Was that doctor dragged off the United Airlines flight because he was Asian? Many in China think so.

By Simon Denyer 

United Airlines said a man wouldn’t give up his spot on an overbooked flight. According to witnesses, he was pulled screaming from his seat by security and back to the terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. 

BEIJING — News that a passenger was forcibly dragged off a United Airlines plane has gone viral all over the world, but in China the outrage has been fueled by one uncomfortable fact: The doctor who was pulled off the plane, first screaming and then bleeding, appeared to be of Asian origin and was overheard complaining that this might have been a factor in his treatment.
“He said, more or less, ‘I’m being selected because I’m Chinese,’” fellow passenger Tyler Bridges was quoted as saying by The Washington Post.
That quote, translated into Chinese, was widely circulated on social media here. (Another witness on the plane said the man was originally from Vietnam, according to the BBC.)
By late afternoon on Tuesday, the topic had attracted 160 million readers on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, and 97,000 comments. 

Petitions to boycott United Airlines were also going viral on WeChat, a popular messaging service.
“United Airlines just randomly chose an Asian? It’s blatant racial discrimination,” a user called @Rhando_hiclarie wrote in a typical post. 

“UA is super rubbish.”
The airline first offered compensation to passengers who volunteered to give up their seats, but no one came forward. 

Passengers were then reportedly told by a manager that a computer would select four people to get off.
Later, however, Charlie Hobart, a United spokesman, would not say whether the bumped passengers were chosen by a computer, an employee or some combination of the two, according to the New York Times.
Some users pointed out the irony of United’s motto: “Fly the friendly skies,” but many saw the incident as an example of American hypocrisy, and what one user called “a perfect illustration” of human rights in the United States.
“I am going to tell you a joke: ‘America is the country with the best human rights in the World,’” one user called @Youthliteratureandart wrote in a post that attracted more than 4,000 likes.
“Americans often say they have democracy and human rights, but they can’t even respect people who have different skin colors,” @Nanchigirl wrote.
“Americans are so barbarous,” @_tua wrote. 

“Overbooking is the airline company’s own problem. This passenger didn’t break the law. The security guy beat him until his face is covered in blood, is this the so-called American democratic society?”
Chinese media drew attention to an online petition entitled #ChineseLivesMatter calling for a federal investigation into the incident, while public figures also joined in the chorus of complaints.
"Reflecting on my three nightmare-like experinces with United, I can say with responsibility that United is the worst airline, not one of the worst," Richard Liu, the CEO of popular online shopping platform JD.COM posted on weibo.
Chinese-born comedian Joe Wong urged his followers to join the boycott of United.
“Many Chinese people feel they’ve been subject to discrimination, but [fear of losing] face prevents them from speaking out, which leads to mainstream media in the West and the public not taking discrimination against Asians seriously,” he said.
Others made similar points.
“Why don’t you randomly choose a black person?” another user asked in a post that attracted 1,294 likes, implying an Asian was an easier target for racial discrimination than an African American.
The calls for a boycott in China could have a real impact on the company’s bottom line, with shares of United Airlines parent United Continental Holdings Inc falling in early trade Tuesday.
United has often billed itself as the top American carrier to China, operating more nonstop U.S.-China flights, and to more cities in China, than any other airline.

It offers direct flights from various American cities to Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Hong Kong, adding Hangzhou and a seasonal flight to Xi'an in 2016. 

The company got about 14 percent of its 2016 revenue from flying Pacific routes.

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.”