Ever since former New York Times journalist Howard French’s must-read, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa was published in 2014, there’s been a lot of curiosity and increased awareness in the West about the rising presence of Chinese laborers across the continent. For ordinary Africans it’s a daily reality and at times a source of local labor tensions in many countries with high unemployment rates as they see thousands of Chinese workers and managers leading dozens of government-commissioned infrastructure projects in their cities and beyond. But while French’s “million” number might have been an informed estimate, the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI), a project at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has been keeping track of the official data going back to 2005. These official numbers will likely not include the hundreds of Chinese migrants who stay on in a country after the infrastructure project they were invited to work on is completed, or the thousands of entrepreneurs and artisans who come to seek their fortune in Africa be it in local retail, small-scale manufacturing or artisanal mining for example.