(Photo: Chinese boss hollerin’ at his ditch diggers in Kabwe, Zambia)

Presently at Indiana University in Bloomington, attending an academic symposium on China’s rapidly expanding investments in Africa, and the implications it will have for the continent’s long-term development.

I am also buying buckets of fireworks. Or seriously considering it. Indiana has some of the laxest fireworks laws in America, which I suppose makes it an apt place to host a symposium about China (where fireworks were invented). In 2006, the state legalized the home use of exploding firecrackers and rockets with minimal restrictions. A local newspaper complains that the new law has “turned almost every summer night into Independence Day.” I didn’t know this in advance, but figured something was up when we crossed the Michigan-Indiana state line and were welcomed by a half-dozen fireworks warehouse emporiums, and the exuberantly-phrased roadside billboards advertising their never-ending array of celebratory combustibles.

Beyond the state-line fireworks stores, the other first impression Indiana makes is that it smells like poo. There are lots of farms, at least in the flatter north end of the state.

As for the symposium: the most revealing and entertaining presentation thus far has come from Wenren Jiang, a political science professor from the University of Alberta. What sets Jiang’s research apart is that he focuses not only on the official, state-level engagements between China and African governments (often involving Chinese state-owned enterprises), but also the mostly overlooked small and medium-sized Chinese entrepreneurs operating in Africa without state support.

Jiang’s presentation was based on research done in the Katanga region of southeastern Congo, paying particular attention to the sudden proliferation of copper smelters there 3-4 years ago, when copper was going for a handsome $9,000 US per tonne on world markets. The western media’s perception of China’s involvement in Africa, has mostly been a) skeptical, and b) focused on the state’s direct or indirect involvement. The story Jiang told was a “Wild West” scenario where independent Chinese investors went in, hastily threw together smelters, bought raw materials from freelancing locals (as opposed to establishing their own mines like Western companies in the area) and paid bribes to local bigwigs when necessary. Generally, they had little contact with Chinese officials in the country. The Chinese ambassador in Kinshasa told Jiang these dudes “only call when they’re in trouble.”

Relations between the entrepreneurs and local employees were strained. The smelters were frequently robbed, sometimes by their own staff. Safety and environmental regulations were either non-existent or unenforced. And the Chinese made little effort to understand the local culture or language. Not much after the would-be copper barons arrived, however, copper prices plummeted; first to $6,000 per tonne, and they’re now in the neighborhood of $3,000. Suffice it to say the Chinese are gone, and left little behind but unpaid wages, derelict smelter compounds, and a rising tide of crime. (But the region still has copper, plus cobalt, uranium, and diamonds—which is why some fear the resource wars currently happening in northeastern Congo, at the Ugandan frontier, could spread southward.)

Jiang’s point being that, contrary to the way we’ve framed our understanding of China’s involvement in Africa as  state managed, there’s a growing contingent of non-state, market-driven Chinese actors who are making their own deals, and in some cases, their own rules. For these players, diplomacy and south-south economic ties mean little. All that matters to them is the global market.

This article in the Asia Times by Jiang references his research around Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga province.