Localizing Chinese migrants in Africa: A study of the Chinese in Libya before the Civil War

State projects in Libya and commercial trial balloons

Contact between China and Africa across the Indian Ocean can be traced to at least the early 15th century. ¹³ The historiography of Chinese migration presents several stages of large-scale movements, in the forms of the coolie trade before and during the Second World War, of migration associated with ‘Chinese aid packages under [the] Mao era’s international policy in the late 1950s’, ¹⁴ as well as migration linked to the entry of SOEs and private firms to the African market in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) open door era, beginning in 1978 and continuing today.

The first important event in terms of a Chinese presence in Libya occurred in May 1956, when a delegation from the government of Taiwan (at the time still recognized by the UN as the Republic of China (ROC)) paid formal visits to several Arab countries, including Libya. ¹⁵ , ¹⁶ Before that, extant records reveal only a few Chinese travellers who took notes about Libya when passing through on their way to Europe or elsewhere in Africa. ¹⁷

The first modern Chinese sojourners in Libya arrived as a result of the Cold War, specifically diplomatic competition between the PRC and ROC. As part of a global strategy, both governments used economic incentives and humanitarian initiatives to encourage African nations to offer them diplomatic recognition as the legitimate government of China, with the pendulum gradually swinging towards the PRC. ¹⁸ The 1961 overthrow of the Kingdom of Libya by Gaddafi did not affect diplomatic recognition of the ROC. Taiwan, supported by the United States, embarked on an African aid plan called the Vanguard Project, while the PRC gave (and continues to give) ‘favourable aid terms to African countries which support its claims to Taiwan’. ¹⁹

Zhuang Zheyan was among the first group of Taiwanese ²⁰ medical personnel who arrived in Libya in 1962. In the preface to Li Zhongxiang’s book Practising Medicine in the Desert: Hardship, Joy, Love (沙漠行医 – 苦、乐、爱), ²¹ Zhuang outlines the state of their prior knowledge:

At that time [1962], nobody knew that Libya was in North Africa; we all thought we were going to Liberia in West Africa, the place where ships from all sorts of different countries are registered. Once we had read the summary, we were shocked to realize that Libya was a desert nation in North Africa. Then the hospital directors, Pan and Qiu, patiently sought to motivate each [medical aid] team member with spirited words, consoling and encouraging us, until we all agreed to a two-year contract [in Libya], that we might contribute to the hospital and to the nation. ²²

Xu Maoming, a Taiwanese otolaryngologist providing medical aid in Libya, gives an outline of his motives in the first paragraph of his article ‘Sketches of a European trip’ (欧洲旅行漫谈), which was published in the journal Green Apricot (青杏) in 1967:

My main purpose for going to work in Libya was that I coveted a free trip to Europe; in the second instance, I wanted to earn a little money to have a financial fallback after returning [to Taiwan]. After completing a two-year work period there [in Libya], there would be 72 days of vacation. The Libyan government paid the equivalent of an air ticket to Taiwan, which was just enough to use to go see something of Europe instead. ²³

These autobiographical writings and published interviews show that early Chinese sojourners arrived in Libya as a result of state-sponsored projects. Their presence in Libya was entirely unrelated to individual preferences or interests, although it could be integrated into narratives of patriotism or material concerns.

In 1971, Libya under Gaddafi voted in favour of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758, which recognized the PRC government as ‘the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations’ and expelled the ROC diplomats from the world body. However, official diplomatic relations were not established until 1978, making Libya the last country in the region to do so. ²⁴

After that time, as a result of a series of bilateral agreements in the areas of medicine, economics, culture and agriculture, state-sponsored PRC sojourners appeared on Libyan soil. A Chinese medical team of about 15 members worked in Libya between 1983 and 1994, when the agreement expired. In parallel, from 1981, Chinese construction companies began to enter Libya. However, due to UN sanctions adopted in 1992 and the uncongenial economic environment in Libya, most of these companies gradually withdrew from the country. By the end of 1999, there were only 862 PRC citizens in Libya. ²⁵

Xu Peng, the author of Thirteen Years of Experience in Contracting International Engineering Projects (国际工程承包实践十三年) and the former vice-director of China State Construction Engineering Corporation, offered a general description of projects in Libya in a post-field visit report:

[From] the establishment of the Libya office in 1982 until the present day [1993], there have been 102 valid signed contracts, 72 of which have been construction contracts, and 30 of which [were] contracts to supply labour. . . . By the end of March 1993, 78 were completed and paid for; there are 24 contracts for which the bill has not been paid or which are ongoing … between 1991 and 1993, foreign currency transferred back to China only reached US$30 million, which was only 38 per cent of the target. ²⁶

When UN sanctions on Libya were lifted in 2003, some Chinese private entrepreneurs and traders overseas perceived the potential of what was, in their eyes, the untapped Libyan market. A small number of them turned to Libya from their former bases elsewhere in the Arab world, looking forward to opportunities they believed would follow from Libya’s economic liberalization. One example is Peng, a footwear wholesaler, who arrived in Tripoli in 2006 from Kuwait. In an interview, he explained his marketing strategy:

Apart from footwear wholesaling, I rented a warehouse here, and put a lot of wooden doors and security doors in storage there. I noticed that the price of these two types of doors is very high here, while the quality is mediocre. As soon as the local government loosens its policy, the construction market will start to boom, and there will be quite a large demand for wooden and security doors. What I’m doing now is waiting for that day to come, and I can corner the local market. At that point, the doors I’ve got in storage will yield considerable profits. ²⁷

But Peng abandoned the Libyan market in the same year, frustrated by the dim prospects of any loosening of economic regulations and policies toward foreign investments.

