For more than a decade, rumors have circulated about Chinese prisoners working in various African countries. These allegations are persistent in Nigeria and Zambia, but also surface in countries like Tanzania or Angola.
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To understand the dynamics behind the narrative of Chinese prisoners working in African countries, the timing can be key. "These allegations most of the time rear their heads during election cycles," said economist Zuhumnan Dapel. At the time there were protests by unemployed Nigerian graduates, Dapel explained. Four years later, the argument still circulates.
"It's more-or-less like you're making people who can carry out the job effectively, you're making them redundant," one woman in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, told DW. One major reason for the outcry, it seems, is the strong presence of Chinese companies across Africa, companies that are known to contract workers from China.
Here's the story: Early in July, several papers including the Washington Times and the Sri Lanka Guardian and the Japan Times published an opinion piece written by a New Delhi-based security analyst, Dr. Brahma Chellaney, a former journalist and currently a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
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Chellaney wrote that China was engaged in "the forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects". He said that Sri Lanka had "thousands of Chinese convicts" working on infrastucture projects in Sri Lanka and that convicts from China were also building 4,000 houses as part of China's tsunami reconstruction aid project in the Maldives.
Earlier, in June, opposition politicians in Sri Lanka had claimed that 25,000 Chinese convict labourers were working on the island. I hear it is now being discussed in Brazil.
In a later interview with The Hindu, Chellaney did not give any information about his sources but said that they were "unimpeachable." He told Bloomberg News: “The opinion piece was based on actual investigations and thorough fact-checking and I stand by what I wrote,” Chellaney said.
The Hindu also quoted an African diplomat, who raised practical questions about the claim: “Chinese workers overseas is already a sensitive issue, just by their being there and working on projects in large numbers,” said a diplomat from an African country. “Why on earth will China make matters worse by shipping out criminals?
Dr. Chellaney actually provided no sources, no evidence, and no specifics to support his claim.
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Here is part of what he replied: "He is a bit of an ultranationalist ... I read this story. I don't believe it. I have heard stories of forced Chinese prison labor overseas but these happened during the colonial period: the British and the Dutch dispatched Chinese and other prisoners to work off their sentences in a number of overseas locations, including South Africa.
... Chinese convicts who did come over were considered "black" and largely treated as slaves...
Although Dr. Chellaney reported that the forced export of prisoners is a "new policy", the claim about modern-day Chinese convict labor in Africa has been around for many years.
For example, in May 1991, Roberta Cohen, a trustee for the International League for Human Rights, and a former State Department political appointee, wrote a letter to the New York Times claiming that when she lived in Benin in the 1980s, she had "learned" that Chinese prison labor was being used there.
The German paper Der Spiegel reported opposition politician Michael Sata's claim that 80,000 "former prisoners" from China were working in Zambia.
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Getting more specific, Richard Behar in Fast Company said that he had interviewed an immigration "consultant" in Zambia who said she had "processed paperwork for hundreds of Chinese prisoners." My best guess is that stories like this are largely urban myths.
People view the way that Chinese construction workers live, in extremely basic conditions like those on the left, in compounds on the construction site. These construction sites are usually surrounded by security fences, but this is to keep the construction site secure, and in particular, to prevent the stealing of construction materials, rather than to keep the workers locked inside.
Forcing prisoners to work overseas as official policy, as Dr. Challaney maintains, is most unlikely.
Given the high levels of corruption, the need for local governments to raise revenues, and the multiple Chinese actors operating overseas, it's plausible that a contractor could make a deal with local prison officials. But exporting large contingents of prison labor as official policy would be politically very risky. If it has happened, it is almost certainly uncommon and ad hoc.
I ask about this issue fairly frequently during my research and have never come across any hard facts or evidence of Chinese prisoners working in Africa. But after giving a talk at a university here in the US a few months ago, I met a student who told me that he actually had some evidence on this from his own travels.
What do other researchers say?
Swiss journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret report in their book China Safari (p. 252):...the dragon slayers and some NGOs have spread the rumor that most Chinese workers in Africa are actually prisoners. But in all our travels we have not met a single one and feel free to assert that this is anti-Chinese propaganda.
China has devised a novel strategy to relieve pressure on its overcrowded prisons: employ convicts as labourers on overseas projects in the developing world. The practice has exposed another facet of China's egregious human rights record which, when it comes to the overseas operations of Chinese companies, includes the government's failure to enforce its own regulations.
China executes three times as many people every year as the rest of the world combined. Amnesty International has estimated that, in 2007, China secretly executed on average "around 22 prisoners every day".
In addition to being the world's leading executioner, China has one of its largest prison populations. The 2009 world prison population list compiled by the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, put the total number of inmates in Chinese jails at 1.57 million - larger than the population of Estonia, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritius, Swaziland, Trinidad & Tobago, Fiji or Qatar.
The forced dispatch of prisoners to work on overseas infrastructure projects raises new issues regarding China's human rights record. It also adds a new element - the dumping of convicts - to its trade and investment policy, which has been much criticised for dumping goods.
