In a New Yorker article – the promised land – Evan Osnos about African merchants living in China. He also narrates an Audio Slide Show about the economic, social, and religious life of African migrants in Guangzhou.  On his blog he writes:

Prof. Adams Bodomo is a Ghanaian linguist at the University of Hong Kong and one of the first scholars to write in English about the African community in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

… As Bodomo and other scholars see it, immigration, like other byproducts of prosperity, is an unfamiliar issue in China. For most of its history, China was so poor that hardly anyone but missionaries or marauders wanted to stay. China’s posture toward foreigners was erratic; it oscillated between the xenophobia that produced the Great Wall to the zealous overture of the Beijing Olympics. But China is still ambivalent about people settling down permanently, and Bodomo sees that as a the big question about whether these communities survive.

There is also a podcast interview with Osnos.