Three middle-aged Chinese women and one Libyan man opened Al Maida Chinese Restaurant in Tripoli at the end of 2006, prior to the largest influx of Chinese people in 2007. The restaurant remained open even during the war. Song Shan, the grown-up daughter of one of the women, arrived in Tripoli in 2006, and worked at the restaurant until 2009. In a 2011 interview, she recalled:

We all come from Quzhou City [in Zhejiang], famous for its mushrooms. My mother’s first visit to Libya was in 2003, when she came with two other [Chinese] women of about her age. None of them had any overseas experience. In China, my mother sold vegetables at the market, while [the other] woman worked at the local medical station, making up the prescriptions, and the third one operated a textile shop. The initial opportunity was because of a Libyan businessman who was looking for Chinese technical workers who would work with him to grow mushrooms in Libya. Through introductions by several middlemen, he finally got in touch with my mother and the two other Chinese women. The first visit to Libya to conduct market research was not satisfactory, since the natural conditions in Libya are not hospitable to mushroom cultivation. Considering the tens of thousands of renminbi spent on the trip to Libya, they decided after consultation to open a Chinese restaurant there, as a result of their Libyan market research, as well as to effect a compromise vis-a-vis their Libyan partner. After a series of preparations both in China and in Libya, the restaurant was finally opened for New Year’s Eve in 2007. ²⁸

To at least one Chinese businessman, the period after the lifting of UN sanctions seemed opportune to introduce the tried-and-true model of large-scale centralized Chinese private trading to a Tripoli setting. At roughly the same time as the footwear wholesaler mentioned earlier was giving up his plans, Chen Zhiyuan, the former director of the Wenzhou Chamber of Commerce in Dubai, made his first visit to Libya. Chen had greater ambitions, being already a well-known businessman among Chinese migrants in the United Arab Emirates. In an interview with a Chinese newspaper, Chen explained:

We cannot wait any more, because we lost tens of millions of US dollars on account of the Iraq War. Our only choice is [to] try to make up our losses after the war. . . . The purpose of flying [to] Libya is to find opportunities to introduce Zhejiang merchandise into the post-war Iraqi market [through Libyan businessmen], a strategy we could call an ‘outflanking tactic’… [on my first visit] there were very few passengers on the plane to Libya, which was worrying, but when I thought of the huge market in post-war Iraq, I told myself that I had to go to Libya, that’s the first stop. ²⁹

Enterprises such as the Chinese Commodity City (CCC) had proven a successful business strategy in Dubai for Chen as early as 2003 (中国商品城 and related projects), and he had transplanted the model to Santiago, Chile, in 2006 (Centro Comercial China 中国商品贸易中心). ³⁰ Chen planned to develop a shopping complex in Tripoli, also named Chinese Commodity City, along similar lines for small-scale Zhejiang traders. Chen’s success in Dubai had depended on his arriving early on the scene, and he hoped to replicate this success in Tripoli. He invited Wenzhou merchants, some of whom were from the mainland and some from other expatriate communities, to open shops in a building he had rented, thus taking advantage of economies of scale in transportation and custom clearance, and promoting the competitiveness of Chinese commodities in terms of price and convenience.

Chen had settled on Tripoli as the most desirable location after exploratory trips to Libya, Jordan and Sudan in 2003. In November 2004, an agreement over the establishment of the CCC in Tripoli as a platform for promoting Chinese products was signed between the China Commodity City Company, of which Chen was the CEO, and the Libyan Ministry of Economy and Trade. The agreement allowed Libyan and Chinese businessmen or companies to sign import–export contracts concerning Chinese products displayed at the CCC. The products could only be sold at the CCC through a commercial agency registered in Libya. ³¹ There are few reports on the operation of the CCC in Libya, except for a handful of interviewees who described how individual Chinese traders opened their shops in the seven-floor building, selling a variety of products, from clothes to toys and household commodities. The shops were open even on Fridays, when all local shops were closed for religious reasons. However, individual Chinese traders’ efforts ended in bitter disappointment just a few months after the CCC’s promising beginnings. After a fire, the merchants were left with a burnt-out shell of a building and an unsolved criminal case. Three Chinese electrical technicians were charged with criminal neglect resulting in fires in the CCC basement, but they denied any involvement:

