Popular accounts of the expansion of Chinese capital in Africa have presented it as a rapid and exciting process of furious movement and violent transformation. By contrast, fieldwork conducted among employees of a Chinese state-owned construction firm in Luanda, Angola, in 2013–14 reveals repetitive rhythms of monotony and boredom. This essay explores how Chinese migrant workers in Angola experienced their time abroad as work without life, despite spending much of their time every day engaged in non-productive activities. Justifying their deferment of ‘life’ with dreams of what their money would eventually buy in China, and attempting to contrast their own ‘hard work’ against an image of idle Africans or Americans, the Chinese men the author met in Angola were ultimately pretty bored.

Increased mobility from China to Africa over the past two decades has given birth to the ‘Africa drifter’ ( 非漂 ). Employed and driven, yet restless and plagued by the lack of a sense of security, many Chinese who move to Africa for work, especially those attached to large-scale infrastructure projects, find themselves afloat—caught between remaining and returning. Why do Africa drifters wind up in this uncertain state? And how can we link this type of mobility to developments in China?

The globalisation of capital from the People’s Republic of China has been accompanied by a growing range of human flows. Since the late 1980s, small traders selling consumer goods, labour migrants working on state projects, and students have expanded to much of the world and been joined by expatriate managers and technicians, tourists and lifestyle migrants. These flows play different roles in the global geography of capital from China, carrying with them distinct modalities of labour relations that involve both Chinese and non-Chinese actors.