The young entrepreneur Huang Hongxiang wants to help Chinese companies make their foreign investments more sustainable and better align them with conditions on the ground. The demand for a better understanding of Chinese companies is huge in places like Africa, he says in an interview with Fabian Peltsch. However, the Chinese side, in particular, continues to stonewall in many cases.
In 2014, you founded "China House" in Kenya, a socially focused company that has set itself the goal of combining Chinese foreign investment with sustainable development. How did you come up with this idea?
About ten years ago, when I was still working as a journalist, I studied and wrote a lot about Chinese overseas investments in the global south and their socio-environmental conflicts in mining projects, oil projects, and so on. In the beginning, I was focusing on Africa, and Kenya is like the gateway country for many Chinese people who go to Africa.
There are a lot of sustainable development issues connected to China's global engagement and Chinese companies overseas, especially in the Global South, but you don't find many Chinese civil society organizations working there, resulting in a lot of communication gaps, misunderstandings, and conflicts between the Chinese stakeholders and local, international stakeholders. That's why I started China House. So when local communities, NGOs, and media want to learn more about China and want to connect with Chinese stakeholders, they could come to us.
What are the main problems you aim to solve with "China House"?
First and foremost, we want to create dialogue and reduce misunderstandings and conflicts. Chinese companies in the global south often have very little understanding of the international and the local side of handling business, but local and international stakeholders also understand little about how Chinese companies and Chinese communities work. We have seen this situation everywhere, not just in Kenya. In Latin America and even many parts of Asia it is the same. They want to know what the Chinese are doing and why they are doing what they're doing. And then they, of course, want to influence them on how they do it, let's say, on sustainable development.
You want to help Chinese companies to improve their working conditions and protect the environment. How do Chinese companies react when you offer them your services?
There have been mixed reactions. It is not easy getting the trust and funds from the Chinese company side. One of the challenges we face is that many of these companies do not allocate budgets for sustainable development projects. Additionally, the concept of what we do as a social enterprise is relatively new to many of these companies, so it is difficult to convince them that our service is helpful for them.
However, we also had some successful cases of working with Chinese companies on CSR programs in countries like Kenya, Myanmar, Tanzania, South Africa, and so on. These programs cover different areas, including vocational training and wildlife conservation.
Given the bad press in many countries, one would think that Chinese companies should be keen to improve their reputation overseas …
Many people working in Chinese companies in the Global South perceive media-related services differently than you perceive it in the West. For example, we approached a Chinese company and said, 'Hey, we want to do some beneficial community project, do you want to be part of it? It can improve your image and might even give you new business opportunities, regarding there is a lot of negative press about Chinese companies.' And what they mainly asked us was: 'So, if there is negative press about us, can you erase that?' And I have to say to them: Sorry, no, we can't, and we don't do such things.
Is there any suspicion that "China House" could be working directly for the Chinese government or exclusively for the benefit of Chinese companies?
Sometimes, we encounter this as well. Because it is uncommon to see Chinese civil society organizations in the Global South, some local people would think we are from the government. However, usually, after we explain what we do and the projects that we have done, we manage to gain their trust.
Did you ever try to approach the local Confucius Institutes to collaborate?
Government organizations in China are often not interested in working with us because we are a pure grassroots civil society organization. For many Chinese people, if you are not "official" (associated with the government), you are a nobody.
And that's different with Western organizations?
Yes, compared to Chinese companies and government-related organizations, international organizations such as global NGOs are way more open to working with us. I think that also has something to do with my background, as I studied international development at Columbia University and worked with many international sustainable development organizations before. And I also played a role in an award-winning Netflix documentary about the ivory trade investigation in 2016. That brought us a lot of credibility.
In the Netflix documentary "The Ivory Game," you posed as a Chinese businessman who wants to buy ivory.
Yes, it is relatively easy for Chinese investigators to get the trust of traffickers in the Global South, and that helps fight the illegal wildlife trade. We have built a Chinese investigator team for global wildlife conservation issues. We recently discovered a big black market for pangolins in a country in Southeast Asia, and we are currently in the process of investigating in a similar manner. We operate several sustainable development projects, including the Human-Wildlife Conflict Project in Kenya, Orangutan Conservation in Indonesia, Anti-Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) initiatives in Kenya, and so on.
Do you believe that the efforts of Chinese companies to tackle such problems will increase when a new generation of internationally-minded Chinese are in leadership positions?
I think more and more young Chinese people are interested in this field of sustainable development. They want to learn about issues like gender equality, quality education and environmental protection. However, they need guidance to learn and get into this area. Through such programs, they would learn about this area and grow their global citizenship. In the future, when they work in Chinese companies and so on, I believe they will behave in a very different way.
But we need to find a way to sustain ourselves because this is a very long-term project. We need to be able to sustain our team and maintain our programs. Apart from us, there aren't many opportunities for young Chinese students to go to the field and learn about global sustainable development issues.
How do you aim to achieve this?
This year, we hope to do some fundraising globally and work more with international organizations who could provide some funding. Securing sustainable funding for these international projects is a significant challenge. We have to try to do fundraising for those international projects, particularly from China. We have to try different ways because I believe there is a big need for an organization like ours, which aims to further integrate China into global sustainable development, so it is important for us to find sustainable ways to continue those projects.
Hongxiang Huang graduated from Fudan University and holds an MPA in development practice from Columbia University. In 2014, he founded "China House" in Kenya to advise Chinese companies looking to invest in the continent on sustainable development. In addition, "China House" is involved in several education and development projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. In 2018, Huang was nominated by Forbes China as a "30 Under 30" in the social enterprise category.
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