On the day of the fire, we were not at work, but at the railings outside the building. Even three days before the day of the fire, there had been no work allocated for us to engage in. We know nothing about the cause of the fire in the basement. ³²

The rumour that Libyan rivals were behind an arson attack circulated locally. From then on, Chinese trading on any substantial scale disappeared in Libya, and individual arrivals have been few and far between. In consequence, nowhere in Libya is there that element of visible private Chinese trading which has been described as ‘the heart of the marketing of Chinese manufactures in Africa’, ³³ nor are their ‘presence and conduct … permanent features of the … economic landscape’ in Libya. ³⁴ Instead, the omnipresence of made-in-China merchandise in Libya was not accompanied by any physical Chinese migrant presence. After the failure of the CCC and before the civil war, there was only one Chinese couple engaged in trade living in Libya, operating a nightgown wholesaling business. Their family runs nightgown manufacturing factories in their hometown of Wenzhou, and every year their relatives exported at least two containers of nightgowns to Libya. The couple lived in Tripoli and stored the containers in a rented basement. Their customers were local clothing retailers who lacked the means to travel to China directly to import nightgowns in large quantities. However, before the civil war, the couple had already decided to withdraw from the Libyan market due to decreasing profits.

Tight kinship ties and a social culture of family-operated business among Libyans had produced a family-based retailing system in Libya, allowing little room for Chinese trading migrants, who in addition face bureaucratic, linguistic and social obstacles. There is thus no pattern of unregistered ‘China shops’ such as one finds in some Southern African countries, for example Namibia. ³⁵ According to Terterov and Wallace, ‘From early 1988, Libya moved toward liberalization of its economy, exemplified by the greater scope allowed to private enterprise in the retail trade.’ ³⁶ Since then, Libyans have travelled outside the country to do business. Instead of Chinese traders bringing their products to Libya, Libyans have gone to the factories in China directly and brought the products back. Thus Chinese traders do not hold a great strategic advantage albeit their familiarity with the supply market in China, which elsewhere allows them to import goods at very low prices from large wholesalers or factories in China. ³⁷

As a case in point, we can cite Majed, one of the most successful Libyan businessmen travelling abroad, who followed his brother to Thailand at the end of the 1980s, to arrange for the import of products to Libya. He soon discovered that Guangzhou provided excellent business conditions, with relatively cheap wholesaling on account of the proximity of major factories. For over two decades, Majed spent most of his time in Guangzhou, visiting different factories, purchasing large quantities of clothes and shipping them in containers to Libya. Inside Libya, his two brothers run several shops carrying Chinese clothing in one of the main retail centres in Tripoli, which some local businessmen call Yabao Lu (雅宝路), after China’s biggest market for export clothing in Beijing. Similar cases exist for other types of merchandise. Unlike some other Arab countries, Libya has an underdeveloped manufacturing sector, and relies heavily on oil exports. Hence individuals lack professional options outside of commerce. Apart from civil servants, schoolteachers, doctors and nurses, and farmers, most Libyan passports list citizens’ occupation as ‘free individual’. The actual profession of those in this category tends to be traders, either retailers or wholesalers, or else service staff such as drivers. This type of retailing, with Libyans importing the goods from China and selling in Libya, supplies Chinese commodities to the Libyan market.

CCC thus represented the first serious attempt to establish a substantial small-trader presence, and the disastrous 2007 fire acted as a strong deterrent to any further such ventures, causing the Wenzhou traders and other potential merchants to turn their attention to their previous trading hubs in the Arab world. There was no indication of a resurgence in Chinese private trading interest in Libya by the time unrest rendered the idea unthinkable in the short term.

Types of Chinese migrants in Libya, 2007–2011

After Al Maida Chinese Restaurant opened on New Year’s Eve 2007, Song Shan was well placed to observe the arrival of the bulk of Chinese construction companies, either state-owned or private, since the managerial staff working for these companies formed her customer base:

During the first half of 2007, we were all anxious, unsure whether the restaurant could turn a profit or not. At the time, almost all our customers were working at foreign embassies or Chinese staff working for ZTE Corporation, the Chinese provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions in Libya. However, starting in the autumn of 2007, things began to get better for us. Chinese people started to come to Libya to undertake market research, and most of them were directors and engineers from Chinese construction companies, as well as bosses of private companies. Later, as everyone saw, many SOEs signed construction contracts with the Libyan government, and subsequently hundreds, thousands, and then tens of thousands of labourers came. We won our gamble on opening the restaurant. ³⁸

The project contracts signed with the Libyan government by Chinese SOEs amounted to US$18 billion by early 2011, and the financial importance of these deals overshadowed any notice the Libyan public took of the accompanying migration. To date, the only official figure on Chinese nationals in Libya was released in connection with the mass evacuation that took place before the civil war broke out. During the lianghui (两会) – the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference which constitute the central event of the domestic political calendar – Chen Deming, the PRC minister of commerce, stated that 75 Chinese companies had invested in Libya, working on more than 50 construction projects worth almost US$19 billion and employing 35,860 Chinese staff. ³⁹ All but a few hundred of these individuals had arrived within the previous few years, and the majority (given the relative brevity of the contracts) within the past two years.

