3 - Boundary Brokerage: Sino-Congolese Couples Bridging Intergroup Boundaries in Congo (DRC)

Over the past few decades, the intensifying China-Africa engagements, characterized by the bidirectional exchange of goods, capital, people, and knowledge, have fueled growing academic interest in the micro-level interactions between Chinese and Africans, spanning economic activities to intimate relationships. Chinese in Africa are often portrayed as “self-segregated” and “non-integrated”, fostering miscommunication, mistrust, and even tension in their inevitable daily interactions with locals. Drawing on ethnographic research on Sino-Congolese couples residing in Congo (DRC) collected between 2022 and 2024, this paper explores how these couples engage as “boundary brokers” in the negotiation of intergroup boundaries between Chinese migrants and local Congolese. Findings suggest that intergroup boundaries between Chinese and Congolese are (re)constructed and maintained through the juxtaposition and interlocking of social and symbolic boundaries based on multiple differences between the two groups. While these boundaries create various forms of inclusion and exclusion, they remain permeable, relational, and interactive. Although boundaries between groups are not limited to ethnicity but encompass a wide array of socially constructed differences, including nationality, ways of living, socio-economic status, and race, these couples bridge gaps and circumvent closures. Yet, these Chinese and Congolese partners perform different roles, possess unequal capacity, and embody distinct values in boundary brokerage. This paper offers a nuanced understanding of how grassroots interactions in China-Africa encounters are brokered at the micro level, using the empirical case of Sino-Congolese couples.