ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Chinese migrants pursue their Chinese dreams in Africa. It helps readers understand how spatial mobility has become a channel for social mobility for many Chinese migrants from the inner provinces of China. The chapter elaborates on several typical categories of Chinese migrants in Benin and Ghana and their motivations. It adds to the conventional binary pattern of migration flows of manual workers and student migrants to developed countries, as described in most other new Chinese migration studies. A common motivation for employees of Chinese companies in the West African countries was a 'higher salary'. For young university graduates from the Chinese interior provinces, the meaning of a higher salary is related to a more recent phenomenon: the commodification of the marriage market. Human mobility forms an essential and integral part of social systems and their transformations; the mobility patterns are the results and causes of ongoing social developments of both sending and receiving countries.
