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To Cite: Castillo, Roberto. 2021.
“The Han saviour behind the blackface: racialised and gendered media
representations in Africa-China popular geopolitics” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 22 (3). DOI:
[Pre-print version]
The Han saviour behind the blackface: racialised and gendered media
representations in Africa-China popular geopolitics
Roberto CASTILLO
Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, PRC
ABSTRACT
In this article, I provide a critical look into the cultural politics of racialised and gendered representations in
Africa-China related mediascapes from the perspective of “popular geopolitics.” Geopolitical frameworks have
been used in political science and international relations research to analyse Africa-China issues, but have been
remarkably overlooked as methodological tools for making sense of the cultural politics of Afro-Chinese
racialised politics and narratives, and their implications. To breach this gap, I focus on a number of recent
controversial incidents (e.g. an advertisement, a theatrical skit, and debates around social media posts) that
weave old and new racist rhetoric/tropes, and gendered stereotypes, into evolving processes of racialisation that
inform everyday geopolitical imaginaries of the Africa-China encounter. This is followed by a brief discussion
where I use the notion of “multiple triangulations” to trace the routes through which negative stereotypes about
blackness could have entered China. By specifically looking at contemporary popular media representations of
Africa and blackness, I show how “race,” ethnicity, gender, class and nationalism, problematically underwrite,
and are written into a rhetoric that evinces geopolitical asymmetries that characterise crucial areas of Africa-
China relations. Throughout the article, I argue that there is an emerging pattern where Chineseness is
discursively constructed as a “replacement” for whiteness.
Introduction: the COVID-19 storm and the unfolding of a geopolitical drama
In early April 2020, as the first part of the COVID-19 storm subsided in China while still
ravaging the West, a number of incidents emerged through social media in which black
people in the southern city of Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, were seen
being racially targeted. The videos showed them being forcefully evicted from their houses
and hotel rooms, denied entrance into commercial venues (on the premise of “no black
people allowed”), and harassed and arrested by police in the city’s commercial streets. These
incidents were partly triggered by the decisions of Guangzhou’s local government, following
Xi Jinping’s remarks about the risk of “imported” infections, to implement a strict
To Cite: Castillo, Roberto. 2021. “The Han saviour behind the blackface: racialised and gendered media
[Pre-print version]
surveillance and testing programme, and impose a 14-day mandatory quarantine on all
African nationals, regardless of travel history or testing results.
International media focused on a dozen videos of different incidents to paint a portrait
of widespread racial profiling and persecution of black people in China. The situation quickly
escalated into a full-blown diplomatic crisis. As pundits wrote about an “unprecedented
rupture” in Africa-China relations (Walsh 2020), Chinese ambassadors were summoned all
over the African continent in an extraordinary show of disapproval from the African side.
The strong diplomatic response from African governments forced China’s Ministry of
Foreign Affairs to address the issue. Unsurprisingly, China’s response was to deflect and spin
the narrative as yet another situation where “alleged incidents” were distorted by Western
media and fake news, and to maintain the country’s official stance: China does not
discriminate against any foreigners. China’s state media presented what was happening in
Guangzhou as a response to behaviours by foreigners that failed to abide by quarantine rules
—a response compounded by the fact that fears and anxieties about a second outbreak in
China, especially among a traditionally difficult to track population (i.e. visa overstayers),
were still high (Castillo and Amoah 2020).
Less than a month after the incidents, governments on both sides declared the end of
the diplomatic crisis. However, the images of black people sleeping under bridges, families
with children being evicted from their legally rented places of abode, as well as entrance and
service denial to blacks, reactivated a debate that has become a recurrent feature in Africa-
China relations scholarship (and punditry): how “race” and “racism” are articulated in
popular narratives/understandings and media representations of Afro-Chinese encounters. To
Africa-China “race” relations observers, what has come to be known as the “Guangzhou
incidents,” represent yet another chapter, in an increasing list of controversial, spectacular
and often hyper-mediatised incidents in contemporary Africa-China relations (Castillo 2021).
In this article, I look into the cultural politics of racialised and gendered
representations in Africa-China related mediascapes from the perspective of “popular
geopolitics.” Geopolitical frameworks have been used in political science and international
relations research to analyse Africa-China issues (see Power, Mohan, and Tan-Mullins 2012,
for instance), but have been remarkably overlooked as methodological tools for making sense
of the cultural politics of Afro-Chinese racial(ised) politics and narratives, and their
implications. To breach this gap, I focus on a number of recent controversial incidents (e.g.
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an advertisement, a theatrical skit, and debates around social media posts) that, I argue,
weave old and new racist rhetoric/tropes, and gendered stereotypes, into evolving processes
of racialisation that inform everyday geopolitical imaginaries of the Africa-China encounter.
The geopolitics of Africa-China relations are not only about diplomacy or trade, they also
emerge from the realm of the everyday. By specifically looking at popular media
representations of Africa and blackness, I show how “race,” ethnicity, gender, class and
nationalism, problematically underwrite, and are written into a rhetoric that evinces
geopolitical asymmetries that characterise crucial areas of Africa-China relations.
Importantly, within these asymmetries, I identify an emerging pattern where Chineseness is
discursively constructed as a “replacement” for whiteness.
Before proceeding, it is important to note that in this article, I do not blame “China”
or “the Chinese” for the problematic meanings associated with the controversial media stories
that I examine. Conflating “China” with “the Chinese” and blaming anything done by an
individual on the whole of China is a longstanding reductionist and racist practice—pervasive
in Western news media and, to some extent, academia—that casts China as a monolithic
culture/society. When the usual white male mass shooter goes on a rampage in an American
city, media narratives do not cast all white American males as mass shooters. However, the
incident is understood as symptomatic of American racial and social problems. Similarly,
when a Chinese museum curator takes a decision that is seen by many as “racist,” his action
should not be seen as evidence that China is a “racist society” but as symptomatic of certain
perceptions in relation to “race,” racial hierarchies, human development, skin colour, culture
and tradition, that may or may not be problematic. These perceptions, as I will show in this
article, are central to the construction of an everyday geopolitics of Africa-China relations.
The critical geopolitics of Africa-China
In traditional geopolitical approaches, China is often framed in binary terms: on the one hand,
as another “great power” in a long succession of powers rising to the top; and on the other, as
a completely new phenomenon because of its historic and cultural “particularity” (Agnew
2010). To go beyond this binary, Prasenjit Duara suggests that the geopolitics of China can
no longer be cast as the traditional geopolitics of China’s “place” in the world as discussed by
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both Western analysts and Chinese intellectuals. In order to make sense of contemporary
Chinese geopolitics, analyses must “attend to the politics of narratives” (Duara 1997, 26). In
short, in order to have a more comprehensive grasp of contemporary geopolitics, scholars
must inquire into how geopolitical reasoning is textualised within certain narratives and
stories in the multiple contexts where China has become more relevant than ever.
The Africa-China narrative/story has been, and may well become, one of the defining
geopolitical features of the twenty-first century. However, while Afro-Chinese engagements
have been widely discussed in media and scholarship over the last decade, there is a dearth of
geopolitical analysis on Africa-China relations. The limited scholarship that does exist tends
to have been conducted from a traditional geopolitical perspective: focusing on issues of
