Revolution of Our Times

Hong Kong Democracy Slogans Heard at Mainland Chinese Protest: Report
By Hillary Leung / Hong Kong,

Hong Kong Democracy Slogans Heard at Mainland Chinese Protest

Slogans of Hong Kong’s democratic movement have been heard at protests in a Chinese city 60 miles to the west.
According to Hong Kong-based Apple Daily—a vocal supporter of the democracy campaign in Hong Kong—chants of “Liberate Maoming! Revolution of our times!” were heard during several days of protest in Maoming.
The chant is a take on the “Liberate Hong Kong” slogan commonly used during protests across the border, where anti-government demonstrations have raged since June.
Protestors also reportedly told Apple Daily reporters that their movement was “just like you [in] Hong Kong.”

Both cities share a common Cantonese language.
In confrontations that began last week, Maoming protesters pelted police with bricks and set off fireworks, forcing authorities to announce Sunday that they would not be building a crematorium on plot of unused land in the area. 

The long-running plan had infuriated residents, who had been promised an ecological park on the same site.
Protests against town planning are common in China, releasing pent-up anger at corruption and local officialdom. 

But the climbdown by authorities in Maoming is unusual, as is the reported decision to release some 200 protesters arrested in recent days.
Mainland Chinese authorities have heavily censored news around the demonstration, with searches of relevant protest keywords drawing up blanks on social media platforms like Weibo and WeChat. 

But videos purportedly filmed in Maoming, showing scuffles between protestors and police, have been circulating on Twitter.
Beijing is determined that calls for democracy in Hong Kong will not spread. 

News of the Hong Kong protests is censored and overland travelers from Hong Kong to China have reportedly had to unlock their phones for border officials looking for evidence of participation in, or support for, the unrest.

China's State Terrorism

50 student activists missing in China after police raid

Video shows police storming flat used by students backing workers seeking union rights
By Lily Kuo in Beijing

Activists supporting the factory workers are pictured inside an apartment in Huizhou. 

Fifty student activists have gone missing in southern China after police raided an apartment where they had been mobilising support for factory workers demanding union rights.
Labour activists who were in touch with the group said the raid took place at 5am on Friday in Huizhou, near Shenzhen, in Guangdong province. 

Activists said they were not able to contact or locate those who had been detained. 

Video footage of the raid showed police in riot gear storming an apartment and scuffling with occupants.
The group, made up 50 students and five workers, is part of a small but growing labour rights coalition in China’s manufacturing region where independent labour unions are barred and activism is seen as a threat.
Last month, workers and their supporters staged protests at an industrial welding equipment factory in Shenzhen, Jasic Technology, in response to the firing of employees who had attempted to form an independent trade union. 

All unions in China must register with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a government-affiliated group that usually sides with factory management.
The protests gained the support of Chinese university students who posted letters of support online, while others travelled to Shenzhen. 

The group of supporters has expanded to include retired party officials and Maoist groups. 

As of the end of July, 30 people had been arrested, according to Amnesty International.
Earlier this month about 50 students protested outside a police station in Shenzhen where workers and their supporters had been detained, according to China Labour Bulletin, a labour rights group in Hong Kong.
The group said two workers representatives and a student who had been advocating for the Jasic case had also disappeared.
On Thursday the group in Huizhou posted a video explaining their support for the workers. 

Standing in a group, wearing matching T-shirts, one said: “The reason the Jasic case has gotten so big is because [the authorities] refuse to deal with the problems themselves and insist instead on dealing with those who raise the problems.”

China's Final Solution to the Black Question

China has an irrational fear of "black devils" bringing drugs, crime, and interracial marriage

By Joanna Chiu

Feeling it in Guangzhou. 

Beijing -- Earlier this month in Beijing, amid the pomp of China’s annual rubber-stamp parliament meetings, a politician proudly shared with reporters his proposal on how to “solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong.” 

The latter province is widely known in China to have many African migrants.
“Africans bring many security risks,” Pan Qinglin told local media (link in Chinese). 

As a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the nation’s top political advisory body, he urged the government to “strictly control the African people living in Guangdong and other places.”
Pan, who lives in Tianjin near Beijing—and nowhere near Guangdong—held his proposal aloft for reporters to see. 

