Meet Zaf Gebretsadik, from Addis Ababa. After graduating from pharmacy school, in the early 1980s, she worked as a pharmacist in a government hospital. In the mid-1980s the drought and famine that made Ethiopia infamous worldwide hit the country. Gebretsadik joined a relief organization and then transitioned to researching pesticides.

In 1992 she decided to set up her own company. In her work as an agricultural researcher in a largely agrarian economy, she had witnessed the need for both human and animal medicines, and she saw a business opportunity in selling them. Ethiopia made very few medicines, so she decided to import them. She knocked on the doors of the Chinese, French, and Swiss embassies. Only the Chinese were responsive. With the help of their economic consular office, she managed to connect with multiple Chinese drug manufacturers and become their official representative for the Ethiopian market. Within two years she was winning big medical supplies contracts from the Ethiopian government.

A few years later one of the Chinese companies she represented in Ethiopia came to her with an intriguing proposition: They should form a joint venture to make gel capsules, the glossy casings for drugs.

Meanwhile, Africa is in the early stages of a population boom that will reach 2 billion people by 2050, creating the largest pool of labor in the world. (Southeast Asia will have only 800 million people by then.) Yet African nations have some of the highest unemployment rates in the world. The official unemployment rate in Nigeria is 12.1%, but the government recognizes an additional 19.1% of the working-age population as “underemployed.” For young people, the situation is much worse: Youth unemployment is at 42.2%. Thus Africa is a natural destination for China’s manufacturing jobs.

From the corporate investor’s perspective, one advantage is that although Africa is still challenging in many ways, it offers arguably the widest array of market options. Nigeria boasts an enormous domestic market with high margins and relatively little competition for a variety of consumer goods. Lesotho enjoys tariff-free access to the U.S. market along with proximity to excellent South African infrastructure and logistics services for shipping time-sensitive fashions to American customers. Ethiopia offers attractive tax breaks along with cheap power and proximity to lucrative Middle Eastern markets. In other words, Africa can provide an appealing location for pretty much whatever business model a manufacturer has.

Today, it’s not only the Chinese who have woken up to “Made in Ethiopia.” In the lakeside town of Hawassa, the weekend playground of the Addis elite, a huge industrial park opened in 2016. American clothing giant PVH, whose brands include Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and H&M, takes up a chunk of the 400,000 square-meter space.

Hawassa is one of 30 industrial parks that will have opened in Ethiopia by 2020. Mostly Chinese-built, these “areas of excellence” echo the Special Economic Zone model that turned Shenzhen into a manufacturing powerhouse within one generation.

As such, Ethiopia has been called the “China of Africa,” and there are some undeniable parallels. The Solomonic dynasty, which ruled Ethiopian until Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown in 1974, traced its roots -- somewhat suspectly -- directly back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in 10th century BC; China claims to have 5,000 years of continuous history.

Meles decided early on that China could be useful in two ways. Firstly, in generating manufacturing jobs to mechanize its workforce and encourage knowledge transfer. Secondly, in building infrastructure, such as the Addis Ababa-Djibouti rail line, which cut the journey time for whisking goods from landlocked Ethiopia to the sea from days by road to 12 hours.

Arkebe clarifies that Ethiopia doesn’t take Chinese loans for buildings such as football stadiums, unlike Zimbabwe, Senegal, and Angola.

Fast forward a few decades, and China has pulled off a jaw-dropping economic boom. “African leaders saw China go from being an economy on its knees, with a poor, rural, uneducated population, to the second-largest economy in the world. That’s concrete evidence that magic can happen,” says Solange Chatelard, academic and research associate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.

By the late 1990s, Africa had dropped off the radar for the West, which associated the continent with poverty and the AIDS crisis, says Chatelard. “That’s exactly when China was plotting its comeback.” In Africa, China saw an opportunity for diplomacy and trade.

In 2000, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was launched in Beijing and has since become a triennial deal-making powwow between China and all African states. At FOCAC 2015, China pledged to invest $60 billion in Africa over the next three years

Contrary to popular belief, these scenarios are not unusual. A groundbreaking McKinsey report last year, which surveyed more than 1,000 Chinese companies in construction, manufacturing, trade, real estate, and services in eight African countries, including Ethiopia, found that on average 89% of employees were African. Several million African jobs had been created by China on the continent. Nearly two-thirds of Chinese companies provided skills training, while half offered apprenticeships, and a third had introduced a new technology.

It was the first time a large-scale dataset on Chinese hiring practices in Africa had been made available,

Just 1% of the 4,000 workers at the Jemo factory are Chinese, says Bonn Liang, a manager who was headhunted from Dongguan one year ago. "But in the future, we will all go back to China,” he adds.

That’s already happened at the Sino-Ethiop Associate pharmaceutical factory in Dukem, south of Addis. A joint venture between two Chinese and one Ethiopian firm, the facility has 177 employees, only one of whom is Chinese. “In our first year, some Ethiopian workers were sent to China for training, and about 50 Chinese experts came here,” says Andrew Shegaw, the factory manager. “Now we are 100% independent.” The factory employs Ethiopian pharmacists, engineers, and electricians, who received workplace training from the Chinese to supplement their academic knowledge.