https://medium.com/@jakepagano/african-students-encounter-institutional-racism-at-a-top-chinese-university-raising-urgent-cd8a6eeb1fa4
no need to hide your racism like in America, it is from top to bottom
Geoffrey started at the University in 2017 after receiving a scholarship to the internationally recognized Institute of International and Comparative Education. Along with Nanjing and Beijing Universities, ZJNU is one the most popular Universities for international students, and hundreds of African students now study there. To Geoffrey, it seemed like the ideal option: a prestigious degree, renowned professors, and a central location in Jinhua, a city near Hangzhou known for culture and commercial trade, and a relatively clean climate. It has become a hub for Africans abroad.
But in the first few weeks, Geoffrey frequently encountered discrimination from school administrators. What shocked him was not the overt racism — he had expected it, having spoken to several Malawi friends abroad in China and read about racialization at Chinese- run factories throughout Africa. It was that the University hosting him was so directly complicit.
“I soon realized that racism in China is a problem that exists everywhere. Not just in person-to-person interactions, but in school administration, in University life,” he explained.
Geoffrey then did what several classmates suggested: he joined a group of his country’s expats on WeChat, China’s popular texting app. In daily discussions on the app, he heard of similar experiences, both with racialized behavior and more systemic administrative neglect.
And in interviews with a dozen students abroad at ZJNU from Ghana, South Africa, and Malawi, the consensus was similar: racism was imbedded in educational institutions and, in both daily interactions and University school programs, often created the experience of second-class citizenry.
Expressing a common sentiment of “invisibility,” a female student from South Africa explained that racism made her “feel that [she] did not exist. [She] would be sidelined [in class]... and throughout the program activities.” Others described racial profiling when they went shopping in Jinhua, or suggested that visiting African professors, though asked to lecture at the University with open-arm invitations, were treated differently than their white European colleagues.
There were also more explicit instances of discrimination: ZJNU Professors who refused to take African students as advisees, or gave them disparaging comments on essays; African students who, despite having higher grades, were receiving lower level scholarship funding on ZJNU’s three-tiered scholarship system than their white peers; and, a culture where many African students would hear Professors and classmates make xenophobic comments, such as “Africans are draining our scholarship funds.”
Some African students sense that the racism they are experiencing emerges in part from ignorance, and that the actors perpetuating it are fundamentally victims of a larger culture which shuns, or parodies and stereotypes, the “other.” The line between racism and straight, albeit destructive, naiveté is sometimes blurred. And a few students told me that they’ve had success explaining to Chinese classmates the violence in racializing behavior.
Too often, however, ignorance had nothing to do with what was happening. “When it’s an educated student or a professor who’s discriminating, well, you know that’s not from a lack of knowledge. Not at all,” Geoffrey said.
Allegations of racism on Chinese University campuses might not be shocking on their own, but consider their context: China is now the top destination for African students studying overseas. Beginning in 2000, as part of its focus on African education and resource development, China led a Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, which began outlining scholarship initiatives and offering political support for African students. It pledged to offer 30,000 scholarships to African students by 2018, a goal which it has achieved and which has led to a global shift towards China as a center for education. As
a recent report in Foreign Policy documents, over 60,000 Africans, the majority of whom are from Zambia and Tanzania, studied in China in 2016, topping the number that was enrolled in the U.K. and the U.S, long considered the most popular destination for students from Africa.
But many of the African students at ZJNU offer stories that profoundly complicate the narrative suggested by those statistics.
A constitutive part of their concern is that the racism they are experiencing in China goes far beyond racial name-calling or people avoiding them on public transportation. It is, they report, imbedded in institutions, school policy, and a culture where no one in power is held accountable.
“The racism here seems like it’s not serious, but it’s on another level,” Kwame, a master’s student in Public Policy who serves as the Vice President of Ghana’s expat community in Jinhua and asked to be referred to by his pseudonym, said. “Because it’s institutionalized, people don’t see it. That’s the most dangerous part. You know in Europe, it manifests in name-calling, in ‘hey you, hey black monkey, or whatever.’ Here it’s not like that. It’s at the institutional level. They set rules in ways that do not favor the foreigners, and that especially do not favor the blacks.”
Kwame recounted an employment fiasco that he says is all too common. In search of a teaching job to supplement his stipend, he went to a tutoring service affiliated with the University where classmates had previously been hired. They asked him to come back the following week. When he finally met the company’s HR team, he heard the boss say, “You know, your English isn’t good. It isn’t standard’,” Kwame recounts. English is Kwame’s mother tongue, but the company instead hired several white Europeans, for whom English was a second language.
Despite these realities, for many students choosing between African Universities and costly American or European institutions, China still offers an invaluable, accessible land of opportunity.
However, accounts from Zhejiang Normal University illuminate a largely invisible underside, and set of unforeseen challenges, within China’s rapidly growing role in higher education.
Most noticeably, African students abroad in China are confronting racialized worlds and troubling colonial-era narratives that many had thought belonged firmly to the past. Racially insensitive comments, such as University Professors complaining that African students lacked basic secondary educations, were all too common, a student from South African explained.
And it’s not racism alone that they are facing, but socio-political power structures that augment disenfranchisement.
Part of the problem is that China’s opaque bureaucratic structures offer few opportunities for foreigners, and especially African students, to pursue justice or seek recourse. Consequently, most African students feel that opportunities to contest racialization, or pursue internal reform at Universities, are virtually non-existent.
Instead, they seek expat community groups and on-campus clubs that offer sources of alliance. Equally important, those groups give an opportunity to discuss how best to navigate a world where they lack even basic civil power. Any allegations levied against them, whether by Professors, police or local Chinese students, are often immediately accepted as fact.
