ABSTRACT
Complete localization (only having African staff) of the Chinese SOEs in Benin and Ghana would be impossible, as suggested in last chapter. The Chinese managers and directors are a barrier. Why do they stay on, and why did they come to work in Africa in the fi rst place and stay? Until now, Chinese SOEs’ expats have been invisible and omitted from the China-Africa analysis. In contrast, managerial autonomy and agency cost, for instance, are popular research subjects in Chinese studies (see, for example, Qian 1996, Walder 2010, Yeo 2013). Control dynamics between the Chinese state and its SOEs are often an issue in China. There are constant calls from the Chinese government media to, for example, increase supervision of SOE executives 1 and provide more transparency on their salaries, 2 which refl ects the Chinese state’s diffi culty in supervising its SOEs in China, let alone those overseas.
