There and Back Again: Conceptualising the Chinese Gold Rush in Ghana

Abstract

In mid-2013, the Ghanaian government initiated a crackdown on the estimated 50,000 Chinese nationals engaging in small-scale gold mining in the country. In both the media and popular discourse the Chinese miners were depicted as feeding into corruption, destroying the environment and stealing resources from marginal sectors of Ghanaian society. However, we still do not know much about who these miners were, the factors that compelled them to travel to such a distant land in the hopes of ‘striking it rich’, or how the spoils of this gold rush were distributed back in China. Show more