Anti-Blackness in Contemporary China? A Media Analysis on Chinese - African Engagements on Chinese Interactive Online Platforms

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1: Belonging, Mobility, and Racialization in Transnational Asian Contexts

Abstract

This paper explores the discourse of anti-Blackness in China using data from the Internet from the perspective of “new racism” and overt racism to reveal Chinese local communities’ reactions to Africans and Black people’s presents in China and Chinese people’s everyday life through interactive online platforms. Considering the low real-life contact between local Chinese and Africans, media contents may have been the primary source for China’s public opinion on Africans and Black people in China. "Bilibili.com" is the biggest interactive video-sharing platform in China allowing official media and personal media to create accounts, post videos, and receive reactions and comments from the viewers. Using data scraping tools, 1044 unique videos, collected from the keywords “Africans in China,” “Black people in China,” and its variations, were included in this study to analyze how Chinese media that contains interactive features influenced Chinese people’s opinions toward Black people and African communities, and how these opinions are reflected in the content.

For each video, Python version 3.9 was used for sentiment analysis with BaiduNLP and content analysis using word clouds, generated by an external Python library, “Wordcloud.” Quantitative analysis methods were applied to evaluate viewers’ reactions, i.e., the total number of views, shares, danmu, likes, saves, and coins a video receives. Specifically, negative binomial regression models are applied to explore the associations between the viewers’ reactions and the creators’ perspectives. Such a regression analysis is applied to both the dataset with all 1,044 videos and the subset with 780 videos of high relevance. Results from the content analysis show, on the Chinese internet, Africans are associated with Blackness. The concept of “Africans” was often used in unfortunate situations, while “Europeans” referred to lucky people. Such metaphors reflect a White-above-Black racial hierarchy that local Chinese take and use as common sense.

Author

• Xuemeng Li, CUNY-Hunter College