Yidi Zheng

Developing Smart Cities and an open economy are central to China’s visions for a post-socialist future. Guangzhou, a southern port city famed for its openness toward foreign trade from the 16th century to this millennium, is the site of contention for these two visions. African trader-migrants, having crowned the city with the moniker “capital of Africa in China” upon their arrival to Guangzhou since the early 2000s (Castillo 2021), embody the very friction between the state’s dual ambitions for digital modernization and creating a “first-class international business environment” (Qiushi 2024). Under the Smart City initiative, the sedimentation of digital surveillance infrastructure in urban areas—intensified during the zero-COVID era—rendered the previously untraceable African visa-overstayers traceable. From 2016 to 2020, official census data indicates that even the number of legal African residents saw a sharp decline, falling from 16,000 to just over 4,000 (Li 2020). My research explores this fraught smartification of Guangzhou as well as African traders’ spatial strategies employed to sustain and develop their cross-continental trade network. Bridging the “narrative divide” (Thrush 2016) between the study of transient populations and urban development, this project invites anthropological reflections on the co-constitution of space and communities within digitized globalization.