ABSTRACT
While there has been a rapid migration of Chinese nationals to Zimbabwe following the ‘Look East’ policy, there has been little research on and about how the Chinese migrants relate and interact with locals and how they negotiate their social identities thereof. This paper examines Chinese small-scale traders in Harare, in particular their mundane forms of the everyday, with specific focus on their social and business practices, social relations and interactions with the locals. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research with small-scale Chinese traders, workers and clients in Harare, this paper argues that as Chinese traders devise and deploy various tactics and strategies to adapt and get-by in the city of Harare, new and unique forms of Chineseness emerge akin to what some scholars referred to as ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’. The paper further reveals how Chinese mobility reconfigures the ways in which Chinese identities and Chineseness are enacted and articulated in Harare.
