By Roberto Castillo for Quartz Africa
Over the last fortnight, an ongoing number of incidents have emerged through social media where black people have been mistreated, persecuted, evicted from their houses and hotel rooms (without prior notice which has effectively left many of them homeless), and denied entrance into commercial venues (such as restaurants) in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. These incidents were triggered by Guangzhou’s local government decision to implement a strict surveillance and testing programme and impose a 14-day quarantine on all African nationals, regardless of travel history or testing results, in an attempt to prevent a potential outbreak in this foreign community.
Government’s Reaction
The deluge of evidence shared through social media prompted a strong response in Africa, where many governments summoned Chinese ambassadors to answer for the incidents. A great deal of the indignation on the African side was compounded by the fact that many in the continent saw Africa’s role in the early days of the pandemic as strongly supportive of China. So, the images of black people sleeping under bridges, families with children being evicted from their legally rented places of abode, as well as entrance and service denial to blacks, were seen by many as Chinese racism and as a Chinese betrayal of African solidarity in these difficult times.
Africa’s strong diplomatic response forced China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to address the issue. Unsurprisingly, China’s response was to deflect and spin the narrative as yet another situation distorted by Western media and fake news, and to point out that China does not discriminate against any foreigners. A crucial element in the attempt to spin the narrative has been to emphasise a couple of COVID-19 related incidents: the first around a Nigerian patient who after testing positive for the virus attempted to escape confinement and violently attacked medical personnel. The second incident relates to a group of Nigerians who, while infected, were roaming around the city and patronising restaurants and shopping centres. China’s media apparatus presented what is happening in Guangzhou as a response to these incidents.
Fear and anxiety around foreign populations
In 2014, in the context of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and to allay fears of a potential spread in China, Guangzhou’s government reported that some 16,000 Africans were legally residing in the city. Last week, in the midst of the controversy, local authorities reported that the whole African population, consisting of some 4,500 individuals, had been tested. A sharp decline in the population in only six years. However, these figures describe the legal residents, not the overstayers. It is well known that visa overstayers (mostly West Africans) account for a significant portion of the African population in the city. A great deal of the intense commercial activity that takes place between Guangzhou and places like Addis Ababa, Mombasa or Lagos is organised by them.
As in many other parts of the world, one of the paths that these illegal residents take is that of hiding (or ‘losing’) their passports. By doing so, they ‘voluntarily’ become undocumented, and effectively set themselves down a highly precarious path where the main aim is to be untraceable if caught overstaying. Untraceability, however, does not bode well in a pandemics scenario where asymptomatic individuals shed the virus, and where one of the main strategies is to ‘test and trace’ in order to mitigate.
Accordingly, Guangzhou’s longstanding overstayer population is cast in a new light under COVID-19. Local authorities not only fear an outbreak among the city’s foreign communities (especially amongst a group of foreigners without clear, stable and documented identities) but also a central government crackdown/purge on them (the local authorities) were Guangzhou’s foreign community to become a virus hotbed. The impossibility of fully managing and/or controlling the overstayer population exacerbates these pandemic-related fears and anxieties.
COVID-19 is proving to be a landmark in terms of the relation between technology, mass surveillance and mobility control in the country. It is not unthinkable that special mobility and access measures could remain in place even after COVID-19 ceases to be a threat. In a post-pandemics China, undocumented individuals will have a hard time trying to circumvent these new technological hurdles. For example, without a legal abode, it is impossible to apply for Alipay Health Code, a system that assigns a colour code to users indicating their health status, and determining their access to public spaces such as malls, subways and airports. In this context, African overstayers and the thriving commercial sectors in which they insert themselves may be among the first ‘victims’ of the new normal in China. This may well be the last nail in the coffin of an already declining African population in Guangzhou.
Africans in China 
An interesting article, that outlines several issues, including that of a few bad apples branding the entire crate. A particular issue when there is already a notion of “Africa is a country”, some xenophobia in the circumstances and the other major issue (it seems) of undocumented people. Clearly we need African Studies now more then ever in this region if we are to solve these issues. But this is also an issue by extension that can be applied to other peoples of colour in the region.