Chinese boss: "Kenyans were like a monkey people"

Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination

By Joseph Goldstein

Richard Ochieng’, 26, at his home in Nairobi, Kenya. His Chinese boss called him and other Kenyans monkeys.

RUIRU, Kenya — Before last year, Richard Ochieng’, 26, could not recall experiencing racism firsthand.
Not while growing up as an orphan in his village near Lake Victoria where everybody was, like him, black.
Not while studying at a university in another part of Kenya.
Not until his job search led him to Ruiru, a fast-growing settlement at the edge of the capital, Nairobi, where Mr. Ochieng’ found work at a Chinese motorcycle company that had just expanded to Kenya.
But then his new boss, a Chinese man his own age, started calling him a monkey.
It happened when the two were on a sales trip and spotted a troop of baboons on the roadside, he said.
“‘Your brothers,’” he said his boss exclaimed, urging Mr. Ochieng’ to share some bananas with the primates.
And it happened again, he said, with his boss referring to all Kenyans as primates.
Humiliated and outraged, Mr. Ochieng’ decided to record one of his boss’s rants, catching him declaring that Kenyans were “like a monkey people.”
After his cellphone video circulated widely last month, the Kenyan authorities swiftly deported the boss back to China.
Instead of a tidy resolution, however, the episode has resonated with a growing anxiety in Kenya and set off a broader debate.
As the country embraces China’s expanding presence in the region, many Kenyans wonder whether the nation has unwittingly welcomed an influx of powerful foreigners who are shaping the country’s future — while also bringing racist attitudes with them.
It is a wrenching question for the nation, and one that many Kenyans, especially younger ones, did not expect to be confronting in the 21st century.
Kenya may have been a British colony, where white supremacy reigned and black people were forced to wear identification documents around their necks.
But it has been an independent nation since 1963, with a sense of pride that it is among the region’s most stable democracies.
Today, many younger Kenyans say that racism is a phenomenon they largely know indirectly, through history lessons and foreign news.
But episodes involving discriminatory behavior by the region’s growing Chinese work force have unsettled many Kenyans, particularly at a time when their government seeks closer ties with China.

An unfinished stretch of the Standard Gauge Railway, a 300-mile Chinese-built railroad between Nairobi and Mombasa.

“They are the ones with the capital, but as much as we want their money, we don’t want them to treat us like we are not human in our own country,” said David Kinyua, 30, who manages an industrial park in Ruiru that is home to several Chinese companies, including the motorcycle company where Mr. Ochieng’ works.
Over the last decade, China has lent money and erected infrastructure on a sweeping scale across Africa.
To pay for such projects, many African nations have borrowed from China or relied on natural resources like oil reserves.
And when tallying the cost, African nations have generally focused on their rising debts, or occasionally on the exploitative labor practices of some Chinese firms.
But here in Nairobi, concerns about racism and discrimination are a growing part of the conversation about China’s expanding presence.
In Nairobi, workers in their 20s and 30s swap stories of racism or discrimination they have witnessed. One described watching a Chinese manager slap her Kenyan colleague, who was also a woman, for a minor mistake.
Other Kenyan workers explained how their office bathrooms were separated by race: one for Chinese employees, the other for Kenyans.
Yet another Kenyan worker described how a Chinese manager directed his Kenyan employees to unclog a urinal of cigarette butts, even though only Chinese employees dared smoke inside.
The Chinese population in Kenya is difficult to count accurately, although one research group put the figure at around 40,000.
Many are here for just a few years, to work for one of hundreds of Chinese companies.
Many of the employees live together in large housing developments and are bussed back and forth from work, leaving little social interaction with Kenyans.

Silk Noodles, a Chinese restaurant in Nairobi, is in a group of Chinese storefronts popular with Chinese who live in the city.

“Because of the isolation and lack of integration, usually they are not very aware of the local situation,” said Hongxiang Huang, a Chinese conservationist and former journalist who has lived in Nairobi.
“They do not know very well how to interact with the outside world.”
And they arrive with hierarchical views of culture and race that tend to place Africans at the bottom, said Howard French, a former New York Times correspondent who wrote the 2014 book “China’s Second Continent,” which chronicles the lives of Chinese settlers in Africa.
Accusations of discrimination have even emerged on a major state-sponsored project: a 300-mile Chinese-built railroad between Nairobi and Mombasa.
The train has become a national symbol of both progress and Chinese-Kenyan cooperation, though positive reviews have at times been overshadowed by concern over its $4 billion price tag.
But in July, The Standard, a Kenyan newspaper, published a report describing an atmosphere of “neocolonialism” for Kenyan railway workers under Chinese management.
Some have been subjected to demeaning punishment, it said, while Kenyan engineers have been prevented from driving the train, except when journalists are present.
It was a particularly explosive claim because during the train’s maiden voyage, with President Uhuru Kenyatta on board, two Kenyan women drove the train to much fanfare.
In interviews with The New York Times, several current and former locomotive drivers agreed that only Chinese drivers got to operate the train, describing a range of racist behavior.
Cheering after President Uhuru Kenyatta flagged off a cargo train for its inaugural journey to Nairobi on the Chinese-built railway last year.

