It’s been almost five months since a spate of anti-African discrimination erupted in Guangzhou, home to the largest overseas African population in Asia. Back in April, amid mounting fears of a COVID-19 outbreak in the southern Chinese, dozens, possibly hundreds of African residents were evicted from their homes and hotels and forced onto the streets with nowhere to go.
Videos, photos and other accounts of the events filled social media feeds in Africa and sparked widespread outrage that still lingers today.
In July, a group of five Chinese high school students, most from the eastern city of Suzhou near Shanghai, traveled to Guangzhou to find out what, if anything, has changed since April in terms of relations between African residents and the local population.
They recorded their experience for a short-form documentary “Africans in Guangzhou: Misunderstanding, Discrimination and Communication” that they published in August on YouTube and the Chinese video sharing platform Bilibili.
Two of the film’s producers, Chen Xingbei and Xiao Kaiyuan who are both rising seniors at The Overseas Chinese Academy of Chiway Suzhou, join Eric & Cobus to discuss their new film and to share their impressions of the current state of Chinese-African community relations in Guangzhou.
Show Notes:
- The China Global South Project: Bittersweet Memories: a Holistic Picture of How Africans Are Treated During COVID-19 in Guangzhou by Houming Ling, Lynn Yuhan Pan, Meng Zhao and Zach Ziye Zhang
- The China Global South Project: It’s Been Nearly 6 Months Since Guangzhou, What Have We Learned? by Eric Olander
- Asian Ethnicity: Africans in post-COVID-19 pandemic China: is there a future for China’s ‘new minority’? by Roberto Castillo and Padmore Adusei Amoah
