The Construction and Negotiation of Africanness and Blackness in the Chinese Social Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis

In contrast to the West, racial issues in China have remained underexplored, though the anti-black and anti-African sentiments are becoming increasingly salient. Drawing on the Okonkwonwoye Case, where a Nigerian man named Okonkwonwoye brutally attacked a Chinese nurse in 2021, this study develops a contour of how Blackness and Africanness are discursively and dialogically constructed and negotiated in Chinese cyberspace. We collected 2517 posts and 21,995 comments from Weibo, one of China's most popular microblogging platforms, using keyword searching and Octoparse, an automatic web-scraping tool. Taking a social constructionist (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) and a symbolic interactionist perspective (Mead, 1934), and conducting a critical discourse analysis, the study reveals that using the predicate “biting”, Chinese Internet users establish a metonymic connection between Black people and uncultured animals, representing the former as unevolved and subhuman; the concept of “素质”, a unique Chinese concept translated as “quality”, is used to distinguish the Chinese Self with “high quality” and Black Other with “low quality”. Notably, arguing that discrimination against Black people should be attributed to their “low quality”, this quality discourse also functions to shift the responsibility of discrimination to the victim. Moreover, as the incident occurred in Guangzhou, a Chinese city that hosts the largest African community in China, Chinese Internet users also discuss the African migrants in China, during which, deploying the hyperbolic discourse of numbers, they define Africans in China as the synonym for illegal stayers. However, the prejudiced representation of African migrants is challenged by some users, manifesting the contested process of meaning construction. Nevertheless, this challenging voice remains mitigated and quantitatively subtle, indicating the possible normalisation of the racist discourse in Chinese cyberspace.