ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a historical analysis of China’s changing political dispensation over the past century and how this impacted on the relatively small Chinese community in South Africa. Beginning with the last dynasty of the Chinese Empire it traces the position and strategies of this ethnic cultural minority to this changing environment up to the present dispensation, when both China and South Africa underwent dramatic transformations towards the end of the twentieth century. Their deliberations with and under the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China, the People’s Republic of China and the government of Taiwan reflect on how they had to continually position and reposition themselves within the convoluted contours of changing international dispensations and allegiances. It will argue that the respective South African governments’ formal relations with China had implications for the South African Chinese community and is one of the lesser-known factors that placed them in an exceedingly invidious position under the new South African democratic dispensation.
