Earlier this month in Beijing, amid the pomp of China’s annual rubber-stamp parliament meetings, a politician proudly shared with reporters his proposal on how to “solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong.” The latter province is widely known in China to have many African migrants.
“Africans bring many security risks,” Pan Qinglin told local media (link in Chinese). As a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the nation’s top political advisory body, he urged the government to “strictly control the African people living in Guangdong and other places.”
Pan, who lives in Tianjin near Beijing—and nowhere near Guangdong—held his proposal aloft for reporters to see. It read in part (links in Chinese):
“Black brothers often travel in droves; they are out at night out on the streets, nightclubs, and remote areas. They engage in drug trafficking, harassment of women, and fighting, which seriously disturbs law and order in Guangzhou… Africans have a high rate of AIDS and the Ebola virus that can be transmitted via body fluids… If their population [keeps growing], China will change from a nation-state to an immigration country, from a yellow country to a black-and-yellow country.”
On social media, the Chinese response has been overwhelmingly supportive, with many commenters echoing Pan’s fears. In a forum dedicated to discussions about black people in Guangdong on Baidu Tieba—an online community focused on internet search results—many participants agreed that China was facing a “black invasion.” One commenter called on Chinese people (link in Chinese) not to let “thousands of years of Chinese blood become polluted.”
The stream of racist vitriol online makes the infamous Chinese TV ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent, which went viral last year, seem mild in comparison. The ad featured a Asian woman stuffing a black man into a washing machine to turn him into a pale-skinned Asian man.
Not about reality
Of course, while a growing number of Africans work and study in China—the African continent’s largest trading partner—the notion that black people are “taking over” the world’s most populous nation is nonsense. Estimates for the number of sub-Saharan Africans in Guangzhou (nicknamed “Chocolate City” in Chinese) range from 150,000 long-term residents, according to 2014 government statistics, to as high as 300,000—figures complicated by the number of Africans coming in and out of the country as well as those who overstay their visas.
Many of them partner with Chinese firms to run factories, warehouses, and export operations. Others are leaving China and telling their compatriots not to go due to financial challenges and racism.
“Guangdong has come to be imagined to embody this racial crisis of some kind of ‘black invasion,’” said Kevin Carrico, a lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia who studies race and nationalism in China. “But this is not about actually existing realities.” He continued:
“It isn’t so much that they dislike black residents as they dislike what they imagine about black residents. The types of discourses you see on social media sites are quite repetitive—black men raping Chinese women, black men having consensual sex with Chinese women and then leaving them, blacks as drug users and thieves destroying Chinese neighborhoods. People are living in a society that is changing rapidly. ‘The blacks’ has become a projection point for all these anxieties in society.”
The past year or so has seen heated debate among black people living in China about what locals think of them. In interviews with Quartz, black residents referred to online comments and racist ads as more extreme examples, but said they are symptomatic of broader underlying attitudes.
Senegalese journalist Madeleine Thiam in Beijing. (Madeleine Thiam)
Madeleine Thiam and Christelle Mbaya, Senegalese journalists in Beijing, said they are saddened but not shocked when they are discriminated against in China.
“Sometimes people pinch their noses as I walk by, as if they think I smell. On the subway, people often leave empty seats next to me or change seats when I sit down,” said Thiam. “Women have come up to rub my skin, asking if it is ‘dirt’ and if I’ve had a shower.”
Yet on a recent coffee break most passersby politely admired the fashionable women as if they were going down a catwalk.
One Chinese man, gazing at Thiam in her purple lace blouse and a yellow dress flaring around her hips, let out an admiring “wow” as the elevator doors opened to a third-floor café. Servers greeted their regulars with warm smiles and asked them in English, “How are you?”
Racism or ignorance?
Such experiences speak to the duality of life for black people in China. They may be athletes, entrepreneurs, traders, designers, or graduate students. Some are married to locals and speak fluent Chinese. Yet despite positive experiences and economic opportunities, many are questioning why they live in a place where they often feel unwelcome.
They grapple with the question: Is it racism or ignorance? And how do you distinguish the two?
Paolo Cesar, an African-Brazilian who has worked as a musician in Shanghai for 18 years and has a Chinese wife, said music has been a great way for him to connect with audiences and make local friends. However, his mixed-race son often comes home unhappy because of bullying at school. Despite speaking fluent Mandarin, his classmates do not accept him as Chinese. They like to shout out, “He’s so dark!”
The global success of black public figures, such as politicians, actors, and athletes, appears to have a limited effect on Chinese attitudes.
“People would say to me, ‘Obama! You’re a black American!’ And I’d be treated better than my African friends,” said Jayne Jeje, a marketing consultant from Maryland who has worked all over mainland China and now lives in Hong Kong. “I think it’s a class thing. If you’re African you’re from a poor place and should be treated with less deference, but if you’re African-American, that’s great, and you get some grudging respect.”