Kwame said, “When new students come from Africa, we tell them: Here are the rules, here are the Dos, here are the Don’ts. We spell out the rules for them, because if they get into trouble, we cannot defend them. The expat communities can seem powerful, but no, we are really powerless.”
Kwame speaks to a much broader, underlying worry that China’s rise in various theatres, especially education and commerce, has brought with it a glaring absence in basic civil procedures.
That is indeed a global concern shared by Africans in spaces overseen by Chinese- government-led administrators. Joseph Goldstein reports in The New York Times that Kenyans working in Chinese-operated factories experience discrimination and policies reminiscent of neocolonialism. Kenyans, who are often notably proud of their country’s stable democracy, are not only appalled by such blatant racism, but at the lack of channels through which to seek justice. Students at ZJNU describe similar realities. And while it would be misleading to suggest that Africans studying in the West do not encounter racism, there is a crucial difference that many ZJNU students pointed to: there are some rights afforded them. At most Western Universities, for example, administrations are bound to follow some version of civil rights guidelines.
Chinese Universities, however, are typically overseen by Municipal bureaucracies, which report directly to the central Ministry of Education. This creates a legal void for foreigners studying abroad. Indeed, despite national laws stating that no one should be discriminated “on the basis of race,” there do not exist civil rights’ standards that administrators are obligated to follow, nor to which students with grievances might appeal.
The intersectional nature of racial discrimination and civil disempowerment thus leaves many in a state of increased vulnerability, anxious to avoid conflict and concerned that if they speak up for themselves, or protest an unfair policy or administrative decision, no one will defend them.
Further contributing to their disempowerment are global power structures, namely that China, which has major stakes in Africa’s key commercial projects, holds economic leverage over many of the African nations from which students originate. In the past, embassies of both Kenya and Ghana have sided with Chinese authorities when their own nationals have been arrested, charged, or threatened with deportation for untried allegations.
In May 2016 for example, when a Ghanaian student at ZJNU was riding a bike that a group of Chinese students had lent him that night, the police approached and claimed it
was “illegal to ride a bike registered in another’s name.” When he told them that the Chinese students had offered it to him just fifteen minutes earlier, the police retorted that it was stolen. The Ghanaian, shocked by what was clearly a cruel trick by the Chinese students, was arrested at his dormitory’s stoop.
The next day, he appealed to his embassy, but officials sided with the Chinese authorities. He was afforded no trial or opportunity to contest the allegations, and deported the next day.
The tenuous status held by African students in China to which such stories attest, and the racialization they face, is not a recent phenomenon. While Africans and black Americans, including the Black Panthers, forged strong alliances with Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in the 1960s and united over a shared distrust of Western governments and capitalist structures, black students studying in China in the 1980s began confronting racism.
Anti-black racism rose throughout the late 1980s, culminating in a year’s long uprising, the Nanjing Anti-Africa protest. It began at a Christmas Eve party at Nanjing Hehai University in 1988, when two African men were attacked for bringing Chinese women as their dates. A brawl erupted across the University, leading hundreds of African students to seek refuge in their nation’s respective embassies. After a tense showdown at a Chinese railway station, the targeted students escaped.
A series of anti-African protests at various University campuses were held throughout that year, and by 1989 the number of Africans in the country drastically reduced. It only began to increase, slowly at first, in the 1990s, and more rapidly in the 2000s, especially with the China-Africa forum of 2006.
Today, that kind of zealous, racially motivated uprising in China is unthinkable. The socio-political space has been completely eclipsed by a Party that values, and at nearly all levels of society institutes, order. It largely succeeds in preventing any public conflict. Protests are rare.
But just as racial bigotry has been channeled into institutional policy and online forums in much of the world, so anti-African sentiment in China has sequestered itself in various media spaces and chat forums. While this does not provide concrete evidence for the culture some African students face at University, it does help paint a picture of the charged atmosphere in civil society.
In a report by one of Jinhua’s Daily newspapers, an editorial ran in the fall of 2017 with a series of interviews by local residents, many of who suggested that Africans were taking up “too much space in the city” and pulling crucial education funding away from secondary schools.
And in a popular online forum, Zhuanluan, a highly circulated post from 2017 reads: “Should China continue to subsidize millions of Africans?” Above the article is a photograph of several Africans dancing, the implication being that Africans come to China to party, not study.
For both Geoffrey and Kwame, studying at ZJNU has led them to confront carefully a culture that often feels distinctly, yet obliquely, hostile They have arrived at a grim and pragmatic conclusion: being abroad in China is about recognizing both the possibilities, and the real limits, of what the country can offer them. While it’s not a place where they would be comfortable living long term, the education is important, and finding ways to endure the unjust landscape, help others do the same, and learn from the complexity of Chinese culture and history, is their operative principle.
Still, part of what is so troubling to students at ZJNU is that the only thing many feel is keeping them safe from greater outbursts of racialization and discrimination is the strict limitations on public discourse in China today. Just as dissent of government policy overseas is prohibited, so is any display of sentiment that would jeopardize China’s image of its alliance with Africa.
“We have this very strange feeling walking through the streets, or at times within the University,” Geoffrey recounted. “The fact that the Chinese do not openly resent us does not mean they welcome us here. We have this feeling.... that tension and animosity [are] building up within them. But it’s really repressed.”
Despite the rising tensions, it is likely that the number of African students in China will continue to increase under ever-expanding Africa-China education initiatives.
And it is equally probable that students, without any real resistance power or help from either internal authorities or international sources, will be left to navigate a disturbing concatenation of neo-colonial power structures and embedded racialization.
“African youth nowadays are tough,” Kwame said, when I asked if he finds himself concerned for the next cohort of African students beginning study in China this year. “They have made their own decisions to survive. It’s not racism that will make them stop. They will outsmart, they will find a way.”
