ABSTRACT
Trade migration as a category and a form of migration in contemporary societies and scholarly discourses is an unusual term. This is largely because trade, migration, and employment are often seen as related but separate. International trade treaties and tariffs are negotiated by ministers under the auspice of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and international trade seems to be carried out largely by governments and multinational corporations (MNC), both of which seem to have little to do with migration. However, I have met many migrant traders from Africa who have resided in China for five to fifteen years, and Chinese traders running shops in Africa for ten or fifteen years. Besides these “stationed traders,” I have also met many more transient traders from all over the world who go to China regularly or irregularly to buy goods, including many from Africa, or who originated in Africa but reside in North America and Western, Northern and Southern Europe as first-generation immigrants or their descendants. I met these stationed and transient traders when doing fieldwork researching grassroots multilingualism (Han 2013) in the context of “trade and migration,” as I had called it. This project includes working with African traders in China since 2009, with Chinese traders in South Africa and Namibia since 2010, with visits to several other southern and western African countries over the years, and focusing on the stationed traders’ interactions with locals and internal migrant traders as well as international traders. While visas, work permits, or residency have presented a major challenge, in addition to trade on their own, with or without running a shop, a logistic company, or a trading company, stationed traders in Guangzhou often act as market guides cum interpreters or agents for transient African traders, which makes them the core of the African trade community in Guangzhou. The stationed Chinese traders in Namibia and South Africa are mainly engaged in running the so-called China shops.
