Take the M2 east in Johannesburg and down the Fu Jin off-ramp near what used to be Doornfontein. For the area as we knew it is no more — the Ellis Park shopping centre behind the Johannesburg sports stadium has been rechristened China City.
The hustle and bustle of traders unpacking mountains of goods, and of porters pushing trolleys chock-a-block with bulging bags, is an inkling of what life in the furiously industrialising Chinese cities of Fu Jin, Guang Dong, Harbin and Beijing is like.
It’s a fast and buccaneering brand of retail capitalism that has made China the world’s factory — and also its shopping basket.
From those cities, the Chinese entrepreneurs, who must have Mao turning in his grave, fan out over the globe — some have come to the tip of Africa and taken over the east of Jo’burg.
Quite distinct from South Africa’s first wave of Chinese immigrants who came at the beginning of the 20th century, the second generation has boosted the complement to between 200 00 and 300 000 traders, who use the city as a launching pad into Angola, Namibia, Mozambique and Botswana.
Ellis Park is now China City, half of the old Game store on Bruma Lake has been transmogrified into Oriental City and all of what used to be Anglo American’s avant-garde Bruma Lake shopping centre is now called Asia City. Look at that end of the city from a hilly vantage point and the neon-red signs in Mandarin that dot the skyline are a striking symbol of a new community. All of Cyrildene, much of Edenvale, swathes of Bedfordview and also of Kempton Park are home to the second generation.
Outside Asia City, a container-load of soy sauce and canned mushrooms is being unloaded by a team of young, black truck-hands supervised by Calvin Ye, a recent computer science graduate fresh from Beijing.
His family has opened a spanking-new Chinese supermarket at Bruma, where his younger brother David carefully arranges noodles for Africa — in an array of sizes, shapes and flavours that Pick ’n Pay can only dream about.
“The one thing,” he says, explaining Jo’burg’s eastern explosion, “is that Chinese things are cheap. Labour is cheap — about R500 a month and that’s a good price because our goods can compete. With 1,4-billion people, our society forces you to be like that. You have to fight for your work.”
The abiding image of the city’s eastern retail business is of boxes. Boxes being decanted from a traffic nightmare of trucks, containers and bakkies, checked by Chinese and South African shop assistants who sit on the floor counting and unpacking shirts, dresses, tracksuits and such a profusion of plastic platform-heeled shoes it seems that if you put them in a line, they would make the distance to the Great Wall of China.
The hands of eager traders grab as much as they can. The teeming and constant mass of shoppers making their way through the gates of China City is a kiss goodbye to the local rag- trade, which has steadily been going to its own wall through the Nineties with what the unions call the “flood of cheap Asian imports”.
These Asian imports are so gob-smackingly cheap that the Proudly South African campaign — its “buy local” component, at least — seems consigned to the heap of “nice ideas that never happened”. Nothing more than R100, most items under R50. Sunglasses, perfected by master counterfeiters, sell for R3 a pair.
For Christmas the Chinese traders have stocked up on a selection of kitsch that will dent the profits of local tills: who can resist a baby Karate King paperweight, a silk-flower pot-plant you can turn on and off, or the singing rabbi doll, each for less than R20 — even less if you take several at a time?
We meet hawkers and shop owners from four African countries — Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Malawi — stocking up.
The retail hub is supplying not only South Africa’s informal sector, but also that of neighbouring countries and those further north. It is a growing node on an ever-expanding continental trade route.
In the Bruma Lake parking basement, Zhengen Shi is hoping for bumper Christmas sales of smiling Buddha statues. The parking lot is a riot of vases, room dividers, Buddhas and towering vases he brought over for the Rand Easter Show.
As Shi takes payment from a customer for one of the faux Ming vases, he peels change from a sheaf of notes, mostly blue. He smiles a lopsided smile and pronounces business as “OK! OK!”
Up the road from Bruma on a rainy afternoon, the sense of being transported to a city within a city is even more pronounced. Jo’burg’s historic Chinatown is in the west of the city and grew cheek by jowl with the city’s old business district. Now its sands have shifted, too, as Cyrildene has stolen the crown for the place where the new community and the city’s other residents choose to shop, eat and play when their tastes turn to a touch of the Orient.
Young women chatting in Mandarin skip across the main drag in Cyrildene, carrying the latest DVDs and chewing chicken satays you can buy for R2 a stick from a street chef.
King Li crouches in a doorway, shovelling fresh clams into packets and weighing live crabs he imports from Mozambique.
The newspapers on sale are locally published but written in Mandarin; keyboards at a local Internet cafÃ