“‘With uniforms on, you won’t look like monkeys anymore,’” Fred Ndubi, 24, recalled his Chinese supervisors saying.
Two other workers with him offered the same account.
Mr. Ndubi, who has since left the railroad, said his family had sold about a quarter of its land so he could afford the training needed to become a train operator.
“We just stood there and asked him, ‘How can you call us monkeys?’” Mr. Ndubi recalled.
Sometimes, the racial controversies have unfolded in full public view.
Two years ago, a laundry detergent company in China ran a television commercial in which the detergent’s effectiveness was demonstrated by transforming a black man into a light-skinned Asian man. 
Last year, WeChat, the country’s popular messaging app, apologized after its software was found to translate the Chinese words for “black foreigner” into a racial slur in English.
This year, China’s televised Lunar New Year gala, estimated to reach 800 million viewers, included caricatures of Africans, with blackface and men in animal suits.
When asked about the controversy, China’s foreign ministry spokesman suggested that Western news organizations had blown the matter out of proportion in an effort to “sow discord in China’s relations with African countries.”
Mr. French, the author of “China’s Second Continent,” said that when it comes to Africa, China has had a tendency to dismiss criticism of its conduct by noting that the West, not China, fueled the slave trade and colonized the continent.
But that misses the point, Mr. French said, by ignoring the treatment of Africans today.
“Their experience is that they are being treated in flagrantly disgusting, racialized ways,” Mr. French said.

Chinese employees helping passengers at the new Standard Gauge Railway terminal in Nairobi last year.

Kenya, home to more than 40 officially recognized ethnic groups, has long had its own problems with prejudice and ethnic tensions.
A disputed election in 2007 led to several weeks of mass violence, much of it along ethnic lines.
And Kenyans of Indian and Pakistani descent have long felt secluded from mainstream Kenyan life, although the government has granted them greater official recognition.
But the Chinese presence has added a volatile new element and, at times, the Kenyan government has seemed divided over how to respond.
When allegations of discrimination by Chinese employers emerged over the summer, a Kenyan government spokesman suggested that part of the problem lay instead with Kenya’s national work ethic, which he said might need to change.
There are signs that elements within the government may be pushing back.
Last month, the Kenyan police raided the Nairobi headquarters of a Chinese state-run television channel, briefly detaining several journalists.
The timing struck many as curious: It was the same week that President Kenyatta was in Beijing, raising the question of whether someone inside the Kenyan government wanted to create a diplomatic row.
The experience of Mr. Ochieng’ and other workers speaks to the future of relations between the two countries.
He took a job as a salesman, thinking it would secure a prosperous future, but when he showed up to work he found a different reality.
The pay was a fraction of what he was initially offered, he said, and it was subject to deduction for a long list of infractions.
“No laughing,” was one of the injunctions printed in the company rules.
Each minute of lateness — sometimes unavoidable given Nairobi’s notorious traffic — came with a steep fine.
An employee who was 15 minutes late might be docked five or six hours’ pay, he said.
One Chinese manager, Liu Jiaqi, 26, loomed particularly large.
At times, he was smiling and good-natured, Mr. Ochieng’ said, but whenever the question of pay came up or something went wrong, Liu turned on his subordinates.
When Mr. Ochieng’ left a sales brochure behind in the car during a sales visit and had to excuse himself to retrieve it, he said Liu began crowing, “This African is very foolish.”
But the most painful, he said, were the monkey insults — the kind of dehumanization used to justify slavery and colonization.
Mr. Ochieng’ said he protested several times, but the monkey comments did not stop.
“It was too much,” he said.
“I decided, ‘Let me record it.’”
The rant that Mr. Ochieng’ recorded came after a sales trip had gone awry.
Mr. Ochieng’ asked his boss why he was taking out his anger on him.
“Because you are Kenyan,” Liu explained, saying that all Kenyans, even the president, are “like a monkey.”
Mr. Ochieng’ continued that Kenyans may have once been oppressed, but that they have been a free people since 1963.
“Like a monkey,” Liu responded. “Monkey is also free.”
Inspecting part of the railway in June.

