Anti-Black and anti-African sentiments as a common ground: A critical discourse analysis of digital representations of Blackness and Africanness in China

In China, racial issues remain relatively under-investigated, while grassroots anti-Black and anti-African hostilities are becoming increasingly salient. Drawing on Okonkwonwoye Case, where a Nigerian man brutally attacked a Chinese nurse in 2021, this study examines how the knowledge (in a Foucauldian sense) of Blackness and Africanness are represented, instrumentalised, and negotiated discursively and dialogically in the Chinese digital space. Deploying keyword tracking, I first tracked the hashtags on the events on Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging platforms in China. Then, using Octoparse, a web scraping tool, I automatically extracted 2517 posts and 21,995 comments under the hashtags, which are all naturally occurring. Taking a social constructionist (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) and a symbolic interactionist perspective (Mead, 1934), I view discourses as social practices through which the knowledge of the objects is systematically and intersubjectively formed, disseminated, and conventionalised. Accordingly, “race” is a flow of knowledge constructed and reinforced in and through discourse, which is usually based on distorted social realities (Nahs, 1989). A critical discourse analysis of data reveals that using the predicate “bite” and animal metaphors, Blackness is associated with animality and is therefore represented as brutal and less evolved; the concept of suzhi, translated as “quality”, serves as a determinant distinguishing Self from Other, allowing Weibo users to evaluate Black people based on ethnocentric standards. Meanwhile, drawing on suzhi, Weibo users also attribute the cause of discrimination toward Black people to their low qualities, shifting the responsibility of discrimination to the victims. Potentially, this anti-Black sentiment functions to solidify a Self- identity in relation to an Other-identity in a time of health crisis. Additionally, the findings suggest the discourse of African immigrants is always associated with illegality, generalising African immigrants as synonymous with illegal immigrants. Though this derogatory representation is challenged by some internet users, demonstrating a contested and heteroglossic nature of meaning-making in cyberspace, these voices remain subtle and mitigated compared with the quantitively significant xenophobic discourse in the data, implying xenophobic ideas, once considered socially unacceptable, seem to have become a normalised common ground in Chinese social media.