ABSTRACT
Among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, “Heiren (黑人)” (black person/people) is a ubiquitous term with many referents, encapsulating everyone from labourers to state officials, and ranging from an ethno-racial category to an individual pronoun. In English translation, the term bears on a contentious debate regarding racialisation in Africa-China relations. In this paper, based on seventeen months of fieldwork among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, I examine racialisation in everyday discourse, and also the politics of (white) ethnographic reportage on (non-white) racism. I focus on the social lives of the word heiren among Chinese, examining how it is deployed in heterogenous social situations and discursive contexts. I argue that the use of ‘Heiren’ flattens otherwise heterogeneous experiences with and attitudes towards Tanzanians, contributing to the construction of an African other. Specifically, talking about Heiren becomes a way that economically privileged but politically vulnerable Chinese migrants talk about the tense relations they have with Tanzanians. However, I argue the significance of Heiren talk is not that it defines ‘the Chinese’ in isolation as ‘racist’, but rather how it becomes discursively complicit with global anti-blackness.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
3 The fieldwork this research is based was approved by Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Brown University (#1404001021)
12 Cf. Mao Zedong’s 1963 statement “Supporting American Blacks in their Struggle Against Racism.”
20 Lan (Citation2017), Huynh and Park (Citation2018). This is especially true when heterosexual male Chinese opposition to romantic intimacies between Chinese women and African men are treated as “Chinese” attitudes without considering the perspectives of the Chinese women in question themselves (cf. Shen Citation2009).
21 Brown (Citation2016, 21). But see also Liu (Citation2013) on African experiences of racial discrimination in Mao’s China.
52 Lan (Citation2017, 61) provides examples of jokes in China about Africans in Guangzhou which play on these double meanings.
54 For some migrants, the different nationalities in Africa are merely different versions of African. I heard Chinese interlocutors sometimes use phrases like “The Black people here” (这里的黑人,zheli de Heiren), or “The Black people in Botswana” (博茨瓦纳的黑人, Bociwana de Heiren).
56 Chinese migrants rarely use Heiren as a direct address in the second person, but more often learn and adapt Swahili terminology, such as “brother (kaka),” “sister (dada),” and “friend (rafiki)”
63 Di Wu (Citation2021) describes how such storytelling in Zambia contributes to both a sense of a Chinese community, and a pervasive “anxiety” that crosses the class lines which otherwise divide the Chinese.
67 Personal Communication.
68 My use of complicity is focused on the production of racial discourse, and is therefore different from Steinmuller (Citation2013) who defines “complicity” in terms of Herzfeld’s idea of the cultural intimacy of participating in practices that are disavowed in the official (state) register, but are nonetheless practices that allow members of a community to recognise each other.
72 There has been a trend in recent years by Black writers and Chinese allies to start a conversation about racism in China.
Wu Di (吴迪). 2016. “依附与非匀称性殷勤-中国、赞比亚的领导方式与上下级关系比较 (Attachment and Asymmetrical Attentiveness: A Comparison of Subordinate Relationships under China-Zambia Leadership Styles).” Kaifang Shidai 4. http://www.opentimes.cn/html/Abstract/2117.html. Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden: Wiley and Blackwell. Steinmüller, Hans. 2013. Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China. New York: Berghahn Books. Pagliai, Valentina. 2011. “Facework, and Identity in Talk About Immigrants in Italy.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (s1): 94–112. Pagliai, Valentina. 2011. “Facework, and Identity in Talk About Immigrants in Italy.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21 (s1): 94–112. Fennell, Vera Leigh. 2017. Comments. Workshop on Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives on Race, Racism, and Racialization in China-Africa Relations. New York University January 13, 2017. Additional information
Funding
I would like to thank the National Science Foundation (Grant #1422254), Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant #8864), and the Social Science Research Council (Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship 2014) for their support for this project at different stages.
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