Thousands of Chinese convicts, for example, have been pressed into service on projects undertaken by state-run Chinese companies in Sri Lanka, a strategically important country for China as it seeks to enhance its regional position in the Indian Ocean.
After providing Sri Lanka's government with offensive weapon systems that helped end the country's decades-long civil war, China has been rewarded with port-building, railroad, and other infrastructure projects.
Chinese convicts also have been dispatched to the Maldives, where the Chinese government is building 4,000 houses on several different islands as a government-to-government "gift" to win influence.
Chinese companies' operating practice for overseas projects, including in Africa, is to keep the number of local workers to a bare minimum and to bring in much of the workforce from China, some of which comprises convicts "freed" on parole for project-related overseas work.
Convict labourers, like the rest of the Chinese workforce on such projects, are housed near the project site. That way, if any convict worker escaped, he would be easy to find in an alien setting.
In theory, such practices run counter to regulations promulgated by the Chinese commerce ministry in August 2006, in response to a backlash against Chinese businesses in Zambia following the death of 51 Zambian workers in an explosion at a Chinese-owned copper mine.
These regulations called for "localisation," including hiring local workers, respecting local customs, and adhering to safety norms. During an eight-nation 2007 African tour, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a point of meeting with Chinese businesses to stress the importance of corporate responsibility in their local dealings.
Moreover, in October 2006, the state council - China's cabinet - issued nine directives ordering that Chinese overseas businesses, among other things, "pay attention to environmental protection", "support local community and people's livelihood cause" and "preserve China's good image and its good corporate reputation".
But Chinese regulations are sometimes promulgated simply to blunt external criticism, and thus are seldom enforced, except when a case attracts international attention. For example, in 2003 China enacted a law on environmental-impact assessments, which was followed in 2008 by "provisional measures" to permit public participation in such assessments.
Yet Chinese leaders remain more zealous about promoting exports and economic growth than in protecting the country's air and water.
Similarly, the state council's 2006 nine directives to Chinese overseas companies have been subordinated to the drive for exports and growth, even when it imposes environmental and social costs on local communities abroad. Indeed, as part of the government's "going global" policy, Chinese companies are offered major incentives and rewards for bagging overseas contracts and boosting exports.
The use of convict labourers adds a disturbing new dimension to this strategy. But even before convicts became part of China's overseas development effort, some Chinese projects, especially dam-building schemes, were embroiled in disputes with local communities in Botswana, Burma, Pakistan, Ghana and Sudan.
Chinese companies cannot get thousands of prisoners released on their own, let alone secure passports and exit permits for them. It is obvious that the practice of pressing convicts into service on overseas projects has been instituted at the instance of the Chinese government.
Until the Chinese government's treatment of its own citizens and those of other countries is guided by respect for basic human rights and the rule of law, China is unlikely to command the respect that it seeks on the world stage.
It should be noted that the author made such shocking and sweeping allegations without any evidence. His allegations are both unfounded and totally untrue. Under China's law, criminal convicts are prohibited from travelling abroad and Chinese companies are not permitted to hire people with criminal records to work on their overseas projects.
"Partnerships are meant to bring mutual benefits like infrastructure, schools, and development. In December religious groups and civil society members in South Kivu’s Mwenga territory took to the streets, voicing their concerns over the activities of Chinese mining companies.
“These Chinese companies in (the towns of) Lugusha, Kitutu, Kaboke, Suguru, and Mitobo have failed to fulfill their promises. They promised to build schools, bridges, roads, hospitals, and a stadium, and to provide scholarships for our students.
China's African Mineral Rush: Exposing Human Rights Abuses and Environmental Degradation
This story originated in VOA's Central Africa Service. Some information also came from Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
The Chinese in 18th and 19th century South Africa are recorded as historical and statistical footnotes: mentioned in passing in prison inventories, court cases and notices of enslavement and exile. But everywhere you read closer, their personalities, that individual who lived and loved, as well as their complex social realities, keeps breaking through.
His love, Thisgingnio, the only Chinese woman convict recorded at the Cape.
The DEIC used the Cape as a dumping place for political and civilian troublemakers in the East Indies from 1658 to 1795. A number of Singhalese and Javanese, but mostly Batavian Chinese convicts were sent to the Cape.
By 1706 there was a significant Chinese community at the Cape. The convicts worked in the quarries, built fortifications and collected salt and lime. They worked and were housed together with the slaves.
Chinese engineers quarters, Sierra Leone 2007
The Chinese footprint in South Africa is nearly a millennium old. Carbon-dated shards of Chinese porcelain in the collection of colonist Cecil John Rhodes dating from the 1100s and also later, were found at Mapungubwe, an early site of civilization in South Africa’s north and also at the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, giving credence to historical writings that southern Africa was one of the main gold suppliers to the Ming Dynasty.
Most of the Chinese in Cape Town in the 1600 and 1700s came from the Dutch “prize colony” of Batavia (present-day Jakarta), and consisted mostly of criminals exiled to South Africa’s coastal Cape region.
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