When Xu Jing completed her French degree, she decided not to follow in the footsteps of Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, who worked in France in the 1920s.
The young woman from Beijing instead joined a big Chinese construction company that she knew would send her to francophone Africa. Within a month she was in Algeria, joining the hundreds of thousands of Chinese working in Africa as part of a rapidly expanding diaspora.
“In college I dreamt of going to France as people say that it’s the most romantic country in the world,” Ms Xu says. “But then I realised I can visit anytime . . . Africa, on the other hand, was different as nobody I knew had been there.”
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