this list was another piece of A4 paper, filled with drawings of little (p.136) suns and corresponding dates from the calendar. Li had used a pen to color in the suns and signify the weather: a dry work day would be represented by a fully colored sun, while rainy mornings or afternoons warranted only half-suns. Li Hang explained that Ethiopian workers were quick to claim wages for days on which they had not worked because of rainy weather. Using this table, she could refute the workers’ claims. According to the staff members in the project department, the damages they paid in court had to do with the company’s poor management of Ethiopian employees. “Drivers of Qimo steal.” “Guards of Qimo steal everything they can lay hands on.” Rumors like these spread like wildfire. But the contractor and other subcontractors like Wuhe Construction and Duyin enterprise were also entangled in lawsuits, as the growing number of cases concerning Chinese enterprises and individuals in Raya Azebo Wereda Court attested. Raya Azebo Wereda Court had not dealt with cases involving foreign nationals before the arrival of the Chinese in Mehoni. Since the start of the project in 2008, 99 cases of a total of 7,805 concerned Chinese enterprises or individuals. In 98 of these cases the Chinese had been taken to court and charged chiefly with the violation of labor rights. In only one case had the Chinese contractor sought redress after eighteen truck tires were stolen from the storage shed next to the Huang De’s car workshop. The theft was revealed when the police spotted young men at daybreak, hurriedly rolling tires over the new tarmac road in the direction of Mehoni town. One of the guards was accused of having organized the theft. The case dragged on, as the main witness, the security guard, was also a suspect. Between September 2011 and March 2012, Chinese nationals were involved in as many as 59 of all 1,108 cases. The lion’s share of these court cases concerned labor issues and had been filed by laborers after having been dismissed by their Chinese employer. The workers had claimed unpaid wages, severance payment, and other kinds of damage restitution. “The Chinese fire workers without cause or warning,” explained Yared Terefe, staff member of RCE, who dealt with lawsuits in wereda courts in Mehoni, Alamata, and in the zonal court in Maychew on a frequent basis. “The judge typically calculates a few months of salary and various amounts of compensation for transport costs, holidays, and overtime. He specifies this in a list. This happens in 90 percent of cases.” Yared was about to leave for Alamata to find out which subcontractor had lost the lawsuits for which the Raya Alamata Court had deducted funds from the contractor’s bank account with the Alamata branch of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia. The Page 4 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits bank statements did not indicate which subcontractor had lost the cases in question. The Chinese were, after all, seen as constituting one company. The sum of ETB 33,261 had been deducted on November 2. The sums of ETB 12,650 and 12,315, deducted on November 15, 2011, had probably been (p.137) transferred to individual workers who had sued their Chinese employer after dismissal. Bank withdrawals like these could be ordered by the courts, including wereda courts that were not immediately situated along the project road. This meant that cases ended up as far away as Chercher, southwest of Mehoni, representing workers from regions farther afield. The lax attitude of Chinese management toward Ethiopian labor regulations upset legal authorities. “The Chinese think they can dismiss someone who arrives too late at work,” said one of the judges who worked at the Raya Azebo Wereda Court. “They just don’t care about their Ethiopian employees. It is a huge problem.” Low-level Chinese managers had been ordinary workers themselves in China; few of them took an interest in local labor rights and regulations. Moreover, for those with work experience in the Chinese construction industry, road construction in Ethiopia was perceived to be primitive, poorly organized, and unregulated. As a result, the low-level managers did not necessarily feel the obligation to work or act according to rules that they would have respected in China. To put Chinese management’s motivation in context, it was not until 2008 that a robust labor law came into force in mainland China. The 1995 Labor Law had excluded migrants from the countryside, which led to the widespread exploitation of their labor. That said, lack of respect for and interest in legal regulations is contrary to the increased awareness of legal rights and protections that scholars have noted among rural migrant workers in China (Lee 2007). Managerial decisions based on personal whim and rules made on the spot cast the Chinese managers in a bad light. In the eyes of Ethiopians, the attitude of Chinese management was perceived as a lack of respect toward Ethiopian society more generally.

A Chinese reading of Ethiopian labor law Chinese managers routinely complained that Ethiopian labor law was biased toward rank-andfile workers and that it jeopardized management’s attempts to organize labor efficiently. By extension, Ethiopian labor regulations were seen as impeding economic development. Few Chinese had actually read the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation. Their objections to the law were chiefly based on the growing number of lawsuits filed against their companies. Chinese labor practices in Ethiopia were largely founded on established practices, that is, on what management saw other Chinese companies do, rather than on law. Thus, disregard for Ethiopian labor regulations on the part of Chinese management was a recurring issue. This did not apply to labor law alone but to legal documents in general, including the project contract and specifications. The deputy project manager once contended that the contract documents were all Latin to him. Ethiopian (p.138) consultant engineers appeared to be much more aware of legal regulations and better versed in articulating their rights or those of the Ethiopian Roads Authority in legal terms. Asphalt plant operator Dai Tianhan forwarded to me a translation in Mandarin of the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation. Dai had been employed by Golden Roads from the outset and had taken up the task of administering company documents, which he filed in the desktop computer in his cabin, a small space filled with cigarette smoke and heavy metal music. This document originated with the Serdo-Afdera road upgrading project and was, I assume, though cannot state with certainty, produced by its project department. The translator was not mentioned. Dai received the document, which must have been in circulation on at least three road projects, after Page 5 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits his arrival in Mille, Afar Regional State, in 2007. The translation seemed to be aimed at educated Chinese middle-level managers. At the time I had skimmed the document and put it aside without paying much attention to it. Only as I began to delve into Ethiopian labor regulations more deeply once I had returned from the field did I discover that a significant number of articles based on the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation No. 42/1993 or Ethiopian Labour Proclamation No. 377/2003 were missing. Rather than adapting their labor practices to the law, it seemed as if the translator of the document had adjusted the law to Chinese labor practices. Tellingly, the missing articles hint at what were considered sensitive issues by management and offer a great deal of insight into labor relations between Chinese managers and Ethiopian workers on the ground. The original Ethiopian Labour Proclamation consists of 193 articles. Only 48 articles appear in the Chinese document. The translation begins with Article 11, which stipulates regulations in regard to the probation period of workers and leaves out completely Division One (Articles 4–8) of the employment contract. The missing articles define the terms and conditions of the employment contract, which must be generated in written form and contain the name and address of the employer, as well as the name, age, address, and work card number of the worker; the type of employment; the rate of wages and, as described in missing Articles 9 and 10, the type of contract (e.g., for an indefinite or definite period of employment). In practice, Chinese companies, subcontractors in particular, failed to draft written employment contracts. Their employment relations with Ethiopian staff were often based exclusively on verbal agreements. At the time of my stay at the asphalt plant, Golden Roads did not offer employment contracts to Ethiopian employees. A simple worker profile, drawn up by Dai, provided confirmation of employment with the company. The profile included a black-and-white photograph taken with Dai’s webcam, the name of the worker in Chinese pinyin—as in YiLiMa (p.139) (Yilma), SaLaMan (Solomon), HaTuLong (Haftu)—a signature, and a red fingerprint of the employee’s index finger. The following line, where one would normally state one’s age, was mostly left blank. Chinese management had little clue about the ages of its Ethiopian employees. A line stating the month and year of commencement of the job (not the exact date) followed and, at last, the type of job. Workers did not receive any documents stating that they were employed with Golden Roads. The worker profile sheets— three profiles fitting onto a single page— remained in the sole possession of the immediate employer. In case of other subcontracting companies, such as Qimo Enterprise, workers’ timesheets were the sole evidence of their employment status. The absence of employment agreements for Ethiopian employees was common. Most Chinese managers, I sensed, considered the absence of contracts for Ethiopian workers perfectly normal, despite the fact that they themselves had received labor contracts. The color bar appeared to normalize disparities in employment security. The third part of the Labour Proclamation stipulates regulations in regard to wages and mode of payment. Here, too, the Chinese version is selective about which articles it includes and which it leaves out. Below is Part III of the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation. The articles left out of the Chinese version appear in gray, the ones included are in black.

PART III. WAGES

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Entangled in Lawsuits Chapter I. Determination of Wages 53. General. (1) “Wages” means the regular payment to which the worker is entitled in return for the performance of the work that he performs under a contract of employment. (2) For the purposes of this Proclamation, the following payments shall not be considered as wages: (a) overtime pay; (b) amount received by way of per-diems, hardship allowances, transport allowance, transfer expenses, and similar allowance payable to the worker on the occasion of travel or change of his residence; (c) bonus; (d) commission; (e) other incentives paid for additional work results; (f) service charge received from customers. 54. Conditions of Payment for Idle Time. (1) Unless otherwise provided for in this Proclamation or the relevant law, wages shall be paid only for work done. (p.140) (2) Notwithstanding Sub-Article (1) of this Article, a worker shall be entitled to his wage if he was ready to work but, because of interruptions in supply of tools and row [raw] materials or for reasons not attributable to him was not able to work. Chapter II. Mode and Execution of Payment 55. General. Wages shall be paid in cash, provided, however, that where the employer and worker so agree, it may be paid in kind. Wages paid in kind may not exceed the market value in the area of the payment in kind and in no case may exceed 30% of the wages paid in cash. 56. Execution of Payments. (1) Unless otherwise agreed, wages shall be paid on working day and at the place of work. (2) In case where the payment mentioned in Sub-Article (1) of this Article falls on Sunday or a public holiday, the day of payment shall fall on the preceding working day. 57. Payment in Person. Unless otherwise provided by law or collective agreement, wages shall be paid directly to the worker or to a person delegated by him. 58. Time of Payment. Wages shall be paid at such intervals as are provided for by law or collective agreement or work rules or contract of employment. 59. Deduction from Wages. (1) The employer shall not deduct from, attach or set off the wages of the worker except where it is provided otherwise by law or collective agreement or work rules or in accordance with a court order or a written agreement of the worker. (2) The amount in aggregate that may be deducted, at any one time, from the worker’s wages shall in no case exceed one-third of his monthly wages. 60. Keeping Record of Payment. (1) The employer shall keep a register of payment specifying the gross pay and method of calculation of the wages, other variable remunerations, the amount and types of deductions, the net pay and other relevant Page 7 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits particulars, unless there is a special arrangement, on which the signature of the worker is affixed. (2) The employer shall have the obligation to make the register accessible, and to explain the entries thereof, to the worker at his request. (3) The fact that a worker has received without protest the net amount indicated on the register shall not constitute waiver of his right to any part of his wages that was due.

The missing articles are critical. Chinese employers conformed to Articles 55–58 but failed to specify the gross pay and method of wage calculation (Article 60). Moreover, they did not record the amount and types of wage deductions. As we have seen, this failure led to widespread worker discontent on payday. As was the case with most labor issues, Chinese managers typically located such discontent in the natural disposition and greed of Ethiopians rather than in their own management practices. Management (p.141) only reflected on its employment practices after they had lost court cases, and then they altered these practices so as to protect the company rather than the worker. Only Article 61 of Chapter I (Hours of Work) of Part Four (Hours of Work, Weekly Rest and Public Holidays), which stipulates that the number of work hours cannot exceed 8 hours a day or 48 hours per week, appears in the Chinese translation. The regulations on the reduction of hours by the employer are, however, missing. Article 66 on the general terms of overtime is included— but not, however, the circumstances in which overtime work is permissible (Article 67): when there is an accident, force majeure, urgent work, or to substitute absent workers on work that runs continuously without interruption. Otherwise a worker may not be compelled to work overtime. Article 68 on overtime payment is included, perhaps because of the numerous court cases on this issue. Workers were sometimes asked to work up to 11 or 12 hours per day, despite set restrictions on number of work hours a day under standard salary regulations. For the extra hours the employers should pay workers in line with the overtime rate—as stated by missing Article 69. In practice, most Chinese employers failed to do so. Occasionally, workers were rewarded in kind. Once, the Chinese manager of the all-Ethiopian company encouraged his workers to continue working until midnight to finish a box culvert before the forecasted rain the next day. He offered qollo (toasted barley), a bottle of Coca Cola, Sprite, or Miranda, and an ad hoc cash gift of ETB 100 to each worker. Wages were calculated per day rather than per hour. As a consequence, laborers rarely received overtime payments. The working day was long, especially when a particular structure had to be finished before nightfall or an asphalt section completed before forecasted rain. The Ethiopian Labour Proclamation prescribed that work carried out in addition to the regular 8 hours per day should be considered overtime. The hour overtime rate was 1.25 times the regular hourly rate for work carried out between 6 o’clock in the morning and 10 o’clock in the evening. In the case of work carried out outside this time frame, the hourly rate had to be multiplied by 1.5 (Article 66). When work was carried out on weekly rest days, that is, on Sundays, the hourly rate was to be multiplied by 2. Sundays were not only rest days by regulation but also by Orthodox Christian belief, which made the employer’s insistence on working these days particularly sensitive.