In response to international criticism of racism against blacks in China, some commentators have argued that the racism is not as serious as it is in other countries. Hong Kong columnist Alex Lo wrote in the South China Morning Post that criticism from Americans is “rich coming from a country that was founded on black slavery… China has racial problems. But murderous racism against blacks isn’t one of them.”
And of course racial tensions occur elsewhere, sometimes with ethnic Chinese as the victims. In France this week, Chinese protesters gathered in northeast Paris to protest the shooting of a Chinese man by police. Many complain of racism directed against them, and also of being targeted by gangs (video) of North African descent.
Looking deeper into history, evidence suggests a preference for slaves from East Africa in ancient China. African slavery in the country peaked during the Tang (618 to 907) and Song (960 to 1279) dynasties.
More recently, violence broke out after the Chinese government started providing scholarships allowing African students to study in the country in the 1960s. Many Chinese students resented the stipends Africans received, with tensions culminating in riots in Nanjing in the late 1980s. The riots began with angry Chinese students surrounding African students’ dormitories in Hehai University and pelting them with rocks and bottles for seven hours, with crowds later marching through the streets shouting anti-African slogans.
In the past few years, loathing among some Chinese toward foreign men who date local women has led to a recent rise in violent attacks against foreigners.
Staying optimistic
Yet most respondents Quartz interviewed remain optimistic. Vladimir Emilien, a 26-year-old African-American actor and former varsity athlete, said that for him, learning Chinese was crucial to better interactions with locals. Emilien volunteered last year as a coach teaching Beijing youth the finer points of American football. He said that once he was able to have more complex conversations in Chinese, he was struck by the thoughtful questions locals would ask.
Go deep. (Vladimir Emilien)
“They’d say, What do you think about Chinese perception of black people? How does that make you feel?’ So they are aware that there is a lot of negativity around blacks and against Africa as a very poor place.”
Emilien hopes that more interactions between Chinese and black individuals will smooth out misunderstandings. But others say that improving relations requires more than black people learning the language, since that shifts responsibility away from the Chinese.
“The government has never done anything serious to clean up racist ideas created and populated by the [turn-of-the-20th-century] intellectuals and politicians that constructed a global racial hierarchy in which the whites were on the top, Chinese the second, and blacks the bottom,” said Cheng Yinghong, a history professor at Delaware State University who researches nationalism and discourse of race in China.
Instead of addressing discrimination, the Chinese government has focused on promoting cultural exchanges while pursuing economic partnerships with African countries. However, many have pointed out that relationships appear unbalanced, with China taking Africa’s limited natural resources in exchange for infrastructure investment.
“Racism is racism, period, and although some people would say that in different places it is more explicit, nuanced, or implicit, as long as there are victims we have to call it racism and deal with it,” said Adams Bodomo, a professor of African studies focused on cross-cultural communication at the University of Vienna. “China can’t be the second-largest economy in the world and not expect to deal with these issues.”
CGTN, or the ‘new’ face of CCTV, just came up with a short series of clips covering African presence in Guangzhou. Interestingly, the angle taken in these clips is (obviously) not replicated in CCTV’s domestic broadcasts.
Africans in Guangzhou: Challenges for African-Chinese marriages
Visas a major problem for Africans in Guangzhou
Africans in China: Challenges of integrating into local life in Guangzhou
The vast literature on transnationalism has primarily been concerned with people, practices, and social fields. Less attention has been devoted to the enigmatic relationship between transnationalism and place. A place itself cannot be transnational in the sense of operating or extending across national boundaries to places elsewhere. But if we understand place as a ‘meaningful location’ (Agnew, 1987), it is evident that transnational connections can be central to imbuing locations with meaning. In short, the transnational is simultaneously antithetical to place and constitutive of it. So, how can the transnational qualities of a place be empirically examined? This Featured Graphic explores the salient yet elusive transnationalism of a unique neighbourhood in Guangzhou, the third-largest city in China.
Guangzhou is the primary trading hub of the Pearl River Delta, which produces more than a quarter of Chinese exports. Some of these exports are destined for Africa. In fact, while most of the academic and policy interest in China–Africa connections has focused on Chinese demand for African materials, Sub-Saharan Africa has a large and growing trade deficit with China. The African market for Chinese manufactured goods has led thousands of African traders, brokers, logistics agents, and other service providers to come to Guangzhou.
Few places in China have been as marked by the African presence as Guangzhou’s Xiaobei neighbourhood (Li et al., 2009). Transnational connections and ethnic diversity are manifest in the urban landscape in a number of ways. There are directly trade-related shops and service providers and a multitude of trader-oriented businesses, such as hotels, beauty parlours, restaurants, and gift shops. Restaurant names and advertisements for shipping services contain jumbled references at various geographical scales, to Africa, Angola, and Luanda, for instance.
