China’s Han-centric view historically discriminates and scapegoats the Black community.

One of the dire outcomes of the emergence of COVID-19 has been the glaring racial and ethnic disparities that have defined the course of the spread of the virus. This has been true for all communities of color across the global system, including in China, where the Han majority has systematically targeted the Black community as being super-spreaders of COVID-19. As a recent migrant-minority community in China, the Black experience has been defined by vulgar racism, exploitation, and stigmatization. This is not surprising, as anti-black racism in China is embedded in Han-minzu racialist ideologies, which perceive Blackness as occupying the bottom of the racial totem pole (Dikötter, 1992; 1997). In the context of COVID-19, the Black community in China was again a target of multiple racial projects (Omi & Winant, 1994) that sought to label their bodies as diseased and physical presence as a threat to the viability and safety of the Han majority. The resulting actions led to wholescale banning of Black individuals from entering restaurants, engaging in business transactions, seeking medical attention in hospitals, renting apartments, and were forced into government-sanctioned quarantines (Marsh, 2020).

One response to this discrimination manifested on the social media platform, Twitter, which was used by the victims of the targeted attacks and activists alike to expose how the Chinese government is systematically facilitating discriminatory policies against Black migrants in China. The online mobilization has generated a tremendous outcry across Africa and the global community to hold China accountable. These online Twitter posts have not only framed the racialized experiences of Black migrants to the world but also produced simultaneous global responses to their lived reality in China under COVID-19. What overall themes can we derive from these public conversations on Twitter regarding anti-Black racism in China? How have the grievances of the Black community been framed in response to heightened Han racism in the context of COVID-19? In the present paper, we attempt to answer these questions by exploring how global Twitter mobilized awareness regarding anti-Black racism in China. We first discuss the history of African migration to China and then discuss the Han racial ideologies that are driving the anti-Black racism. We then discuss the topics that emerge as a result of our analysis of tweets using the natural language processing (NLP) technique of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to extract the underlying topics of the analyzed tweets. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion on anti-Black racism, COVID-19, and the future of the Black community in China.

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Understanding Black Migration to China

Various countries in Africa and China initiated diplomatic relations within the first decades of the People’s Republic of China's (PRC’s) founding. During this early period, Mao's republic supported African liberation and communist movements that resisted colonial rule to gain independence. However, the Chinese accelerated their relations with African states in 1955, only after China actively pursued political allies to create an international united front against Western capitalist nations (Kanza, 1975). In the 1955 Asian-African Conference, the Chinese government sought to solidify relations with Africa through policies that would be mutually beneficial, promote peaceful coexistence, and mount a firm opposition to colonialism (Shinn & Eisenman, 2012). The Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organization conferences in 1957 and 1960 further enhanced the relationship (Shinn, 2019). The PRC continued an anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Western foreign policy outlook until the 1970s when the Communist Party gradually deserted certain ideological positions for those that were more pragmatic. It was the time that Mao met American President Richard Nixon to normalize Chinese-American relations to gain international support for admission into the United Nations, a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, a One-China policy in Taiwan, and support its opposition to the Soviet Union. African states played a crucial role in their ardent backing of these policies. As Deng Xiaoping initiated the open-door policy, China increased trade, investment, and cooperation with African states that switched from war and revolution to peace and development (Shinn, 2019). Prior to Xiaoping, the only Africans visible in China were diplomats but China's economic and diplomatic shift attracted a significant number of African students to Chinese schools and universities.

China's increased economic growth in the late 1990s forever changed African-Chinese relations. Along with the diplomats and students, merchants, entrepreneurs, and businesses from Africa started moving to China. The 1997 Asian financial crisis opened economic prospects for many Africans (Bodomo, 2012) and was further amplified by the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation conference in 2000. Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 transformed the global market as Chinese industrialization, trade liberalization, and the embrace of economic globalization intensified the African-Chinese relationship (Shafaeddin, 2002). Part of China's global economic strategies required the migration of business investors from different parts of the world to China and foreign economic policies focused on acquiring resources and selling Chinese products and goods to diverse markets. In the African context, African-Chinese trade exports reached 1.26 billion in 1992, however, since 2009, China has become Africa's largest trading partner with the value reaching $192 billion in 2019 (SAIS-CARI, 2020). The Chinese imported cotton, manganese, oil, gas, and mineral resources from Africa. According to the Institute of Developing Economies (2020), China is also involved in infrastructure projects in 35 African countries. Military cooperation between the Chinese and numerous African countries has become stronger as the PRC uses its military to consolidate its interests. Consequently, African-Chinese trade has brought an estimated 1 to 2 million Chinese migrants to numerous states across the continent (Bodomo, 2020; French, 2014; Park, 2016).

China has also become a significant migration destination for Africans. Bodomo (2020) estimates that there are around 500,000 Africans who currently live and work in China and identifies several categories of migrants that often overlap: Short- and long-term students, professionals, diplomats, and official representatives, as well as short- and long-term traders. The increase of African migrants in China is due to several factors. Many Africans are no longer looking north as immigration policies constrict legal forms of migration to the Americas and Europe. Therefore, many Africans focused on South-South migration to the Arab Gulf and Southeast Asia. China’s growing economy and substantially cheaper cost of living made it an even more common migration destination. The notable trend in African migration to China is the increased presence of traders who are currently the largest migrant category (Bodomo, 2020). Since the 2000s, major manufacturing cities such as Guangzhou have areas designated as “Chocolate City” by the locals. The continued presence of Africans in China is producing new racialized tensions exerted by the Han majority against the Black minority population. This Han racism is increasingly defining the lived experiences of the vulnerable Black migrant population in China. However, these experiences in the age of social media are also producing a global response wherein the Black migrant community in China is able to connect and raise awareness in their home nations in Africa and abroad to express their grievances and mobilize a response from within and outside the Chinese State.