development, aid and resources, and centring around (institutionalised and elite-based)
political power practices (see Power, Mohan, and Tan-Mullins 2012). Resultingly, China’s
actions in Africa are mostly studied as the strategic actions of a nation-state player (i.e.
through the lens of methodological nationalism), and written into the conventional knowledge
around geopolitical imperatives. At this point, it is important to note that the idea of trying to
make sense of what China (or any other non-Western actor) does (geo)politically by simply
inscribing its actions into the script of conventional, Western, hegemonic calculus is not only
naïve, but fundamentally problematic.
Recently, however, there has been some scholarly effort to reflect on the “wider
geopolitics of China-Africa relations (past and present) in order to understand how China is
opening up new ‘choices’ and altering the playing field for African development for the first
time since the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s” (Power and Mohan 2010, 462). Unsurprisingly,
issues of “race,” racism, ethnicity, gender and class—issues central to the everyday life and
cultural politics of the Afro-Chinese encounter—have been overlooked in the analyses of so-
called “wider geopolitics.”
While these issues have been central to the scholarship conducted in geopolitical
analyses in Euro-American contexts (see Tesfahuney 1998; Quintero 2009), critical
perspectives on the geopolitics of the Afro-Chinese encounter are still missing. Such critical
perspectives would necessarily have to engage media, and new media narratives to foster a
deeper understanding of how discourses (re)produced within Africa-China mediascapes
construct certain types of imaginaries through popular culture and everyday practices.
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Therefore, heeding Power and Mohan’s (2010) call to engage with Chinese
geopolitical discourses on China’s engagement with Africa, and Duara’s (1997) suggestion to
attend to the “politics of narratives,” this article looks into how China’s geopolitical narrative
about the Africa-China encounter is produced from diverse, multiple and often problematic
positions. My intention is to provide another take, from the perspective of popular
geopolitics, to understand the ways in which Chinese imaginations about China-in-the-world
may be in the process of shaping the future of Africa, China and the globe.
Critical and popular geopolitics
Since its inception more than a century ago, the term geopolitics has commonly been
associated with political science and international relations analyses of the influence that
physical and geographical determinants have over politics (Agnew 2003). Traditional
geopolitical analyses mostly focus on economic and military factors, and often follow a linear
narrative (drawn from Western intellectual history) that is profoundly shaped by the logic of
the emergence and expansion of the modern state system over space and territory (2003). The
vocabularies of traditional geopolitics often discuss themes such as “geopolitics of
resources,” “geopolitics of disease,” “geopolitics of finance,” or “geopolitics of
immigration,” to name a few. Geopolitics—like almost every other concept in the social
sciences—encompasses multi-layered phenomena. It is assumed to be something that occurs
out there, in the “real world” (i.e. beyond academic and policymaking discourses), while
simultaneously being a way of theorising about those “real world” occurrences (or an
analytical framework built upon them).
However, geopolitics as a term has also been redefined to refer to the study of the
practical geopolitical reasoning of states and other actors in world politics (Agnew 2010).
This reasoning is “concerned with creating the image [emphasis added] of control and
permanence over a global spatiality that is always potentially in flux” (Agnew 2010, 570).
Indeed, besides describing a “natural” connection between space/territory and politics,
geopolitics can be seen as an attempt to write (a particular version of the history of) world
politics into places/spaces. So, beyond its descriptive character, geopolitics can be seen as the
crafting of a discourse, a creative intervention: the telling of a story of how the world was, is
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and will be (a political poetics of power and control, if you will). This has become
particularly true in the post 9/11 world, but more crucially in the current pandemic context, as
the world has been divided (i.e. re-imagined, reconfigured) further into zones and regions
identified with risks and dangers. The decades of murderous wars that followed 9/11, and the
aftermath of the viral outbreak, have forced a re-imagination and reconfiguration of
geopolitics in the world at large.
Critical geopolitics
Since the 1990s, scholarly work in the area of “critical geopolitics” has provided a crucial
critique not only of the presumed natural correlation between politics and geography (implicit
in traditional geopolitical analyses) but, perhaps more importantly, of the perceived
reductionisms of traditional geopolitical theory (Dittmer and Gray 2010). By looking at the
relations between power, desire and space, and the discursive and practical roles that “race,”
gender and class play in world politics, critical geopolitics became—not without criticism
(see Haverluk, Beauchemin, and Mueller 2014)—a way to better understand the mechanisms
through which geopolitical reasoning is informed and produced, and to elucidate the
techniques through which it creates certain images, and produces or conceals certain
narratives (Tesfahuney 1998; Dittmer and Dodds 2008). In a nutshell, critical geopolitics has
been an intellectual effort to provide a more complex perspective into how elites and publics
construct spaces of political action and how these spaces, in turn, reflect the ways in which
politicians and populations imagine their place in the world (Agnew 2010).
In his seminal book Critical Geopolitics, O Tuathail (1996) argues that geopolitics
saturates the everyday life of states, nations and citizens. He explains that geopolitics’ sites of
production are multiple and pervasive: from policymaking (e.g. national security policies), to
media representation (e.g. newspaper headlines), and to individual world views. O Tuathail
(1996, 113) persuasively argues that any “critical theory of geopolitics needs to recognise that
the problematic of geopolitics is a discursive, contextual one that inevitably forces one to
address questions concerning the politics of signification, the interpretative politics of reading
and writing.” In addressing questions concerning the “politics of signification,” O Tuathail
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(1996) suggests critical geopolitics analyses should simultaneously engage in exposing the
power plays of grand geopolitical schemes, and in challenging discourses of power.
Moreover, O Tuathail (1996) identifies three different types of geopolitical reasoning:
formal, practical and popular. Building upon O Tuathail’s theorisation, Mawdsley (2008)
notes that: “formal geopolitics” comprises the arena of intellectual debate (e.g. theories and
perspectives on statecraft and international relations); “practical geopolitics” refers to the
discursive arena where politicians and policymakers describe and make sense of the world;
while “popular geopolitics” describes the arena of the public sphere (e.g. manifestations of
the links between power and geography as portrayed in various media). Certainly, as O
Tuathail (1996) points out, there are plenty of overlaps, complementarities and linkages
between these three spheres—meaning that it is often difficult to separate them or
comprehend the precise ways in which they influence each other.
One of the main criticisms of the early scholarship in critical geopolitics was that it
mirrored some of the flaws from traditional geopolitics—namely, a top-down, Eurocentric,
approach (see Kelly 2006). Sharp (1993) highlighted that the foci of early analyses and
knowledge production in critical geopolitics was centred around “elite texts” and “elite
media,” under the assumption that ideas trickle down from founts of wisdom into the realm of
popular media, and, eventually, into the everyday lives of individuals. Moreover, Agnew
(2010, 569) noted that critical geopolitics have traditionally been focused on the
contemporary United States and Europe—"as if they were the sole active forces in world
politics.”
These criticisms notwithstanding, a key contribution of critical geopolitics (and one
that is relevant to this article), has emerged from recent work in the subfield of popular
geopolitics. As a subfield, popular geopolitics recognises that geopolitical ideas and
knowledge are not only informed or produced by academic and policymaking discourses—
they are embedded in, and produced by, mundane, everyday life processes (Dittmer and Gray
2010).
Popular geopolitics
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The study of popular geopolitics focuses on the production of evolving “geopolitical

