Where Walmart dares not go -- or believes it can't make a profit -- Chinese merchants quite often fill the void. That is, they are often the low-cost consumer goods supersellers to much of the developing or war-ravaged world.
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China's growing presence in Africa is by now well known. But while most news headlines focus on extraction industries, Chinese entrepreneurs have also been active in other sectors, from textiles to grocery outlets. In some cases, their presence has fueled local resentment, especially when they are competing directly against African merchants; in other instances, Chinese merchants have brought finished products and supplies that otherwise wouldn't be available or affordable, to unlikely consumers in Africa and elsewhere across the globe.
Indeed, the rise of Chinese merchants in other underserved markets may provide a glimpse into the future role the Chinese could play in Africa. Take Eastern Europe. Chinese merchants have been moving en masse into the region since the early 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc turned post-communist Eurasia into a free market free-for-all.
I became interested in Eastern Europe's Chinese communities when I first visited the Balkans in 2004. At the time, the highest numbers of Chinese were found in the Yugoslav successor states, particularly Serbia and Montenegro (which still existed as one federal entity) and Republika Srpska, the eastern part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Various news agencies had put the number of Chinese in the former Yugoslavia at 200,000. Experts told me this was an inflated estimate, but I could not dispute the pervasiveness of the Chinese in the Balkans.
Everywhere I went, I saw little shops called kineske prodavnice (literally, "Chinese shops") scattered throughout the cities and countryside of Serbia and Montenegro. The kineske prodavnice peddled cheap goods made in China -- pens, umbrellas, knockoff Pumas, everything but food. They were a natural part of the landscape, patronized by locals and staffed by Chinese merchants who spoke broken Serbian.
Curiously, every shopkeeper I spoke with -- from Belgrade to the little town of Ulcinj on the Montenegrin-Albanian border -- hailed from the same county in Zhejiang province in southeastern China. They told me that the Zhejiangese were also shopkeepers in North Korea, Cambodia, and Russia.
In each of these places, there is a clear need for basic commodities. But because of embargoes or political instability, few multinational companies are interested in opening their doors. Yet the Chinese merchants were willing to launch small businesses in the shadiest of emerging markets.
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