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Chinese Racism Towards the Black Community

To understand the vulgar racism experienced by Black migrants in China, one must delve into Chinese conceptions of race and racial identity. While many scholars have promulgated the perspective that racial projects only have European origins (Omi & Winant, 1994), the reality is that the experience of the Black community in China in the context of COVID-19 is a reflection of a deeply embedded racial project in which Han Chinese are believed to be culturally and racially superior to other ethnic minorities in China, including the Black migrant community (Dikötter, 1992). The term often utilized by the Chinese state to describe ethnicity and nationality is the concept of “minzu,” which is essentially defined by the homogeneity of a given group of people who may have a shared history, culture, ancestral bloodline (Dikötter, 1992; Joniak-Lüthi, 2015, P. 121). Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, advanced this belief in endowing the Han majority with superior racial qualities by stating that, “…the greatest force is common blood. The Chinese belong to the yellow race because they come from the bloodstock of the yellow race. The blood of ancestors is transmitted by heredity down through the race, making blood kinship a powerful force” (Dikötter, 1997, p. 4).

This racialized conception of group difference has been utilized by previous empires through to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the contemporary context to racially “Sinicize” all officially recognized minzu's towards a Han racial and ethnic identity (Dikötter, 1992; Joniak-Lüthi, 2015). The emphasis on the supremacy of Han Chinese culture and race is framed on the Othering of both non-Han, and non-European communities as barbarians needing civilizing drawing, on their imagined “history, blood, ancestors, culture, land, and minzu character” (Joniak-Lüthi, 2015, p. 121). Even chairman Mao critiqued this ideological framework by coining it “Han chauvinism” to describe the blatant racism and discrimination toward other ethnic minorities (Dikötter, 1992). This racial-ideological framework of Han superiority can also be seen manifested contemporaneously as the bedrock of the current CCP genocidal campaigns against the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province to cleanse Uyghur culture and identity and forcibly assimilate the Uyghur minzu into second class citizens (Buckley & Ramzy, 2020; Finnegan, 2020; Roberts, 2020). This same racial-ideological framework has also been the backdrop of the anti-Black racism that has undermined the presence of Black people in China since their early migrations and is currently defining their attitudes in the COVID-19 era. Starting back in 1986, African students marched in Beijing against racism, and again in 1989, around 2,000 Chinese students boycotted classes to protest Han student’s physical attacks on Black students for an African man dating a Chinese woman (Marsh, 2020).

The racial thinking that spurred the viral news items and video tweets showing Black people being kicked out of their apartments, not allowed into stores, restaurants, and hospitals, and forcibly targeted for quarantine is one that is embedded in Han racial ideologies that ultimately view Black people as inferior and disease-ridden (Dikötter, 1992). Even symbolic Blackness in Han culture reflects the identifier of the labor class who are labeled colloquially, “black-headed people” (Dikötter, 1992, p. 11). The negative portrayal of the Black community is sourced in a larger history where they were targeted and racialized in previous epidemics in fact, “race-making of people, viruses, and the places they share became a powerful means by which Chinese public health professionals made sense of infectious disease” (Mason, 2015, p. 2). At the height of the HIV-AIDS epidemic, African students were singled out as carriers of the disease as they “originated” from primitive societies whose “lack of moral fiber, in contrast to the virtues of socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Dikötter, 1997, p. 27). However, in contrast, the white race were “seen as contributors to China's development, while Africans were viewed as uncultured suppliants” (Sautman, 1994, p. 424). This also shapes Chinese Han perceptions of the African continent and Black racial identity in which they view themselves not as exploiters, but in their ethnocentrism, as benevolent actors in a global racial hierarchy led by the “superior” European and American white race (Dikötter, 1992; 1997). In their examination of the well-being of African-Black migrants, Amoah et al. (2020) found that negative Chinese attitudes caused psychological distress on Africans through the confusion of their personal and social identity as black people, discrimination, and in the struggle to form enduring relationships with the locals. They also found that the media has also contributed to these negative attitudes by highlighting news reports on drugs, AIDs, illegal immigration, crime, fraud, and other offenses when mentioning African migrants (Li, Ma & Xue, 2009).

In the context of COVID-19, previous racial projects that identified the Black community with the propensity toward disease and violence were mobilized as they targeted the Black community as the source for the spread of the virus and a public health threat in Guangzhou and other cities with large Black minorities (Marsh, 2020). The turning point in the global media's attention on anti-Black racism in China was the viral post of a local McDonald's restaurant hanging a sign in the front door stating, “we’ve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant. For the sake of your health consciously notify the local police for medical isolation, please understand the inconvenience caused” (Deabler, 2020). Such an act showed the normalization of discriminatory behavior in contemporary China, where Han owned stores often hang signs banning the entrance of Blacks, Uyghurs, and other minorities. The viral global reactions to the Black community's online posts produced tremendous outrage on Twitter and mainstream new media outlets. Leading to several African nations raising concerns with Chinese ambassadors and tweeting their grievances to the public (Asiedu & Kazeem, 2020).