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Entangled in Lawsuits For similar reasons, Part Four of the Labour Proclamation was contentious. Chinese companies kept to a 7-day working week. As a result, Ethiopian laborers were not granted rest days unless they asked for a day off. A rest day was, by definition, unpaid. Ethiopian construction companies worked on Sundays on other road projects, I was told, only if there were outstanding (p.142) works to be completed. Otherwise they took the day off. Anxious not to waste time at the cost of productivity, Chinese management was preoccupied with time management, according to the Ethiopians. Whereas Chinese managers used to think in terms of timed labor—the time that was needed for labor—and organize labor within set time frames around daily fixtures, Ethiopians were more task oriented. Divergent ideas about how to use time productively are common in work settings, but they should not be understood as absolute (Cooper 1992; Thompson 1967) or in binary terms of modern versus traditional or productive versus unproductive (Atkins 1988; Parry 1999; Smith 1986). Chinese managers typically perceived their own arrangement of time as rational and efficient and that of Ethiopians as irrational and inefficient. The Ethiopian engineers, by contrast, criticized the Chinese for taking the value or use of time to be more important than the task ahead and, for that matter, the quality of road. Materials inspector Meze Negus noted: The Chinese don’t follow our instructions. They are more interested in time, you see. What they see is time. They don’t care about the instructions. What they want is to finish the work on time. That is a problem. They have so many issues [conflicts and quarrels] with the consultant staff, even when I just arrived…. If they are scheduled to do something, also if the condition is not good for work, they just work, to work on time. For example, if there is moisture in the soil part. They should wait until it will be dry. The Chinese will not follow that instruction. They simply say, “I should work, I should work,” and so they should work. (Ethiopian materials inspector, male, June 27, 2012) Chinese managers organized work around daily fixtures, such as meals and rest time, including the afternoon nap. Ethiopian workers often poked fun at Chinese punctuality. “Mr. Ding, no lunch go?!” sniggered one worker when it was a few minutes past 12 o’clock and his manager had not yet left for lunch. In contrast, the Ethiopian workers and managers of subcontractors arranged their meals and rest time around work. Lunch or dinner was consumed after a certain task or road section was completed. As a result, their meal times fluctuated. The rigid time regime of the Chinese contractor occasionally clashed with the work rhythm of the Ethiopian subcontractors. Conflicting notions of time and temporal reckoning caused misunderstandings that sometimes led to quarrels on-site. Once, an Ethiopian subcontractor from Addis Ababa was working on the compaction of the base course layer. The crew continued until the section was finished, whereas the Chinese supervisors had hurried off for lunch around 11:30 to reach the compound in time for lunch, starting at noon sharp. When the representative of the project management came back at (p. 143) 14:30, the Ethiopian crew had just finished work and was having lunch in the shade of a roller machine. Following a number of tests by the Chinese materials engineer, it turned out that part of the section failed to meet the required compaction ratio. The subcontractor had to redo most of the section as a result and did so grumbling. If the Chinese had been on-site between

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Entangled in Lawsuits 11:30 and 14:30, they could have flagged this problem earlier and reduced the cost to the subcontractor. Starting from Article 69, the following two chapters on weekly rest and public holidays are completely omitted from the Chinese version:

Chapter II. Weekly Rest 69. General. (1) A worker shall be entitled to a weekly rest period consisting of not less than Twenty-four non-interrupted hours in the course of each period of seven days. (2) Unless otherwise determined by a collective agreement, the weekly rest period provided for in sub-article (1) of this Article shall, whenever possible: (a) fall on a Sunday; (b) be granted simultaneously to all of the workers of the undertaking. (3) The weekly rest period shall be calculated as to include the period from 6 p.m. to the next 6 p.m. 70. Special Weekly Rest Scheme. (1) Where the nature of the work or the service performed by the employer is such that the weekly rest cannot fall on a Sunday, another day may be made a weekly rest as a substitute. (2) The provisions of sub-article (1) of this Article shall be applicable to the following and similar activities: (a) work that has to supply the necessities of life or meet the health, recreational or cultural requirements of the general public; (b) essential public services such as electricity, water, communication, transport and similar others; (c) work which, because of its nature or for technical reasons, if interrupted or postponed could cause difficulties or damages. 71. Work done on weekly rest days. (1) A worker may be required to work on any weekly rest day only where it is necessary to avoid serious interference with the ordinary working of the undertaking in the case of: (a) accident, actual or threatened; (b) force majeure; (c) urgent work to be done. (2) Subject to the provisions of Article 68(c), a worker who, by virtue of the provisions of this Chapter, works on a weekly rest day, shall be entitled to a compensatory rest period; provided, however, that he shall be compensated (p.144) in the form of money if his contract of employment is terminated before he is granted the compensatory rest period.

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Entangled in Lawsuits 72. Application. (1) The provisions of this chapter shall not apply to commercial travellers or representatives. (2) The Minister may issue directives determining the special application of the provisions of this Chapter to workers who are directly engaged in the carriage of passengers and goods. Chapter III. Public Holidays 73. General. Public holidays observed under the relevant law shall be paid public holidays. 74. Non-reduction of wages. (1) A worker who is paid on a monthly basis shall incure [sic] no reduction in his wages on account of having not worked on a public holiday. (2) The payment of wages on a public holiday to a worker other than the payment mentioned under sub-article (1) of this Article shall be determined by his contract of employment or collective agreement. 75. Payment for work on public holidays. (1) A worker shall be paid his hourly wages multiplied by two for each hour of work on a public holiday. (2) Where a public holiday coincides with another public holiday or falls on a rest day designated by this proclamation or any other special law, the worker shall be entitled to only one payment for working on such a day.

Most Chinese subcontractors also worked on holidays, such as Epiphany and Easter, with Ethiopian New Year as an exception. In addition to annual festival days, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church celebrates monthly saints’ days, of which ordinary people honor only a few. On these days farmers refrain from work on the land and spend their time on household chores and social activities (Getachew 1998; Levine 1965). The fact that the Chinese companies continued construction work on holidays offended Ethiopians, workers and residents alike, who saw this as a sign of disrespect to religious power and Ethiopian tradition. On saints’ days like Saint Michael’s day, as we have seen in chapter 4, many workers called in ill or simply stayed away. Grumbling that Ethiopians celebrate too many festival days, Chinese management still could do little but accept these practices. Their complaints however resonate with a competing view held by many (urban) Ethiopians that the large number of saints’ days and the refusal to work on these days is unmodern and an impediment to national production (Boylston 2018, 39). Chinese Labor Law (2013) regulations on working hours and rest time are not significantly different. Article 36 stipulates that a working day should not exceed 8 hours and a working week, 44 hours (47), and Article 38 grants employees one whole rest day a week. If a company seeks to deviate from (p.145) these regulations, it requires permission from the Labor Administration (Article 39) (48). Employers are allowed to let their employees work one extra hour a day on a monthly average. For special reasons an employer can extend overtime to 3 hours a day, or 36 hours a month, only if the health and safety of the workers are guaranteed (50). The designated Chinese national rest days are New Year’s Day, the Spring Festival, National Labor Day, and October First, commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China. On these days employees must be granted rest (Article 40) (49). In Tigray the Chinese continued to work on most of these days, except for the Chinese New Year, even if they often celebrated other holidays with festive meals in the evening. Away from home, they did not have Page 11 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits family obligations. In part because of this, the Chinese migrants failed to recognize the value of Ethiopian holidays for Ethiopians, complaining about the many holidays that the locals celebrated. The articles under Chapter I (Preventive Measures) Part Seven on “Occupational Safety, Health and Working Environment” were missing too. These articles defined the employer’s obligation to ensure its employees’ health and safety. As noted previously, the failure of Chinese employers to supply their Ethiopian employees with work clothes and safety equipment was a bone of contention. In China, there are provisions in the Labor Law and the Construction Law (1998) to protect the health and safety of employees. Chapter 6 of the Chinese Labor Law (Zhongguo Renmin Gongheguo 2013, 57–61) stipulates the regulations in regard to “safety and sanitation of the workforce.” Article 54 requires the employer to provide sanitation measures and protection equipment and to arrange health examinations in case of occupational accidents (58). However, regulations on health and safety do not define employers’ concrete responsibilities. In this respect the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation is more precise. The missing Article 92 of the Ethiopian Labour Law states that the employer shall “provide workers with personal protective equipment, clothing and materials and instruct them of their use.” The articles on health-care payments to injured workers are the final articles of the translated version of the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation. The subsequent parts on labor disputes and trade unions do not appear at all in the Chinese translation. Chinese managers saw unionization and collective actions of workers against management, by definition, as illegal. It should be mentioned, however, that Ethiopian workers, too, failed to abide by certain labor regulations—equally due to ignorance. They resigned without advance notice and initiated strikes without informing their employer or the concerned government office (Articles 158 and 159 in the Labor Proclamation). For one thing, the dubious activities of one party were often a response to the equally questionable actions of the other party. Chinese bad practices caused workers to act in a comparable way to protest (p.146) or to protect themselves against managerial caprice. The above comparison of the Chinese translation of the Ethiopian Labour Proclamation and the Amharic/English version not only reveals the common bad practices of Chinese employers but also explains the ease with which workers, legal authorities, and brokers were able to find loopholes for legal counteractions against the Chinese to punish them for their ignorance.

In court On one morning in February 2012, the sound of rolling drums suddenly faded away at the asphalt plant. The workers had begun the day, as always, collecting empty bitumen drums from the previous day and rolling them to the residential compound, where they piled the drums up against the fence. The morning passed as usual. The kitchen assistant was the first to rise, to prepare breakfast for the Chinese crew, which usually consisted of steamed stuffed buns, rice gruel, or bouillon, along with little dishes of salted peanuts and pickled vegetables or vegetables left over from the previous day. Meanwhile, the cleaner watered the vegetable garden with the buckets she normally used for washing clothes. The cook was the last to get out of bed. His workday started with the preparation of lunch. Wang Taihe was busy doing chores, while Li Hongde made his way to the asphalt plant with his clipboard with workers’ time sheets under his arm, to find all the workers other than Bekele Negus, who was busy at the back of the plant, gathered outside the compound. The workers were embroiled in a debate. The guards stood back and watched from a safe distance. “Mindin new? Mindin new?” (What is going on?), asked Li loudly, trying to find out what was happening. Worku Lebna intervened and tried to translate

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Entangled in Lawsuits the workers’ demands to his manager using wild gestures. The laborers were demanding a pay raise. Li Hongde walked back to the office to discuss the issue with plant manager Liu Deye and the other Chinese crew members. The workers had not agreed as to how high the wage increase should be: some said ETB 5, others demanded ETB 7, a few had asked for ETB 10 on top of their daily salaries. Liu grumbled but remained composed. He sat down on one of the chairs at the desk island. Wang Taihe was pacing up and down the office. After a while, Liu Deye and his team settled on the following arrangement: diligent workers would receive ETB 3 on top of their daily salaries. The wages of the rest of the workers would remain the same. It was up to workers to decide whether they wanted to stay or leave, Liu clarified. Worku was called to the office to pass on this message to the workers. A few minutes later four laborers queued up in front of the office, and Worku summoned them inside, one after the other. The dogs were kept quiet by Wang Taihe. While waiting his turn, one worker in the queue started picking leaves off the lettuce and (p.147) cabbage in the Chinese vegetable garden. The others followed, nibbling at the vegetables in an attempt to provoke the Chinese, who in turn tried not to take offense. The laborers were visibly upset by the situation. Once in the office, those who had decided to leave received their outstanding wages and were told to sign a termination of contract statement (see chapter 5). They left the asphalt plant site, bewildered. Peace returned, until the early afternoon 2 days later, when I heard shouting coming from the office. Two men rushed out of the compound, chased by the dogs. A minute later Liu Deye came out of the office, muttering, “I almost kicked their buttocks.” He was waving a piece of paper in his hand, which he let Worku Lebna and a few workers read. The laborers giggled, whereupon Liu cursed. All he understood was that the letter, written in Tigrinya, summoned him to court. He was being sued by Mehari Tefere and Fikir Gebre, two of the workers who had regretted their decision to leave the plant. They had waited at the main gate the whole morning following the strike in the hope that Golden Roads would take them back. Liu Deye had stood firm and refused to reinstate them. The figure of ETB 5,700 in the text of the letter led him to guess that the complaint concerned a request for compensation, or a severance payment. Apart from the amount of money demanded, he recognized two dates: the dates the workers stated they had started working for Golden Roads. According to their worker profiles the two young men had been with the company for 8 and 3 months, respectively. According to the complaint both men had for worked 20 months for Golden Roads (or RCE, in their understanding). Liu was relatively familiar with court procedure, having dealt with it before. The first step was to set up a response to the charges in Tigrinya by visiting the legal writers stationed in little wooden sheds on the slope of the town hill in Mehoni. The wereda administration, the police, and the prison were located at the top of the hill. On the center of the hill stood a large umbrella tree, which provided a small patch of shade, as well as an outdoor canteen next to the police station, both serving as gathering places for people who were either waiting to be assisted by one of the institutions or who were simply killing time. Raya Azebo Wereda Court was situated at the foot of the hill, on the southwest side, facing the compound of the contractor and the consultant half a kilometer away. The Mehoni court consisted of three main buildings—one made of brick and the others of corrugated iron. Carved wooden sticks, or dulas, leaned against the trees at the entrance to the court. The dulas belonged to farmers, often elderly litigants, who came and went from court. A blue board hung above the gate, on which a yellow scale had been

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Entangled in Lawsuits painted in white letters with the words bét fird wereda raya azebo (Court of Wereda Raya Azebo). Wooden benches stood in the open space outside for people to sit while waiting. (p.148) One of the writers summoned Liu inside his wooden shack, which was fitted with a wobbly table, a law book, a pen, and two tiny stools: one for him, one for his client. A legal writer could charge as much as ETB 50, an amount that local people were often able to haggle down, ETB 2 for two folded, lined A3 pages and ETB 1 for a sheet of carbon paper. The writer advised Liu to request that the charge be dismissed. Without waiting for his client to speak up one way or the other, the writer began penning this response to the complaint. It was not clear how the workers had calculated the damage restitution, he explained. Mehari and Fikir had not stated that their claim even concerned a severance payment. Were the case to be dismissed, Liu Deye would still have to pay ETB 290 to cover the litigation expenses, which, according to the writer, was an acceptable amount. Without any further debate, the writer dashed off the response. Liu signed the document with his own name and the name of RCE, the contractor. He then took one copy to the courtroom, where one of the judges on duty put the piece of paper in a faded pink file; this file, in turn, landed on a large pile of other pink files, each consisting of a single case. A second copy of the response would go to Mehari and Fikir, to be handed over at the beginning of the hearing, and one was retained by Liu. Liu Deye failed to appear at the first hearing. He had confused the dates, as had the court archivist, who had mistakenly summoned Liu to court on Tuesday instead of Monday morning. When Liu Deye and I arrived late on the rescheduled date, we found a displeased judge at the front of the courtroom. Mehari and Fikir were silently sitting next to each other in the second row, with their arms folded. The judge made a comment about Liu’s failure to turn up at the first meeting then asked for the testimonies of both the workers and Liu Deye, which I delivered on his behalf. None of the parties had brought witnesses. After the testimonies the judge asked to see the evidence. Liu handed over the worker profiles and the termination of employment statements. Lacking a translation in Tigrinya, the evidence turned out to be invalid.3 Raya Azebo Wereda Court did not employ a translator. We were referred to the zonal court in Maychew. Liu was visibly irritated. He slouched in his chair, his facial expression betraying a combination of anger and boredom. He had gone to the trouble of donning his good leather shoes, yet he had refused to change his camouflage jacket for something neater. When the meeting ended, he walked silently out of the courtroom. Outside he cleared his throat and spat on the ground. He then proceeded to the project department back at the compound, to ask one of the local employees to translate the worker profiles and termination of employment statements into Tigrinya. Liu and I subsequently (p.149) returned to court with the documents and the translations, both of which disappeared into the same pink file. A week later Liu and I returned to court for the verdict. To our surprise, Liu won the case. The judge maintained that Mehari Tefere and Fikir Gebre had already ended their employment with the company by signing the termination of contract statement. They had received their salary up to the day of their resignation (or dismissal, in their understanding). Having done so, they were no longer entitled to ask for a severance payment. The signed statements had served as sound evidence on Liu Deye’s behalf and so won the case for management, even though the documents had been drawn up in languages that the workers did not comprehend. Chinese employers seldom won lawsuits of this kind. Would the judge have come to the same verdict had I not been present? We had no way of knowing one way or the other. Liu was astonished and glad but remained calm. He did not say a word in the car on the way back to the asphalt plant.