Emmanuel Ma Mung’s typology divides Chinese migrants in Africa into three groups: temporary labour migrants linked to ‘public building works and infrastructure projects undertaken by large Chinese enterprises’, small-time entrepreneurs, and transit migrants. ⁴⁰ However, because there are ‘few existing empirical studies on Chinese migrants in various African countries’, ⁴¹ there is little information on the social and geographical characteristics of sojourning communities, especially as they relate to other overseas Chinese. ⁴² Based on the first author’s field experience in Libya since 2006, as well as numerous direct contacts and conversations with Chinese migrants in Libya, we have become aware of a substantial gap between what one might expect based on reports from other African nations and the real situation of Chinese migrants in Libya.

Prior to the Libyan civil war, the Chinese population in Libya could be divided into three categories: a temporary labour and white-collar employee migration flow contracted in the fields of oil, construction, and telecommunication (Mung’s first type); a very small number of private entrepreneurs whose customers were Chinese migrants themselves (i.e. no private trading with African customers); and Muslim students sent by the Chinese government to pursue Qur’anic studies at the World Islamic Call Society in Tripoli.

Labour migrants are commonly identified as a single type of Chinese migrants, linked to public building works and large infrastructure development projects undertaken by large Chinese concerns. They stay for the duration of their contract and return to China once their contract expires. The engineers and professionals, an admittedly smaller group but one that is substantially different, is either ignored by scholars or described sometimes as ‘remaining in the African host country as independent migrants, often establishing themselves as small entrepreneurs’. ⁴³

Yet in the case of Libya, labourers and white-collar staff, who compose the vast majority of Chinese migrants, shared important characteristics. Like the labourers, white-collar workers stayed for a certain period and then returned to China, as distinct from patterns in, for example, South Africa, where a substantial number of both labourers and workers opt to remain at the end of their two to three-year contract periods. ⁴⁴ The main difference between the two groups was in the nature of their recruitment. Unlike the Chinese labourers, who signed an overseas work contract for two years which took effect on the date they arrive in the host country, Chinese white-collar staff – such as managers, translators, secretaries, accountants, and engineers – were dispatched directly by the company. There was no special contract signed between the company and white-collar employees regarding overseas work, and the duration of their overseas stay was in most cases a verbal agreement, which lasted from three months to one year depending on the position and work of the employees. Few, if any of them, considered staying in Libya as independent migrants. While the nature of their jobs created more chances for interaction with the local society, meaningful exchange remained limited, not only because of a language barrier, but also because most Chinese employees showed little interest in a foreign society which seemed in every way – history, religion, culture and mentality – alien.

In contrast to the large number of labour and white-collar migrants, Chinese private entrepreneurs were few in number and catered to the SOE-driven migration. They included four Chinese restaurants (two run by Chen’s family, one by Taiwanese, and one by people from north-eastern China) on the same street in Tripoli where most of the Chinese branch offices were located; one quarry located in Al Aziziyah, not far from Tripoli, extracting aggregates and providing them to Chinese construction companies in Libya; one hair salon in Janzoor (on the outskirts of Tripoli); one steel factory in Misrata (producing non-approved steel products which entered the private homeowners’ market in Libya directly); and one Chinese food workshop in Tripoli, producing tofu and importing Chinese spices and condiments to cater for the food demands of Chinese labourers and employees.

Beginning in the 1980s, the Chinese government started sending Muslim students to Tripoli for Qur’anic studies each year. We are not aware of any reports on this small group, but there were at most a few dozen at any given time. After the arrival of Chinese companies in Libya, many such students chose to work as translators, and some even abandoned their studies to pursue this career path. We know of no migrants in Mung’s third group, that is, those temporarily sojourning in Libya with the intention of travelling onward.

Why are they there? Accounting for the success of the SOEs in Libya, and the development of a private sector service industry around them

Commenting on Chinese involvement in Africa, the political economist Gu Jing proposes that since 2005 the relationship has entered a fifth stage, one of ‘acceleration of private companies in various sectors and continued expansion of SOEs, and the development of clustering industry strategy’. ⁴⁵ In this case, Libya is no exception. Official data indicates that before the civil war, there were a total of 75 Chinese enterprises conducting more than 50 projects in Libya, ⁴⁶ but the data set does not indicate the ownership or organization of these Chinese companies. One could assume that, as elsewhere in Africa and unlike state-backed SOEs, ‘[private] firms tend to act autonomously from the Chinese government’s policy frameworks and existing bilateral arrangements’, ⁴⁷ and that they ‘have followed their own paths to Africa’. ⁴⁸ However, in the case of Libya that assumption would be largely erroneous. Only three of the Chinese enterprises registered in Libya in the oil, construction and telecommunication sectors, were private: Huafeng Construction Co. Ltd (华丰建设集团股份有限公司), Beijing Hongfu Group (北京宏福集团), a construction company, and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd (华为技术有限公司). This contrasts strongly with the situation in some southern African countries, such as Zambia, where only ‘half of [the sizeable Chinese firms are] state-owned’ and ‘some 20–30 private Chinese firms’ are present. ⁴⁹

