Every day, we carry our hearts in our hands”. You hear this Chinese idiom across Africa; it means to live in fear. As one young man said recently: “Every week the police and immigration come and extort money from us, but the Chinese embassy does nothing, they just look down on us. Why do we have to live as if we are thieves?”

The speaker had lost his job in a factory in Fujian province and had travelled thousands of miles to work at a relative’s shop in Angola’s capital, Luanda. He is one of hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants making a living as traders in Africa, selling everything from food to clothes to household gadgets.

Their stories belie two myths about China in Africa: that it’s all about commodities, and that China moves as one. They also illustrate why Beijing cannot afford to ignore the immigrants any longer. For over a decade the prevailing image of China’s presence in Africa has been of a monolith, as state-owned energy giants race in offering infrastructure in return for commodities. Now a more complex picture is emerging with different actors, driven by diverse aims and needs, creating new flashpoints for China-Africa relations.