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Entangled in Lawsuits The wereda courts and other actors involved in the litigation process, such as the professional legal writers, functioned as a channel for Ethiopian workers and their Chinese employers to voice their demands. The writers, in effect, acted as legal brokers. They rendered litigation accessible to lay townsfolk, farmers, and Chinese managers, as they translated oral into written language, and colloquial into legal language.4 Assisting plaintiffs and defendants, the legal writers wrote up complaints and responses and were, as a result, able to exert a significant influence over the litigation process. Other legal brokers were student interns, like Petros Yonas, who studied law at Mekelle University and spent the summer of 2012 working in Mehoni, his hometown. He assisted farmers and uneducated town residents in their dealings with the police and the court, mostly free of charge or for a small tip. For Petros this was a way to gain practical experience in the professional environment in which he hoped to work after graduation. People like him made wereda courts accessible to everyone. Like the judges in court, the legal writers mediated relations between the Chinese employers and Ethiopian workers, mostly by assisting the latter to the disadvantage of the former. Chinese management generally complied with court verdicts and paid damages. Often only the threat of having to defend a case in court made employers compliant and willing to compromise and improve the workers’ employment conditions.

(p.150) The role of wereda courts Both the accessibility of wereda courts and the speed with which they dealt with civil and labor cases contributed to their growing role as a channel for negotiating and gradually improving employment conditions. In the absence of active trade unions and other institutions to support the workers’ case, the wereda courts became—together with town authorities—de facto mediators in relations between the Chinese employers and Ethiopian laborers. The wereda courts turned out to be much more effective in helping press Chinese employers to conform to labor regulations than the Ethiopian Roads Authority or their representatives on site, who were, as the surveyor remarked, afraid of the Tigrayan people. The cases waged in court put in motion a gradual improvement in the employment conditions of the Ethiopian workforce. Some Chinese workers even believed that Ethiopian workers got away with a better deal than them. Wuhe’s Lao Zhao, for instance, did not pay his Chinese employees overtime allowances, while he felt compelled to do so for the Ethiopian workers. He was rumored to make his Chinese staff patrol the compound and the construction machinery outside working hours and charged them if spare parts or petrol was stolen. Ethiopian workers were able to fight successfully for their rights when the Chinese were not. This is not to say, however, that the situation of Ethiopian workers was less precarious. On the whole, the employment security of the local workforce was much more tenuous in the face of regular lay-offs. Information on court cases and their outcomes spread rapidly by word of mouth. Workers across camps and companies informed each other about successful and less successful cases, and, in this way, workers came to learn about their legal rights and protection. However, the surge in lawsuits was also partly the result of a wave of instigation fueled by a mix of discontent and opportunism. Workers who had been successful in court—a worker could receive between ETB 5,000 and 15,000 in restitution—encouraged their fellow workers to try their luck as well. “They just get hired to be fired, whereupon they can sue us in court,” a Chinese engineer of RCE phrased it. Labor disputes were fought exclusively on the wereda level. Neither the kebele courts,5 nor the shimgelna, a council of elders that acts as arbiter in conflicts arising from land disputes, theft, and violence, was believed to have the authority to resolve interethnic labor disputes. The Abo Page 15 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits Gereb, another dispute settlement system in the Raya region that mediates interethnic conflict, most commonly between Tigrayans and ethnic groups from the neighboring Afar region (Shimelis and Tadesse 2008), did not play a role in (p.151) mediating these type of disputes either.6 Selected on the basis of age, skill in dispute resolution, and respectability, the elderly men of the shimgelna and the Abo Gereb are typically part of religious associations (Am. mahberoch, sing. mahber) that provide community support in Tigray and other regions across Ethiopia. These councils of elders listen to each disputant and ask each disputant to present witnesses. However, they lack the power to enforce decisions. They can, however, delegate cases to kebele or wereda courts. Wereda courts were recognized legal institutions and were permitted to deal with lawsuits that involved claims up to ETB 500,000, according to Berihun Desta. Apart from appeals, labor cases seldom ended up in zonal or supreme courts. In fact, appeals were rare at the time of research. For rank-and-file workers the costs of litigation, which included the expense of traveling to Maychew, were considerable, and this made the whole enterprise challenging and risky. The Chinese, too, commonly abandoned the idea of prolonging a court case with an appeal. I am not aware of cases involving Chinese nationals being brought before the shimgelna. When a young Chinese man hit a 10-year-old boy with a car, resulting in the boy’s sustaining a bruised and swollen ankle, the family of the victim suggested presenting the case to a shimaglé (elderly person). In the end the parties came to a compromise on a compensation fee and did not need the shimaglé to intervene. However, the traffic police, in an attempt to extract a lucrative bribe from the Chinese driver, threatened to take the case to court. The parties agreed on ETB 7,000 in addition to the medical costs already paid for but had yet to convince the head of the traffic police to refrain from a judicial process. Right-of-way issues emerging from the annexation of land and property for the road, on the contrary, were dealt with exclusively by the zonal court in Maychew or the State Supreme Court in Mekelle when the claims exceeded ETB 1 million. Lawsuits arising from right-of-way disputes fell under federal law and were filed by local residents and brought against the Ethiopian Roads Authority, which falls under the federal state. Workers who were slightly older and had received a secondary education, typically took their dispute to court. Mehari Tefere, who had taken (p.152) the initiative in the case described above, had finished 12th grade at a high school in Mehoni and aspired to go to university, yet dire straits kept him in his hometown. Having lost both parents, he had taken over the care of his little brother. At the asphalt plant Mehari had revealed himself a leader. Full of initiative, committed, and hardworking, he had become a role model for the other workers. His departure was a loss to the company and to the local workforce, which arguably made Liu Deye even more upset with the situation. He realized he had been sued by one of his best workers. After the court case I ran into Mehari. He regretted the course events had taken and hoped to return to work at the plant. He asked me to convince Liu Deye to reinstate him. “If only he had not caused so much trouble,” Liu replied resentfully when I raised the issue.

Facing antagonism of the local state The role played by the wereda courts and town administrations in mediating management-labor relations went against expatriate managers’ ideas about the role of the local state, ideas that were largely based on the Chinese model of the local developmental state. Since the start of the economic reforms in 1978, county and municipal administrations in China have played a leading role in boosting the local economy by supporting enterprises, especially those that bring in Page 16 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits investment from outside (Kim 2013). As they are permitted to retain and allocate a significant share of locally generated revenue, county and municipal governments have attempted to maximize revenue in order to spur local growth. To understand the views of Chinese employers in southeastern Tigray and their repudiation of the role played by wereda courts and local administrators by siding—as the employers perceived it—with the local workforce, I offer a brief account of the local developmental state in China and its emergence after state socialism. Under the planned economy of Mao Zedong, local administrative units were required to turn over most revenue to the upper echelons of political power (Oi 1999). Since the reforms, a major objective of the Chinese government has been to spur incentives to increase production at the county and municipal level by transferring responsibility for development to lower levels of government (Wu 2002, 1074). The government thus granted county and municipal governments more autonomy over the generation and allocation of revenue, a process that has been called fiscal decentralization (Kung, Xu, and Zhou 2013). Together with the implementation of the household responsibility system in 1981, which granted farmers land use rights and the autonomy to allocate their own labor, the fiscal reform prompted local governments to become economic actors (Chen 1998, 1137). As a result, they were able to shift investments and resources from one enterprise to (p.153) another or to use revenue for public works (Unger and Chan 1999), such as road construction. County governments are said to have played a key role in spurring economic growth in China (Lin, Liu, and Tao 2013; Oi 1999; Zhou 1996). Fiscal decentralization also initiated the delegation of national state-owned enterprises to local governments. In the infrastructure sector, branches of state-owned enterprises came to fall under the authority of provincial, municipal, or county governments. Jianghe Construction is a case in point; it was transferred to the provincial government of Heilongjiang in the early 1980s. However, once the central government saw the budget revenues of local governments growing, it introduced the tax sharing system to secure at least part of these revenues (Lin, Liu, and Tao 2013, 479). As a result of these changes, many local government-owned firms, such as Duyin Enterprise, were privatized during the enterprise reform in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Duyin was founded in 1987 as a county government–owned construction company based in Shouguang, Shandong. The company won its first big contract in 1998 when it took part in the construction of the Qing-Ji motorway (from Qingdao to Jinan), which crossed through the center of Shouguang. During the enterprise reforms Duyin was sold and turned into a private enterprise. Chen Delin, Duyin’s manager on this road project, estimated that in 2007 his company employed 170 to 180 people in China. Ethiopia was the first African country Duyin entered in that year, before Ghana in 2009, Senegal in 2011, and Uganda in 2012. At the time of research, the construction firm employed 230 people in China and 42 in Africa. Profits made in Africa have been invested in China. The close cooperation between local governments and construction consortia in China is not only the result of a developing state keen to spur economic growth. Enterprises involved in road construction have been mostly state-owned companies, comprising both local units authorized by provincial or municipal governments and central ministry-affiliated enterprises (Chen 1998, 715). Although the central government implemented project bidding for building contracts in 1984, competitive bidding (gongkai zhaobiao) in mainland China has not been as public (gongkai) as the name suggests, because of the blurred lines between client and contractor and the extensive negotiations that take place between client and tenderers (717).

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Entangled in Lawsuits Deng Chenghe, who initially came to Ethiopia with Jianghe Construction before he transferred to RCE, explained that the provincial government of Heilongjiang used to give preference to his former company in major provincial building projects. Guanxi, he asserted, played an important role in the allocation of construction contracts in China. This is also the reason why private construction enterprises cultivate ties with local officials up to the point that they become de facto state-owned companies, as one engineer (p.154) asserted. Jianghe has offices in the major cities in Heilongjiang. Deng Chenghe estimates that his company employs 12,000 people in China, of whom 2,000 are employed by the local branch in his hometown, Anda. More recently, however, Jianghe Enterprise has faced dwindling revenues due to the sharp decrease in building projects in China. With fiscal recentralization, local governments retained one important source of tax revenue, namely, business tax, which consists of taxes levied mainly on the real estate and construction industries. Fiscal recentralization caused a shift of focus from industrialization to urbanization (Kung, Xu, and Zhou 2013). As they were no longer able to extract revenue from state-owned and town and village enterprises, local governments began cultivating new tax bases by attracting private (foreign) investment. Local officials who wished to attract and hold onto overseas investment developed tacit alliances with the expatriate entrepreneurs operating on their soil (Solinger 1999, 280). Jaesok Kim (2013) demonstrates how the expatriate managers of a Korean multinational garment corporation in Qingdao, Shandong Province, cultivated close cooperative ties with county government and village officials at the factory location. The officials offered tax benefits, assisted in the recruitment of workers, and were involved in the supervision of labor by patrolling the Chinese dormitories outside the factory premises (167–90). These ties were, as Kim shows, not unproblematic, as local officials expected favorable treatment in return. In an effort to increase foreign investment, local governments sometimes even signed away part of their legal rights, such as taxation and high-level corporate supervision, in order to guarantee the smooth operation of foreign enterprises. In the eyes of many Chinese workers, local governments in Ethiopia did not seem invested in maintaining good relations with foreign enterprises. On the contrary, they were seen to be working against investment initiatives like those of the Chinese. “The situation is different in China. Local governments are keen to attract capital. Foreign companies will be welcomed as kings and the company premises treated as palaces,” explained Yu Bohai, enraged as he was by increased incidents of theft and the failure of the local government to counter pilfering. “If Chinese people would do something to a foreign enterprise, they will be punished for it.” This critique may seem ironic, given the strong case that Meles Zenawi (2011) made for the developmental state in Ethiopia. Along with Rwanda, Ethiopia provides the most notable attempt to realize the idea of a developmental state in sub-Saharan Africa, serving as an example of its applicability beyond East Asia (Clapham 2017, 2018). In underdeveloped economies, Meles Zenawi (2011) asserted, the neoliberal paradigm cannot bear fruit, and the developmental state provides a better alternative. He defined the developmental state as a state that has as its mission accelerated development, (p.155) which at the same time is its source of legitimacy. On the structural level, the developmental state, while retaining a degree of autonomy, attempts to guide the private sector with incentives and disincentives to make decisions in a manner that accelerates economic growth. Meles Zenawi’s analysis, however, focused on the central level of governance and did not elaborate on the role of local state institutions. In southeastern Tigray there was an obvious disconnect between the central and local state. The former seemed to

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Entangled in Lawsuits support the Chinese case; the latter appeared to dispute it in order to protect the local community. How then can Chinese management’s perception that the local state in Tigray was hostile be explained? The apparent antagonism derived at least in part from the alienation of wereda administrations from the road and its construction. The project road was a federal road and thus fell under the administration of the Ethiopian Roads Authority. The Wereda Rural Road Offices, which build and maintain exclusively DS-9 and DS-10 roads (earth roads with an average daily traffic of fewer than 25 vehicles), had no say in the planning or design of the federal roads. Neither could they decide on the allocation of resources or labor or intervene in various local issues that arose during construction. They were thus not only left out of the decision-making process but also poorly informed about it. DS-9 and DS-10 roads are built using mostly voluntary community labor. Before a wereda starts building a new rural road, its representatives go to the affected kebeles “to create awareness among residents of the use and value of the road,” explained Halefom Mulugeta, director of the Raya Alamata Wereda Rural Road Office, and to ask communes to contribute labor and resources. Although the veto remained with the wereda administration, kebele committees were incorporated into the decision-making process. With respect to federal roads, like the road project of this study, incentives from the federal government failed to trickle down to the local level because of a lack of communication or sheer neglect of local authorities by the central roads authority. Over the course of the project, the wereda administrations did, however, manage to push through a number of design revisions, such as the construction of a 1-meter broad central reservation in the built-up sections of Alamata and Mehoni, the provision of an asphalt layer on junctions with feeder roads, and an alteration of the vertical alignment of the Adiqey section— although not to an extent that satisfied the local residents. General discontent with the lack of participation and say in decision-making processes translated into dissatisfaction with the road, in particular with the design and the quality of the construction work. Officials complained about the width and the color of the asphalt, which was light rather than dark gray and so quickly came to look dirty. The sloppy work of the contractor was seen as proof of Chinese indifference to the road and its quality. (p.156) On March 29, 2012, the resident engineer was standing on site in the pouring rain when he received an emergency phone call from the director of Ethiopian Roads Authority’s Design and Build Department in Addis Ababa, who in turn had received a call from a regional government representative in Mekelle, who had received a phone call from an Alamata town official, who had informed him that the newly laid asphalt of the Alamata section had been washed away. The director was, naturally, concerned about this allegation and sought to verify the report. Nothing about these rumors turned out to be true. This incident, however, illustrates the implicit and at times explicit critique by local authorities of the road. That said, the lack of cooperation on the part of town authorities can also be understood as a form of conscious resistance. The authorities’ antagonism also derived from more general anti-Chinese sentiments, which in turn were largely based on disapproval of Chinese labor practices and their poor treatment of local residents. Indeed, residents and workers were part of the same tight-knitted community networks.