imaginaries” (emerging from the combination of visual images, language and political
performance (Agnew 2010), and how they are communicated, shaped, and often produced,
from the realms of everyday life and culture.
Agnew (2010) argues that geopolitical imaginaries are complex discursive formations
that are often deployed in an attempt to validate certain ideas, or to instil particular values
(i.e. power relations). They do so through the constitution of hegemonic regimes of
representation (Mawdsley 2008). Central to these regimes are not only narrative techniques,
but also visual images, and language. Existing work on popular geopolitics has been
concerned with how these regimes of representation operate in and through popular media
culture (e.g. through films, documentaries, cartoons, comics, novels, magazines and news),
and how they simultaneously produce, and are produced by, geopolitical images and
imaginaries (see Dodds 2003, 2007; Power and Crampton 2005; Sharp 1993, 1998, 2000).
Since the late 1990s, popular geopolitics has become an increasingly relevant
perspective in the study of various forms of racism, nationalism, and terrorism (Dittmer and
Dodds 2008; Mamadouh 2003; Entman 1992; Mwangi 2002). Moreover, popular geopolitics
has been used in a variety of institutional and visual contexts to analyse how the construction,
and dissemination, of narratives and representations of world politics impact on and shape the
relationship between elites, media, and the general public (Dittmer and Dodds 2008;
Pickering 2017).
It is not news that Africa has played an increasingly crucial role in China’s
geopolitical reasoning for the last two decades (Alden 2007; Alden and Large 2018). Often,
in official Chinese rhetoric (and academic discourse), Africa-China relations are portrayed as
a relationship between equals working for a better future (i.e. brothers in anti-colonial, anti-
imperial and anti-racist struggles). However, a deeper look into contemporary popular
representations of the Afro-Chinese encounter (produced by both official and non-official
sources) produces a different picture. In it, power asymmetries, racialised and gendered
hierarchies, and binary ideas of superiority/inferiority seem to be the defining features.
Gendered and racialised media representations in Africa-China relations