It read in part (links in Chinese):
“Blacks often travel in droves; they are out at night out on the streets, nightclubs, and remote areas. They engage in drug trafficking, harassment of women, and fighting, which seriously disturbs law and order in Guangzhou… 

Africans have a high rate of AIDS and the Ebola virus that can be transmitted via body fluids… 

If their population [keeps growing], China will change from a nation-state to an immigration country, from a yellow country to a black-and-yellow country.”
On social media, the Chinese response has been overwhelmingly supportive, with many commenters echoing Pan’s fears. 

In a forum dedicated to discussions about black people in Guangdong on Baidu Tieba—an online community focused on internet search results—many participants agreed that China was facing a “black invasion.” 

Han racial purity

One commenter called on Chinese people (link in Chinese) not to let “thousands of years of Chinese blood become polluted.”
The stream of racist vitriol online makes the infamous Chinese TV ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent, which went viral last year, seem mild in comparison. 

The ad featured a Asian woman stuffing a black man into a washing machine to turn him into a pale-skinned Asian man.

While a growing number of Africans work and study in China—the African continent’s largest trading partner—the notion that black people are “taking over” the world’s most populous nation is nonsense. 

Estimates for the number of sub-Saharan Africans in Guangzhou (nicknamed “Chocolate City” in Chinese) range from 150,000 long-term residents, according to 2014 government statistics, to as high as 300,000—figures complicated by the number of Africans coming in and out of the country as well as those who overstay their visas.
Many of them partner with Chinese firms to run factories, warehouses, and export operations. 

Others are leaving China and telling their compatriots not to go due to financial challenges and racism.
“Guangdong has come to be imagined to embody this racial crisis of some kind of ‘black invasion,'” said Kevin Carrico, a lecturer at Macquarie University in Australia who studies race and nationalism in China. 

“But this is not about actually existing realities.” 

He continued: “It isn’t so much that they dislike black residents as they dislike what they imagine about black residents. The types of discourses you see on social media sites are quite repetitive—black men raping Chinese women, black men having consensual sex with Chinese women and then leaving them, blacks as drug users and thieves destroying Chinese neighborhoods. People are living in a society that is changing rapidly. ‘The blacks’ has become a projection point for all these anxieties in society.”
The past year or so has seen heated debate among black people living in China about what locals think of them. 

In interviews with Quartz, black residents referred to online comments and racist ads as more extreme examples, but said they are symptomatic of broader underlying attitudes.

Madeleine Thiam and Christelle Mbaya, Senegalese journalists at a Chinese international radio broadcaster in Beijing, said they are saddened when they are discriminated against in China.
“Sometimes people pinch their noses as I walk by, as if they think I smell. On the subway, people often leave empty seats next to me or change seats when I sit down,” said Thiam. 

“Women have come up to rub my skin, asking if it is ‘dirt’ and if I’ve had a shower.”

Racism or ignorance?
Such experiences speak to the duality of life for black people in China. 

They may be athletes, entrepreneurs, traders, designers, or graduate students. 

Some are married to locals and speak fluent Chinese. 

Yet despite positive experiences and economic opportunities, many are questioning why they live in a place where they often feel unwelcome.
They grapple with the question: Is it racism or ignorance? 

And how do you distinguish the two?
Paolo Cesar, an African-Brazilian who has worked as a musician in Shanghai for 18 years and has a Chinese wife, said music has been a great way for him to connect with audiences and make local friends. 

However, his mixed-race son often comes home unhappy because of bullying at school. 

Despite speaking fluent Mandarin, his classmates do not accept him as Chinese. 

They like to shout out, “He’s so dark!”
The global success of black public figures, such as politicians, actors, and athletes, appears to have a limited effect on Chinese attitudes.

Looking deeper into history, evidence suggests a preference for slaves from East Africa in ancient China. 

African slavery in the country peaked during the Tang (618 to 907) and Song (960 to 1279) dynasties.
More recently, violence broke out after the Chinese government started providing scholarships allowing African students to study in the country in the 1960s. 