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Entangled in Lawsuits That the civic authorities themselves opted for the legal route caught Chinese by surprise. When a heavy trailer was unable to drive up a slope at kilometer 77 because of shifting sand, it slipped, slid down, and toppled over, blocking the road for more than a week. Wuhe had been carrying out earthworks on this section after construction blasting was finished, but it had left too little space for traffic to pass on a steep, slippery grade. Local officials notified the contractor that they considered taking the case to court. This incident was one of many. Civic authorities often threatened the contractor with going to court if traffic flow was curbed as a result of construction work, to the consternation of the Chinese contractor. This would never happen in China, I was told by Chinese engineers. Such threats exacerbated Chinese perceptions of wereda courts and town administrations along the project road as uncooperative at best and hostile at worst. The Chinese felt victimized not only by their local workforce but also by the civic authorities. They blamed the Ethiopian Roads Authority and the regional government in Mekelle for inaction. “Please tell the Ethiopian Roads Authority how difficult the locals make it for us to carry out our work. Mister [Hakim, head of the department of Ethiopian Roads Authority] still does not believe me,” the project manager urged me, assuming that an outsider’s voice would carry more authority. He believed that his own complaints to the Ethiopian Roads Authority had met with no response. Not surprisingly, then, the Chinese thought they stood alone, and this perceived antagonism led to repeated expressions of self-pity. Liu Deye, for one, believed that everyone should know about the hardships endured by the Chinese in Africa, including readers of the New York Times. Notes: (1.) Wereda courts are courts operating at the wereda level of administration. They stand above kebele courts, which are often classified as social courts, and below zonal courts, such as the court in Maychew. In addition to these official courts, there are a plethora of customary dispute resolution organs, of which the most common is the shimgelna, a council of elderly. I will return to this below. (2.) Since Ethiopia is a federal state, every regional state is allowed to name its own ethnic language as the officially recognized language, to be used in all regional state institutions. (3.) All written and oral evidence in foreign languages was to be provided to the wereda courts with a translation in Tigrinya. (4.) It is unclear what the illiteracy rate was in this region. Enrolment rates for primary schools in Tigray are, at 92 percent, high in comparison with other regions in Ethiopia. However, this rate is lower in rural areas. Illiteracy rates were much higher in the past. A significant proportion of the older generation was illiterate. Moreover, the enrolment rate for secondary education is low: 37 percent for 9th and 10th grades (15–16 years) and 9 percent for 11th and 12th grades (17–18 years) (Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Education 2012, 76). (5.) Kebele courts are not part of the state court system and are typically referred to as social courts. They deal with property and monetary claims up to ETB 5,000 (Girmachew 2010). (6.) There are many customary dispute resolution mechanisms in the Raya region, and Tigray and Ethiopia more generally. Apart from the shimgelna and the Abo Gereb, priests and sheikhs play an important role in dispute settlement of family-related conflicts. The Raya community is said to prefer traditional dispute resolution over the formal justice system (Shimelis and Tadesse 2008). However, in dealing with Chinese employers, local residents bring disputes to state Page 20 of 21 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Entangled in Lawsuits courts. Customary dispute settlement bodies cannot enforce decisions. The failure to abide by decisions made by the shimgelna and the Abo Gereb can bring shame and guilt or may lead to ostracism. Disconnected from local community structures, the Chinese were by and large immune to moral punishments. State courts, on the other hand, can and did enforce court decisions.

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Speaking Bitterness

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Speaking Bitterness Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords Unmet expectations inspire narratives of bitterness among Chinese road builders. These tales of suffering, however, derive not only from the obstacles they face on the construction site, but also from their backgrounds as sons of peasants who are struggling to cast off their rural backgrounds – migrants who are forced to move overseas to climb up the social ladder in China, and men who seek to gain respectability as sons, husbands, and fathers. Their hopes of fashioning Ethiopian laborers are intricately linked to expectations regarding themselves. The bitterness reflected in their tales derives as much from their predicaments abroad as at home. Yet speaking their bitterness also has a positive twist and fulfills a crucial function. Juxtaposing conditions of victimhood with collective strength in enduring these conditions, the narratives offset self-pity by celebrating perseverance, lending workers the strength to carry on. Keywords:   Bitterness, narratives, expectations, peasant workers, social mobility, futures

We face a lot of difficulties. The suzhi of local people is so low that we have trouble managing them. Petrol theft is very serious. The labor law is partial toward local people. Local courts do not rule justly. We are entangled in lawsuits. Moreover, most of these lawsuits we lose. We are unable to speak rationally. There is no place for reason. The economy of this country is very unstable. The exchange rate changes frequently and is very capricious. The risks our company faces are extremely high. We are often short of supplies and everywhere there are severe price hikes. It is impossible to budget costs. Because local people possess a lot of guns, safety is hazardous. The minds of black workers are rigid. As soon as they are not able to think calmly, they shoot off their gun. It is a risky business for our company. In China it is impossible for individuals to carry guns. This way it is very safe. I have heard that in other companies, black people have killed Chinese. —Project manager, male, September 28, 2011

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Speaking Bitterness Project manager Xie Yang’s account is representative of the migrant narratives I heard during my field research in Ethiopia. Expressive of both sorrow and ire, these narratives sought to explain the limited success of Chinese projects or spoke to other hardships endured. Like Xie, many narrators pitied themselves, while blaming the other. Alluding to the hostility they felt, their stories spoke of Ethiopians as thwarting, or worse, sabotaging Chinese goodwill. Yet other narratives had a less defined antagonist, such as the burning sun, the Spartan living conditions, or loneliness and isolation. In this chapter, I seek to unravel the migrant narratives of suffering in order to learn more about their narrators. I am interested in the origins of suffering—eating bitterness (chiku)—itself as well as the origin of narratives of suffering—speaking bitterness (suku)—that circulated in daily life on the construction site and in the residential compounds. What precisely was the bitterness these migrants ate? Where did the bitter taste come from? And why did the Chinese workers feel the need to speak out to coworkers, Ethiopian consultant engineers, and the foreign ethnographer about the hardships they endured? For one thing, the bitterness the Chinese spoke of provides a window onto their hopes for the future as much as it is revealing (p.158) of their position in southeastern Tigray and in China, as well as of China’s shifting place in the world.

Eating bitterness The hard work of the Chinese overseas and their ability to eat bitterness is historically and culturally anchored in the figure of the coolie, a term that is reminiscent of the Chinese word for a person who carries out ku li (bitter work). The Chinese character ku translates into “bitter,” as in the taste, as well as “sorrow” or “pain.” In Africa, Chinese coolies followed in the footsteps of African slaves as indentured laborers. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Chinese were put to work in the gold mines of southern Africa, on the sugar plantations of Madagascar and Mozambique, on the tobacco plantations in German East Africa, and on colonial railway projects across the continent (Snow 1988, 41, 45, 46), mostly carrying out tough physical labor. Although modern Chinese workers have not yet cast off the image of the coolie, few Chinese on infrastructure projects in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa carry out ku li in the traditional sense of the word. They are usually employed as managers, overseeing local laborers who perform the actual building work. Nonetheless, the image of the coolie persists in the popular imagination. This is not surprising, given the fact that many of the contemporary Chinese migrants were ordinary laborers back home, belonging to the first or second generation of peasant workers who carried out what they called “blood-and-sweat labor” (xuehan gongzuo) in sweatshops and on construction sites across China. They now also frequently rolled up their sleeves to work alongside Ethiopian workers. The idiom “eating bitterness” is commonly construed as undergoing and overcoming suffering by biting the bullet. It is understood as a means to an end. Eating bitterness, in the eyes of Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, would ultimately pay off. It was underpinned by strong hopes for a more comfortable life in the future; a life free of grunt work. But if bitterness no longer consisted of undergoing physical hardship per se, what exactly were the tastes of bitterness that these workers swallowed? For one thing, it was a newly developed flavor inherent in their marginal position in an increasingly affluent China. They had tasted the new prosperity and comfortability, but could not enjoy it, let alone indulge in it. In order to maintain the lifestyle they had created for themselves in China, they were forced to continue work overseas.

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Speaking Bitterness In everyday narratives, however, bitterness was commonly related to the perceived dullness of work and the loneliness of life in Ethiopia. Chinese workers typically compared their camps to a prison and their life in Ethiopia to life in jail. One RCE surveyor noted: (p.159) Our scope of activities is, apart from the building site, this compound. There are a few people who are a bit older and like to go for a walk. We might play basketball, table tennis, watch a movie, play a video game, eat, sleep…. Our scope is just within a couple of hundred meters by a couple of hundred meters. It is like a prison. In fact, it is a prison. We cannot move. We are just inside. If you do not go out [to the building site], you are just here. Consultant office, our office, like today: consultant office, our office. That’s it. The prison is that big. Only, you can go out for exercise and fresh air as you wish [suiyi fangfeng]. (Surveyor, male, June 17, 2012) Not only the restriction of physical mobility but also the monotony of daily life heightened a feeling of seclusion that contributed to their bitterness. Compounding the prisonlike sense of isolation was the fact that the workweek was a full 7 days. As a Chinese manager of a stateowned enterprise in Sudan says about his expatriate personnel: I truly admire the Chinese workers toiling abroad. They can endure hardships, hardships that people in China cannot imagine. The weather is so hot, there is nowhere to stay, the only place for them to work hard on the construction site. They work 7 days a week, for more than 10 hours every day. After coming back to the compound, they have to stay in a bunker, no fun. The most stressful thing is that at 5 in the dark they are picked up by car and taken to work, and they return at 11 o’clock in the evening. Like moving in circles; they work like machines. (Nanfang Zhoumo, July 25, 2007) Using the metaphor of a machine for the repetitiveness and monotony of work and life in Africa, the manager gives weight to his argument that Chinese workers abroad know how to eat bitterness. The depiction of the machinelike life of Chinese workers in Africa also captures the loneliness they feel. Asphalt plant manager Liu Deye once caught me by surprise when during lunch he suddenly put down his chopsticks and said, “You know, the evenings are really lonely. No wife, no child, no parents.” He used the sleeve of his camouflage jacket—that he wore open to give his belly space —to wipe the pearls of sweat off his face and stood up to leave the dining room in silence. Liu Deye had a 15-year-old daughter and a wife, who lived in with his parents in a small town in Liaoning, in northeast China. Occasionally he spoke to them over Skype. Yet contact with his family decreased when his accountant Gu returned from her annual holidays in China. On the day of her arrival, he put on his best clothes and suede navy shoes. Despite his turbulent yet long-lived love affair with Gu, Liu remained plagued by a feeling of loneliness, torn between two women, two living places, two continents. In the summer of 2012 he asked for early leave on the basis of health issues that remained unclarified. His superior attributed these ailments to stress. None of his crew members expected Liu to return to Ethiopia after the 2 months of leave in China that he was granted to improve (p.160) his health. But he

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Speaking Bitterness did return to Ethiopia in the end, after the general manager in China had enticed him back with a lucrative pay raise. The road builders cited their inability to harvest the fruits of their productivity as another factor in their sense of seclusion that contributed to the bitterness they ate. “There is nothing to spend my salary on” was a much-repeated grievance. Consumption in post-reform China fosters individual desires and social networks (Davis 2000), and consumer products and tastes have become important markers of status in a society in which social class is no longer defined by the workplace or political orientation of an individual but by her power to consume (e.g., Y. Yan 2009; L. Zhang 2010). The centrality of consumption in present-day China accounted for the unfulfilled wishes of migrants in Ethiopia to spend their recently earned income. Power to consume, realized rather than unrealized, was moreover a measure of distinction that differentiated Chinese employers from Ethiopian employees, signifying the relative wealth of the former. It furthermore revealed the growing affluence of Chinese and manifested its newly gained glory, or guangrong. Their lack of opportunity to consume, by extension, symbolized destitution and threatened to put Chinese workers on a par with their Ethiopian counterparts. The inability to consume was exacerbated by the lack of entertainment and opportunities for sociability. The only female employee of RCE explained about her male colleagues: The hardship they [Chinese in Ethiopia] bear is that this place is like a prison. You cannot go anywhere. And there are no recreation facilities, like the cinema in China, or Karaoke TV. The hardship is that everything is dry and dull [kuzao], but normal things like food, clothes, accommodation, and so forth, are all okay…. If you earn 10,000 CNY in China, you cannot save it. But if you earn 10,000 here, you can save it all. So there are advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, to live in a camp like this, I think that locals envy [them]. I remember once, one of the people from [Mehoni] court came to visit the camp. He said he really liked our offices. And then I realized, ay, I felt really sorry. All of a sudden, I felt that I was very lucky; but there are too many bugs here, they are stinging me all the time. (Human resource manager, female, May 21, 2012) Many compounds did have recreation facilities, especially those of the Chinese state-owned companies, which included a karaoke set, a satellite TV, a table tennis room and a basketball court. Entertainment was, however, associated with going out. Respondents contended that there was nothing worth going out to, or going out for, except a glass of beer or Axumite (Ethiopian wine) mixed with Coca-Cola in a local bar, or “to look for women in town.” For some, women in fact did constitute a welcome distraction, mitigating the loneliness they felt in the absence of their family members. However, in contrast to the rumors, only a handful of Chinese migrants (p.161) ventured into more permanent relationships with Ethiopian women. A few Chinese occasionally solicit local prostitutes, but most evenings were filled with playing video games such as Defence of the Ancients or watching palace dramas about the court intrigues of Imperial China and Martial Arts series. Love or sexual affairs between Chinese men and Ethiopian women were the exception rather than the rule. Unlike the hardships traditionally associated with the lives of coolies, entailing physical exhaustion and privation, the bitterness that these migrants spoke of was related to their inability to experience the urban middle-class lifestyle they had acquired in China since moving to Ethiopia. They felt disconnected not only from friends and family but also from the comfortable lives they would or could have been living at home. Nonetheless, they were acutely Page 4 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness aware of the fact that work in Ethiopia, and the income earned there, was essential to keeping up their newly won lifestyle in China. The hopes of transforming their lives at home that had driven them to Ethiopia now required them to continue to work overseas with an eye to fulfillment.

