For Chinese, Sophisticated Africans Are Contradictions in Cultural Terms

A West African businessman who was in China last year trying to arrange a cocoa-processing deal found himself shunted from ministry to ministry. Although he is internationally prominent in the cocoa business, he never managed to sign a contract with the Chinese. In the end, he blamed his failure to clinch the deal on what he described as an entrenched racism. The Chinese, he said, cannot grapple with the fact that they are talking with a well-dressed, sophisticated African who knows more about something than they do, is richer than they are and is negotiating the way white investors do.

This incident, by no means isolated, is but one facet of the ingrained racist attitudes shared by a majority of Chinese, including highly educated Chinese, attitudes confronted by many blacks who live in, and visit China--particularly Africans.

Over the last two weeks, this racism has boiled over in several Chinese cities. In Nanjing, Africans were beaten, both by Chinese students and, apparently, by the police. Thousands of students and workers marched through the streets, shouting “black devils” and “down with blacks.” Demonstrations spread to other cities, including Hangzhou and Beijing. A student from Mali said police used electric cattle prods on the genitals and faces of dozens of African students in Nanjing.

Yet the Chinese, both officially and individually, insist there is no racism in China, and that incidents such as those in Nanjing are not racist in character. A well-educated woman from Shanghai, who is doing graduate studies at a U.S. university, expressed bafflement at suggestions that racism existed in China. “Just because we say ‘black devils’ doesn’t mean we’re racist,” she said.

In fact, China’s post-revolutionary history has exhibited deeply etched patterns of institutionalized racism toward the 7% of the country’s population not ethnically Han. Government policies in areas where minority ethnic groups live have ranged from deliberate efforts to wipe out minority languages and life styles to the violent destruction of an entire culture. Almost everywhere in China, non-Han peoples live in greater poverty and with far higher rates of illiteracy than fellow citizens who happen to be Han.

The western corner of Hunan Province, an area of stony mountains and precarious agriculture, has for centuries been home to the Miao, an ethnic minority in China with roots in Southeast Asia. For nearly four decades, elementary school children have been taught not in the Miao language but in standard Chinese. No books or newspapers are printed in Miao and, until recently, many local festivals were banned. Most of the villages of the nearly 1 million ethnic Li of Hainan Island are without electricity or running water. Schools for the Li are few.

Nowhere, however, has the brutality of China’s racial policies been more apparent than in Tibet, where thousands of temples and monasteries were dynamited and looted during the Cultural Revolution. China dismembered the region by parceling enormous slots of Tibet to two adjoining Chinese provinces and imposed an occupation government of Hans backed by the Chinese army, also made up of Han troops. Recently, a new Communist Party secretary for the region was designated, a Han, to replace a man of Yi nationality.

Many Chinese speak contemptuously of Tibetans, employing language echoing unself-conscious racist comments heard three decades ago in the United States. Tibetans, many Chinese say quite openly, are “dirty” and “primitive.” They are not “civilized.” They are, in short, not Chinese. For their part, Tibetans tell foreign visitors of their fear of being turned into Chinese and losing their ethnic identity. Indeed, the Chinese monitor the activities of Tibetan religious institutions, at the core of Tibetan cultural life, aware that unfettered religious and cultural practices could lead to demands for political independence.

Officially, of course, there is no racism in China. TV news reports of the National People’s Congress feature camera shots panning lovingly over exotic headgear worn by representatives of various minority nationalities. It is never clear why army officers place their caps on their desks while, for example, a representative from Xinjiang wears a heavy fur hat with ear flaps through a two-hour speech under hot TV lights. This could simply be a clumsy device to show viewers that theirs is a multiethnic country. What it does more effectively, however, is emphasize that these people in bizarre costumes are different from the soberly attired Hans.

There are, for most Chinese, few occasions to encounter anyone who is not a Han. Chinese stare at Tibetans on the streets of Beijing just as they do at blond Scandinavians or black Africans. But the curiosity of people-watching tends in China to turn to unease, and sometimes hostility, when non-Hans, either Chinese citizens or foreigners, insist on retaining their cultural identity. Even for educated Chinese, this is often difficult to accept.

African students, almost all of whom are male, have discovered this most acutely when they attempt to spend time with Chinese women students. Male Chinese students resent it when female classmates go out with African students, and that resentment was in part at the root of the Chinese student protests against Africans in Nanjing and Beijing.

Several months ago an East African diplomat, in his Beijing apartment, spoke despairingly of Chinese attitudes toward Africans. “They think we’re like monkeys living in trees,” he said. “They think we swing from the trees onto the boat and when we arrive in China we’re given clothing and food.”

This perception clashes with a Chinese foreign policy that proclaims solidarity with developing countries, particularly in Africa. Chinese technicians and engineers have worked in Africa for decades--one of their largest projects was the Tan Zam Railroad linking Zambia with ports on the Tanzanian coast. There are now about 1,500 African students studying in China at Chinese expense. China has also been vocal in denouncing the apartheid of South Africa, although it rejects any criticism of Chinese policies in Tibet as interference with its internal affairs.

While the Chinese reject suggestions of racism, the Organization of African Unity has labeled the behavior of Chinese students as well as the police treatment of African students “an appalling situation” and has demanded an accounting from the Chinese ambassador in Addis Abbaba. For a country like China, where cultural homogeneity has, in great measure, been the norm for millennia, tolerance of diversity was never an issue. Thus there is an element of the genuine in the Chinese government’s protestations against accusations of racism: The reactions of Chinese students brought up in the ordered Chinese culture are not racist per se, but are expressions of distress at uninvited challenges to that order.

What the Chinese fail to see, however, is that to the African student whose parents labored under white colonial rule, and to other countries with histories of racial strife, the incidents of the past two weeks are racist. African students were targets of Chinese violence because they were different, because they were not Chinese, because they were black.