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Much like fictional narratives, geopolitical discourses are cultural creations (the same goes
for any discourse of power). As cultural creations, they can be studied to determine the ways
in which they are complicit in the inscription of certain meanings, and not merely reflective
of them. What follows is an attempt to critically locate a series of (racialised and gendered)
elements, in a number of recent controversial incidents from a popular geopolitics
perspective. The incidents that I present below (and their narrative elements) are crucial to:
(1) the (re)production of problematic geopolitical imaginaries in Africa-China relations; and
(2) to the (potential) articulation of a new hegemonic regime of representation that places
China, and Chinese, at the top of a racial triangulation between blackness, Chineseness and
whiteness (see Castillo 2020).
Qiaobi, or the “most racist ad ever”
The Qiaobi ad, one of most controversial racial incidents in recent Africa-China relations
media history, is a Chinese detergent commercial that went viral in mid-2016. Its plot is
simple. A paint-splattered black man walks into a room where an Asian woman is about to do
the laundry. He catcalls and approaches her confidently as she lures him closer with her
finger. As he attempts to kiss her, she places a detergent tablet in his mouth and shoves him
into a top load washing machine. After a spin cycle, the man pops out of the top as a fair-
skinned Asian man, and hands her back the detergent tablet with a wink.
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Figure 1 Qiaobi ad’s screenshots (screenshots by author).
Needless to say, the ad (which circulated for weeks in television and cinemas in China prior
to going viral) is an iteration of an age-old racist trope in European and North American
advertising history, which presents blackness (and dark skin in general) as something that can
be washed, cleaned, purified, corrected and/or whitened. Giovanna Puppin (2016), a scholar
of Chinese advertising and promotional cultures, notes how the ad has a connection to
Coloreria Italiana, an Italian ad campaign from 2006 that made use of explicit race-based
sexual stereotypes, in which a scrawny, white husband transformed into a buff, black man
after a spin cycle in a washing machine. In the Chinese ad, Puppin claims, the aggravating
factor that fuelled allegations of “racism” and online fury was the reversal of the “racial
transmogrification”: from the exotic, muscular black man in Coloreria Italiana to Qiaobi’s
fair-skinned Asian man (Puppin 2016).
It is important to note, however, that at no point during the Qiaobi ad are the status of
the men in relation to the woman made clear. Is the black man the woman’s boyfriend,
fiancée or husband? Or is he only a painter, an immigrant worker or, maybe, “the help”? Is
the fresh, young Asian man who pops out of the machine the replacement, correction for, or a
better version of the black man? If so, where will he replace him—in domestic work, or in a
relationship with the woman? Certainly, as Stuart Hall (2001) reminds us, ads can be and are
read in multiple ways by viewers across diverse geographies and cultures with different
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histories. Despite the potential of multiple readings, I contend that the ad performs a complex
racial (and geopolitical) triangulation—one that becomes evident when the ad is analysed as a
continuation of Coloreria Italiana, rather than in isolation.
By reversing the “transmogrification” from the Italian imagination of an exotically
ideal man to the Asian/Chinese aesthetic of a good-looking young man (i.e. fair, slim and
tall), the ad leaves the realm of the “exotic/comedic” and, in turn, enters the realm of
“ethnonationalist policing.” Indeed, the ad not only attempts to connect to, or mock (either
wittingly or unwittingly), the problematic histories of washing blackness away (or
whitewashing it) in Western advertising, but more crucially to rewrite those histories by
placing the Asian male body at the top of the triangulation. In other words, by effectively
juxtaposing blackness with a Chinese “whiteness,” the detergent ad alters the input into the
global, (post)colonial racial algorithm. In this case, blackness does not serve the purpose of
promoting whiteness as the correct/clean way to be. Rather, it simultaneously constructs
Chineseness as a “correction” to blackness, and as a “replacement” to whiteness. This is a
crucial point in the contemporary construction of Afro-Chinese geopolitical imaginaries.
Indeed, the articulation of imagery and discourses into a narrative where a version of
Chineseness replaces whiteness can be said to lay at the core of the production of an Africa-
China popular geopolitics—at least from the side of Chinese media. This is crucially
epitomised by the most controversial media related incident to date: the 2018 CCTV Spring
Festival Gala “blackface.”
“Love” and Han saviourship: geopolitics and ethnonationalist boundaries in/as a mis-en-
scene
The theatre is at full capacity and after the loud roar of a lion, the camera follows dozens of
black women who, wearing a mixture of East African traditional dresses, rush down the
centre aisle towards the stage. There, awaiting the women, are a number of black men beating
drums or dancing around dressed as zebras and gazelles. The stage background behind them
depicts a rather empty savannah about to be crossed by a train, although there is no visible
railway. As the women climb up onto the stage, a fragment of Shakira’s “Waka Waka,” also
known as “This Time for Africa” (the official song of the 2010 FIFA World Cup) can be
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heard. At that point, Zheng Kai, a young Shanghainese actor, makes his way to the front of
the stage wearing a smart business suit to confidently perform his short (albeit not-so-bad)
version of a traditional Kenyan dance. It is then that the audience realises he will host the
skit. After being kissed by a lion mascot, Zheng greets the audience and pompously
proclaims the launching of the China-constructed Mombasa–Nairobi Railway. After having a
short conversation with a group of black train stewardesses (who were trained in China and
are fluent in Mandarin), Zheng introduces the audience to the next skit, “The same joy, the
same happiness”—a “comedy” about love, tradition and China’s historical role in Africa.
One of the main characters in this skit, however, drew controversy. Chinese actress,
Lou Naiming, performed in “blackface”— not only was her skin darkened and her bodylines
exaggerated, she was carrying a fruit platter, and being trailed by black man in a monkey
costume. Lou’s role was that of a traditional, although somewhat confused, African mother
who intends to arrange her daughter’s marriage, but is eventually convinced otherwise
(Castillo 2020). The skit—which was aimed at portraying a new phase of China’s
engagement in Africa for a domestic audience—was a pre-recorded theatrical mis-en-scene
that took place live in front of an audience while simultaneously being recorded. In this way,
it was both a live performance for a small theatre audience, and a pre-recorded segment for a
future televisual broadcast.
As a live performance with a political message, the skit is reminiscent of the political
plays that were so popular in China during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. Although
not copious, the history of Chinese political theatrical representations that involve Africa-
China narratives spans back decades. In the early days of the Cultural Revolution and during
China’s mission in the Third World, there were a few performances that would be considered
“blackfaces” in the present. However, those performances were connected to Chinese drama
traditions, where the performing of otherness was based on painstaking research, rather than
to the racist forms of “entertainment” found in American minstrelsy (see, for example, the
1960s plays, Equatorial Drum, and The Raging Congo River). As a televisual broadcast, the
skit is unique in two ways: on the one hand, it was the first skit ever in the history of the
Spring Festival Gala to portray Africa-China relations. On the other, and perhaps more
importantly, it (somehow accidentally and belatedly) introduced Chinese domestic cultural
products (and their audiences) into a geopolitical realm (that of the global ecumene), where
“race,” “racism,” racialisation processes, and other legacies of the colonial/imperial world,
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cannot be easily skewed or ignored. Whether as a live performance, or as a televisual

