Black China: A Journey Through History
COVID-19 has reared itself as a Hydra of sorts in today’s society. The Hydra is a Greek mythological serpent-like monster, which can be found in Hesiod’s Theogeny 13. It has multiple heads, and if you cut off one, two more were said to grow in its place. Similarly, the coronavirus seems to be a monster rearing a multitude of ugly heads, from medical difficulties to a dangerous financial impact. One ugly head it rears, cannot be ignored – racism.
The reasons for this are demonstrated by part one of this article, in which we have explored China’s treatment of the Uighurs Muslims and the neo-colonialist character that the Sino-Africa relationship has become. China shakes hands with Africa in a multitude of business dealings while failing to protect and respect Africa’s people. If the warning from China is not clear enough then perhaps their behaviour post COVID-19 will be. One thing is for certain, nothing will be the same once we have come out of quarantine, and I believe the same applies to Africa’s relationship with China. I can only hope that these changes mean that African leaders will see, that the flourishing trade relationship with China does not diminish their prejudice towards Africans in their land.
While there are historical disagreements on when discourse between China and Africa started, the beginning of the Sino-African relationship goes back much further than people think. While we can hark back as early as the 4th Century for evidence of interactions between the African continent and China, the most prevalent evidence of early Sino-African relationships is in the 7th century in which African slaves are recorded to have been traded in China. This was all part of the large scale, Arab maritime slave trade in which many East African’s were sold in the Middle East and Asia.
During this time the Mandarin Chinese word Kunlun was used prominently in historical Chinese writing to describe darker skinned people. Not all darker-skinned people, such as Malaysians, but particularly ‘dark-skinned’ people. This may not have related to black Africans if you believe historian Don Wyatt, who argued that this word was used to describe people of a darker colour, mainly from the Malaysian peninsula. However, the word Kunlun was also connected to the mystical, powerful Kunlun slaves of the Tang fiction Taiping guangji, that were likely to have been some of those East Africans trafficked during the Arab maritime slave trade.
"Lion and Kunlunnu" of Mañjuśrī (detail of "Paradise of Bhaisajyaguru 藥師"), 836 CE, excavated from Dunhuang Mogaoku cave 17, The British Museum ⓒRoderick Whitfield and the British Museum, 1982, plate 16-5.
These myths give us an idea of how the ancient Chinese conceptually thought of black Africans. There are descriptions of the Kunlun slaves objectifying and dehumanising them. When one character, the Chinese Tan Xian, deliberately throws his sword and jade bracelet overboard on his boat and sends his slave Mo He to retrieve them for the seventh time he says
“You, the sword, and the bracelet are my three treasures. Two of them are lost. How will I use you in the future?”.
His slave is his chattel and Tan Xian believes he can use him as he pleases.
In the 9th century, famed Chinese writer and traveller Du Huan describes East African slaves as
“black, and their customs uncouth.[…]. These Xunxun exceed all the Yi (~) and Di (1*) [non-Chinese people from the east and north] in their sexual depravity. […] They do not revere their country's king or respect their fathers and mothers.”
This perception of black Africans are ones we see in the history of the Western world too. The transatlantic slave trade left us with many sources regarding Africans as tools and objects, and the stereotype of black people being hypersexualised continues even today. There is a tone of disgust in Du Huan’s narrative, including in his statement that the East African’s did not revere their mothers and fathers, a trait of uncivility to the Chinese who have respect for elders deeply ingrained into their culture (as, despite this narrative, many Africans also do).
This racial hostility from the Chinese towards Africans continued into 1988 in which a group of Chinese students at Nanjing’s Hehai University called for a group of African students to be excluded from the university with immediate effect. This protest called for ‘Death to the black devils’ and ‘Blood for Blood’ from Chinese students. This was displayed on placards by Chinese students and referred to the international African students at their university, many of whom came from wealthy families and experienced higher standards of living compared to some of their Chinese counterparts. British students who attend Russell Group universities and see international students walking around in the latest designer gear would recognise the feeling.