Speaking bitterness Chinese migrant narratives of suffering are reminiscent of the practice of suku promoted by the Chinese Communist Party in the first half of the 1950s, the early days of the People’s Republic of China, when the government pushed for land reform (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1992; Rofel 1999). Suku sessions, in which peasants were encouraged to speak up against their landlords, were set up by the party. As a form of ritualized suffering (Schwarcz 1997, 126), speaking bitterness was aimed at raising class consciousness. The peasants were made to believe they could overcome their oppression by speaking out about sorrow and suffering; in this way they could rectify their oppressive situation. Suku sessions had the power of transforming stories of personal suffering into collective narratives (Farquhar and Berry 2004, 116). Elizabeth Perry has called suku emotion work, as it was a method of mass mobilization that spoke to shared sentiments (2002, inspired by Hochschild 1979). Vera Schwarcz (1997) perceives eating and speaking bitterness as moral practices that are distinctly Chinese and locates their origin even earlier in history. She shows how in the thought revolution initiated by the May Fourth Movement,1 suffering had gained a certain didactic value. “The sour (p.162) taste of ku became a source of positive insight” (126). This idea resonates with the migrant narratives here. Learning to suffer or training the spirit to endure hardships is held to be one of the positive aspects of moving to Africa. Accountant Zhou Deyi, who likened his experience in Ethiopia to an exercise in bearing hardships, explained, “After you have experienced this kind of harsh environment, after you have probed it, you will enhance your knowledge, … which again gives you power. You will not only understand them [locals] better, you will also get closer to them. In other words, in the future you will be more able to eat bitterness.” Of course, the practice of suku of the early socialist period is different from the migrant narratives of suffering. The former was choreographed and specifically used as a political instrument, whereas migrant narratives, even if they are just as repetitive and formulaic, appear to be more spontaneous and are initiated by the narrators themselves. The stories nonetheless have a political edge, although one that is more implicit. By speaking bitterness, the migrants made subtle statements that sought to arouse compassion for their fate of being, in their words, “pushed to Africa.” They also denied their responsibility in what they viewed to be the partial failure of their activities in Ethiopia. As such, they were an implicit call for respect and empathy. The collective rather than the individual moral significance of the suku practice also reverberates in speaking bitterness in Ethiopia. Migrant narratives, however, are based on national rather than class sentiments that are shared across occupational strata—from on-site foremen to high-level managers in head offices in Addis Ababa. Notice, for instance, in the opening quote to this chapter, that project manager Xie Yang uses the pronoun “we” to refer to the Chinese in Ethiopia, or more broadly, in Africa. The pronoun indicates not only the shared dimension of the experience of suffering but also that the Chinese were all facing the same obstacles. The idea of a common, if vaguely defined, challenge or enemy helped to cultivate solidarity and boosted a sense of national pride.

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Speaking Bitterness Narratives of bitterness thus expressed a yearning for empathy for the hardships they endured in Ethiopia. Xie Yang was, in his words, “pushed to this country” to save a road project that had been going badly over the course of 2 years. “Now we have come, we should stay and take the rough with the smooth. I did not expect that carrying out projects in Ethiopia would be so difficult,” he continued. “But no matter what, we have to carry on. We cannot become deserters, right?” Xie had 17 years of work experience in the road-building sector in mainland China, having worked in Jiangsu, Hebei, Guangxi, and, most memorably, Hainan. Transplanting himself to Ethiopia start anew. The cultural movement addressed a wide variety of social issues. For an excellent discussion of the May Fourth Movement and its aftermath, see Rana Mitter’s A Bitter Revolution (2005). (p.163) was an order, he emphasized, not a choice: “I was appointed the post on my death bed.” For Xie Yang this mission was an opportunity not so much to see more of the world as to remain working in a sector he had come to love. Nevertheless, a year after I first met him, Xie Yang resigned from his position. This meant that he quit his profession altogether. He was one of the few engineers who returned to China. Upon return, he relocated to Shenzhen and started a jewelry business that he ran up to 2017, when I last contacted him. He evaded my question about whether business was going well. Xie had nonetheless accomplished what most Chinese workers still dreamed of achieving. He had become his own boss. Other Chinese interlocutors expressed similar feelings of bitterness. The attitude that one should “take the rough with the smooth,” as Xie Yang put it, was common. Dealing with whatever circumstances they might confront was viewed as simply part of the Africa experience, and it was a minor price to pay for the ultimate goal of saving for a deposit on a house in China. Individual stories, then, were naturally linked to collective experiences. Shared life stories (at home) and shared migratory experiences connected the migrants emotionally and socially and led to the collective dimension of speaking bitterness, expressed in terms such as “we” or “we Chinese.” Recall Liu Deye’s request that I inform the New York Times about the hardships that “we Chinese” suffer in Africa. The narratives typically juxtaposed conditions of victimization to collective strength in enduring those conditions. Self-pity, then, was offset by a sense of heroism and the celebration of toughness and perseverance, character traits that my interlocutors readily attributed to themselves. “Chinese in Africa know how to eat bitterness,” was a common refrain. Ultimately, many held they would be able to overcome obstacles posed by the host community. An unpublished article written by project manager Gu Hongyang, who had sent me the piece at the start of my fieldwork, with the title “We Will Never Give Up Our Cohesive Capacity,” reflects this attitude. Presented as a reflection of and a guide to road construction overseas, the piece expounds on the difficulties RCE faced over the course of the road project, such as the challenges posed by design specifications, the construction of the infamous bridge crossing the seasonal Hara River—nicknamed the “China-surprise bridge” because of the surprisingly long period (nearly 4 years) it took to complete the bridge—and the prolonged periods of rain in 2011. The project manager offers suggestions as to how to overcome various types of adversities. One should act in unison, he convinces the reader. Referring to the popular Chinese movie Assembly about the Chinese Civil War, the project manager speaks of misfortune, combat, and ultimate victory. To overcome adversity, one has “to be bold in showing the sword” and to proceed with clear “tactics.” Gu ends on an optimistic note: “At present everything has (p.164) appeared to turn out for the better. We have changed the bugle call to assemble that has not yet

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Speaking Bitterness blown a bugle call to attack into a counter-attack in a decisive battle!” Primarily addressing his colleagues and party members in other parts of Ethiopia and in Beijing, Gu strikes a tone reminiscent of the Communist propaganda discourse of another era. He depicts road construction overseas as a battle and the challenges posed by local conditions and the local community as the enemy. But, he concludes optimistically and with a sense of patriotic pride, Chinese perseverance will overcome adversities and lead Chinese workers to victory. In other words, eating bitterness ultimately leads to salvation.

Expectations and realities They don’t have the first idea what we are doing for them. Instead they bear grudges against us. You feel that … you feel that nothing is worth it. We came to assist in building up [the country]. We came to help to make this country prosperous [fanrong], richer and more powerful [fuqiang]. And we expect nothing in return for everything we do. Instead, you say we are stealing from you, and you hate us…. Everything we do is for you, but you think otherwise. You think that we are grabbing your resources and stealing your money. That is what really surprised me. (Civil engineer, male, May 31, 2012) Peng Gaofei had moved to southeastern Tigray in the summer of 2011, barely a month after graduating from college in Qingdao. He sought to free himself, as he phrased it, from social pressures at home. His primary motivation for signing a 5-year contract with his current employer, RCE, was, however, to get a better salary. Peng’s decision to move overseas to work had surprised his classmates and disappointed his family members. The initial response of Peng’s next of kin had been influenced by the common image in China of Africa as a place where one was bound to eat bitterness. Peng left his then girlfriend behind, who had started working for soft drink producer in Shandong, his home province, as well as his parents, who returned to farming when their son left for Ethiopia. Peng Gaofei’s account in response to my question about what had surprised him most after coming to Ethiopia is representative of the views of the Chinese migrants I met. Chinese engineers like Peng perceived their work in Ethiopia as benevolent. “China doesn’t care. We are only losing money here. However, with this road we can raise their salaries and stimulate their economy,” explained one foreman. There was a widespread belief in Chinese generosity, alongside their ardent faith in their ability to make Ethiopia prosperous and powerful, as Peng phrased it. On the construction site, however, I encountered a mixture of bewilderment, exasperation, and occasionally resentment. The Chinese road builders saw themselves as introducing (p.165) development in a region that, in their eyes, lagged behind, only to find their development ideal meet no response, or at least not the response they had hoped for all along. These unmet expectations reinforced their feelings of self-pity, sentiments that were bound up with their expectations of life more generally and their position in a rapidly changing society at home. Peng came from rural Shandong. His parents were subsistence farmers: “They grow what they eat,” in Peng’s words. When his son enrolled at university in the old port city of Qingdao, his father left the land to work in a town close to their home village. Juggling various odd jobs, he managed to earn an income that was enough to cover his son’s university fees and living expenses. When Peng moved to Ethiopia for work, he insisted that his father and mother “stay home to grow old.” His parents heeded his advice yet refused to touch their son’s income. Peng earned nearly USD 2,000, a starting salary that was much higher than that of most of his former Page 7 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness classmates. Only one other student of his civil engineering class had moved to Africa. He was employed by a privately owned Chinese company in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an experience that was, Peng deemed it important to emphasize, of a different order. “One year struggling at home and one year struggling abroad is not the same,” Peng commented once with a half-smile. “One year struggling abroad equals 2 years struggling in Africa. Five years abroad equals 10 years at home.” He was an optimist. Since his company provided a sought-after Beijing household registration, his grand plan, as he excitedly called it, was to buy a house in the capital for his parents. Most of Peng’s colleagues, who were generally a few years older than him, were more modest about their future plans; seldom did they call their plans grand. In search of respect and security, rather than prestige, they intended to buy a property in a city nearby their home village and achieve a moderately prosperous life. Having just turned 25 years old when I first met him in his company’s compound in Tigray, Peng Gaofei was sharp witted and confident, jovial almost. His neat jeans and polo shirts distinguished him from most of his colleagues, as did his active lifestyle. Peng liked playing basketball on the court in his compound, wearing borrowed sneakers, as his brand-new basketball shoes had been stolen a few weeks after he arrived. The Chinese migrants’ sense of being misunderstood and being trampled on was partly founded on the discrepancy between their initial expectations and the realities on the ground. They imagined Ethiopia would be stricken by poverty and chaos, anxiously awaiting Chinese assistance. Although Chinese migrants recognized the commercial nature of their endeavor, most of them invariably saw their projects in Ethiopia as benevolent. If anything, their companies—or the taxpayers in China who paid the African bill—were suffering financial losses. (p.166) Much like the Western development agents before them, Chinese migrants saw Ethiopian society as a neutral object of development (e.g., Escobar 2012; Ferguson 1994, 2006; Mitchell 2002). In fact, official narratives that have sought to distinguish Chinese development in Africa from Western aid by underscoring the mutually beneficial and collaborative nature of Sino-African relations mask the similarities between Chinese and Western approaches to, and experiences with, development assistance. Neither the chasm between their optimistic and, at times, presumptuous development narratives and the realities they faced on the ground is new, nor does the resentment that followed differ in essence. In reality, this chasm is a recurring theme in international development studies. Aid projects often do not work out as anticipated, as development policies—abstract, generalized, and simplistic—fail to fit complex and diverse societies (e.g., Crewe and Harrison 1998; Hobart 1993; Mitchell 2002). James Ferguson (1994, 15) identifies two meanings of development. The first casts development as an evolutionary process toward a more complex, civilized, and capitalist society. The second meaning of development concerns quality of life and is linked to levels of welfare. The latter definition, which is not strictly historical and processual but moral, Ferguson argues, came into vogue in the 1970s. The Chinese, too, deploy both meanings of development and apply them to individuals, societies, and nations. They have, for instance, long referred to their country as a “nation in the midst of development” (fazhan zhong guojia), suggesting that China has not yet reached the stage of so-called developed nations (fada guojia)—a term used to refer to countries in Europe and North America. By alluding to both China and African nations as developing, Chinese diplomats conceal the political and socioeconomic asymmetries between China and African countries, thereby justifying their investment initiatives as based on goodwill. However,

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Speaking Bitterness the contrasting reality of inequality and dependence continues to challenge the Bandung spirit of egalitarianism (Alden and Large 2011). There are three important parallels between Chinese and Western perspectives of development. First, both tend to conceive of development as a linear process: a tendency reminiscent of the classic modernization narrative (see, e.g., Frank 1966; Wallerstein 2011). However, interlocutors seldom explained the ultimate cause of underdevelopment in structural terms, which are those of a country’s or continent’s place in the world system and its dependence on more developed centers. Instead, they used agentive terms, describing underdevelopment as the consequence of citizens’ lack of effort and willingness to develop the self and society. Whereas the assumption that one can bring, implement, or introduce development to societies classified as underdeveloped has been partly abandoned by Western development agents, most of my Chinese interlocutors were staunchly convinced (p.167) that they could teach Ethiopians about development and the best ways to achieve it. The second parallel is the idea of the simultaneously omniscient and oblivious developer. Claiming to have superior knowledge over the people to be developed, the developer is in both discourses presented as an expert (Mitchell 2002). Indeed, to become an expert, the people to be developed have to be depicted as passive and ignorant, as we have seen in the previous chapters. Alberto Arce and Norman Long (2000, 37) argue that “the entire exercise [of developers] is to construct an objectifying optic, that comes to resemble nothing more than a ‘neutral’ engineer’s tool-kit in which reality is presented as predictable and subject to control.” Mark Hobart (1993, 16) introduces the concept of “obliviance” to describe the active ability to ignore alternative representations, while promoting one’s own point of view. The omniscient yet oblivious developer presents supposedly objective problems as existing externally from and independently of people and fails to take into account local variations and contingencies. Not unlike Western developers, Chinese workers failed to recognize themselves as social and political agents. The third parallel, as I have shown, lies in the tendency of Western and Chinese developers to universalize human motivation. Reflecting neoclassical economic discourse, individuals were assumed to make rational decisions based primarily on economic interests (Crewe and Harrison 1998, 36). Chinese management’s project of turning Ethiopian laborers into worker subjects, discussed in Chapter 4, was part and parcel of this process. Chinese workers were, however, aware of previous Western development assistance to Ethiopia. Some believed that the country’s stagnating economy was the result of Western aid, which was seen to have impeded the evolution of a capitalist spirit. This is somewhat ironic given the nature of Western structural adjustment schemes whose main objective was the introduction of a capitalist market in Africa. Some Chinese interlocutors held that Western development aid had negatively affected the mind-set of Ethiopians, having taught them to beg or “naturally hold out their hand and ask for money.” In other words, Western involvement in Ethiopia had cultivated greediness and indolence. From this point of view, African poverty was no longer the traditional poverty of the backward peasantry; rather, it was the unfortunate product of Western development schemes. Chinese workers in Ethiopia typically interpreted resistance to road construction as resistance to the higher cause of national development and modernity. Convinced that roads herald economic growth and prosperity, they were puzzled by the apparent lack of gratitude for them. Juxtaposed against Ethiopian indolence and ignorance, the Chinese can-do attitude reflected Page 9 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness their firm belief that one can change one’s fate through hard work. This conviction is manifested in the socialist catchphrase, “regeneration (p.168) through one’s own efforts” (zili gengsheng), which continues to ring true for present-day Chinese society, even if it has gained an individualist edge. Only those who were prepared to invest in the road and engage in its potential would reap its benefits (see Harvey and Knox 2012, 2015). The fact that the Ethiopians failed to acknowledge what was presented as a truism of the road’s potential led to lamentations by Chinese workers, who believed they were preaching to deaf ears. However, this disappointment in the discrepancy between their expectations and the less rosy realities alone cannot explain the bitter taste in the migrant’s mouth. To grasp the multiple tastes of bitterness, we have to turn to insoluble matters of recognition and respect.