The day after the video began to circulate widely, Liu, who could not be reached for comment, was deported.
It was an especially stark illustration of the clash between the two cultures, with many adding that it produced a noticeable chill in relations between Kenyans and Chinese people in the capital.
“That video had a big effect,” said Victor Qi, the Chinese manager of a noodle restaurant in Nairobi, adding that business from black customers seemed to fall off after that.
After the video emerged, an official with the motorcycle company called Liu’s behavior an “unfortunate transgression.”
Mr. Ochieng’ says he has heard stories of colonialism — “what our forefathers went through” — and worries that the Chinese will take Kenya backward, not forward as the nation’s leaders have assured.
“These guys are trying to take us back to those days,” he said in the tiny room he shares with his wife and 2-year-old son.
On the wall hung a poster with a verse from Ephesians.
Nearby, on a little desk rested two Bibles, both equally dog-eared with use.
“Someday I will tell my son that when you were young, I was despised because I was black,” he said.

Han Racism

China’s Ugly Exploitation of Africa—and Africans
By BRENDON HONG

HONG KONG—This week, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is visiting five nations on the African continent—Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria—to discuss how the United States and these countries can collaborate in counter-terrorism, trade, and investment.
Beijing is watching the trip closely, because these and other African nations are considered by the Chinese Communist Party to be stepping stones for the PRC’s rise as a superpower.
But China’s relations with Africa, while vast and expanding, are undermined by cultural and sometimes rather extraordinary political insensitivity.
Two recent Chinese action films are set in African nations.
Wolf Warrior 2, which was released last July, tells the story of a Chinese soldier-turned-mercenary who defeats Somali pirates in underwater combat, and protects aid workers and Chinese nationals from rebels and arms dealers.
Operation Red Sea, which was released in February and is still in theaters, is loosely based on the peaceful evacuation of 600 Chinese nationals from Yemen during the early days of the ongoing war there, but with the addition of gunfights and explosions galore.

Both films have lavish action sequences in the overblown style of Michael Bay. 

Both were massive commercial successes. 

The former is the highest-grossing Chinese film ever.
With the archetype of the Chinese Savior firmly established, attitudes within China are showing a lack of racial sensitivity at best, and a sense of superiority over other races at worst.
In an infamous incident last month during the Chinese New Year break, a gala show on state television included a skit that involved an Asian woman in blackface and oversized butt pads and an African actor in a monkey suit. 

Criticisms of the skit were censored. 

In 2016, an advertisement for a laundry product showed a black man being shoved into a washing machine, only to emerge as a boyish-looking Asian man—with skin of a much lighter hue.
Moving off-screen, we can see those attitudes play out in Guangzhou’s Little Africa, derogatively called “Chocolate City” by locals. 

Once a vibrant hub where traders from Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, and other African nations gathered or even settled, the neighborhood has been “beautified” by the city government: street markets that once were abuzz with commerce and camaraderie have been banned; the police maintain a constant presence, checking the passports and visas of the foreigners they encounter; locals often hold the mistaken belief that these outsiders are involved with drug trafficking or prostitution. 

Many shops have been shuttered.
Although Little Africa was once estimated to be the temporary home of over 100,000 people, few Africans walk its streets now. 

Sections of the once culturally diverse neighborhood have been paved over to build parking lots and erect pristine residential units; often, the new landlords will not allow Africans to sign a lease.
A 2008 diplomatic cable obtained by Wikileaks suggests that a decade ago local authorities were “extremely concerned about the high degree of concentration of Africans into a few Guangzhou neighborhoods.”
The many entrepreneurs who sought their fortunes by obtaining cheap, sometimes fake, goods in the Pearl River Delta region and shipping them home have been displaced. 

Even those who have Chinese nationals as spouses aren’t guaranteed the right to remain in the country with the families they have built.
In December, The Telegraph published an article penned by Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom, titled “China’s role in Africa is as an equal partner.” 

But as Chinese state-owned conglomerates enter the continent, Africans in China face incessant police raids, harassment, and racist attitudes. 

