Governmental responses: #ChinaMustExplain

The deluge of evidence shared through social media prompted a strong response in Africa, where many governments summoned Chinese ambassadors to answer for the incidents. A great deal of the indignation on the African side was compounded by the fact that many on the continent saw Africa’s role in the early days of the pandemic as strongly supportive of China.

So, the images of homeless Africans sleeping under bridges, families with children being evicted from their legally rented places of abode, as well as the widespread denial of entry and/or service to black people, were seen by many as reiterations of forms of racism found elsewhere, as emerging forms of‘Chinese racism’, and as a Chinese betrayal of African solidarity in difficult times.

Africa’s strong diplomatic response forced China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to address the issue. Unsurprisingly, China’s response was to deflect and spin the narrative as yet another situation distorted by Western media and fake news, and to point out that China does not discriminate against any foreigners. The state-run English language newspaper The Global Tinies, for instance, accused Western media of spreading fake news and of trying to sow discord between China and African countries (Cahlan & Lee, 2020).

A crucial element in the attempt to spin the narrative was to amplify the incidents mentioned above (e.g. the Nigerian patient attacking a nurse, and a group of Nigerians roaming around the city) and to present these as the reasons behind Guangzhou’s decision to forcibly test and quarantine black people in the city. In short, state media pushed a narrative that presented the Chinese state as reacting against unruly foreigners. However, by the end of April, Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials were characterising what happened in Guangzhou as a ‘miscommunication’ and assured the public that Guangzhou’s authorities were working to improve their methods (Cahlan & Lee, 2020).

At the end of April, Nabil told me that one of his Kenyan friends, who worked at a circus, had been quarantined in a four-star hotel and treated in a way that he described as ‘excellent’. While in confinement at the hotel, the Kenyan acrobat was interviewed by different Chinese media outlets and requested to thank the government for the treatment live on camera. However, according to Nabil, what had happened to Africans in Guangzhou in early April was going to be difficult to forget. Nabil himself was doubting his return to ‘business as usual’ in China after the pandemic. ‘Things will never be as they were before this for us blacks there’, he explained to me in our last WeChat communication about the incident.