Why were the SOEs able to win contract bids? One element was their financial resources. In 2008, the Libyan government withdrew several projects which had been contracted to companies from other countries on account of their inability to issue a bank guarantee in the initial phase. These projects were then reassigned to Chinese companies. Libyan construction specifications required all contractors to use materials officially approved by the Libyan government. Raw materials such as sand and aggregate had to be purchased locally, while cement and steel had to be purchased at officially designated local or foreign companies, mainly Turkish and European. In Libya, Chinese enterprises had no ‘access to cheap building materials through supply chains from China’, ⁵⁰ as they did elsewhere in Africa. Three factors, then, largely account for the SOEs’ success in entering the Libyan construction market: ‘cost competitiveness in overall bidding price’, ⁵¹ willingness to carry out work under considerable hardship in remote areas, and the financial capacity to issue bank guarantees for enormous sums.

Contracts for large projects inevitably led general contractors (SOEs) to look for sub-contractors. Although the practice is common, sub-contracting is forbidden in Libya, and sub-contractors were usually represented to Libyan clients as branch offices of the general contractors (SOEs). In practice, SOEs were responsible for dealing with Libyan clients, whereas private enterprises or branch companies of SOEs organized the labourers, engineers and other staff. While the sub-contractors carried out the work, the SOEs provided assistance, such as dealing with local governmental departments. The main task of private enterprises, then, was to interface with the general contractors and to undertake construction, and not to independently explore new business opportunities. One kind of private enterprise was indeed crucial to the arrival of Chinese migrants, namely the Chinese government-licensed private employment agencies, whose function was to find and recruit workers. These agencies recruited all kinds of skilled and semi-skilled labour within a brief period, assuring the smooth commencement of overseas projects. However, this was another example of private companies contributing to the delivery of labour to SOEs, and not functioning as the engine behind migration itself.

To clarify the role of private Chinese enterprises in Libya, we will outline a few cases of independent entrepreneurs who developed businesses focused on servicing SOEs and SOE-employed labour migrants.

Lu Jun, an entrepreneur from Hubei Province, visited Libya for the first time in 2007 with a Chinese construction company. He leased a plot of land in the mountainous Al Aziziyah district and used it as a quarry, extracting construction aggregates and supplying them to several Chinese SOEs. Although the quality of his aggregates was high, he dealt only with Chinese SOEs. He explained that the aggregate demand from Chinese SOEs was large enough that he had no need to seek Libyan clients. He also admitted that differences in both language and mentality were barriers to expanding his customer base to include Libyans. In addition to the quarry business, Lu established a small workshop inside one SOE’s construction site in Surman City, manufacturing and supplying hollow bricks to the SOE. He rented a warehouse in Misrata where he stored machinery imported from China, and carried out earth clearance work as a sub-contractor for Chinese SOEs.

Zhao left his position at a private Chinese construction company after his company failed to obtain a construction contract. He started his own business importing ingredients for Chinese cuisine, such as Chinese vinegar, chilli, soya sauce and dried mushrooms, and selling them directly to SOEs. Since the orders were for large quantities, he did not register a shop or a company legally, but instead transported his wares directly from customs to the construction sites. Once this underground wholesaling business was earning stable profits, he brought his father, his brother and his brother’s wife to Libya, where they began producing tofu and other soya bean-derived products for sale to employees working for SOEs in Tripoli.

Yu rented a villa in Janzoor, on the outskirts of Tripoli, in 2010, officially as a private residence. However, she imported hairdressing equipment and haircare products and set up one large room in the villa as a hair salon. Her customers were largely labour migrants. On weekends she and two other Chinese barbers would drive to Chinese construction sites, providing hairdressing services to labourers there. Weekdays were relatively idle, although occasionally some female employees came to have their hair done.

Like Song Shan, the aforementioned restaurateur, none of these individual entrepreneurs had any previous overseas experience. They were driven by competition within China, a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and early information regarding market gaps and opportunities. But, unlike other African countries, Libya offered no space for foreign business traders in retailing or wholesaling. Instead, Chinese individual entrepreneurs responded to demand created by workers from Chinese SOEs, buttressed by social business connections with managers of SOEs, which reduced pressure on their sometimes illegal enterprises and assured the stability of their businesses.