Even if they once saw China’s rise as a model to emulate, and came to trade, learn, and grow, a flight back home now seems like the only option.
China’s exploitative relationship abroad with African nations became most evident earlier this year. In late January, the French daily Le Monde reported that the Chinese government’s gift of a headquarters building and computer network for the African Union in Addis Ababa contained a back door to facilitate the transfer of data to servers in Shanghai.
China’s ambassador to the AU, Kuang Weilin, responded to allegations that China is spying on the AU by calling the findings “absurd” and “preposterous.”
The myth of Chinese support for African nations has been perpetuated both at home and abroad, with the $200 million AU complex in Addis as the crown jewel within the narrative of international cooperation fostered by Chinese public funds. 

But the charm in Beijing’s Africa blitz doesn’t hide the profiteering and wrangling for influence that follow.
Just next door to Ethiopia, China’s move into Djibouti is a prime example. 

The tiny east African nation sits along one of the world’s major maritime shipping lanes, and is home to American, French, German, Italian, and Japanese military bases, with the latest addition of a Chinese “logistics and supply center” to the many foreign military installations already there. 

The Chinese naval facility was inaugurated last summer, and is part of Xi Jinping’s plan to modernize his country’s military, expanding its navy’s blue-water capabilities.
Beijing shells out $20 million a year to lease the real estate for its base in Djibouti, and has already stationed over 1,000 troops there, with sufficient space for 10 times that number if needed. 

On top of that, the Chinese government has given the host nation loans topping $1.1 billion to upgrade its commercial port, build an additional airport, a railway that stretches to Addis Ababa, and a water pipeline that moves water from Ethiopia.
Djibouti officials have expressed concern about their country’s ability to repay those loans—failure to channel funds back to China would place the nation in an undesirable position in the very near future.
Over in Kenya, controversy is unfolding around the country’s largest infrastructure project since its 1963 independence.
A Chinese-built railway has been designed to be extended through the wildlife reserve just outside of Nairobi.
A court ordered that construction be halted as the case is reviewed, but builders and engineers from the China Road and Bridge Corporation have already begun work, with protection from armed guards.
The ranking member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jack Reed, has already warned of China’s influence in African nations.
After a recent trip to the region, he said, “Wherever we’re going in Africa, they seem to be there, or following close behind.”
Under a messy Trump administration, American policy has failed to keep up with the actions of the Eastern superpower.
It isn’t even clear whether America aims to cooperate with China on the continent, counter its clout, or implement a combination of the two options.
Beijing’s goals, however, are much clearer.
Chinese industrialists—often with the state’s backing—are eyeing their moves to a new continent as the economic and governance models at home switch gears.
Ethiopia, for instance, has received a cash injection of nearly $11 billion to bulk up its industrial infrastructure, transforming farmland into industrial parks that can house factories that churn out fast fashion clothing items and consumer electronic goods.
The country has opened four such parks since 2014, and plans to launch eight more before 2020. Hundreds of Ethiopian farmers have complained of land grabs, displacement, and lack of compensation, as the government clears space for newcomers from Beijing.
It doesn’t matter how many Friendship Bridges are built, or how many Cooperation Summits are organized.
As long as attitudes toward other races—and nations—do not change within China, the relationships that are cultivated abroad will be exploitative, with only rapacious advancement of one party as a result.

Han racism: Chinese museum pairs Africans with animals

More than 141,000 people visit the exhibit in Wuhan before it is eventually removed after sparking complaints from Africans.

By Benjamin Haas in Hong Kong

A photo of an African boy and a gorilla by Yu Huiping in an exhibit in China.

A museum in China has removed an exhibit this week that juxtaposed photographs of animals with portraits of black Africans, sparking complaints of racism.
The exhibit titled This Is Africa at the Hubei Provincial Museum in the city of Wuhan displayed a series of diptychs, each one containing a photo of an African paired with the face of an animal. 

In a particularly striking example, a child with his mouth wide open was paired with a gorilla and other works included baboons and cheetahs.

The exhibit was eventually removed after complaints by Africans, including some living in China, the curator said. 

All the photographs were taken by Yu Huiping, a construction magnate who has travelled to Africa more than 20 times, has previously won awards for his work and is vice-chairman of the Hubei Photographers Association.
Racial sensitivities are muddled in China, where about 92% of the population belongs to the dominant Han ethnicity and ethnic minorities mostly live in the sporadically populated far west of the country. 

African countries are increasingly important trading partners, but cultural stereotypes dominate Chinese popular discourse on the continent.
Wang Yuejun, one of the exhibit’s curators, said that comparisons to animals were typically seen as a compliment in Chinese culture, pointing to the zodiac signs that identify people with animals according to their birth year.
“The target audience is mainly Chinese,” Wang said in a statement. 

