Sri Lanka - Plight of African Nationals in China

(MENAFN- Colombo Gazette)

In early April 2020, Chinese authorities in the southern city of Guangzhou, Guangdong province, which has China's largest African community, began a campaign to forcibly test Africans for the coronavirus, and ordered them to self-isolate or to quarantine in designated hotels. Landlords then evicted African residents, forcing many to sleep on the street, and hotels, shops, and restaurants refused African customers. Other foreign groups have generally not been subjected to similar treatment. Human Rights Watch criticized the Chinese government on this issue and pointed out that China should end the discriminatory treatment of Africans related to the Covid 19 pandemic. Authorities should also protect Africans and people of African descent throughout China from discrimination in employment, housing, and other realms.

Traditionally, Beijing has portrayed racism as a Western problem. But for many Africans, whose countries have in recent years become heavily economically entwined with Beijing, the Guangzhou episode exposed the gap between the official diplomatic warmth Beijing offers African nations and the suspicion many Chinese people have for Africans themselves; that has been a problem for decades.

Background

Beginning during the late 1990s economic boom , an influx of thousands of African traders and business people, predominantly from West Africa, arrived in Guangzhou and created an African community in the middle of the southern Chinese metropolis. In 2012, it was estimated that there were more than 100,000 Africans living in Guangzhou, but most of them stayed for a very short time. Since 2014, the city's African population has significantly declined due to strict immigration enforcement by Chinese authorities and economic pressures in home countries including depreciation of the Nigerian naira and Angolan kwanza .

Africans in Guangzhou are African immigrants and African Chinese residents of Guangzhou , China . Most of the hundreds of thousands of Africans who arrive in Guangzhou are short term visitors making a purchasing run, making population figures liquid and difficult to estimate. According to official figures, 430,000 arrivals and exits by nationals from African countries were recorded at the city's checkpoints in the first nine months of 2014. Most of these migrants were from West Africa. Many Africans left Indonesia and Thailand and went to Guangzhou after the 1997 Asian financial crisis , and the economic opportunity attracted more.

Riots against Africans

Conflict between the African community and police in Guangzhou resulted in riots in 2009 and 2012. In July 2009, two Nigerian men jumped several floors from a building in an attempt to flee Chinese immigration authorities. Both men were hurt from the fall. But on hearing rumors of their deaths, hundreds of Africans, mostly Nigerian, surrounded a local police station. The demonstration escalated into a riot that shut down eight lanes of traffic on a major thoroughfare for several hours.

In June 2012, an African, held in police custody after a taxi fare dispute, died later“suddenly losing consciousness”, according to police. Over a hundred Africans gathered at the police station in question demanding to know the cause of death. Guangzhou police responded with a statement that they would“investigate and settle this case strictly by law” and also that“all should abide by the law of China; no one should harm public interests or damage public order.”

The presence of African students in China was highly unusual. Most foreigners fled China after the Communist Party came to power in 1949. When African students began arriving in significant numbers in the late 1970s, China was just beginning to open up to the world. The vast majority of people still lived in rural areas with no access to international media, and had not seen a black person outside of propaganda posters – let alone met one.

From the beginning, clashes were reported across the nation. In 1979, Africans in Shanghai were attacked for playing music too loudly, leading to 19 foreigners being hospitalized. After another fracas in 1986, this time in Beijing, 200 African students marched through the capital, shouting that Chinese claims of“friendship was a mask for racism,” according to a New York Times report .”The Chinese deceived us,” Solomon A. Tardey, of Liberia, told the newspaper.”We know the truth now. We are going to tell our governments what the truth is.”

China's then Education Ministry spokesman said :”It is the consistent and long-term policy of the Chinese government to oppose racism.” That response was echoed nearly word for word in a statement from the Chinese government responding to the fallout in Guangzhou.

In the city of Hangzhou, students claimed Africans were carriers of the AIDs virus in 1988, even though foreign students had to test negative for HIV before entering the country, wrote Barry Sautman in China Quarterly.

Then, in January 1989, about 2,000 Beijing students boycotted classes in protest against Africans dating Chinese women — a recurrent lightning rod issue. In Wuhan that year, posters appeared around campuses calling Africans“black devils,” and urging them to go home.

By 1988, a total of 1,500 of the 6,000 foreign students in China were African, and had been scattered to campuses around the country — a tactic designed to dilute racial tensions, according to a 1994 report by Michael J Sullivan in China Quarterly magazine.

But the attempt didn't work, and on Christmas Eve that year anti-black tensions exploded in the eastern city of Nanjing, resulting in a mob of Chinese protesters running the Africans out of town.

After, the Chinese government claimed that African students had arrived at a campus dance armed with weapons, including a knife, and beat up Chinese guards, teachers and students after being asked to register their Chinese guests, according to the Jiangsu provincial yearbook.

Just as African media across the continent was outraged by the Guangzhou incident in April 2020, newspapers in Africa reacted with indignation in the 1980s. A Kenyan publication said they were not“accidental,” wrote Sautman. A Liberian newspaper spoke of“yellow discrimination.” A Nigerian radio station said the Chinese students“could not bear to see Africans” mix with Chinese girls.

Covid 19 Issues

The discrimination and maltreatment the African nationals have suffered are the direct result of the rising pressure from the imported cases of COVID-19 faced by the authorities of Guangzhou. Guangzhou, the home to Asia's largest African migrant population , suddenly became the front line of China's renewed battle with COVID-19.

In the midst of the global scramble to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, relations have ruptured at a most unexpected front—between China and Africa. Since April 8, reports and social media discussions about the eviction and maltreatment of Africans in the Chinese city of Guangzhou have gone viral, leading to a series of formal and official diplomatic protests from the African Union and African countries toward China . Never before had the two sides had such a critical, high-profile, and widespread clash of positions, let alone allowed it to erupt in front of the public. Given China's relentless efforts to consolidate ties and enhance engagement with Africa (including sending medical equipment and doctors to the continent during this crisis ), this racism and discrimination against African migrants and residents is both shocking to the world and damaging for China's policy agenda.

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