The Guangzhou incident: persecutions, forced evictions, and quarantines

The latest mediatised incident, or incidents, around African presence in China emerged in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and were represented by media and scholarship as an ‘unprecedented rupture’ in the history of Africa-China relations (Walsh, 2020).

Late one night in mid-April, 2020, I received a WeChat message from Nabil, one of my Kenyan contacts in Guangzhou, who was stranded in Nairobi and unable to fly back to China. He was anxiously asking me to do something about series of incidents which had started that day, in which Africans of several nationalities (many of them Nabil’s acquaintances) had been forced to quarantine, arbitrarily detained by police (without warrants), evicted from their places of abode by fearful landlords (without due notice), or harassed in the streets of Guangzhou. At that point, I was not able to confirm the extent of what Nabil was telling me, but I assumed that it would have been a small series of localised incidents in one of the neighbourhoods around Dengfeng, or perhaps Guangyuan West Road.

The next morning, through a deluge of messages in the various WeChat African groups that I belong to, I learnt that the last couple of days had been chaotic for African and other black communities in Guangzhou. At a time in which the government was beginning to lift lockdowns across the country, black communities throughout the city were being summarily targeted for testing and enforced quarantines.

Earlier that month, as the COVID-19 storm seemed to subside in China while still ravaging the West, President Xi Jinping warned that the battle was far from over, and that in order to prevent any potential new outbreak, every province, every city, every municipality needed to be ready to trace and control ‘imported’ infections. In other words, China’s coronavirus task force was moving its focus from the domestic shutdown to what they called ‘the two risks’, imported infections and sporadic, local outbreaks. Although most of the imported infections were Chinese nationals returning from Europe, foreigners in the country became the target of stringent measures and discriminatory practices by both local authorities and ordinary citizens over fears and anxieties that they could trigger a new Wuhan. Weibo posts related to the risk of imported infections, using keywords such as ‘foreign trash’, for instance, spiked in April 2020. A cartoon depicting officials throwing

Transnational flows 151 white and black foreigners who weren’t abiding by quarantine rules into the trash went viral on several platforms (Cahlan & Lee, 2020).

Naturally, in this context, the Southern Chinese province of Guangdong, with its long history of foreign communities, was placed in the spotlight. Soon after Xi’s warning, the city of Guangzhou identified 120 imported cases of COVID-19, with a dozen concerning nationals of African countries. Fear and anxiety were compounded by viral stories about foreigners, Africans in particular, not abiding by quarantine measures. A day after Xi’s comments, news broke on social media that a Nigerian man had assaulted a Chinese nurse while trying to escape quarantine at a Guangzhou hospital. At around the same time, another story claimed that a group of Nigerians had patronised an eating spot, popular with Africans in the city, during the virus incubation period. These news reports fuelled fears of a potentially wider infection among African communities in Guangzhou.

Xi’s remarks were indeed a catalyst for what was about to happen to Africans in the city. However, his remarks have to be located within a media ecology in which fake news, and online chatter, along with a history of tensions between certain African communities and authorities in some areas of the city, combined to create the perfect storm.

In the following days, dozens of incidents emerged through social media where black people were mistreated, rendered homeless, and/or denied entry to commercial venues where non-black foreigners were allowed. Indeed, in order to ‘coronavirusproof’ the city (and to avoid Beijing’s criticism), Guangzhou’s local government decided to implement a strict surveillance and testing programme, and impose a 14-day quarantine on all African nationals, regardless of travel history or testing results, in an attempt to prevent a potential outbreak among the African communities. The implementation was messy and not well coordinated, however. Word of mouth, for instance, rather than clear political communication, spread the rumour that black people were not allowed practically anywhere (this rumour also impacted on black people from non-African countries). In the midst of this crisis, city officials designated the districts where Africans congregate as ‘medium risk’, while the rest of the city remained ‘low risk’. This created a very difficult situation for many black people in Guangzhou that was mainly framed by Western media as a series of ‘racist’ attacks against the African communities of Guangzhou (Reuters, 2020).