Chinese efforts to contain the fallout from the recent crisis in Guangzhou appear increasingly ineffectual among a large, and growing, swathe of Africans.
Beijing has mounted a robust diplomatic and media campaign to persuade the continent’s governing class that allegations of mistreatment of and discrimination against African residents in Guangzhou emanated from poor communication and overly-zealous local health authorities eager to contain a resurgent COVID-19 outbreak. But those efforts have seemingly fallen flat with African publics, the media, and a wide range of civil society groups.
In just the past week, the mood online has hardened considerably as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and private WhatsApp groups have been flooded with a never-ending stream of often violent videos supposedly depicting Chinese abuse of Africans. The fact that many of these videos are either not related to what happened in Guangzhou, don’t even involve Chinese nationals (ethnic Chinese people in SE Asia, for example, are often mistaken for PRC nationals) or are otherwise misleading, is almost beside the point. What’s important here is the wider narrative they’re crafting, which is mostly one of righteous anger.
Hashtags like #RacismInChina and #ChinaMustExplain are trending on Twitter and Facebook, among a growing number of content streams that are coming to dominate the current social media discourse related to China-Africa.
Older politicians, scholars and other stakeholders who don’t spend much time on social media, particularly those in China who also can’t access foreign social media sites, often dismiss these memes as just “online rantings” that don’t have a meaningful impact in the so-called “real world.” But on a continent where the median age is 19.7 years old and with rapidly expanding access to the mobile internet, social media is now among the most important battlegrounds of public perception (television is also very important).
The combination of the generation gap between Chinese policymakers and African publics, plus the fact that most officials in China are not permitted to access websites beyond the Great Firewall helps to explain why Chinese messaging in Africa is not resonating with the continent’s huge population of young people.
Even among more conservative traditional media outlets, little if any of China’s positive messaging is getting through. Coverage in Kenya is dominated by stories of evacuations from China, while in South Africa journalists are focusing on calls for investigations into the treatment of Africans in Guangzhou, and in Nigeria on the ongoing controversy surrounding a Chinese medical team deployed to the country.
China-Africa scholar Li Hangwei, a PhD candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, wrote a compelling column on this trend yesterday on the financial news site Quartz. Li contends that the increasingly negative perceptions of China on the continent have now escalated to such a point that it threatens to overwhelm Beijing’s hugely ambitious COVID-19 diplomacy agenda in Africa.
Highlights of Li Hangwei’s Column “The Mistreatment of Africans in Guangzhou is a Big Threat to China’s Coronavirus Diplomacy”
- ALIENATING IMPORTANT PARTNERS: “Many African countries will be particularly disappointed given how much their diplomats have spoken up for China on the international stage. African governments have supported China on issues including its membership of the UN in the 1970s, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang.”
- NOT COMBATTING RACISM AT HOME: “Little effort has been made to educate the Chinese public against racism, or to emphasize the importance of political correctness. So it’s not surprising the past few years have seen racist tropes appear in a Chinese detergent advert and on China’s biggest lunar new year television show. Many Chinese believe that foreigners have been given extra benefits, leading to concerns about unfairness and inequality.”
- DIFFICULT DOMESTIC POLITICAL REALITIES: “The recent mistreatment of Africans in Guangzhou shows the different priorities of local and central politics in China. The Guangzhou municipal government faces unprecedented pressure to stop a second wave of coronavirus. If the local government can successfully avoid a second outbreak, it might determine the future promotion of some senior officials.”
