Making Friends, Building Roads: Chinese Entrepreneurship and the Search for Reliability in Angola
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork conducted in 2013–2014 with a provincial‐level Chinese state‐owned construction firm in Luanda, this article examines how Chinese businesses attempted to expand in the aftermath of a booming period of Angolan postwar reconstruction. Chinese entrepreneurs found that business could only be done with the help of local mediators promising to open otherwise inaccessible portals to political expediency. They shared with their would‐be collaborators an image of Angola as a land of vast extractive opportunities, available only to those who could gain access through crucial personal connections. Highly aware of the opacity and potential deceptiveness of their “friends,” in part because they engaged in dissimulative practices themselves, Chinese businesspeople evaluated Angolan partners less in terms of sincerity than efficacy. Amid a general atmosphere of mistrust, “reliability” emerged as a necessary quality for constructing relationships of mutual benefit and exploitation. [friendship, mistrust, business, globalization, China–Angola relations]
Source: American Anthropologist
DOI: 10.1111/aman.13558
Author: Cheryl Mei‐ting Schmitz
Institution: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,000
OpenAlex ID: W3084043481