broadcast, the performative space of the skit (i.e. its mis-en-scene) can be thought of as an
“entry point” into the cultural geopolitics of contemporary Africa-China relations. The
aftermath of the performance can be read as the discursive entrance of domestic Chinese
entertainment (and politics) into the realm of the global geopolitics of Africa-China relations.
While much of the discussion centred on the racist (or not racist) connotations of the
“blackface,” mainstream analyses of the skit missed another critical issue: its problematic
gendered, and patronising, geopolitical perspective.
Figure 2 Lou Naiming in “blackface,” centre right (screenshot by author).
In what follows, I argue that beyond the discussions about the racist caricature, the skit is
exemplar of the (re)production of a problematic trend in the Africa-China encounter. This is a
trend that I claim reveals a concerted patronising and gendered effort to simultaneously
construct Africa as China’s “damsel in distress,” and China as a modern hero/saviour—
replacing the West in its “historical” mission to save Africa.
The (false) saviour and his damsel
The skit’s story is rather simple. Carrie, an eighteen-year-old Kenyan stewardess, tricks her
Chinese teacher to pose as her boyfriend to avoid a blind date with a Kenyan man organised
by her mother. Carrie does not want to marry yet. She wants to work and then go to China to
study. In the skit’s resolution, Carrie confesses to her mother and explains her desire to go to
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China. It becomes clear that Carrie sees China as a way to escape tradition (and her mother’s
traditional views on marriage).
As I have noted elsewhere (Castillo 2020), the skit reminded me of a contestant in the
highly popular dating TV show If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao). Similar to the
Gala’s skit, the If You Are the One portrayed Xiao De (a participant from Guinea Bissau) as a
free-spirited girl trapped by tradition. Xiao De saw going to China as a way to escape her fate
(an arranged marriage), and an opportunity to study, and become an independent woman. In
the dating show, Xiao De is strictly looking to marry a Chinese man. Moving to China and
marrying a Chinese was for Xiao De, as it is for Carrie, a way to escape tradition and enter
modernity—a Chinese version of modernity.
The “blackface” skit, and Xiao De’s portrayal in the dating show, reproduce a
gendered narrative that encapsulates the way China approaches its relationship with Africa.
Both official and popular Chinese narratives about Africa consistently try to construct an
image of China as a “techno-saviour” that aims to liberate Africa (the “damsel in distress,” or
princess in jeopardy) from the shackles of tradition, and European colonialism (the monster)
(Castillo 2020).1
Moreover, the “blackface” skit seems to surprisingly flirt with the idea of a Sino-
African love affair—in the skit’s confusion, Carrie introduces her Chinese teacher as her
boyfriend. As the story unfolds, however, the plot quickly moves towards a resolution which
complies with the imagined boundaries of Chinese ethnonationalism: the Chinese teacher was
never really going to marry Carrie, as he is just about to marry a Chinese woman (brought to
Africa by his brother-in-law). This is consistent with the message in the Qiaobi ad, and can
be seen as a representational reluctance to break away from ethnic boundaries in
love/affective relationships.
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Figure 3 From left: the bride, the teacher, Carrie and her mother (screenshot by author).
Perhaps inadvertently, the production team for the CCTV Gala has contributed to the
discursive construction of Chineseness as a replacement for whiteness. This manifests in two
clear ways in the skit. First, it is evident in the replacement of the white body in blackface
(symbolising the white actor of American minstrelsy) by a Chinese body in blackface—also
for the sake of “entertainment.” And, second, it is made clear through the placement of China
as the techno-saviour, who seems more than willing to take on the traditional role of the
white saviour vis-à-vis Africa. The saviour trope has multiple iterations in contemporary
Chinese geopolitical thinking and is linked to what I call the “Han saviour” complex. In the
case of Africa, this complex connects divergent and longstanding streams into a consistent
narrative that proffers China as a way, perhaps the last one, for Africa to enter modernity (see
Lefkowitz 2017).
Before proceeding, it is important to note that the timing of this mis-en-scene was no
coincidence. The skit emerged recently, at a time in which China’s “going global” strategy
has intensified, and its involvement in many different (geopolitical) arenas is being addressed
by the country’s domestic cultural industries. This involvement has been represented by
Chinese media in recent box office hits such as Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), where Chinese forces
save Chinese citizens stranded in an unnamed African country; and in The Wandering Earth
(2019), where China plays the role of the world’s saviour. China’s saviour narrative is also
present in the upcoming drama series Ebola Fighters (2021), in which China saves Africa
and the world from an Ebola pandemic.
[Pre-print version]
In the years that I have been teaching Africa-China relations in Hong Kong, I have
striven to reject associations between the Chinese presence in Africa with “neo-colonialism”
(see French 2014). I often do this by highlighting that there are many differences and very
few similarities. However, at times, those similarities emerge as substantially problematic.
Looking into the popular geopolitics of the Africa-China encounter through Chinese social
media and online shopping platform practices, for example, is illuminating here.
Popular geopolitics 2.0: the construction of racial hierarchies through social media
As noted earlier, the imaginaries upon which an Africa-China popular geopolitics is