From heroes to victims Narratives of suffering also originated from a perceived lack of recognition at home. Since socialist aid projects have made way for commercial infrastructure projects, the status of Chinese workers in Africa has been distorted from that of brave and noble representatives of the nation into greedy money seekers—those who go to Africa “to pan for gold” (tao jin). Indeed, Chinese road builders have lost their honorable title of expert (zhuanjia). Now they are somewhat pejoratively referred to as wage workers (dagongren) or migrant workers (nongmingong). This shift in the representation of Chinese in Africa as well as the value of their achievements can be attributed to the decline in the status of employment in Africa and, consequently, the low status of those who move there to work. Under Mao Zedong and in the early years of economic reform, as I touched upon in Chapter 1, engineers were chosen to go to Africa. Seen as serving the nation abroad, these migrants enjoyed a good reputation. State newspapers elevated Chinese experts in Africa into heroes by praising their courage and ability to eat bitterness. The following piece, excerpted from the Jiefangjun Bao (People’s Liberation Army Newspaper), speaks about the Chinese workers who built the Freedom (Uhuru) Railway running from the Zambian Copperbelt to the coastal city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the most prestigious Chinese infrastructure project in Africa at the time: The Tanzanian, Zambian and Chinese workers and engineers of the railway project worked closely together and supported each other to shoulder the struggle. They endured the blazing sun, fought against wind and rains, lived in straw sheds, slept on the ground and used whatever methods to cope with life on the site. They constantly improved their construction plans. They fought a battle against the weather and the earth, fearless of hardship, fearless of fatigue, fearless of adversity, fearless of danger…. They slept next to their machinery and made every second count, struggling (p.169) day and night to guarantee that the project would be a victory. (Jiefangjun Bao, July 16, 1976) While these Chinese workers were depicted as heroes, their work was presented as a combat— notice the word choice (e.g., struggle, fight, battle, and victory)—against a rather vaguely defined antagonist. The author typically draws on natural forces, such as the blazing sun, the wind, and the rain as metaphors of hardship, and accentuates the simplicity of life in Africa, referring to the sheds made of straw and sleeping on the ground, not least to underline the relative underdevelopment of the continent in comparison with Communist China. In these narratives, too, Africa figures as the antithesis of development and China. The article, however, Page 10 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness also emphasizes the mutuality of the enterprise and unconditional support between the Chinese and African workers, depicting the two as comrades. A comparable image is drawn in an article published in the state newspaper Renmin Ribao (the People’s Daily) in 1996, which reports on the China Road in Amhara regional state, the first road in Ethiopia to be built by the Chinese: The China Road is like a silver band flowing back and forth through the rift valley, leading around mountains and climbing over ridges. It runs over overhanging cliffs and strides across canyons. It makes me think of how Ethiopian friends described to me the Chinese construction workers at the time. They were not afraid of the hardship and the danger of high mountains and lofty mountain ranges. They split open the mountains and rocks [pi shan kai shi] on the 3,000-meter-high plateau, enduring difficulty in breathing at this altitude. It took 8 years of hardship, 8 years of blood and sweat to complete the imposing beauty that the Ethiopian people nowadays can see. The Ethiopians admire her [the road] and are moved by her. When it was complete the president of the country came over personally to inspect the road. He repeatedly expressed his gratitude to the Chinese ambassador Zhao Yuan of the time and to the Chinese government. A local farmer said, “Even a donkey cannot climb these sheer cliffs and precipitous rock faces, and a Chinese goes on top to build a road, could it be that they are sent by God?!” Of course, the Chinese were human beings, not gods. Because of this road, Chinese experts paid the price of fresh blood and lives. Three experts found their eternal rest in foreign lands and places far away from their homeland. I admired the cemetery at the foot of the mountain on one side of the road. The gravestones have their names engraved. Their spirits are a symbol of ChineseEthiopian companionship (Renmin Ribao, December 1, 1996) Note how the forces of nature, such as mountains, cliffs, canyons, and rocks, and even the air pressure, are depicted as antagonists; hardship is expressed in blood, sweat, and the sacrifice of life. The article has a patriotic ring to it, characteristic of Chinese state media. Note that only the Chinese (p.170) construction workers are described as mortal beings, of flesh and blood, not their Ethiopian counterparts, who are left unmentioned. A more recent article titled “In Africa” in the Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekly), a newspaper popular among Chinese intellectuals, uses a slightly different tone to depict the lives of Chinese in Africa. The author interviews a manager of the state oil company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in Sudan. Although the manager sets out using a tone similar to that of the media discourse discussed above, praising the mental and physical strength of his expatriate personnel, his tone changes in the course of his account, once the subject of his narrative shifts from “them” (his hard-working staff members) to “us” (his company or the Chinese in Africa in general): Sometimes we feel we cannot associate with local people very well. The local labor law is very dense and comprehensive [kehou kequan]. The provisions included in the contracts with black people are very detailed. Moreover, if something happens, the local trade union gets involved and wants to make trouble. It is not like in China. Once a black driver skipped work. I docked his salary. As a result, he took me to court. An oppositional faction Page 11 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness of the government of South Sudan sent the police to arrest me. But I was defended by a soldier from the northern government, who blocked his path. [We] do not dare to dismiss black people anymore. If someone has a reason [and can justify himself] we owe him a year’s salary. We are at our wit’s end with local workers who do not turn up at work. We are at a loss to manage them. Absenteeism, for instance. If the Chinese person in charge raises [this issue] it does not count. He has to find two black people who sign and leave a fingerprint who can testify that [the person in question] was absent from work. Only then is it effective. But witnesses are hard to find. Black people do not want to act as witnesses. (Nanfang Zhoumo, July 25, 2007) The suffering of the Chinese employees described by the manager resembles the suffering of victims, instead of heroes combating adversity to accomplish ultimate victories. His words fit into the discourse of suffering. In fact, the sentiments expressed by the CNPC manager employed in Sudan could equally well have been those expressed by my Chinese interlocutors in Ethiopia. By granting Chinese in Africa a voice, the author of the newspaper article demystifies the workers in state media of earlier times. The relationship between Chinese migrants and local Africans is expressed as being problematic and layered, and no longer presented as one of true comradeship. The devaluation of migrant labor in Africa—likening it to ordinary donkeywork rather than the nation’s Herculean toils—was paralleled by the devaluation of migrants and their suzhi in public discourse. This is echoed in Liang Jun’s explanation that Tsinghua University graduates no longer wished to go to Africa. In fact, Chinese companies in search of certified engineers aim at second- and third-tier universities when they recruit new personnel for overseas projects. Students from top Chinese universities would (p.171) rather go to Europe or the United States than “undergo hardships in Africa,” I was told repeatedly. It was those who came from villages who were pushed to Ethiopia.

Entering society Narratives of suffering were based not merely on quotidian experiences in Ethiopia. They were tied to deeper sentiments. Migrants regretted the very fact that they had to migrate to Africa. They were all clear about one thing: had they had the choice, they would have decided against the move altogether. Societal strain at home was construed as the main evil that drove young Chinese men, and to lesser extent women, to Ethiopia and other African countries, in particular, the pressure felt upon “entering society,” as they framed it, when society “required” them to get a job, buy a house, and find a marriage partner. Young men sought not only to meet the high expectations of their social environment but also to overcome their nagging insecurity. As Zhou Deyi, a 29-year-old accountant, put it: In China, there is a strong social pressure. There is no real social security. This means that if you are at the fringe of the crowd, life is really quite difficult. That is why Chinese have a kind of feeling of insecurity. You have to do your utmost to earn money. When you finally have the feeling that you have accumulated a certain amount of money, only then might you feel secure…. Why do you think Chinese are so hesitant to spend money? A lot of people are like this because of this reason. It is not because they do not want to spend money, … but because they want to leave themselves a secure life…. Medical insurance [in China] covers only a small part [of the actual medical expenses]. And medical costs in China are high. Page 12 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness Moreover, you want to make sure you buy a house before the house prices rise even further. I remember when I started my studies, one square meter in Xi’an cost about 1,000 to 2,000 CNY. At the time I graduated one square meter already cost as much as 3,000 CNY. When I went back [to China] last time, I discovered that the cost of one square meter had gone up to more than 7,000 CNY. (Accountant, male, June 7, 2012) Zhou Deyi had managed to take the first two steps, or strides, toward finding a job and buying a house. He had moved to Ethiopia in 2006, right after obtaining his degree in accounting from a college in Xi’an. During his 2009 summer holidays, he bought a flat in Yangzhou, in his home province Jiangsu, for CNY 4,000 per square meter. He had urged his parents to move into the new property, but they refused for reasons he fully understood yet accepted only with reluctance. His parents preferred to stay in their home village. “They are satisfied with their life as it is,” he mused. However, he wanted more from life, a well-paid and rewarding job and a house. “But,” he (p.172) sighed, “now I have a house, but still no wife.” Zhou was worried about his prospects of finding a wife, as were his parents. “But how can I find a wife here [in Ethiopia]?” Zhou Deyi, like many of his peers, draws a link between security, buying a home, and establishing a family. Real estate is a normal form of investment in China and is seen as life insurance in the absence of other reliable ways to invest in a future income. Furthermore, homeownership is significant in confirming a man’s masculinity and adulthood (Driessen 2015). The Chinese dictum “only when you have a house, do you have a family,” echoed by Zhou Deyi, speaks to this idea. “Chinese attach a lot of importance to the family…. Even if you are forward thinking, you will be pressured to conform to the mainstream.” Even if a woman accepts a man who rents rather than owns an apartment, her parents will not; and rightly so, according to Zhou Deyi, who bemoans but willingly accepts these requirements. “The parents think that you will not be able to provide [for their daughter] in the future.” Unable to look to kin for financial support, young male migrants perceive a home purchase as a major burden. Zhou Deyi grew up in rural Jiangsu, where his parents earned a living from breeding fish when he was a child. This profession, which had been passed on from his grandparent’s generation, provided an unstable source of income that his parents gave up when he was in high school. Zhou’s father moved to Yangzhou to take up menial work with a refurbishment company. Zhou’s mother stayed behind to look after her husband’s aging parents along with the land and the ducks and chickens. When Zhou moved to Africa, his father returned from Yangzhou to accept a job at a factory close to their home that produced street lights. Being unable and unwilling to rely on his father’s meager income, the main reason for Zhou Deyi to migrate, he admitted frankly, was to secure a higher salary and smooth the way to enter society. Zhou Deyi’s sentiments were shared by the older generation of migrants whom I met in Ethiopia: “If we don’t have security, how can we live? In China … you can distinguish yourself only if you have major talent. But there are very few outstanding people. Most people belong to the other category. They belong to the commoners,” the 43-year-old materials engineer Fang Lei explained. And commoners, he argued, will always be in search of security. “In fact, everything is about earning a bit of money,” Zhou explained to me. “If you give your employees [here] the same salary as employees in China, nobody would come here [to Africa]. Right? If I could earn

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Speaking Bitterness the same salary in China, why would I endure hardships far away in this remote place?” To my suggestion that people might be drawn to Africa out of curiosity, he replied: Curiosity? Students maybe, right after graduation. They may be curious. But if they have to enter society, this won’t be the case. In the current state of the country in China there is no social security. Ordinary people lack (p.173) security. Apart from those who have a lot of money. They are in a better position. Maybe a child from a rich family may not have to think about security and does not have this pressure. I am talking about ordinary families. (Accountant, male, June 7, 2012) Both Fang Lei and Zhou Deyi believe that most Chinese feel a lack of security. Zhou attributes these sentiments to “the current state of the country” (guoqing). The shift away from the socialist contract and the transfer of responsibility to the individual has enhanced insecurity among a large segment of Chinese society. Socialism in the cities guaranteed workers lifelong security. Socialism in the countryside was built on a strong and extensive network of social support, which has crumbled in the past two to three decades as a consequence of steady migration to the cities. Recent socioeconomic transformations have made both peasants and urbanites worried about social security, and how to finance it. Returning to China, though, had become more difficult. The saturated construction industry has left few job openings for an increasing number of engineering graduates and redundant employees (those who were xiagang, that is, without work yet not without an employer), let alone for returnees from overseas projects. This became more palpable and pressing over the course of my research. In the summer of 2017, when a new batch of engineers joined RCE, rumor had it that some construction consortia in China hired fresh engineering graduates to comply with government stipulations, only to subsequently make redundant, or even dismiss, their newly recruited brethren. What is more, the standards of road building were completely different. “As soon as you move to Africa—I mean to work, not as a tourist—there’s no way back,” sighed one company veteran. “Look at me. I’ve been here for 11 years. I’m a middle-aged man now. If I go back to China, I have to start from scratch. The FIDIC [International Federation of Consulting Engineers] standards are useless in China. They are completely different. Or perhaps I won’t start from zero, but at most from 13 years of age.” Despite waning employment opportunities and difficulties with professional reintegration, Chinese workers fostered hope that they will be able to go back home. Before their annual return flight to China, most of my interlocutors convinced me that this time they would stay in China. And yet they returned— almost all of them. Some had looked for employment opportunities at home, but when asked why they had come back in the end, they contended that they were unable to find employment or unwilling to compromise on a lower salary. The bitter reality was that the newly gained urban middle-class lifestyle required Chinese workers to stay in Ethiopia. As of yet, most of the migrants have been unable to reap, let alone taste, the sweet fruits of overseas (p.174) migration. Of course, I refer to a particular generation of migrants, a generation that finds itself in a state of suspension, stuck between China and Africa, between a rural past and an urban future, between enduring hardships and enjoying comforts, between deep insecurity and shaky security, between falling and climbing. Of Page 14 of 15 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Speaking Bitterness course, this generation is the child of China’s rapid economic growth and the radical societal transformations it has engendered in its wake. It is a generation that has greatly benefited from the economic and social opportunities a swiftly changing Chinese society has afforded them, and yet its members can scarcely enjoy the rewards. Notes: (1.) The May Fourth Movement grew out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting the government’s acquiescence to the decision, laid down in the Treaty of Versailles, to transfer former German concessions in Shandong Province to Japan. Its origin should, however, be located earlier in history. The collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 had sparked debates about whether China’s legacy should be used to address the contemporary crisis or whether it was necessary to abandon that social and cultural inheritance and