The large-scale Chinese presence in Libya presented a unique migration pattern, focused around the numerous Chinese SOE contracts for projects in oil, construction and telecommunications which constituted the core of labour migration. Pushed by Chinese overseas economic strategies and pulled by new opportunities for foreign companies in Libya, Chinese enterprises of various scales, almost invariably state-owned, entered the Libyan market. The financial strength of Chinese SOEs gave them an edge over other nations and over Chinese private enterprises. These SOEs handled the interactions with Libyan officialdom while outsourcing labour to SOE branch companies and private Chinese construction companies. The sub-contractors were immediately responsible for the projects, directly employed the Chinese sojourners and procured materials, while the SOEs took a percentage of the value of each contract as an administrative charge. The sub-contractors brought more than 30,000 Chinese labourers and employees to Libya, who in turn produced the demand for a small informal service industry provided by small numbers of Chinese independent traders and entrepreneurs. Since recruitment was not carried out primarily through family or geographic association, labourers hailed from Hubei, Hebei and the north-eastern provinces, as well as from the more traditional migrant areas of Zhejiang and Guangdong.

Libyan contracting practices and subcontractor recruitment strategies in the domestic market were thus the major determinant of the size and make-up of the Chinese migrant community. Individual agency was highly exceptional. Some elements that have been widely considered in analysing the Chinese migration patterns in other African cases, such as provincial origin, previously formed Chinese communities and internal economic integration, are evidently very weak elements in the case of Chinese migrants in Libya.

Finally, the gender and age structure of the community should be mentioned. Blue-collar workers (labourers and technicians) were almost exclusively male. The white-collar population was also disproportionately male, with the gender imbalance in engineering and the perceived status of women in Arab countries acting as deterrents to female migration. Most female migrants were accountants, interpreters or secretaries. While some European engineering and construction companies were contracted to construct mosques, hotels, universities, hospitals and other landmark buildings, most of the contracts signed by Chinese SOEs were for housing and infrastructure, which normally have lower technical demands than the projects conducted by European companies. Consequently, the Chinese white-collar workers were largely young men of modest expertise. Besides a small number of managers and executives, the population was predominantly between the ages of 20 and 40. Very few managerial staff brought their spouse or children with them.

There were rumours that one company had hired female employees for ordinary on-site work in the daytime (following common practice in China), but for the provision of sexual services at night. In 2010, the first author overheard a conversation between Libyan drivers employed by a Chinese company, about a Chinese brothel near the Tripoli airport that catered exclusively to Chinese senior managers and bosses in Libya. As the first author was a young, white-collar female employee, male Chinese employees were reluctant to provide any information to her about this side of the Chinese migrant experience in Libya. There can, however, be little doubt that sexual services played an economic role in the informal SOE-associated migration, and a small amount of migration was likely motivated specifically to provide such services.

Chinese migrants and the host society

The areas of residence of Chinese migrants in Libya were concentrated and quite homogeneous, largely based in closed compounds next to project sites, most of which were located in remote desert areas. Leisure time was mainly spent within these compounds; interaction with local populations was neither sought nor encouraged. Labourers and some white-collar staff were allowed to stay either on the project site or in the compound. As a result, social integration, or any interaction, with local communities was negligible or even non-existent. Most Chinese workers in Libya will have learnt no Arabic, made no Libyan acquaintances, eaten little or no Libyan food, undertaken no domestic or regional tourism, observed no local holidays and seen no more than drive-through glimpses of Libyan life. In fact, infinitely more cultural, social and linguistic adaptation occurred between labourers from different regions within China than in any interaction with locals. Indeed, Chinese companies always seek to provide as Chinese an environment as possible, bringing Chinese cooks, cutlery and kitchenware from China to the project sites and headquarter offices, and recruiting Chinese-Arabic interpreters of Chinese nationality to handle any necessary interactions. For lifestyle elements which the subcontractors did not provide at the camps, astute Chinese businessmen quickly filled the gap, providing on-site Chinese-style barbering and hairdressing, and delivering tofu to the project sites. This case is a reminder that it is possible for tens of thousands of people to live in a foreign country without dealing or interacting with the sociocultural aspects of that location.

White-collar employees numbered no more than a few hundred office workers, engineers and translators working in company headquarters in Tripoli, or in the other main Libyan cities of Misrata, Benghazi and Zuwara. Since integration and acculturation were minimal, the standard features of migration – family structure, social associations, and citizenship – were absent. To take intermarriage as an example, although several Libyan businessmen had married Chinese women, only one of these women opted to live in Libya with her two daughters of Libyan nationality, while all the others lived in China with occasional visits to Libya, or in a third country.

Though the social existence of Chinese migrants was largely isolated, the economic effects of the migration were more apparent. The arrival of Chinese and other international companies in Libya, along with the booming construction market, stimulated the expansion and activity of several sectors of the Libyan economy, including retail. Senior and white-collar employees from China often purchased luxury goods, such as French perfume, Swiss watches and branded clothing, ⁵² since the price was much lower than in China, while some labourers bought laptops in Libya for the same reason. Chinese construction companies also stimulated vehicle sales (almost all purchasing Toyota Land Cruisers), ⁵³ transportation services, construction material supply, food supply and real estate. Towards the end of 2010, Libya’s state-owned Afriqiyah Airways launched two direct flights weekly between Tripoli and Beijing, and Tripoli and Guangzhou. It offered the lowest round-trip ticket price as compared to options offered by airline companies such as Qatar Airways, Turkish Airlines, Egypt Air, Emirates, Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa and Alitalia Airways, clearly targeting the SOE labour migrant market.