articulated do not only emerge from elite media producers or official TV shows. Some of the
narratives and practices informing these imaginaries (e.g. the “China as the future, Africa as
the past” narrative, see Castillo 2020, and Madrid-Morales 2018) also emerge from Chinese
social media in Africa.
In 2017, a popular and controversial trend swept through the Chinese online
marketplace Taobao. Vendors on the platform started selling customised videos and photos of
mainly Zambian children delivering written/recited messages in Mandarin (a language they
did not speak or understand). Although these messages were originally birthday wishes or
messages for other meaningful occasions, advertisers in China soon found a niche, joined the
trend, and started paying for the children to recite advertorial content. The videos, in which
Chinese citizens coached the children in-situ, were mostly sold over Taobao for prices
ranging between 10 and 200 RMB—without any proven remuneration given to the children
(Deahl 2017).
[Pre-print version]
Figure 4 Zambian children in the Taobao controversy (screenshot by author).
While other stores on Taobao offered similar services with people from non-African
countries, such as Italy and Brazil, the focus of the controversy was the African children.
Commentators debated about whether the practice was racist, exploitative, or just clever
Chinese marketing, with some scholars seeing “nothing inherently wrong with it” (Cheung
2018). Again, as in most of the incidents described above, Chinese netizens alluded to
“cultural differences” as the reason why the videos simultaneously generated both fascination
and outrage (Davis 2017). Interestingly, the Taobao case closely resembles that of other
freelance service marketplaces, like Fiverr, where similar videos featuring Indian children
were sold to American consumers in 2015 (Ellman 2015). Unlike in the Taobao case,
however, the Fiverr videos were taken down amidst accusations of child exploitation.
Incidents relating to the exoticisation of Africans go beyond the advertorial content on
Taobao, of course. In 2018, in what resembled the imagery produced by early European
colonisers in Africa, Indonesia and Australia, users of Kuaishou — a video-sharing and live-
streaming app—started sharing live content that presented indigenous peoples from Ethiopia
as exotic objects.
[Pre-print version]
Figure 5 Kuaishou user feed (screenshot by author).
In late 2018, Ghanaian YouTuber, Mr Ghana Baby (also known as Wode Maya) posted a 6-
minute video on his YouTube channel exposing these trends (Wode Maya 2018). Under the
title “STOP these type of Chinese in Africa,” Mr Ghana Baby denounced the
commoditisation and objectification in both the Taobao and the Kuaishou practices. In
another video, the YouTuber explained that his complaint was replicated in Chinese social
media, where netizens wrote about and reported the controversial Kuaishou trend. According
to Mr Ghana Baby, the Chinese Ministry of Culture contacted him about the case and later
forced Kuaishou to take down all videos related to the trend (Wode Maya 2018).
[Pre-print version]
Figure 6 Kuaishou user feed (screenshot by author).
Interestingly, the discussions around these two cases delved into exploitation, rather than race
and racism. Nonetheless, Mr Ghana Baby pointed to another layer in the power asymmetry
that characterises Africa-China “race” relations: while Chinese can go to Africa and
commoditise children or objectify indigenous people, no African would be allowed to do so
in China without getting into trouble (Wode Maya 2018). The asymmetries evidenced by
these “touristic practices” are similar to those scrutinised by An, Zhang, and Wang (2020, 4)
in their analysis of the (re)production of geopolitical discourses through Chinese tourism in
Africa. An, Zhang, and Wang (2020) see Chinese touristic practices in Africa as a space
where independent individuals negotiate otherness and (re)imagine difference while
participating in, reproducing, and/or challenging existing geopolitical discourses.
Cases such as the Taobao and Kuaishou incidents point to how in the construction of
Chinese identity online within the context of the “rise of China,” the “othering” of Africans
(and the use of stereotypes to depict Africa and Africans as backward and not modern), is a
popular discursive practice (see Frazier and Zhang 2014; Pfafman, Carpenter, and Tang 2015;
and Lan 2017, for more on this). This is consistent with the “China as the future, Africa as the
past” narrative, and with the witting, or unwitting, endeavour to construct the image of China
as the modern saviour in the face of its encounter with “timeless” Africa.
Indeed, the “racial position” from where the Kuaishou users showcase black bodies to
their audiences is not only reminiscent of colonial, “anthropological” displays of non-white
[Pre-print version]
bodies, but also consistent with the replacement effort that I have been highlighting
throughout this article. This begs the questions: who owns the colonial, anthropological gaze
in the Kuaishou displays? Are the Chinese bodies in these social media posts replacing the
white bodies of the colonial officials (i.e. the early anthropologists) when
displaying/inspecting black bodies? In their fascinating discussion about discourses of
racialisation of labour in Africa-China relations, Sautman and Yan (2016, 2151) note that
Chinese in Africa “are not positioned to create a public discourse to inferiorise their African
hosts.” But, do these problematic social-media-based representations inferiorise Africans?
When confronted with criticisms about incidents such as the ones described above,
“woke” Chinese netizens often argue that negative stereotypes about Africa, and black people
in general, have infiltrated Chinese society through the consumption of American media—
blaming, more specifically, Hollywood blockbusters and ignorance (Castillo 2018, 2020).
While Hollywood’s history of racist portrayals of bodies of colour is indefensible, and the
industry is to blame for the historical, global dissemination of damaging negative stereotypes
about non-white others, it is also worth considering whether there were other sources—
perhaps culturally closer sources—through which negative stereotypes about blackness could
have “entered” China.
Enter Crazy Safari and Hong Kong’s cinematic representation
A few years ago, as I was researching contemporary forms of self-representation among