Diversity in Xiaobei defies established notions of immigrants and locals. Among the foreigners, there is a continuity of attachment, from first-time visitors via circulating traders to long-time residents. The latter group includes foreigners who provide services for traders on short-term stays, as well as people who export goods to business partners or customers overseas and only leave China occasionally. Some of these long-term residents have children who are born and raised in China.
After living in Xiaobei for a few months, I had a good sense of the neighbourhood’s transnational connections: they were primarily African, and remarkably diverse. But how could the transnational qualities be measured and mapped beyond impressionistic description? Sample surveys and official immigration statistics might both have their uses, but they are marred by methodological problems in this environment. What I pursue instead are auto-generated data from a pivot of transnational connections: international phone services.
Cheap calls have been described as ‘the social glue of migrant transnationalism’ (Vertovec, 2004) and telephone voice data have been used to examine transnational ties between country dyads (Perkins and Neumayer, 2013). The value of such data is sensitive to technological changes and country-to-country differences, for instance in the prevalence of VoIP traffic. In Xiaobei, the preferred mode for international voice calls is specialized public phone services. The area is dotted with providers of cheap calls, sometimes as dedicated single-function businesses and sometimes in the form of a row of telephones on the counter of a multi-purpose shop or office (Figure 1). Often, the most prominent signage is easily overlooked: lists of numbers such as 00243, 00244, and 00256, followed by numbers such as 1.0 or 0.8. These are dialling codes and prices. Even if other signs announce the service, dialling code price lists are usually also on display.
These displays are interesting data insofar as they reflect demand for calls to specific countries. Several features suggest that they do. First, they always constitute a selection of countries, never the full worldwide list. Second, no two lists are the same. Third, the turnover of businesses (and hence signage) is rapid, and even where businesses remain in place, the lists are often extended or amended by hand. Fourth, many service providers have a prominently displayed short list, plus a longer list for reference.
The lists make it possible to construct a ‘prominence index’ that gives each country in the world a score, a value that reflects the average number of other countries with which the country is listed, and the proportion of providers that have it listed.1
Figure 2 displays Xiaobei’s transnational connections as reflected by the prominence index for telephone services. As expected, ties to Central and West Africa dominate. Connections to India are also conspicuous, and resonate with the noticeable presence of Indians in the neighbourhood. More surprising are the connections to France and the United States, which appear unrelated to the demography of residents or visitors. These connections reflect the demand for Africa-oriented Chinese goods in the African diaspora in Europe and North America. For instance, a large part of the global trade in human hair is sourced and processed in China and destined for the African diaspora. Xiaobei’s connections to Thailand also seem puzzling, since there are few Thais in the neighbourhood. Again, trends in production and trade provide a cue: rising costs in China lead African traders to explore alternative production sites, including Thailand.
The methodology and the results have several implications for the challenge of conceptualizing and measuring transnational dimensions of place. First, the data on telephone services have not only pragmatic advantages, but also particular theoretical appeal as means to gauge the neighbourhood’s transnational qualities: they reflect dynamic social interaction as well as physical manifestations in the urban landscape. These two elements resonate with theoretical concepts of neighbourhood (Kallus and Law-Yone, 2000). Second, the data serve to caution against essentialist assumptions that equate transnational connections with national origins. The ties to France and North America exemplify inter-diasporic transnationalism, which coexists with diaspora–homeland connections (Sperling, 2013; Van Hear, 1998). Third, the data call attentional to the variable legibility of a landscape’s transnational qualities. Most people would not see a sign reading 00244 as a reference to Angola, but Angolans would. In other contexts, the legibility of transnational connections have more to do with interpretation and connotations, as Klaufus (2006) and Lopez (2010) have shown in their analyses of migrant houses and architectural styles.
Notes
Note
1 For each provider where country a is listed, it is given a listing value of 100/n, where n is the number of countries on the list. If there are two lists (one large display and a longer list for reference), weights are calculated as 100/n for each list and countries are assigned their highest value if they are listed twice. The sum of listing values for country a is divided by the total number of providers, and the result is multiplied by the proportion of providers that list country a at all. The index thus has a theoretical maximum value of 100. If all providers had three countries on their lists, a country that appeared on half of the lists would have an index value of 100/3 × 0.5 = 16.7.
The documentary is about an exceptional Chinese woman’s journey to Nigeria. Born and raised up in the Chinese city, Guangzhou, where the presence of African traders numbers some 200,000, the woman named Rase falls in love with a Nigerian trader, Kevin. Facing a wide range of racial discrimination and strict immigration control in China, Rase decides to go to live and work in Nigeria, after Kevin is forced to leave China because of an expired visa. On her arrival, tensions build up. Rase finds work at a Chinese factory where she witnesses tremendous discrimination while Kevin hesitates to continue the relationship.
Amongst the many activities Africans in China organise, there are also different types of awards. Below see some of the contestants for the 2nd edition of the ‘Mama Africa’ (diasporic) awards – most of them based in China (and multi-lingual).
