The counter of the only Chinese restaurant in the rural town of Ladysmith in KwaZulu-Natal offers a selection of plastic handguns, and machine guns - a good example to set for children?
"What is the big deal?" said Liu Feng, the restaurant manager from Fuzhou province. "Everyone has guns at home. These are just toys."
This South African town of 80,000 has no cinema, no big firm and no large retail mall - but 12 Chinese-owned retail shops. They are operated by mainland Chinese who have flooded into South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994 and the establishment of its diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1997.
The number of mainland Chinese in South Africa is about 400,000, more than half having arrived on tourist or travel visas and overstayed. Most are from Shanghai, and Zhejiang and Fujian provinces. They work in the retail and wholesale sectors, importing large volumes of clothes, shoes, electrical appliances and consumer goods.
They poured into the country at a time when many whites, Indians and Taiwanese emigrated from South Africa because of deteriorating law and order, limited opportunities for non-blacks and political uncertainty.
It is part of a flood of Chinese capital, goods and people around the world, a result of the country's surging trade surplus, rising personal wealth and foreign countries easing visa restrictions that had been in force for decades. It is against this backdrop that President Hu Jintao will visit South Africa as part of his eight-nation visit to the continent that starts tomorrow.
But despite South Africa's crime rate, it seems mainland businesspeople are not afraid. They open stores not only in the city centre commercial areas, but also in poor black neighbourhoods where most retailers do not dare to go. Johannesburg alone has seven Chinatowns.
Last year, on average, one Chinese store in greater Johannesburg was robbed each day and, in the whole country, 18 Chinese were killed, compared to 24 in 2005.
In a typical case, in February last year, robbers burst into a shop selling clothes and household appliances in a small town 45km from Johannesburg. They shot dead Chen Jianqing, 35, from Fujian province, and a business partner and wounded Chen's husband.
They stole 50,000 rand (HK$54,000) in cash and jewellery. Chen and her husband had arrived in South Africa in September 2005.
Mainland businesses are vulnerable because many operate retail outlets open to the public. South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with about 4 million licensed firearms and up to 1 million unlicensed ones. The number of people working in the private security industry is more than 300,000, more than double that in the police force.
Such insecurity has persuaded many businesses to leave the city centres and move to better protected suburbs, where private firms offer armed guards, electrified barbed-wire fences, buried vibration and motion sensors, and laser beams.
But most Chinese are recent arrivals and cannot afford such luxuries. For them, the flight of established retailers from the city centres is a business opportunity, if a high-risk one. What they bring is the strength of the world's cheapest manufacturing base, allowing them to import a wide range of consumer goods at prices below domestic producers and suitable for the mass market.
"What keeps my factory open is the five-rand duty imposed on shoes imported from China," said Liang Hsing-te, a Taiwanese who opened a shoe factory in Ladysmith in 1988, attracted by preferential tax and investment policies.
His original plan was to produce for export but he found that product quality and labour efficiency were too low and that he can only sell to the domestic market. "I pay the same raw material costs as a producer in China. His labour costs are lower, so it is the duty that saves me and gives me a profit."
His competition comes not only from producers in China but mainland-owned shoe shops in Ladysmith. "They react very quickly. If we have a new style, they soon copy it and have it in the shops. It is hard to compete with them and, one day, we will perhaps have to close our factory."
Mr Liang is not alone. South African trade unions say that during the past four years, 67,000 jobs in the clothing, textile and footwear sector have been lost because of cheap imports from China. On January 1, 2005, restrictions on Chinese clothing exports were lifted as part of global trade liberalisation, although countries can impose emergency curbs for a transitional period.
The caps and strips of South Africa's national rugby team, the Springboks, on sale at Johannesburg's airport are made in China. "We should not allow a situation whereby the T-shirts for the 2010 World Cup are made in China," Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said last year.
Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the national trade union federation, said retailers had improved their mark-ups on the back of sweated labour in China, with disastrous consequences for South Africa.
When the federation held an anniversary celebration in December 2005, the participants removed their red union T-shirts when they discovered these were Chinese-made.
While the number of mainland Chinese is soaring, that of Taiwanese is going the other way.
From a peak of about 40,000 in 1997, the number of Taiwanese has fallen to between 6,000 and 7,000. Taipei enjoyed excellent relations with the apartheid government, which offered generous investment incentives to its citizens to emigrate and classified them as "honorary whites". Taiwan allows its citizens to hold two passports.
Taiwanese who invested could obtain a green card within two to three months and citizenship within five years. They were attracted by the space, scenery, comfortable living standard, availability of servants and a political system that gave them a high status.
Some also wanted an insurance policy against their own political uncertainty, in the event of an attack by the mainland.
All this changed with the end of apartheid and the arrival of the African National Congress government in 1994. The Taiwanese lost their special status and the new government imposed job quotas to promote blacks in the public and private sectors, to redress five decades of discrimination.
This reduced the job opportunities for children of the Taiwanese, many of whom have migrated to the US, Australia or Canada, moved back to Taiwan or gone to work on the mainland.
The deteriorating security situation has also persuaded many Taiwanese to leave.
Mr Liang said some of the departing Taiwanese had sold their businesses to mainland entrepreneurs, who had taken market share from them as well as local Indian merchants.
In December 1997, the new government broke relations with Taipei and established them with Beijing. Since then, trade and investment ties between South China and China have boomed, bringing with it a flood of new migrants.
South Africa and oil-rich Angola are China's two-biggest trading partners in Africa, accounting for one third of the US$50 billion in trade between China and Africa last year. Kumba Resources, South Africa's biggest producer of iron ore, is shipping almost half of its iron ore to China.
Last year, in a landmark deal, Larry Yung Chi-kin, chairman of CITIC, China's state-owned industrial holding, paid US$800 million for 17 million shares in Anglo-American, the world's third-largest mining group.
Anglo-American is one of South Africa's oldest and most famous companies, founded in 1917 by Ernest Oppenheimer, a German Jew and diamond and gold mining entrepreneur and financier. Last year it had annual revenue of US$34 billion and employed 209,000 people. Mr Yung bought the shares in a personal capacity.