Gordon Mathews
Research Professor & Emeritus Professor, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
How Chinese Counterfeit Phones Ushered Africa into the Internet Age
In this paper, based on two decades of research among African traders in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and various African cities, I discuss the importance of China-made counterfeit phones in the early 21st century. Many authorities believe that counterfeit phones are morally wrong, but I argue in this paper that this is not necessarily the case—that, in fact, China provided a major benefit to the Global South in providing these phones. In traveling in Africa in the early 2000s, it was difficult to communicate with the outside world, while today it is extremely simple. This process of opening Africa to the world took place largely because of Chinese counterfeit smartphones in the era 2008-2015. Today that era is over, because Chinese brands such as Tecno, Infinix, Oppo, and Xiaomi offer excellent high-quality genuine smartphones for low prices; but this has taken place only in recent years. In earlier years, cheap China-made counterfeit phones played an extraordinarily important role in bringing globalization to ordinary Africans, and this may be one of China’s most important contributions to globalization in the early 21st century—it was not Japan, Korea, or the United States that enabled Africa to become linked to the globe through mobile communications, but China, through its counterfeit phones.
Speaker Bio
Gordon Mathews is an Emeritus Professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is the Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He has written What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2000), Hong Kong China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (2008, with Lui Tai-lok and Ma Kit-wai), Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011), The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace (2017, with Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang) and Life After Death Today in the United States, Japan, and China (2023, with Yang Yang and Miu Ying Kwong). He has co-edited books on consumption in Hong Kong, the Japanese generation gap, pursuits of happiness around the world, and globalization from below. Various of his books have been translated into seven different languages. The complex Chinese translation of Ghetto at the Center of the World by Yang Yang was awarded the 7th Hong Kong Book Prize; the simplified Chinese translation by Yang Yang was awarded the 2015 Phoenix Top10 Book of the Year Award in China.