The real question is why did this incident have to turn into a scene of violence? The situation started with two African students and their Chinese dates being denied entry to a dance without providing IDs. The two students were accused of attacking the Chinese university employees by pushing their way into the dance. This led to a protest of over 1000 Chinese students which included the surrounding of two dormitories housing mostly African students and the throwing of rocks and bottles at them for hours on end, thirteen injured, and 130 African students taking refuge in the Nanjing’s central train station, hoping to escape to Beijing.
There is an interesting parallel between this event from 1988 and the recent events in Guangzhou. The racism towards black African’s in Guangzhou also started due to the alleged attack by a Nigerian national on a Chinese nurse. I think both incidences make clear that when it comes to African’s within China, one wrong move from some and all must pay the price. I imagine that actions of violence, whether true or alleged, from any African just confirms the prejudices lying within Chinese societal thought. They are just waiting for the opportunity to chase, what they view as the Kunlun, out.
If that is not convincing enough, then let us turn to the Chinese media, and how they perceive and portray Black Africans. We look to the media because as Malcolm X once said “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses".
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
Malcolm X
The Chinese media tells us that to them black people are undesirable and their skin colour is to be ‘washed away’. There are two key examples of racist adverts demonstrating anti-blackness in Asian media. One of these is the viral Qiaobi detergent advert, which sprung up debate about racism within China across social media.
The narrative follows a young Asian woman smiling at a young Black male before putting detergent in his mouth, pushing him into a washing machine for him to appear as an Asian male ‘washed clean’ of his blackness. The historical racist trope of blackness equating to dirtiness is not new, but for it to be shown on mainstream Chinese television, and during cinema screenings implies that it is a norm for such ideas to be displayed within everyday Chinese life.
Another example is the advert for skin-lightening product Snowz in which famous Thai actress Cris Horwang is juxtaposed with a black-face, ‘unhappy’, darker-skinned version of herself. Both adverts have shown underlying ignorance and prejudice coming from China towards black Africans.
In even more recent history, Quartz reporter Echo Huang argued that the reaction to the film Black Panther demonstrated China’s limited exposure to race. She observed this through the comments left on popular Chinese website Douban (similar to IMDB), which included a reviewer’s belief that:
“When I entered the theater, a bunch of black people was fighting in the night… I’ve never been in a theater so dark that I couldn’t find my seat.”
Despite Black Panther breaking box office records globally, the film was rated as a 6.8 out of 10 on Douban. While the world was celebrating blackness in their droves the Chinese public, to a certain extent, were rejecting it. It cannot be denied that China contributed immensely to Black Panther hitting a billion dollars, with the film making $63 million dollars in its opening weekend there. However, the economic benefits the Chinese provide come with a heavy clause of unaddressed xenophobia and racism against black people.
It came as a surprise to me that there was a black community in China of any prominence, as there is in Guangzhou (also known as Chocolate City), so I decided to look into it further. Guangzhou contains over 20,000 black Africans from Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Mali and other countries. Many are traders who have come to buy cheap, wholesale items to sell within their home countries, but others have settled into lives there. They have married Chinese wives and have children; they call Guangzhou their home. The black community there is said to have been established from the mid-90s, coming in with China’s liberalised economy – it is still a fairly new community, but growing
Hostility towards themselves and their fellow Africans is not new to this community in Guangzhou. In 2009 it was reported that Emmanuel Okoro, of Nigerian descent, decided he would rather jump from the second floor of a shopping mall than be caught by Guangzhou’s police in a raid for illegal immigrants. This led to him being carried by his fellow countrymen to the local police station for a protest against the harassment of the Guangzhou officials. Ironically, as this protest led to a three hour traffic jam on one of Guangzhou’s mega highways, it only made the Chinese media further discuss the ‘African problem’, as highlighted by Ben Chu in his book Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard About China is Wrong. Today this hostility still continues in China’s post-coronavirus back-clash against black Africans.
The hypocrisy of China’s aggressive nature towards their African immigrants, while according to the World Immigration Report 2020, making up the third largest number of migrants living abroad (10.7 million), is not lost on me. How long will Africa fail to stand up for their people against China? How long will anti-blackness within China continue to be paraded in front of Africa’s eyes, while China profits off the continent?
Only time will tell.