African musicians and film-makers in the country for another project, I came to the
realisation that a great deal of Chinese language films with black characters were films shot
in Hong Kong. Indeed, looking in the direction of Hong Kong cinema—a historical site of
cultural translation and transnational imaginations (Morris, Li, and Chan 2006; Jin 2018)—
provides another perspective in terms of representations of blackness in Chinese cultural
contexts.
In “‘Race’ and ‘Racism’ in Contemporary Africa-China Relations Research:
Approaches, Controversies and Reflections” (Castillo 2020), I argue that in order to make
better sense of racialised constructions in Africa-China relations, it is useful to deploy a
relational way of thinking about “race” that I describe as “multiple triangulations.” Multiple
[Pre-print version]
triangulations are useful to contextualise and historicise processes of racialisation—such as

the ones involved in the incidents that I review in this article—in transnational and
transhistorical ways.
Triangulating through Hong Kong to make sense of Africa-China relations is nothing
new. A number of scholars have analysed representations of China in African
contexts/imaginaries through the viewership of Hong Kong martial arts films (see, for
instance, van Staden 2017). Indeed, triangulating Africa-China imaginaries through Hong
Kong popular culture reveals that the seeds of the contemporary type of Sinocentric racial
hierarchy at work in Africa-China relations, had been sown long before the current
controversies, long before the re-emergence of Africa-China narratives, and crucially, long
before China’s re-accommodation as the centre of global capitalism. Indeed, Hong Kong’s
cinematic representations of blackness, Chineseness and whiteness are crucial to understand
how the discursive process of replacement (i.e. Chineseness replacing whiteness) critically
informs the cultural politics behind the construction of China as a global power.
Triangulating Africa-China narratives through The Gods Must Be Crazy saga
Figure 7 Cover of The Gods Must Be Crazy (South Africa, 1980) (screenshot by author).
Enter The Gods Must Be Crazy, or at least Hongkollywood’s unofficial appropriation of the
saga. The Gods Must Be Crazy is a “classic” low budget film series produced in South Africa
[Pre-print version]
in the 1980s. In the first two films (the “official” ones), The Gods Must be Crazy (1980) and
The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989), the plot is simple. San bushmen from the Kalahari desert
have been living in harmony with each other and with nature for ages. Then, one day, an
empty Coca-Cola bottle falls from the sky. To the viewer, the bottle falls from a plane, but in
the minds of the Kalahari bushmen, the gods sent the bottle. As the strange object—a
signifier of Western modernity—arouses conflict and disdain, the main character sets out on a
journey to get rid of the supposedly cursed artifact. His journey takes him to enter modern
civilisation. The storyline is peppered by “humorous” tropes contrasting “primitive” and
“modern” (i.e. African and Western) societies in the shamelessly racist style that could only
come out of 1980s South Africa.
Interestingly, in the third film—the first of the “unofficial” ones—Crazy Safari (1991)
(produced by Hong Kong directors for both Cantonese and Mandarin speaking audiences),
the bottle of Coca-Cola is used again as a metaphor contrasting pre-modern and modern
subjects. In this iteration of the film, however, it is the Hong Kong Chinese subject who
embodies the modern subject, and who, accidentally, brings Coca-Cola (along with a hopping
vampire/zombie) to the bushmen. The Coca-Cola metaphor not only operates as a narrative
device in the film but also as a reset and restart in Hongkollywood’s appropriation of the
film’s narrative.
Figure 8 Screen shot of N!xau, working as an advertiser for Coca-Cola in Beijing in The
Gods Must Be Funny in China (screenshot by author).
The last two films, Crazy Hong Kong (1993), and The Gods Must be Funny in China (1994),
have plots in which the main character—Nǃxau ǂToma (represented by the same actor from
the first two films)—journeys to China. While these films have both Western and Chinese
[Pre-print version]
characters, they (re)produce a colonial gaze in which: Kalahari bushmen are presented as
uncivilised; and first Hong Kong, and then China, are portrayed as replacing Western
civilisation as the source of modernity. The films are rife with supposedly comedic, but
mostly insulting juxtapositions and stereotypes that contrast Africa’s so-called backwardness
with Hong Kong and Beijing’s versions of Chinese modernity.2
Hong Kong’s appropriation and “translation” of the Gods Must be Crazy saga is just
one example of the many historical and cultural constructions informing the controversial
“blackface” skit—as such, the resemblance between CCTV’s portrayal of Nairobi in the skit
and the Kalahari desert in the films is not as coincidental as it may seem. Indeed, Hong
Kong’s cinematic culture can be seen as a site of cultural translation (and remediation) of
Western representations of blackness. In short, it is a vehicle through which culturally
translated racialising and racist tropes have expanded into the Mainland’s cultural ideosphere.
Triangulating processes of racialisation through filmic representation is crucial to
understand how certain ways of thinking about foreigners in China have been historically
articulated. Perhaps more importantly, triangulating processes of racialisation is useful to
understand how these ways of thinking are deployed in the constitution of an Africa-China
geopolitical imaginary. Often, globalised falsities, reductions and outdated representations are
transmitted via film and television, as masterfully shown by in the incidents presented in this
article.
Conclusion: on whiteness and white supremacy
Discussions about the racial incidents emerging in the context of intensified Africa-China
relations need to be framed within the following conjunctural elements: (1) foreign presence
in China, especially the increase of black/African populations, and the emergence of
cosmopolitan urban spaces in the country (see Castillo 2014, 2015, 2016; and, Wilczak
2018); and, (2) the articulation of “racial nationalism” along with the dissemination of right-
wing, ethnonationalist ideas and sentiments through online Chinese platforms (see Sullivan
1994; Sautman 1994; Pfafman, Carpenter, and Tang 2015; and, Zhang 2019). This framing
needs to be simultaneously located within the logics of the problematic portrayal of China as
a “neocolonial” player in Africa (see Huynh 2021; French 2014); and that of the
[Pre-print version]
normalisation of a racist media/academic narrative that casts an assertive, confident China as