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Conclusion

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

Conclusion Miriam Driessen

DOI:10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords Chinese overseas workers at once represent and enact growing Chinese influence across the world. The bitterness they feel and narrate reveals the disputed nature of China’s engagement with Africa. Rather than being imposed, Chinese-led development in Ethiopia is contested, by Ethiopians and Chinese alike. Yet while Ethiopians assert their agency and challenge the power asymmetries intrinsic to the encounter, their Chinese counterparts, who are commonly presumed to set the standards of their engagement with Africa, lament their lack of agency in bringing their ideas of development to fruition. Indeed, the creativity and gumption with which Ethiopians, workers and non-workers alike, challenge Chinese authority reveals that they define their encounters with Chinese as much as they are defined by them. Keywords:   Development, standards, outcomes, negotiation, agency, leverage

Every day Hamid Mengesha stood in front of his house, motionless, with his hands folded behind his back, overlooking the building site. He lived along the Addis Ababa Ring Road under construction. His house, hidden behind tall juniper trees, adjoined the Debre Markos junction. Despite his ailing heart, which kept him from walking about, Hamid followed all the activities on the building site. Everybody knew him, and he knew everybody, he told me proudly: “Li, the grader operator; Alberto, the Italian consultant engineer; Sisay and Berhe, the inspectors.” He was an admirer of project manager Ding, who was always bustling about on site. “The poor man does not even have time to change his clothes,” Hamid remarked, smiling. Ding wore a black Adidas sports jacket with gold stripes on the sleeves and worn-out trousers. He drove a Futian, a Chinese pickup, which was devoid of all parts other than those needed to keep the vehicle on the road. When Ding walked by, Hamid gave him a nod. When he was in his thirties Hamid had fought for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front against the Derg regime. He came from Dedebit, where the Tigray People’s Liberation Front established its first military base. “It was a dark age,” he recounted. According to him, road construction in Ethiopia had only commenced with the establishment of the current government led by the

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Conclusion Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The man knew a remarkable amount about road building. I asked whether he had been an engineer. “At my age you know a little bit of everything,” was his modest answer. In fact, during the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s long march south, which ended with the seizure of the capital city in 1991, Hamid had supervised road construction, which involved creating passages and corridors for the militia. As the main thoroughfares were occupied by the Derg, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front had to clear its way through the inhospitable highlands of northern Ethiopia, using confiscated dozers, excavators, and dump trucks. Talking about the past, Hamid brightened up. Once he was interrupted by a local worker, gasping from running up the slope and pointing at his (p.176) water bottle. Hamid allowed the young man to fetch water from the tap at his house. “These boys are poor,” he said, “like the Italian engineer, who has come to Africa to work.” “And what about the Chinese?” I asked. “The whole world is in crisis. Europe, America, even Africa, except for China. The Chinese are not poor. They are 1.4 billion and all have something to eat.” If anything, Hamid was grateful to the Chinese and spoke enthusiastically about the infrastructural development in his district of Addis Ababa. Nonetheless, he fostered hope that the Chinese company working on the city’s thoroughfares would soon be replaced by an Ethiopian enterprise. He introduced me to his 18year-old son, who was in his last year of high school and dreamed of becoming an engineer. “Do you think the Chinese exert any political influence on this country?” I asked one afternoon. “I do not think so. They are just building roads. Look at the Chinese busy here. Look at Mr. Ding. Do you really think he has time to get involved in politics?” One of the main objectives of this book has been to provide an insight into the lives of the ordinary Chinese, such as project manager Ding, who make sense of, give shape to, and occasionally hijack Chinese involvement in Ethiopia. The mundane actions of workers like Ding or Li and their interactions with Ethiopians on the construction site cast a different light on Chinese activities in Ethiopia to reveal the discrepancy between the dominant narratives and quotidian practices—the hopes that the Chinese workers harbored and the bitterness they tasted. Certainly, Hamid is right in saying that the Chinese, hard pressed as they were with their daily concerns, had little interest in politics. They had moved to Ethiopia to work and build a better future in China. And yet their activities matter. Their daily engagements prove to be more political than they appear. To be sure, Ding and his colleagues represented, and, more importantly, enacted, China’s growing influence in the world. The bitterness they tasted and spoke of reveals the disputed nature of their country’s increased engagement in Ethiopia. Rather than being imposed, Chinese-led development is actively negotiated by Ethiopians and Chinese alike. For one thing, the Chinese workers saw themselves challenged by members of the local community, not least their own workers. Chinese actors, be they government agents or individual entrepreneurs, are commonly assumed to set the standards of their engagement with Africans, yet the vigor and success with which Ethiopian actors—from federal road authorities to rank-and-file workers and from legal authorities to local residents—challenged Chinese authority refute, or at least undermine, this assumption. The bitter response of Chinese workers to Ethiopian resistance and protest, rather, indicates the lack of agency they experienced in their engagement with the Ethiopians.

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Conclusion (p.177) However, the sentiments of Chinese workers in Ethiopia cannot be explained solely by their felt lack of ownership and respect. The bitterness they tasted is also linked to their position as children of peasants, struggling to cast off their rural background; migrants, who temporarily step down to climb up the social ladder in their home country; status-insecure subjects yearning for security in the face of rapid social and economic change at home; men who sought to gain respectability as filial sons, husbands, and fathers; workers who found themselves at the bottom of a corporate hierarchy, deprived of agency; successors of Mao’s engineers who no longer enjoyed a respectable reputation at home; Chinese citizens, who were acutely aware of their country’s shifting status in the world as superior to Africa. Interpretations of development and how to give it shape depend on the agents who translate development practices from one context to another. The Chinese arrive in Ethiopia, as they do elsewhere in Africa, with baggage. Their perspectives on development are shaped by official rhetoric, popular narratives, and personal experience, among other factors. To be sure, development is embedded, as are the agents of development, like project management Ding. Their notions of development, such as the commitment to self-improvement, the trust in collective strength, and the faith in upward mobility and asceticism as the principal way to achieve it, informed the Chinese approaches to labor. The Chinese managers attempted to fashion the Ethiopian laborers into worker subjects who were diligent, humble, and willing to submit to managerial discipline in the name of the advancement of the self and society as a whole. The transformation of Ethiopian workers and the improvement of Ethiopian society were seen to rest on notions of development that entailed a dual project of achieving material and spiritual civilization. The transformation of the built environment and that of the mind were part of the same trajectory, and it was expected to generate a more powerful and prosperous society. To management’s consternation, the Ethiopian workers were not nearly as subservient as the Chinese peasant workers who had arrived fresh from the countryside to take up work on the shop floors and the construction sites in the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing cities of late twentieth-century China. For one thing, Chinese managers, who had once occupied the lowest rungs of the corporate hierarchy themselves, lacked authority and credibility, not least because of their arbitrary, and at times fatalistic, management style. The strong belief in productivity and its rewards that they sought to instill in their workers found little traction. Chinese managers complained about lazy, unproductive, and inefficient Ethiopian workers. These lamentations, repeated ad nauseam, in fact served a crucial function. While seeking to speed up the building work and thereby keep costs to a minimum, incapable and indolent Ethiopian workers, or at (p.178) least in the Chinese portrayal of them, proved to be central in protecting the safe distance between “us” (Chinese) and “them” (Ethiopians), a distance that was meant to safeguard tenuous Chinese authority and justify racial disparities not only in the corporate hierarchy but also more generally on the global stage. Indeed, the construction site was a microcosm that represented broader geopolitical dynamics. From the start, remaking Ethiopians into disciplined workers was a Janus-faced project that could never be fully achieved if the color glass ceiling was to be preserved. The Ethiopian worker had to remain at least a little bit indolent, a little bit backward, and a little bit immature in order to protect Chinese expertise, managerial control, and the much higher wages that expatriates earned in comparison with the local workforce. The enforcement of labor discipline, then, not only targeted but also to a certain degree constructed the supposedly poor work ethic of Ethiopian workers.

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Conclusion Not only did Chinese managers expect the other to commit to self-development, they also trusted their subordinate compatriots to commit to the same ideal. In Ethiopia notions such as suzhi and wenhua that were taken as measures of spiritual civilization were deployed in value judgments about Chinese colleagues, who corrected or commented on each other’s behavior. The idea that development takes place or ought to take place simultaneously was a key idea transported from China and used in interactions with Ethiopian workers and Chinese colleagues alike. Protecting the reputation of the knowledgeable, diligent, and restrained Chinese was crucial to retain their credibility as harbingers of development. To the chagrin of high-level managers, some members of the Chinese community, in particular, the low-level managers of private subcontractors, grew increasingly intimate with members of the local community. They threatened to spoil the reputation of the Chinese by closing the social and physical distance from the Ethiopians, the very distance that project managers were intent on preserving. Nighttime encounters between Chinese men and Ethiopian women were feared to jeopardize managerial authority, and not only that. Sexual intimacy was believed to lead to a loss of integrity, as the quality of having moral principles and as the state of being undivided, more generally. Labor discipline, implemented by Chinese managers, was met by calculated indiscipline on the part of Ethiopian laborers. In practice, the disciplining of the local workforce had reverse effects. The tug-of-war that ensued between the expatriate management and Ethiopian workers on the building site was extended into the courtroom. The pushback from Ethiopian workers meant that Chinese management was forced to adjust contractual procedures, working hours, wage payment regulations, hiring and dismissal practices, and the punishments they meted out on-site. The remarkable leverage that Ethiopian workers had can be explained by their ad hoc alliances not (p.179) only with legal authorities, such as the judges of wereda courts and other legal brokers, who made the local workers aware of their rights and the expatriate managers of their obligations, but also civic authorities, who effectively legalized what might be classified as illegal practices, such as labor strikes and pilfering, through deliberate inaction. It caught Chinese managers by surprise that rather than safeguarding the interests of the employers, the authorities chose to side with the rank-and-file workers. In China, county and municipal authorities often support corporate management with an eye to boosting the local economy, sometimes with fatal costs to workers’ welfare and the environment. From the vantage point of the Chinese, the authorities in Tigray lacked such incentives for reasons they found difficult to understand. Where development required self-sacrifice and submission to management on the part of the workers, as they saw it, it also demanded commitment from the authorities in supporting enterprises to stimulate the economy. They expected both workers and the authorities to act in the name of productivity and thereby focus on the greater good of development. The supposed unwillingness of the Ethiopians to submit to this ideal was taken to testify to their lack of willingness to develop as a result. Bitterness was nonetheless offset by hope. Chinese workers brought with them a great dose of optimism to counterpoise a long tradition of Afro-pessimism. Having witnessed Chinese society metamorphose in a wink, their confidence in the ability to transform Africa and the lives of Africans is hardly surprising. Their confidence, then, is widely acknowledged, and rightly so. The Chinese have come to possess the capacity and the know-how to bring change—yet not necessarily on their own terms, as is all too often and easily assumed. (p.180)

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Conclusion

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References

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

(p.181) References Miriam Driessen

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Index

Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia Miriam Driessen

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9789888528042 Published to Hong Kong Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI: 10.5790/hongkong/9789888528042.001.0001

(p.194) Index aboriginal, 38, 77 Adama, 7, 20, 56 Addis Ababa, vi, 6–8, 18–20, 22, 24, 26, 35, 42, 49, 53, 58–59, 65, 67, 72, 86, 88–89, 114, 127, 134, 156, 162, 176 Addis Ababa Ring Road, 7, 24, 56, 58–59, 71, 117, 175 Addis Ababa City Roads Authority, vi Afar, 54, 88, 138, 150 African Union, 5 agency, 13, 29–30, 34, 176–77, 179; African, vii, 13, 78 agriculture, 7, 11, 23, 56. See also farmer; peasant aid, 7, 31–32, 84, 166–68. See also development Aksum, 20–21, 24 Alamata, 12, 20, 22–26, 89, 97, 128, 130, 135–36, 155–56 Arba Minch, 119 asceticism, 9, 17–18, 31, 100, 177 Asmara, 19 asphalt, 20, 24–27, 49, 51, 53, 62, 70, 86, 93, 98, 107, 114–15, 123–24, 127–29, 132, 138–39, 141, 146–49, 155–56 asymmetry, 3, 121 authority, 15, 46, 59, 63; civic, 15; legal, 12 Azebo, 22–24, 132, 136–37, 147–48 Bajaj, 25 Belt and Road Initiative, 16 benevolence, 1, 17, 31, 105, 116, 157, 166–67 biracial children, 16–17, 72–74. See also race bitterness, 47, 168, 176–77, 179; eating, 29, 40–41, 157–61, 164, 168–71; speaking, 17–18, 157, 161–64 boundaries (ethnic), 16, 46–48, 60, 68, 79, 80–81, 101–3, 115–17 building industry, vi, 4–5, 13, 92–95, 137, 173 Page 1 of 7 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Index building specifications, 9, 19–20, 26, 39–40, 128, 137, 163 building work, 1, 8–9, 18–20, 24–26, 48, 92–95, 115–16, 126, 135, 158, 177 camp, 8, 17, 25, 40, 45–47, 50–52, 58, 60–62, 71–72, 86, 89, 115, 122–23, 133, 135, 142, 146–47, 150, 157–60, 165 capitalist, 43, 54–55, 94, 130, 166–67 civilization, 11–12, 16, 36–38, 42, 48, 67, 178 civilizing mission, 16, 46–48, 115. See also civilization chiku. See bitterness Chineseness, 15–17, 60–64, 68, 79–81. See also nationalism colonialism, vii, 3, 12 color bar, 74, 87–91, 100, 139, 178. See also race color glass ceiling. See color bar community, 113–15, 121, 124, 129, 151, 155–56, 164, 176–78 complexion, 67–68, 72–76, 81, 85 compound, workers. See camp conflict, 27, 37, 73, 89–90, 97, 117, 126, 134, 142, 150–51. See also violence conformism, 28, 80, 172 construction material, 8, 48–49n2, 58, 84, 112: steel, 27, 39, 49n2, 135; cement, (p.195) 49n2, 63, 85–86, 106, 125, 134; stone, 6, 49n2, 85, 117, 125–26, 128–29, 134 construction sector. See building industry constructor, 11 consultant, 7, 18, 25–27, 39, 48, 52, 61, 86, 100, 122, 124–29, 133–34, 138, 142, 147, 157, 159, 175 contract, 19–20; employment, 35–36, 39, 43, 48, 50, 57, 87–88, 91–92, 107–9, 116, 121, 132, 138–40, 147, 149; project, 19–20, 25, 83, 124, 128, 137, 153 contractor, 5, 7, 16, 20, 25–27, 48–53, 59, 61, 88, 91, 93, 108–9, 114–15, 122, 127–29, 134, 136, 142, 155–56; subcontractor, 45–46, 48–52, 57, 63, 79, 84, 91, 93, 108–9, 123–24, 134–36, 142–44 control, 18, 30, 32, 47, 51, 63, 71, 79–80, 113–15, 118, 167, 178; self-control, 47, 51, 55, 98 sexual, 78; state, 92–93 conviviality, 60–63 court, 12n5, 13, 55, 71, 107–9, 132–37, 141, 146–49, 156–57, 170, 178–79; wereda, 12n5, 14, 108, 133–34, 136, 137, 147, 146–52, 179; zonal, 12n5, 134, 136 Cultural Revolution, 9, 56, 66 curfew, 71 customs (cultural), 36, 45–46, 60, 78n3, 101; customs (border), 114 daiyu, 15–17, 49–51, 53 Derg, 23, 75, 175 design, 20n7, 39–40, 49, 52, 127–29, 155–56; specifications, 9, 19–20n7, 163 desire, 3, 9, 11, 29, 34, 43, 65, 88, 95, 97, 103, 160

