‘Order doesn't come by itself’. Chinese facilitators of order and disorder in Accra

Research on China in Africa has only recently shifted from the inter-state to the interpersonal level. Despite this turn towards directly observable interaction between Chinese migrants and local populations, bias produced by both ideology and regional specialization seems hard to overcome. Combining Africanist and Sinologist perspectives in one research project for the first time, we attempt to present a more balanced assessment of the impact the activities of new Chinese entrepreneurial migrants are having on African societies. Having focused our 2011/2012 fieldwork on Ghana’s trade sector and the complex microcosm of Accra’s central market area, we show how Chinese migrant entrepreneurs are opening up new avenues and opportunities for actors previously largely excluded from access to affordable goods, selling space, market information, specific economic strategies and, not least, relative income security. By circumventing established access mechanisms, it is argued that these new market entrants are profoundly reshuffling the webs of relationships in the marketplace as their practices may gradually undermine established traders’ central role as gatekeepers. Initially perceived as a source of disorder, this development will eventually translate into normative change and result in a new order of the market. However, the Chinese presence and practices can only facilitate such processes of re-ordering by creating new maneuvering spaces. It remains in the hands of the local actors to creatively appropriate and reinvent these spaces.