All over the African continent, the issue of Chinese contract labour is deeply controversial, particularly given the chronic problem of high unemployment in Africa, ⁵⁴ and Chinese SOEs have come under fire for failing to develop ‘collaborative business models, contributions to capacity building and sustainable business practices in recipient economies’. ⁵⁵ This has led to anti-Chinese sentiment in many African countries. Broadly speaking, the lack of interaction between Chinese people and Libyans means that expressions of such sentiments in Libya are limited, although the experience of the CCC suggests that Libya does have the potential for anti-Chinese sentiment in the event of closer interaction or competition. At an anecdotal level, however, Chinese people are exposed to prejudice. When the first author asked a neighbour to stop his son entering the garden of her rental property without permission, she was told in English, ‘You Chinese people make trouble here’.

At a political level, the remarks by officials of the Gaddafi administration did not reflect their policy. Consider the comments of then Foreign Minister Musa Kusa in 2009, when he attended the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (FOCAC) meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh. Speaking to the London-based international Arabic daily newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, he called the developments ‘something akin to a Chinese invasion of the African continent’, and said it ‘brings to mind the effects that colonialism had on the African continent [in the past] from the creation of settlements to the dispersal of African communities’. ⁵⁶ Given that his government’s policies directly produced the pattern of Chinese migration to Libya, including its isolated settlements, and that the ‘dispersal of African communities’ is a completely inapt description of desert-based project-site temporary Chinese settlement, Kusa’s comments are perhaps best understood in the context of regional politics and the desire of the Gaddafi regime to be seen as speaking for Africa.

In fact, during the second half of 2010, far from stemming the tide, the Libyan government was facilitating the visa application procedure for Chinese labour migrants. Under new regulations, Chinese companies registered in Libya and party to state contracts were required to submit a list of the types and number of workers to arrive in Libya for the whole following year. After receiving official Libyan approval, the information would be passed on to the Libyan embassy in Beijing, greatly streamlining the visa process. ⁵⁷ Certainly, before its fall, the Gaddafi regime did nothing either to curb or to integrate Chinese migration in Libya. Chinese workers were simply the labour force provided by inexpensive, most financially secure and quickest-working available contractors. ⁵⁸ The Libyan government did not engage in any way with the social realities of the Chinese presence.

Independent Chinese traders and entrepreneurs posed no threat of competition to local business, since they were supplying certain culturally specific services to Chinese labour migrants that Libyans could not easily provide. Nor were Chinese medicine or Chinese martial arts, which flourish in many African nations, acquiring a local clientele. There was only one practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in Libya, a Libyan who studied the subject in the 1980s in Guangdong. The practitioner, who is married to a Chinese woman and divides his time between Tripoli and his primary residence in the United States, operates for only a few hours a day even when he is in the country. Most residents of Tripoli, including taxi drivers, seemed unaware of the clinic at all, although it is located on a main street.

Despite the fact that Chinese companies frequently offered positions to local people (albeit only drivers were regularly employed), local employment remained a thorny issue for Chinese SOEs, as well as other foreign companies, since their contracts stipulated that 30 per cent of employees working for the foreign construction companies had to be locals. In the view of Chinese companies, the poor quality of Libyan education meant that many skilled jobs could not be filled by locals. As for unskilled labourers or semi-skilled technicians, Chinese companies reported that Libyans were not willing to consider arduous physical employment for a foreign company. The perception among Chinese companies was that Libyans envisaged employment in a foreign company as easy positions of privilege, such as light office work, or facilitating the foreign company’s interaction with local bureaucracy. As a consequence, the employment of Libyans was indeed minimal, perhaps because of a difference in expectations.

This disparity of expectation was also evident when, in the mid-2000s, some Chinese companies tried to establish joint ventures with Libyan partners. The idea was that the Chinese side would provide economic management and labour, while the Libyan side would tackle such issues as material import, tax and logistics. Yet no successful joint venture ever got off the ground.

The most promising attempt involved Majed, the successful Libyan businessman mentioned earlier, who had lived in Guangzhou and done business with Chinese people for more than 10 years. Having successfully bid for a contract, he intended to cooperate with a Chinese construction company. The main obstacle between the two sides was not language, ideology, culture, mentality, expertise or practical experience, but basic ideas about the way construction labour ought to be remunerated. Libyan companies (and the companies of many other countries) hire labourers as employees, paying a fixed salary each month and providing free meals and accommodation. However, Chinese companies consider labourers to be analogous to sub-contractors. The company and the labourers (or the company and the agency that recruits the labourers) first reach an agreement on the price of the work that the workers will accomplish, measured in terms of square meters. On top of that there is a fixed minimum monthly basic salary (usually RMB 6,000), even though the actual income per month is decided by the quantity and quality of their work. Any losses incurred by the labourer are deducted from their fixed minimum salary. If within a month the value of their completed work exceeds RMB 6,000, their salary is increased according to the agreed price of each square meter. In the Chinese view, this system maximizes labourers’ productivity and assures the completion of a construction project on time. However, for the Libyan partners in prospective joint ventures, the system was wholly unreasonable and unacceptable.

