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‘Every day a new shop pops up’ – South Africa's ‘New’ Chinese Diaspora and the Multilingual Transformation of Rural Towns

A first study of Chinese migration and language contact in rural South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2013

Ana Deumert  and
Nkululeko Mabandla
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Extract

In this paper we will provide a preliminary overview of the Chinese diaspora in South Africa, with particular focus on non-metropolitan, rural contexts.

The migrations of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a complex array of Chinese communities around the world. While we know a fair amount about the Chinese diasporas in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and also diasporic communities within Asia, Africa's Chinese community remains a vastly understudied aspect of this larger Chinese diaspora (Ma & Cartier, 2003). Yet there have been long-standing ties between Africa and China, going back to the fifteenth century, and presently China is one of Africa's biggest trade partners and investors (Rotberg, 2008).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 44 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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