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Index development, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 16, 18–19, 28–29, 38, 41, 43, 46, 95, 96, 100, 103, 133, 137, 166–68, 176–79; self-development, 30, 42, 82–83, 98; underdevelopment, 41, 43, 68, 101, 169 development assistance. See aid developmental state, 133, 152–56. See also government Djibouti, 6, 52 diplomacy, 5, 7, 28, 32, 166 discipline (labor), 12, 14, 18, 45–46, 55, 60, 82, 94, 100–103, 104–7, 110–13, 116, 129–30; self-discipline, 47, 55, 100, 114–15 discrimination, 1, 12, 67, 91–92. See also color bar dismissal, 14, 45, 71, 107–8, 122, 137, 149, 178 draftsman, 33, 35, 39–40 dualism (us/them), 91, 101–3 economic growth, 5, 9–10, 28–29, 38, 83, 95, 100, 133, 137, 152–53, 155, 167, 174, 177 economic reform(s), 30–32, 67, 168, 173 education, 15, 31–32, 42, 47, 57, 59, 67, 84, 92, 95, 102, 149, 151–52, 172 employer, 4, 13–15, 20, 23, 25, 27, 35–36, 50, 59–61, 83–90, 104–6, 109–15, 123–25, 129–30, 132– 34, 136–37, 139–46, 149–52, 179 employment, 11, 31–32, 36, 45, 55, 57–59, 84–94, 105, 107–9, 121, 138–41, 168, 173; local, 83–89, 137; conditions, 65, 122, 130, 132–50; security, 15, 37, 50, 53, 55 encounters, 1–3, 13, 15, 47, 73, 81, 105, 116–17, 178; everyday, 1–3, 28, 44; nighttime, 65, 79 engineer, 6, 8, 24, 27, 127, 173, 175; Chinese, 4, 28, 32–34, 39–42, 46, 67, 79, 95, 113, 120, 156, 163–65, 168, 173, 177; consultant, 48, 61, 86, 100, 126, 133, 138, 175; Ethiopian, 24, 27, 86–87, 100, 142; resident, 26, 59, 124, 156 Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, 175 Ethiopian Revolution, 7, 75 Ethiopian Roads Authority, vi, 14, 19–20, 24, 48, 125–26, 128, 133–34, 138, 150–51, 156 Export-Import Bank of China, 20 famine, 23 farmer, 47, 127, 144, 147, 149, 152, 165. See also peasant fasting, 89, 89n3 feidi, 60, 61 (p.196) femininity, 77–81 festival, 61–62, 71, 74, 93, 97, 144–45 friends, 1, 27, 37, 62, 63, 72, 77, 86, 88, 98, 116, 118, 130, 161, 169; girlfriend, 164 friendship. See friends funerals, 118, 121 Gambella, 23 Gamo, 119 gender, 66, 70, 76–77, 81, 88, 101 gift giving, 9, 11, 60, 62–63, 141 Page 3 of 7 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Index God, 88–89, 97–98, 118, 169 goodwill. See benevolence gossip, 37, 47, 54–55, 66, 84 government; local, 12–14, 22–23, 152–56; Chinese, 4, 8, 10–12, 30–32, 48, 92–93, 152–56, 161, 170; Ethiopian, 5, 7, 12, 18, 22–23, 128, 133–34, 152–56, 175–76 gratitude, 3, 11, 17, 105, 133, 167, 169, 176 Growth and Transformation Plan, 5 guangrong, 12, 17, 100, 160 guanxi, 54, 62–64, 153 guards, 107, 136, 146, 178 Hailemariam Desalegn, 5 Haile Selassie, Emperor, 6–7, 22–23 Hewane, 12, 20, 22, 24 hierarchy, 15–16, 30, 48; corporate, 15, 24, 44, 46, 79, 91, 96, 115, 177–78 history, 6–7, 22–24, 96, 161, 168–70 hope, 3, 9, 17–18, 30, 33–36, 40, 147, 149, 152, 157–58, 161, 165, 173, 176, 179 housing, 8, 11, 29, 35, 58, 87, 114 humor, 117–21 hybridity, 73–76 idealism, 3, 28, 35 illegality, 45–46, 49, 85, 98, 110–15, 145, 179 image. See reputation impurity, 16, 24, 79–80, 120 income. See salary indolence, 9, 11, 17, 79, 99–100, 116, 167, 177 infrastructure, 4, 7, 10, 11, 48, 124–29, 153, 158, 168 integrity, 16, 65, 68, 71–72, 79–81, 178 investment, 5, 9–11, 30, 40, 86, 152, 154, 166, 172; personal, 29, 35–36 isolation, 40–41, 157–59 Isuzu, 25, 84, 117 Italian Occupation, 7, 22–24 Italians, 4, 6–8, 20, 22–24, 59, 133, 173 Italy, 6–7 Jimma, 23 jokes. See humor judge, 12, 99, 133–34, 136–37, 148–49, 179 kilil, 12n5 Korem, 24 labor. See employment laborers. See workers language, 16, 22, 26, 34, 36, 69, 77, 85–86, 101, 106, 108, 118–19, 121, 130, 135, 149: Amharic, 9, 26n11, 69, 112, 124, 146; Mandarin, 26, 85, 106–7, 138; Tigrinya, 26, 132, 135, 147–48 laughing. See humor Page 4 of 7 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Index law, 12, 45–46, 70, 92, 94, 109, 113, 115, 132–46. See also court lawsuit, 12, 14, 86–87, 94, 109, 132–37, 149, 150–51, 157, 170. See also court lawyer, 133–35 laziness. See indolence legal system, 12n5, 92, 113–15, 151. See also court; law leverage. See agency lineage, 58, 68 loan, 7–10, 20, 28, 51 loss, 8–9, 27, 38, 47, 51, 109, 127–28, 132, 135, 152, 165 Mao Zedong, 10, 30, 32, 75, 152, 168, 177 market, 8, 10, 37, 50, 56, 85, 167; economy, 9–10, 30, 37, 82, 85, 92–93, 100; job, 4 marriage, 66, 68–71, 76–79, 171 Marx, 50 Marxism, 23 masculinity, 77–78, 81, 172 media, 4n1, 17, 20, 27, 50, 169–170; social media, 38, 41, 59, 76 Mehoni, 12, 22–24, 52, 61, 86, 88–89, 93, 120–21, 123, 125, 128, 132–33, 136–37, 147, 149, 152, 155, 160 (p.197) Mekelle, 6, 12, 19–21, 24, 49, 61, 91, 95, 124, 128, 133, 149, 156 Meles Zenawi, 10, 154–55; death of, 99, 118 menial labor, 6, 11, 18, 83–84, 87, 91, 158. See also workers Middle East, 8, 23, 86 migration; overseas, 28–32, 35, 42–44, 59, 174; rural-urban, 2, 67, 92, 173; labor, 28–32, 34 mobility. See migration mortgage, 28, 58 multinational corporation, 13, 154 Muslims, 23–24, 57, 120 narratives, 2–3, 12, 16–17, 30–31, 34, 37–38, 40, 48, 76–78, 96, 157–58, 161–63, 166, 168, 169–70, 171, 176–77 nationalism, 4, 16, 66, 68 nongmingong, 15, 51, 57, 92, 124, 168. See also workers optimism, 28, 35, 164, 166, 179 Oromia, 19, 23 Orthodox Christianity, 6, 23–24, 89, 118, 125, 142, 144 overtime, 97, 130, 136, 141, 145; payment, 14, 130, 139, 141, 150 passport, 35, 114 peasant, 15–16, 23, 31, 47, 51, 54–60, 69, 78, 80, 83, 92–96, 102, 124, 129, 158, 161, 167, 173, 177 petrol, 27, 49, 52, 94, 150, 157 physical labor. See menial labor Page 5 of 7 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Index pidgin, 26, 69, 100, 106–7, 119 pilfering. See theft planned economy, 152 police, 12, 95, 107, 120, 125, 136, 147, 149, 151, 170 power, 3–4, 10, 43, 68, 78, 80, 89, 92, 104–6, 117, 121, 129, 130, 144, 151–52, 160, 162; labor, 46 pressure, 4, 36, 109, 132, 169; social, 3, 28, 43, 164, 171–73 private company, 8, 48–50, 53, 59, 61, 87, 90–91, 93, 95, 115, 135, 165 production, 10, 31, 46, 82, 94, 97, 105, 114, 117, 130, 144, 152; costs, 9, 96; efficiency, 82, 98, 100; means of, 105, 121 productionist premise, 10–11 productivist promise, 10 prostitution. See sex work punishment, 12, 45–46, 55, 105, 107, 113, 115, 151, 178 purity, 45, 66, 80 race, 16, 47, 65–68, 73–76, 78, 81, 87–88, 100, 139, 178 Raya, 22–25, 89, 125, 132, 136–37, 147–48, 150–51, 155 real estate. See housing recruitment (labor), 32, 45, 59, 84, 93, 95, 133, 154 religion, 18, 23, 26, 38, 61, 97, 99, 120, 130, 144, 151. See also festival; Muslims; Orthodox Christianity reputation, 6, 9, 15, 16, 34, 46, 48, 65, 71, 90, 115, 130, 168, 177–78 resistance, 13–14, 22, 103, 105, 117, 121, 123, 129, 156, 167, 176. See also courts Right of Way (ROW), 26, 126–27 road building, 6–9, 13, 24, 119, 125, 175, 175; sites, vi, 1, 3, 9, 12–13, 25, 27, 54, 57, 62, 65, 68, 84, 106, 116–17, 122–23, 135, 159, 175–78 rumor. See gossip sabotage, 1, 17, 125, 157. See also resistance safety, 35, 43, 45, 47, 86, 89, 111, 113, 145, 157 salary, vi, 3–4, 15, 39, 42, 50–51, 58, 69, 87, 89, 91, 96–99, 102, 110–12, 136, 141, 149, 160, 164– 65, 170, 172–73 schooling. See education security, 2–3, 28–31, 34–37, 39–40, 50–51, 55, 75, 81, 86, 139, 150, 165, 171–74, 177 security personnel. See guards segregation, 60, 72, 87–88 self-cultivation, 9, 11, 47 severance payment, 14, 108, 136, 147–49 sex, 16, 45n1, 48, 65–66, 68–72, 75, 79–80, 119, 161, 178 sex work, 66, 68, 79 sex workers, 37, 45n1, 68, 71 (p.198) sexual morals, 47, 78–79. See also sex sexuality, 65–66, 76 skin color. See complexion; race social stability, 4, 29, 34 Page 6 of 7 PRINTED FROM HONG KONG SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.hongkong.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Hong Kong University Press, 2021. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in HKSO for personal use. Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 08 May 2021

Index socialism, 56–57, 92, 152, 173 South Sudan, 3, 67, 170 Spring Festival, 61, 93, 97, 145. See also festival state. See government state-owned enterprise, 2, 4, 8, 16, 18, 30–32, 37, 48–53, 57–59, 87, 90, 93, 126, 153, 160 stereotypes, 3, 63, 119 stratification. See hierarchy subcontractor, 8, 16, 18, 27, 32, 45–46, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 63–64, 79, 88, 91, 93–94, 108–9, 113–15, 123, 135–36, 138–39, 142–43, 178 success, 11, 13–14, 17, 46, 51, 54, 81, 96, 104, 121, 130, 150, 157 suku. See bitterness survive, 1–2, 51 suzhi, 10, 16, 56–59, 67–68, 80, 94, 113, 157, 170, 178 tales. See narratives teff, 23, 52, 126 Tewodros II, Emperor, 6 theft, 27, 45, 86, 94, 107, 125, 136, 150, 154, 157 Tibet, 11–12, 66, 68, 81 Tigray, vi, 2, 5, 13, 18–27, 57, 63, 65, 71–72, 83–84, 93, 100, 122, 126, 128, 130, 133–35, 145, 150– 52, 155, 158, 165, 175 trade union, 14, 121, 145, 150, 170 United Nations (UN), 7 United Nations Development Program, 7 violence, 54, 92, 150 visa, 48 WeChat. See media wenhua, 42, 58, 67, 94, 113, 178 wereda, 12n5, 22, 24, 83, 128, 132–33, 136–37. See also courts wife, 41, 56, 58, 69, 72, 76–78, 101–2, 159, 172 witness, 135–36, 148, 151, 170 work permit, 36, 48, 114 workers, 9–11, 26–27; Chinese, 11, 15–18, 28, 32, 34–42, 48–60, 69, 71, 92–95, 113–16, 157–74; Ethiopian, 9–15, 55, 73, 82–91, 96–101, 104–6, 108–13, 116–24, 129–31,132–33, 136–56 World Bank, 7–8 Xi Jinping, 16, 35 Yohannes, Emperor, 6n2, 24 yuanjian, 7 Zheng He, 28 Zhou Enlai, 7

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