Opinion | Chinese businesses are driven abroad by profits, not political agendas, whether it’s TikTok or a grocery store in the Congo
- The fact Bytedance is a Chinese company does not mean it is doing the bidding of the Communist Party – or even has its support
- The world needs to start making a distinction between China’s government and its private businesses
The frustration of Zhang Yiming, the founder of Bytedance, over the fate of video-sharing app TikTok in the United States has reminded me of my conversation with a Chinese grocery owner in Kinshasa, the capital of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo.
Zhang Ermei, who like the TikTok founder is from Fujian province, runs a family store in the biggest slum of the African city. In a riot targeting Chinese merchants in 2015, her store was ransacked by a local mob and she lost everything overnight. “Five years of hard work were in vain,” she said to me.
Zhang from the Congo belongs to a so-called old generation of Chinese migrants who do not speak Mandarin, let alone English or French, and who have little support or resources apart from family and an informal network of close friends back home.
The Congo was the first foreign country Zhang ever visited. Driven by a dream she could earn more running a small business there than she could tilling a small plot of land in Fujian, she settled in Kinshasa, a place that was completely unknown to her.
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