Africans in Guangzhou are on edge, after many are left homeless amid rising xenophobia as China fights a second wave of coronavirus

Hong Kong (CNN)The African community in Guangzhou is on edge after widespread accounts were shared on social media of people being left homeless this week, as China's warnings against imported coronavirus cases stoke anti-foreigner sentiment.

In the southern Chinese city, Africans have been evicted from their homes by landlords and turned away from hotels, despite many claiming to have no recent travel history or known contact with Covid-19 patients.

CNN interviewed more than two dozen Africans living in Guangzhou many of whom told of the same experiences: being left without a home, being subject to random testing for Covid-19, and being quarantined for 14 days in their homes, despite having no symptoms or contact with known patients.

Health authorities in Guangdong province and the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

The move comes amid heightened media coverage of the so-called second wave of coronavirus cases, emanating from infections outside of China. Earlier this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged authorities to carefully watch for imported cases from other countries, state news agency Xinhua reported.

But one aspect of the data has received relatively less public attention: on March 26, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Luo Zhaohui said 90% of China's imported cases held Chinese passports.

Africans in Guangzhou have been encouraged to leave the city in recent years through a series of immigration policies, economic developments and heightened policing.

Meanwhile, on Thursday reports emerged from Africans in China that the crackdown on Africans is wider than Guangzhou. One Ghanaian family in Beijing, with no recent travel history or contact with Covid-19, reported that police came to their apartment in the early hours of Thursday morning and ordered them to leave. The Ghanaian embassy in Beijing confirmed that two Ghanaian nationals were currently seeking refuge

[I know black people have said Chinese people will get off of an elevator if a black person is on already or not get on if one is entering the elevator with them.]

This may be related to fears of crime. Blacks tend to punch above their weight wherever they live. The thinking might be better rude than dead.

I have read that the Chinese state-run media highlights the murders of Chinese abroad to discourage the emigration of their best and brightest, in particular to the US. It makes no attempt to hide the race of the perps, who are mainly black. Stateside, political correctness dictates that the perps be referred to as teens or youths. The Chinese media may not be as subtle. So perhaps there’s a sense of racial grievance there, as well. Then there are the observations of Chinese immigrants abroad on Chinese social media:

https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/03/09/813630530/the-killing-of-two-chinese-men-ignites-an-anti-black-sentiment-in-chinatown

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africans_in_Guangzhou#Crime
[Data from Guangdong anti-drug officials indicate that most drug dealers in the province are from Africa or the Middle East.[33][34] Anti-drug officials quoted by US diplomats in a 2007 diplomatic cable described linguistic difficulties faced by the police in countering African drug dealers, noting some dealers used languages like Igbo, a Nigerian language that police had no capability for understanding.[33] A Nigerian consulate official in Guangzhou estimated in 2017 that on average 1% of Nigerians arriving in Guangzhou would be arrested for a drug-related offense.[35]

The Guangzhou Public Security Bureau carried out a major drug bust with 1,300 police officers raiding the Lihua Hotel (Dragon Hotel) in the city’s Yuexiu District. The August 2013 raid coincided with an immigration enforcement crackdown in the summer 2013 and led to the arrest of 168 suspects, most of whom were described by police as citizens of Nigeria and Mali.[36] The then Nigerian Ambassador in Beijing, Sola Onadipe, stated that more than 50 of the suspects arrested were holders of Nigerian passports. He noted large amounts of money were found on the suspects and lamented in an interview with the Vanguard, “As an embassy, how do you tackle such a thing?”[37] The Ambassador in the same interview, a year before planned retirement, was harsh on his countrymen for engaging in what he described as rampant drug trafficking and ill mannered public behavior (”smoking marijuana openly in another man’s country”) and vented “it makes you not to enjoy your job”.[37] Ambassador Onadipe gave the local police credit for fairly adjudicating criminal cases involving Nigerians and pointed out that other African communities in Guangzhou including the neighboring countries of Ivory Coast and Ghana and countries across Francophone Africa didn’t get the same level of police attention as Nigerians.[37] ]

[Sounds like propaganda to blame the Africans for the fake “2nd wave” of COVID, which is just continued infection they never controlled, and far higher numbers of dead they have hidden and lied about.]

I suspect this is just antagonism by local Bull Connors using the opportunity to turf troublesome foreigners protected by the central government. Except the target of Connors’s ire was full-fledged US citizens discriminated against by Jim Crow laws, whereas these Africans are actually foreigners, many of them illegal, foisted upon them by Beijing, which is presumably only sparsely populated by blacks. There is a kind of federalism in China, with genuine locals (i.e. not the carpetbagger governors or mayors appointed by Beijing) resisting top-down edicts disadvantageous to them in a passive-aggressive way, encapsulated in the saying: “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away”.

Let’s say that the black population in China is near zero. If your statistic is correct and they are doing 1% of certain crimes the Chinese attitude is justified.
Although I wouldn’t say that there is such a thing as Chinese racism towards blacks in its classic form. I know a black woman who worked in China for two years and she says it is more like amusement although sometimes uncomfortable.
It is like everyone is staring at you or taking pictures of you, tries to touch your hair and so on. On workplace everybody tries to be your friend, invites to go shopping with them and so on, asking some insensitive questions in process.

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