Author: Laurence Marfaing, Alena Thiel.

China-Africa relations continue to attract substantial academic interest. In addition to the activi- ties of large-scale state-directed enterprises, the social and economic conditions and practices of both Chinese actors in Africa and African actors in China have gained increasing prominence in recent years. Yet, these transnational businesspersons tend to be portrayed in a negative light, with the incompatibility between their business practices and their new environments being emphasized. The isolation, exclusion and, consequently, the limits of social and economic cooperation between the two groups are some of the major themes of the literature.1 In contrast to this, our paper focuses less on the structural description of the encounter between Africans in China and their Chinese counterparts and more on the semantic dimension. Having already established that the Chinese in Africa impact on the local social order by force of their mere presence rather than any close interaction with the local population (Giese and Thiel 2012, Marfaing and Thiel 2013), we set out to describe how the growing number of African actors traveling to China potentially trigger shifts in attitude and practice upon and through their return by translating and incorporating their commercial and intellectual experiences in and with China into their life at home. Our initial hypothesis2 assumed transnational African traders regularly moving between West Africa and China to be the main actors of this translation, with longer-term African resi- dents in China merely influencing their encounter.3 Our fieldwork in China, however, quickly showed us that the division between resident and traveling actors could not be upheld. Ghanaian and Senegalese agents residing in China maintain close relations to their home countries and regularly exchange ideas and goods with those at home. Furthermore, observing that their encounters with China are arguably much more intimate and intensive than those of their short-term visiting compatriots – not only allowing them deeper insights into the workings of the Chinese business environment and society, but ultimately also greater interpretative authority – we reconsidered these actors not as a mere structuring factor in the China experi- ence of transnational traders but as key translators in their own right.