A legislative push to make it easier for foreigners to gain permanent residency in China has stirred an angry torrent of xenophobia online across the country.
AFP reports the new proposal, released by the justice ministry last week, has been gathering billions of views and a flood of angry posts on social media, with respondents targeting Africans in particular.
“China’s forty years of family planning policy does not make it a place for foreign trash to soar,” wrote one user on the Twitter-like platform Weibo, referring to the one-child birth limit China imposed between 1980 and 2016.
The person went on to use racist language against black people, saying: “Our common Chinese ancestry will not be tainted by Africans.”
Some Weibo-users posted videos of black people apparently committing crimes in China, while a campaign to encourage Chinese women to date Chinese men, under the hashtag “China girl”, had 240 million views as of Thursday afternoon.
Another widely-shared post on Weibo read: “China is not an immigrant country.” while a hashtag related to the law has gained more than 4.8 billion views.
Inbound immigration has long been a vexed topic in China, as Breitbart News reported. In 2015 at the height of the European migrant crisis it refused point blank to take a single refugee.
Instead China insisted the U.S. house them all.
“The United States should take its responsibility in the disheartening refugee crisis in Europe as its controversial Middle East policies resulted in wars and chaos that displaced large numbers of people,” hectored China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua.
China’s small refugee population is almost entirely from Vietnam, dating back to the 1980s, with a smattering of North Korean defectors.
The prospect of a refugee wave from a collapsing North Korean state or any other country outside Asia is one of Beijing’s greatest nightmares. The number of current refugees from other sources currently sheltered by China numbers in the hundreds and most of them are seen as temporary, as Breitbart News reported.
Several Chinese analysts quoted by the South China Morning Post previously argued Middle Eastern refugees really do not want to live in China and would encounter “religious, cultural, and political” problems if they did so.
In 2017 Business Standard reported fiery comments from Chinese opponents of migration, including people who referred to U.N. Refugee Agency Goodwill Ambassador Yao Chen, a popular actress, as “Saint Mary Bitch” because she urged China to give more support to refugees.
Chinese traditionally feel the Middle East and its humanitarian disasters simply are not their problem. Some look back to Chinese history and argue refugees should fight their oppressors instead of seeking asylum elsewhere.
The new law — open to suggestions from the public until March 27 — proposes allowing foreigners’ dependants to apply simultaneously for permanent residency, as well as relaxing education and salary requirements.
This taps long-standing anxieties about perceived preferential treatment for foreigners in China, especially international students.
“For a long time, some foreigners in China have secretly received ‘superior treatment’ as citizens,” wrote Hu Xijin, editor of the nationalistic Global Times.
Last July, Shandong University apologised after a backlash over a policy that introduced foreign students to local students of the opposite sex.
Heather Li, a China-Africa business consultant, told AFP she was “really shocked” by the extent of the online racism in China.
She used to tell her African friends that many Chinese people were friendly and curious about their culture, despite their occasional encounters with prejudice.
“But after seeing it on Weibo, I realised there was so much more to it, because people were using very strong language and really disrespecting people from other races,” she said.
State media said less than one percent of foreigners in China have permanent residency.
AFP contributed to this story
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