Conclusions

Officially sponsored sojourns of the ROC, and later PRC, experts in the fields of engineering, agriculture, telecommunication, construction and medicine in Libya took place beginning in the 1960s, but did not result in the establishment of a locally rooted community. Chinese presence in the 1990s consisted of a small SOE-based population, which grew dramatically beginning in 2007 as a result of the lifting of sanctions and the signing of new contracts. Despite analyses proposing that, at a continental level, ‘migration has moved to being largely independent of state action’, ⁵⁹ Chinese migration in Libya prior to the civil war was still overwhelmingly tied to state-contracted projects. This was not only because labourers made up the vast majority of migrants, but also because all other Chinese traders and independent entrepreneurs were in the business of providing services to Chinese migrants in Libya.

The financial power of Chinese SOEs led to success in the competition for high-value project tenders offered by the Libyan government, resulting in the influx of a large number of labourers and employees to Libya. However, the private sector, importing Chinese products through Asia-based Libyan traders and bureaucratically and socially unfriendly towards small-scale foreign traders, left private Chinese individuals with no competitive advantage. Hence, labour and employee migration dwarfed private business migration, with the latter limited to a few dozen individuals.

The patterns of this recent Chinese presence have been destroyed by the Libyan civil war. In the two years since the war, most Chinese companies have remained reluctant to return, given Libya’s current instability. Typically, and for a host of obvious reasons, migration studies examine migrations that either have taken or are in the process of taking root. There has always been a tension in Chinese migration between the narrative of sojourners and migrants. In the case of North America, for instance, the narrative is skewed notably towards the migrants and their descendants, since these constitute, for example, the Chinese-American or Chinese-Canadian communities of today. We know, but hear less of, those who returned to China. Here, in the example of Libya, is a community which did not take root, in which practically everyone has returned to China and is now essentially invisible and untraceable in their various regions. The experience of Chinese migrants in Libya is camouflaged and ephemeral. In that sense, this article contributes towards expanding that shadow history of transient migration, which is still a common pattern in Chinese communities from Khabarovsk to Vientiane, ⁶⁰ but often does not last long enough to garner substantial attention or form a distinct shared identity.

No doubt when Libya’s political situation improves, a Chinese presence will return, but what shape that migration will take is hard to determine. Many projects and sites were seriously damaged or destroyed during the civil war, and the contracts signed between SOEs and the Libyan government are at best in limbo and likely void. The people behind the private businesses surrounding SOEs are now pursuing other projects in China or elsewhere abroad. A new regime may seem to offer prospects to a new generation of private businessmen, but their success will depend on overcoming challenges in the Libyan market which their predecessors could not. With Libyans in China exporting cheap goods back home, and Libya now chiefly known for its civil war, neither push nor pull factors are very strong and Chinese migration will likely remain SOE-based when it re-emerges. It does not appear that the challenges of the new Libya to the development of Chinese migrant communities will be any less significant than those of the old.

The vocabulary of migration studies struggles to keep pace with developments on the ground. Even the relatively conservative assumptions about sojourners (which might include many people who intend to return, but do not) does not reflect the realities of substantial populations whose experience occurs almost entirely in homogeneous social spaces, and whose interaction with the receiving state or society is negligible and indirect, so that even the metaphor of reception becomes problematic. The vocabulary the Libyan Chinese population used for their own experience is telling: far from considering themselves as sojourning, a migrant or an expatriate, labourers typically said they were going abroad to work (出国打工), while white-collar employees spoke of being stationed abroad (驻外). They did not speak of going abroad (出国), which implies agency and privilege, and instead emphasized being away and working. They have only technically spent time outside of China, since beyond actual physical presence their experience abroad – linguistic, social, political, culinary – remains entirely Chinese. Compared to this, even migrant groups usually identified as highly insular are engaged in all kinds of interface with the receiving society. The Libyan situation shows a Chinese population being controlled by (state-owned) enterprises on the supply side, and kept in sociocultural isolation in the face of state restrictions on the demand side. With the current state of communications, transportation, competent interpretation and international relations, it was possible to ship labour to Libya like any other commodity.

From mines in British Columbia to factories in Congo or Romania, this form of shipped labour, isolated from the receiving society, temporary, on contract, agency-supplied and largely out of the public eye, represents more of a displacement than what has been traditionally thought of as a migration. A Chinese camp in the desert is still a Chinese camp, even when the desert is in Libya. One particularity of the Libyan migration was that almost only this form of population movement was present, while in most other cases it runs parallel to other forms.