China’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zhu Jing, is probably hoping that the fuss from the recent emergence of multiple social videos that depict violent abuse of local Congolese workers by Chinese managers will blow over.
After all, it’s a classic official Chinese response to these kinds of controversies: First, ignore the crisis, then find someone to blame (usually the Western media or a Western government), and then repeat that accusation over and over and over again.
This was the tactic that the Chinese government used in April 2020 when videos appeared on social media that clearly showed widespread maltreatment of African and Black residents when they were evicted from the homes and hotels in the southern city of Guangzhou. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, Chinese propaganda and spokespeople uniformly declared that any accusation of discrimination against Black people in GZ was “fabricated” and part of a Western media effort to “drive a wedge between China and Africa.”
But that approach isn’t going to work now in the DRC.
First of all, the Western media isn’t paying any attention to this issue. Other than a single report on FRANCE 24, no other major English-language international news outlet has covered the story of these videos appearing on social media over the past few weeks. Instead, the videos are almost entirely amplified by Congolese social media and news outlets.
Second, Chinese officials should worry about the frequency of these uploads that appeared one after another this summer. So far, at least four are now circulating but there are potentially more out there. When I asked a Congolese mining expert whether Chinese managers have become more abusive towards their local staff, he said no, it’s always been this way only now people are recording it.
That’s the same phenomenon that occurred in the United States where Black people complained for generations about police brutality. Few in mainstream White society took those claims seriously until one horrific video after another forced its way into everyone’s social media feeds culminating with the on-screen murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Those videos have contributed to a severe deterioration in how the public, particularly young people in major U.S. cities, perceive law enforcement and societal institutions more broadly.
That’s what can happen when issues like this go unaddressed.
Ambassador Zhu would be well-advised to call in the local heads of Tenke Fungurume Mining, Sicomines, and the other Chinese-run mining firms to explain that the violence against local staff in their companies has far-reaching implications. They need to get this situation under control, improve working conditions, or else suffer a similar fate as what’s happened to U.S. law enforcement’s whose reputation is now shattered.