But the museum understood the images offended “our African friends”, Wang added.
The offensive nature was first notices by a Nigerian Instagram user, Edward E Duke. 

In a post, which was later removed, he asked why the museum “put pictures of a particular race next to wild animals”.
More than 141,000 people visited the show, which opened just before China’s week-long National Day holiday.
China is rife with examples of tone deafness when it comes to race. 

China’s most popular chat app, WeChat, used the English N-word to translate a Chinese phrase that commonly means “black foreigner”.
Last year a television advert for laundry detergent showed a black man covered in paint going into a washing machine and coming out as a sparkling Asian man. 

The video went viral around the world and caused outrage for its insensitive messaging.
Over the summer China’s state news agency published a video during a border standoff with India featuring an offensive parody of a Sikh man, complete with a turban and fake beard.

Die Endlösung der Hanfrage

The dark side of China’s national renewal
The race-based ideas of the country’s leaders have unwelcome historical echoes
By Jamil Anderlini

Examples of the west ceding global leadership seem to have become a weekly occurrence. 

In the vacuum left behind it is natural to look for a replacement and for many, including the mandarins in Beijing, China appears to be the most credible.
But how much do we know about the kind of global leader China wants to be? 

The best place to start is with the stated intentions of the country’s leaders. 

On assuming the mantle of the ruling Communist party’s paramount leader in 2012, Xi Jinping declared it his mission to realise the “China Dream”, which he defined as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, according to official translations.
This phrase has been repeated ad nauseam since then and has come to underpin and justify everything China does. 

Building a new silk road to Europe, rapid expansion of the People’s Liberation Army and militarising artificial islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea — all are part of the glorious task of rejuvenation.
To an English-speaking ear, rejuvenation has positive connotations and all nations have the right to rejuvenate themselves through peaceful efforts.
But the official translation of this crucial slogan is deeply misleading. 

In Chinese it is “Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing” and the important part of the phrase is “Zhonghua minzu” — the “Chinese nation” according to party propaganda. 

A more accurate, although not perfect, translation would be the “Chinese race”.
That is certainly how it is interpreted in China. 

The concept technically includes all 56 official ethnicities, including Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Koreans, but is almost universally understood to mean the majority Han ethnic group, who make up more than 90 per cent of the population.
The most interesting thing about Zhonghua minzu is that it very deliberately and specifically incorporates anyone with Chinese blood anywhere in the world, no matter how long ago their ancestors left the Chinese mainland.
“The Chinese race is a big family and feelings of love for the motherland, passion for the homeland, are infused in the blood of every single person with Chinese ancestry,” asserted Li Keqiang in a recent speech.
This concept is reflected in Hong Kong where any recent arrival who can convince the authorities they are at least part “Chinese” can get citizenship. 

Meanwhile, people of Indian or white British descent whose families have lived in the territory for over a century will never be granted full citizenship rights.
Some theoreticians in Beijing even argue the modern idea of the sovereign nation state is an illegitimate western invention that contradicts the traditional Chinese notion of “all under heaven”, with the Chinese emperor at the centre and power radiating out from the Forbidden City to every corner of the earth.
Race-based ideas of national rejuvenation and manifest destiny have deep and uncomfortable echoes in 20th-century history and earlier European colonial expansion. 

That is why Communist party translators have opted for the misleading official translation of “nation” rather than “race”.
For many in the Chinese diaspora this linguistic trick does nothing to ease their discomfort as they are increasingly called on to contribute to the “great rejuvenation” regardless of their nationality or attitudes towards the ruling Communist party. 

Li said it was the duty of all people of Chinese descent to help achieve the investment, technological development and trade goals of the People’s Republic of China.
He said they are also required to promote traditional Chinese culture (as defined by the Communist party) all over the world and to unwaveringly oppose Taiwan’s independence.
In exchange for compliance, the party offers the prospect of belonging to the “great family” of the Chinese race as well as a chance to participate in the country’s continued economic boom. 

But those who reject their filial duty to the Communist party risk being labelled “race traitors”, vilified within expatriate communities and banned from visiting mainland China.
For countries in China’s own neighbourhood the rhetoric of rejuvenation has starker implications. Under past dynasties and emperors large swaths of their current territory were conquered and controlled by China.
The logic of China’s great rejuvenation is essentially revanchist and assumes the country is still a long way from regaining its rightful level of power, influence and even territory.
The dangerous question for the rest of the world is at what point China will feel it has reached peak rejuvenation and what that will look like for everyone who is not included in the great family of the Chinese race.