Many Chinese students resented the stipends Africans received, with tensions culminating in riots in Nanjing in the late 1980s. 

The riots began with angry Chinese students surrounding African students’ dormitories in Hehai University and pelting them with rocks and bottles for seven hours, with crowds later marching through the streets shouting anti-African slogans.
In the past few years, loathing among some Chinese toward foreign men who date local women has led to a recent rise in violent attacks against foreigners.

Staying optimistic
Yet most respondents Quartz interviewed remain optimistic. 

Vladimir Emilien, a 26-year-old African-American actor and former varsity athlete, said that for him, learning Chinese was crucial to better interactions with locals. 

Emilien volunteered last year as a coach teaching Beijing youth the finer points of American football. He said that once he was able to have more complex conversations in Chinese, he was struck by the thoughtful questions locals would ask.

“They’d say, What do you think about Chinese perception of black people? How does that make you feel?’ So they are aware that there is a lot of negativity around blacks and against Africa as a very poor place.”
Emilien hopes that more interactions between Chinese and black individuals will smooth out misunderstandings. 

But others say that improving relations requires more than black people learning the language, since that shifts responsibility away from the Chinese.
“The government has never done anything serious to clean up racist ideas created and populated by the [turn-of-the-20th-century] intellectuals and politicians that constructed a global racial hierarchy in which the whites were on the top, Chinese the second, and blacks the bottom,” said Cheng Yinghong, a history professor at Delaware State University who researches nationalism and discourse of race in China.
Instead of addressing discrimination, the Chinese government has focused on promoting cultural exchanges while pursuing economic partnerships with African countries. 

However, many have pointed out that relationships appear unbalanced, with China taking Africa’s limited natural resources in exchange for infrastructure investment.
“Racism is racism, period, and although some people would say that in different places it is more explicit, nuanced, or implicit, as long as there are victims we have to call it racism and deal with it,” said Adams Bodomo, a professor of African studies focused on cross-cultural communication at the University of Vienna. 

“China can’t be the second-largest economy in the world and not expect to deal with these issues.”

Plagues of China

W.H.O. Warns of Worrisome Bird Flu in China
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Culling birds in Hong Kong in 2014 after the H7N9 virus was discovered in poultry imported from China.

After a spate of deaths from bird flu among patients in China, the World Health Organization has warned all countries to watch for outbreaks in poultry flocks and to promptly report any human cases.
Several strains of avian flu are spreading in Europe and Asia this winter, but the most worrisome at present is an H7N9 strain that has circulated in China every winter since 2013.
China has reported over 225 human cases since September, an unusually high number. 

The nation’s Lunar New Year vacation starts soon, and as it does, live poultry shipments increase, and holiday travelers often spread the flu.
The fatality rate is not yet known, because some victims are still hospitalized. 

But Dr. Margaret Chan, the health organization’s director general, said this week that China had had more than 1,000 cases in the last four years, of which 39 percent were fatal.
“All countries must detect and report human cases promptly,” she said. 

“We cannot afford to miss the early signals.”
The flu typically infects people who raise, sell, slaughter or cook poultry, but human-to-human transmission is suspected in two cases that worry health officials. 

Both were older men with a history of poultry contact. 

One apparently infected a daughter who cared for him, and the other his hospital roommate.
Hong Kong’s health department this week warned residents traveling to mainland China to avoid live poultry markets. 

More than 9 percent of samples from markets in nearby Guangdong Province contained H7N9 virus, a “substantial” reading, the department said.
Swabs are typically taken in cages, sewage gutters, feeding troughs, and chopping and de-feathering machines.
Since November, nearly 40 countries have reported finding potentially dangerous flu strains in poultry flocks or in captured or dead wild birds. 

They include a new H5N6 strain, H5N8 and H5N5.
There have also been sporadic cases of H5N1, a strain with a 60 percent fatality rate that caused great alarm more than a decade ago. 

It has caused almost 400 confirmed deaths since 2003, but has not evolved the ability to transmit easily between people.
Since the highly contagious but relatively mild H1N1 “swine flu” circled the globe in 2009, “the world is better prepared for the next influenza pandemic,” Dr. Chan said, “but not at all well enough.”