an existential threat to the international status quo (Trofimov, Hinshaw, and O’Keeffe 2020).
A number of years ago, during a lecture I was giving on Chinese soft power and
“neocolonialism” in Africa at a university in Hong Kong, a white British male student
stubbornly argued that a Chinese-led world would ultimately transform global capitalism,
making it less oppressive and more fair. A Chinese female student, however, replied that
from her years in China she saw no indication that a Chinese capitalism, or a global
capitalism led by China, would be less oppressive, racist, imperial and/or colonising. China,
she insisted, would not change the system, it would just “replace” the leader of the old one.
The “replacement of whiteness” that I identify in this article as an emerging pattern
can also be seen as a discursive effort to replace white bodies with Asian/Chinese bodies in a
geopolitical scheme. However, while this emerging pattern is clearly articulated in the cases
presented in this article, I argue that as a pattern it is still only that: an emerging pattern.
Here, it is crucially important to note that I am not suggesting that Chinese discursive efforts
to (re)present the Han as heroes/saviours will ultimately result in the dismantling of
whiteness and its replacement by a hegemonic type of Chineseness. Whiteness is founded on
a political system of global white supremacy (Mills 1997)—a particular structure of formal
and informal rule, “socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of
material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties” that a potentially
hegemonic type of Chineseness is still far away from accessing.
Indeed, Chineseness is centuries away from reproducing the intergenerational traumas
and actual experiences of racial oppression and violence, imperialism, colonialism, genocide,
murder, rape, eugenics programs, slavery, indentured or exploitative labor, historical,
cultural, political and urban erasure, segregation, racial profiling, ethnic caging, internment,
racially determined laws, policies and practices; social marginalisation and invisibility,
discourses of “otherness,” and the internalisation of racial inferiority and hatred that
accompanies generations of subjugation of people of color under white supremacy (Chen
2021).
As a final note, in June 2021, the world is facing one of the most difficult times after
the Second World War. The spectre of the impending global catastrophe due to the climate
crisis has just been magnified by the “once-in-a-century pandemic,” and by the so-called
Cold War 2.0 (i.e. America’s declining influence and sore reluctance to lose control of global
[Pre-print version]
capitalism to China). We have moved from the “pandemic year” (i.e. 2020) to the “pandemic
ever after,” as Tejaswini Niranjana once told me. “Normal” is gone and hopes for a better
future are dim at best. In this context, it is not news that in the West (e.g. the USA, Europe,
and especially Australia) these are days of profound anti-Chinese/anti-Asian sentiment.
Indeed, never in my two or three decades of observing China-related international affairs
have I seen a time where being so openly racist and anti-Chinese was as normalised (lauded
and funded) as it is these days. As I have argued elsewhere, attempts to portray China as a
racist society often work to palliate “white guilt” (Castillo 2020). These attempts are
consistent with what Charles Mills notes in his “The Racial Contract”: “white
misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race
are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years” (1997,
Overview).
15 June 2021, Sai Kung, Hong Kong SAR, PRC.
Notes
1
The age-old trope of the “damsel in distress” in film, literature and video games depicts a young and beautiful
woman who needs to be saved from a monster by a male hero. In the end, the woman usually marries her
rescuer.
2
Iterations of these juxtapositions and stereotypes can also be seen in films like Jackie Chan’s Who am I (1998)
—which, like many of the contemporary cultural products released in China and the West that deal with
blackness, have different versions—for more recent iterations of this “China version” see the Star Wars and the
John Boyega/Jo Malone controversies.
Funding
The work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council (RGC)
of Hong Kong. RGC Ref No.: 23601618. Parts of this research were supported by a Faculty Research
Grant (code:101869) from Lingnan University.
Notes on contributor
Roberto Castillo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University,
Hong Kong. He has been researching African communities in China since 2010.
Contact address
Email: rocas@ln.edu.hk | Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, HSH 101, Ho Sing
Hang Building, 8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong SAR, People’s Republic of China
Special terms
Equatorial Drum 赤道战鼓

The Raging Congo River 刚果河在怒吼
Fei Cheng Wu Rao 非诚勿扰
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To Cite: Castillo, Roberto. 2021.

discursively constructed as a “replacement” for whiteness.

Introduction: the COVID-19 storm and the unfolding of a geopolitical drama

The critical geopolitics of Africa-China

Critical and popular geopolitics

The study of popular geopolitics focuses on the production of evolving “geopolitical

Gendered and racialised media representations in Africa-China relations

Qiaobi, or the “most racist ad ever”

Figure 1 Qiaobi ad’s screenshots (screenshots by author).

cannot be easily skewed or ignored. Whether as a live performance, or as a televisual

Figure 2 Lou Naiming in “blackface,” centre right (screenshot by author).

The (false) saviour and his damsel

As noted earlier, the imaginaries upon which an Africa-China popular geopolitics is

Figure 4 Zambian children in the Taobao controversy (screenshot by author).

Figure 5 Kuaishou user feed (screenshot by author).

Figure 6 Kuaishou user feed (screenshot by author).

Enter Crazy Safari and Hong Kong’s cinematic representation

A few years ago, as I was researching contemporary forms of self-representation among

triangulations are useful to contextualise and historicise processes of racialisation—such as

Triangulating Africa-China narratives through The Gods Must Be Crazy saga

Conclusion: on whiteness and white supremacy

normalisation of a racist media/academic narrative that casts an assertive, confident China as

Equatorial Drum 赤道战鼓

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