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Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception of Africa and Black Peoples

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Discourses of Race and Rising China

Part of the book series: Mapping Global Racisms ((MGR))

Abstract

An overarching theme of this chapter is an argument that the images of Africa and black people have been portrayed and constructed as a non-Chinese “Other” throughout history that often reflects China’s own problems and desires. From the Kunlun nu during the Tang Dynasty to todays’ “discovering China in Africa,” whatever the particular circumstance, however, a relationship between two racially superior/inferior human groups is either implied or demonstrated in the narratives and discourses of such an interaction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In comparison to so many mainland Chinese authors or commentators who never thought of racial thinking as they challenged the truthfulness of “Mao’s speech,” Liu Xiaopeng, a Taiwanese researcher, raised the question briefly: “Why do so many Chinese accept an error in diplomatic history—‘black brothers lift up China into the UN’ … black people ‘lift up’ China implies a superior-inferior relationship, then why did the Chinese fabricate this scenario of China being lifted up and carried into the UN by Africanblacks?” (Liu2013a, p. 60).

  2. 2.

    In the Islamic slave trade, a large number of black slaves were castrated; while in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the hellish experience of the Middle Passage and the brutal treatment in plantations have been perpetuated in the memories of entire human races. While works detailing the brutality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas are too many to name, for the Islamic or trans-Saharan slave trades, see John Wright, The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  3. 3.

    Because most online popular history essays on Africans or darker-skinned people in ancient China have no credible authorship and are often the work of cut-and-paste with added sensational titles, it is difficult to include them as references, I choose to document them in this footnote. “唐代崑崙奴是非洲黑人?最早的黑奴貿易來源於此?” (Were Kunlun nu in the Tang DynastyAfrican blacks? Was it the earliest slave trade?) https://kknews.cc/history/kz48yeb.html; 你所不知的盛唐奇闻:唐朝已有黑奴为贵族服务,比西方早一千年! (What you don’t know about the powerful Tang Dynasty: black slaves were already serving Tang elites, one thousand years earlier than the West!) https://kknews.cc/history/8bxokon.html; 昆仑奴身份解密:世界最早被交易的奴隶,唐朝中产阶级标配 (Decoding Kunlun nu identity: the earliest traded slaves and the standard for the Tang Dynasty’s middle class) https://kknews.cc/culture/lvvjoz.html; 昆仑奴是从哪儿来的? 唐朝流行养昆仑奴 (From where did Kunlun nu come? It was a fashion for people in the Tang Dynasty to have Kunlun nu) http://www.todayonhistory.com/lishi/201703/58688.html (all accessed May 25, 2018).

  4. 4.

    While heinu remained the most common, there were other terms that also combined color and status. They include guinu (鬼奴 devil slave; “devil” here means “foreign black devil”), heigui (黑鬼 black devil, a term today still used as a racial slur), wugui (乌鬼 darker black devil), heifan (黑番 black barbarian), heisi (黑厮 black servant), etc. Unlike Kunlun nu but similar to hei nu, these terms literarily denote the color black.

  5. 5.

    An observation and comparison between Chinese laborers and black slaves made by expatriates of the southern US slavers who went to Cuba seeking alternative laborers during the Civil War foregrounds the complex of racial hierarchy, labor division, and social control in Cuba (Guterl 2003).

  6. 6.

    I wrote an essay entitled “二战时美军黑人士兵为何差点进不了中国” (Why nearly couldn’t African-American soldiers enter China during WWII?) and published it on a popular history website http://www.ifengweekly.com/detil.php?id=4476. I also presented the history at a conference held in Fudan University (Shanghai) in summer, 2017. The feedback I received from both the general audience and scholars was “I never knew that history.”

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  1. Delaware State University, Dover, DE, USA

    Yinghong Cheng

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Cheng, Y. (2019). Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception of Africa and Black Peoples. In: Discourses of Race and Rising China. Mapping Global Racisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_4

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