‘Made in Ethiopia’ Confronts Chinese Expansion in Africa

A bustling Chinese-owned industrial park becomes the microcosm for a larger treatise on the growing industrialization of present-day Ethiopia, as well as China’s growing impact in Africa. Who are the winners and what is left behind in the pursuit of communal progress? Although it could have very easily been the case, Made in Ethiopia isn’t a simplistic tale of victim versus villain. As a matter of fact, the film is all the more interesting for its nuanced and sensitive reading of a very complicated situation.

OkayAfrica spoke to London-based Max Duncan and Washington DC-based, Chinese-born Xinyan Yu about the film’s central themes. Their responses are lightly edited for length and clarity.

OkayAfrica: You both have backgrounds covering China as journalists. Why did this story have to be a film?

Max Duncan: We were both working as journalists in China for about ten years each. A lot of what we were looking at when we were covering China was related to this kind of extraordinary high-speed industrialization. That period also coincided with China’s increasing investment in the Global South and the rolling out of the Belt and Road Initiative, which is this big global infrastructure scheme. We looked at Ethiopia because at that time Ethiopia was growing very fast at a rate of 9-10 percent GDP growth per year, to the extent that people were calling it, perhaps tritely, the China of Africa. And on some level, the developmental model was very similar to the one that China had used to bring hundreds of millions out of poverty. It seemed like a really interesting place to look at whether this Chinese-style growth model was working in Africa. We also wanted to look at the relationship between China and Ethiopia.

Did you have any relationship with Ethiopia before making this film?

Duncan: I had traveled to Ethiopia a couple of times and found it such an interesting place culturally, so unique with a very strategic position in East Africa. I went on a recce in 2019 looking at everything and anything related to the relationship between both countries from the infrastructure projects to Chinese private companies and industrial parks. We visited this one giant industrial park which had 20,000 workers making shoes and garments and cement and concrete and ceramics, and it seemed like such an interesting place to use as a microcosm to look at all these different complex interactions.

Xinyan Yu: We started working together immediately after Max’s first trip. We were both on the cusp of transitioning from journalism to something more long-form as we wanted to tell more in-depth stories. I personally had worked on a half-hour-long BBC documentary about the Belt and Road Initiative, and there were very similar stories going on in these places, whether it was a milk farm in Poland or schools incorporating Chinese into their curriculum in Kazakhstan.

We were very much driven by the curiosity of seeing the human stories behind them because what we found at the time was these stories were told in a very black-and-white, one-dimensional way. I joined purely driven by that curiosity myself, without a very thought-out plan. We kind of just went with the flow, kept an open mind, and the story found us just as much as we found it.

While making the film, what new discoveries did you reach that you hadn’t seen in your research or journalism work?

Xinyan: The even-handed approach present in a lot of the good academic papers I read had a lot to say about this relationship as a double-edged sword; there was a lot of discussion on infrastructure and debt. But read the news in mass media or even more in-depth articles, and there was always this narrative of villains and heroes. I think because we had covered China for so long, we knew that it is very easy to sensationalize a story about China. There used to be a joke that there were only three kinds of China stories; big China, bad China or weird China. It would be easy to make a story that fits neatly into those three archetypes. And the same could be said about Africa, lots of poverty, famine or war stories. But the story is always much more complicated than that, everyone has a lot more agency than what we see in general news reports. We went in with a lot of willingness to present the complexity.

Why do you think the relationship between Africa and China has been consistent despite all the criticism it has attracted, fairly and otherwise?

Duncan: I don’t want to speak on behalf of African countries, but I think it is fair to say that if you are an African country looking to develop in the 21st century, China makes sense. A country like Ethiopia has a lot of people but not many resources, but they still have to provide jobs. Are they going to look to a China or an India on one hand, or a European country like France on the other? It is fair to say that China knows how to do development. Not to say that this has been perfect but it has workable models that you can adapt. When Chinese come to Ethiopia to work you can see that a lot of them have lived experiences similar to what young Ethiopian workers are living through so they can relate. Also, the Chinese are prepared to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty perhaps in a way that European or American or Japanese investors would be unprepared to do. There is more common ground that both cultures share in that sense.

Xinyan: I want to add that I attended this U.S.-Africa summit held in Washington, D.C. — it was the first time after COVID, and I think the consensus was that America tends to see Africa through the prism of risk, or a series of problems that they need to manage. But China sees Africa through a prism of opportunity, and this manifests in multiple ways, in politics or business or academics. From what I gathered at the summit, leaders in Africa were clear that it is not that they want to follow the Chinese, European or American way. They want to carve out a path for themselves by picking what works from each side. And I think from the Chinese development philosophy, they see a lot of pragmatism and not just charity or lofty ideas about abstractions. I think that vision aligns with many of the African leaders.