Multiple readings and (the lack of) contextualisation
The ad was certainly seen by many people and discussed on all sort of platforms. On africansinchina.net, under the section ‘racist ad’, I collected more than a dozen pieces of analysis or videos about the controversy). More importantly, however, is that these analyses/videos revealed a general disagreement over the ‘racist’ implications of the ad. While Westerners were quick to coin it ‘the most racist ad of the 21st century’, not everyone agreed.The divide was not only between Chinese and black people. Indeed, the biggest gap I found in the readings of the meanings embedded in the ad came from black people from different parts of the world (i.e. Africans compared to African Americans and other black people from the West).
Even within the black communities who reside in China, for instance, the reactions were very diverse.They ranged from those who outrightly rejected the ad (as yet another example of racism in China), to those who wanted to contextualise it, and explain to others that things were different in the PRC. Amongst my black interlocutors in China (of whom not all are African), reactions diverged mostly along the lines of those who had lived in the country for longer periods of time versus those who had only been there for a short time. Most old-timers I spoke to were reluctant to categorise the ad as blatantly racist, and tended to justify it as
Chinese simply being ignorant of the racial implications and racist histories that others could see in the ad. This was also the position of many educated Chinese. Actually, every time there is a racial controversy in Africa-China relations, ‘ignorance’ is often evoked as a justification.
Putting ignorance as a justification aside for the moment (I will come back to this later), as simply a spectator who saw the ad, my first reading (which was perhaps not the dominant one) was that the black man was the boyfriend/husband of the woman doing the laundry. In other words, my decoding of the ad — based on my background, experience, and research — framed the plot within the history of Afro-Chinese romantic relationships; and also, albeit to a lesser extent, within the history of the policing of Chinese femininity in Africa-China relations (see Sullivan, 1994, and Sautman, 1994, on the sexual politics behind the Nanjing anti-African protests). In short, I assumed the black man was in a romantic relationship with the woman, not that he was her employee.
As a result, I was dumbstruck when I entered into a debate with a black British journalist, based in Beijing, over how she saw the ad. In her view, the black man was the ‘help’ (i.e. a domestic worker), and since he was clearly overstepping his boundaries, he got shoved into the washing machine. She alluded to the histories of domestic work, exploitation, and enslavement of black people in the West to argue her point. At first, I was fascinated as to how different our readings of the ad could be. Without a doubt, our backgrounds and experiences were crucial in the ways we decoded the meanings embedded in it, and thus determinant in what we read from it.
While I respect that the journalist had a different reading — in the end, the ad could be seen from any location around the world, and the producers rejected requests for interviews — I believe that her reading (which cast the black man as a domestic worker) not only cried out for some level of contextualisation within the logics of contemporary Afro-Chinese relations, but, perhaps more importantly, was an exemplar of how debates around issues of‘race’ at the global level get quickly colonised, or kidnapped, by the logics of the hegemonic power of Euro-American cultural imperialism that I mentioned earlier.
My contention that the black man in the ad was the boyfriend/husband, however debatable, emerges from years of research in which I have met numerous Africans who have married Chinese women, and who live married lives in nice middle-class apartments like the one in the ad. What struck me from some of the debates that I got involved with was that some journalists and academics failed to recognise that contextualisation and historicisation were crucial to make sense of how global perspectives on notions such as ‘race’ and ‘racism’ intersected with localised histories and practices.
Take, for instance, an article about China’s fear of a ‘black invasion’ (Chiu, 2017), which was published on Quartz shortly after the Qiaobi controversy. It is this kind of article that epitomises a trend in media representations in which narratives about black experiences in China/Asia are filtered through Western media (and academic) gazes.This particular article began with a reference to Pan Qinling, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, who went on a vitriolic rant (in the aftermath of the Qiaobi ad) urging the government to impose stricter controls on Guangdong’s African population because, according to him.
Africans in Guangzhou pose a security risk. The article then went on to quote a West African scholar: ‘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’ (Chiu, 2017). While the scholar was right to suggest that something has to be done about ‘racism’, the emphasis the journalist puts on his assertion that ‘racism is racism, period’ is symptomatic of a longstanding problem in knowledge production about ‘racism’ — namely, a single story/understanding of‘racism’, mostly emerging from colonial and postcolonial contexts.
As a visceral reaction, which as a brown male I have had many times, such an assertion is totally valid. But for the purpose of deepening understandings about how ‘race’ and ‘racism’ are articulated in contexts beyond the West, the ‘racism is racism, period’ assertion obscures and simplifies the complex ways in which ‘racism’ may form and take root in different contexts. Moreover, at least in the Chinese context, such a claim may fuel Chinese dismissals of discussions about ‘race’ and ‘racism’ for what they perceive as a Western ideological orientation.
The most striking implication of the ‘racism is racism, period’ assertion, however, is that ‘racism’ does not need to be contextualised. Interestingly, this is a form of thinking that I have commonly encountered, as noted earlier, among people of colour coming from the West to China. Rejecting contextualisation, especially when talking about Afro-Chinese racial encounters, and imposing the EuroAmerican racial logic as the standard measurement, goes against the most fundamental belief that to be able to tight oppression and hegemony different and multiple voices need to be heard. Throughout my years doing ethnography among Africans in China, I have seen countless debates between Africans and African-Americans as to why something may, or may not, be racist. Debates — like the ones around the ad — that almost always end in disagreement.
If there is no attempt to critically contextualise the ad in this era of global conversations about Africa-China relations, then how do we know what we are talking about. Instead of assuming that ‘race’ and ‘racism’ have self-evident meanings (that ‘we’, the hegemonic ‘we’, all understand), the questions that need to be asked are: How have these categories been textualised within certain systems of meaning at various times and in various contexts?; and, In the context of the ad, how does it get inserted within these systems of meaning? As Hall (1996) points out, while there are certain general features to ‘racism’, the ways in which these features are modified and transformed (by the historical specificity of the contexts in which they become active) crucially point to the need of thinking in terms of ‘racism(s)’, rather than ‘racism’.
What I learnt from the ad controversy is that, in Africa-China research contexts, the term ‘racism’ needs to be critically challenged every time it is knowingly evoked and used — for it often reproduces the misleading view that, ‘because racism is everywhere a deeply antihuman and antisocial practice, that therefore it is everywhere the same — either in its forms, its relations to other structures and processes, or its effects’ (Hall, 1996, p. 435).
Contextualising the Qiaobi ad may, for instance, not only help to highlight another instance in which women’s sexual practices are policed in relation to for-eign/black men (as noted earlier), but also point to the centrality of ‘racial nationalism’ in contemporary discussions of‘race’and‘racism’ in Africa-China relations. Contextualisation is not about rejecting accusations of‘racism’, as my black British journalist interlocutor assumed. Instead, it is about rejecting the universal in light of the specific. Methodologically speaking, contextualisation is about rejecting the application of pre-existing (aprioristic) frameworks to newly emerging phenomena.
Incidents, like the Qiaobi ad, may be read by some as an indication that in this day and age in China, the doors are not completely open to foreigners (especially black men), and that if they do get in, they should be substituted, and their difference effectively ‘washed away’. I believe that as China grows confident in its new role as a global power, the mixture of its anxieties with the right-wing populist and ethnonationalist discourses (that thrive in its social media), will lead to the emergence of more, rather than less, incidents like the Qiaobi ad. What I found most problematic about the ad is that, in my reading, it does not completely close China’s door to foreign/black presence, but rather it suggests that this presence should have a ‘place’, a form, and some boundaries. In the following section, I discuss what these ‘places’ are, and in what capacities are they supposed to be occupied.
