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| CCTV |
The 2018 CCTV Spring Festival (Chinese New Year’s) Gala featured a comedy sketch called “Shared Celebration and Happiness” (同喜同乐) which drew a firestorm of international social media criticism for its abundant use of African stereotypes—and blackface.
A four-hour extravaganza of song, dance, acrobatics, and
comedy, the Spring Festival Gala is the world’s most-viewed annual television
event. The show is performed live, but the script undergoes countless stages of
censoring and revision. As the most prominent television event in China, the
Spring Festival Gala is one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most important platforms
for propaganda. In a sense, it informs the whole country what the Party line
will be for the coming year. Sifting through the torrent of puns, one can
discover what the CCP wants Chinese people to think: China’s ethnic minorities
are childlike, feminine, and unthreatening. Corruption is bad. And China-Africa
relations are good.
The sketch in question (which you can view with English subtitles and some critical commentary here)
begins with Africans in tribal garb dancing to Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time
for Africa)” with a bunch of wild animals in celebration of the opening of a
new high-speed rail project built by China. One of the new employees on the train,
a woman played by a Gabonese actress (credited under the Chinese name 周埃乐),
asks her Chinese friend to pretend to be her boyfriend in order to escape her
mother’s attempts to force her to go on a blind date. Then the mother appears:
famed Chinese actress Lou Naiming in blackface, complete with prosthetic chest
and butt and a fruit plate on her head. Her companion is a humanoid,
basket-bearing monkey played by an actor from Cote d’Ivoire. The mom eventually
figures out that her daughter’s Chinese friend is not really her boyfriend, but
the young woman plucks up her gumption and declares her intention to work
rather than marry quickly: “I want to go to China to study. I want to be just
like the Chinese: I’m going roll up my sleeves and work hard to make the whole
world like me!” Resounding applause. Her mom unexpectedly expresses her approval, saying that of
course she doesn’t mind; after all, a Chinese doctor once saved her life. Then,
in the ultimate flourish, this Chinese woman pretending to be an African woman
faces the audience and bursts forth, “I love Chinese people! I love China!” Resounding
applause.
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| CCTV |
The past Chinese-calendar year included two notable controversies over racism in China: a photographic exhibition at a museum in Wuhan which juxtaposed portraits
of Africans with shots of animals, and the discovery that WeChat was translating 黑老外 (“black foreigner”) as the n-word. On Chinese social media, in the past, the typical response
to such controversies has been along these lines: “What? What’s blackface? Don’t
be so sensitive. It’s not racism. Maybe it’s a little politically incorrect,
but not racist. Anyway, we don’t understand why this stuff upsets you guys so
much.” But this time, there were signs of progress: a large number of responses on Weibo acknowledged the sketch as “racist” and “awkward.” Many
posters pointed out how badly the skit would play before a global audience.
A common defense of Chinese racism is that since Chinese people have no firsthand exposure to black
people (which is mostly true of rural Chinese, but not city-dwellers), their prejudices
regarding black people are entirely derived from the depiction of black people on
American film. There is some truth in this, but China has rich native
traditions of racism dating back to the earliest written records, in which the names
for peoples of non-Chinese ethnicity were written with ideographic elements otherwise reserved for animals. Rather than delve into the history of racism in
China, however, let’s consider what this particular instance tells us about why
racism cannot be a topic of discussion in China.
The international media discussion of this controversy has
focused on signals of racism which are quite apparent to international audiences, namely the depiction of Africans as being in a default state of
jamming out with safari animals, the blackface, the monkey companion, and the
paternalistic tone of the dialog. What international media discussion does not
delve into, however, is the rationale behind such a skit in the signal system
of Chinese propaganda. Because its script receives thorough scrutiny in the
state propaganda organs, it is entirely fair to understand the message being
sent by the Gala as a message direct from the Communist Party. Regarding this
particular incident, the discussion should not be about whether Chinese people
are racist but rather what kind of message the skit was meant to send and why
the state propaganda apparatchiks were unable to recognize or disinclined to
care that the skit was offensive.
What the sketch reveals is the Party’s pitiful understanding
of social discourse abroad and its desire for Chinese people to affirm the
following: China-Africa relations are great. Why? Because China is
oh-so-generous. In other words, the Party’s attitude toward Africa, as toward
so much else, is fundamentally paternalistic.
The obliviousness to the potential reception of the international
audience is unsurprising, because Chinese state propaganda is seldom if ever
targeted to both Sinophone and international audiences simultaneously. Moreover,
the Communist Party often evinces a poor understanding of international
discourse on any number of topics. The official response to this incident is revealing. It brushes off the criticisms as a bad-faith
effort by hostile foreign media to smear China-Africa relations (translation mine):
A foreign reporter raised the question of whether, in the CCTV broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala, a Chinese performer dressing up as an African could be considered racism. Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Geng Shuang responded that China consistently opposes any form of racial discrimination, and that even if there are some people who try to make a fuss out of nothing and instigate disharmony in China-Africa relations, such attempts are destined to be futile: ‘The friendship between China and Africa has gone through trials and hardships but proven absolutely unbreakable. China-Africa cooperation is mutually beneficial and win-win, and its fruits have been substantial. The state of China-Africa relations, good or bad, is written in the hearts of Africans.’
The real question is why the Chinese Communist Party is
incapable of allowing Chinese people to have a frank public discussion of racism
in China—let alone to engage in open and honest discourse about racism with the
international community. The answer, as with any number of other social issues,
is that to admit there is a problem would be to invite criticism of Chinese
society, and to invite criticism of Chinese society would be to invite
criticism of the society which the Party oversees with the zeal of a helicopter
parent on speed, and to admit criticism of this tightly controlled society is
to admit criticism of the Party. To admit that China has social problems is to
admit that the Party allows social problems to exist, because as a Leninist
party, they aspire to insert themselves into every corner of society (debate
the validity of this statement in regard to the Deng era if you will, but this
aspiration has quite clearly recently been renewed).
The point is not so much that a racist skit was aired as
that it was aired by the state propaganda machine. The point is not so much
that the writers of the skit were insensitive or racist as that state response to
the international media was dismissive, and the critical comments on Chinese
social media were censored. In short: the CCP won’t let China be honest with
itself about racism (or anything).
The discussion about racism in China cannot be informed by the
transnational discourse on racism because China is effectively cut off from
certain aspects of international discourse. Racism is an integral aspect of the story of global society. But history and society can only be publicly discussed in China in the
officially approved way, and there is essentially only one officially approved
discourse regarding power dynamics: the Marxist discourse. Whether within or
without the country, the Party desires that competing social visions for or of China
not exist. To allow social criticism from independent voices in China is hard
enough for the Party (look at their treatment, for example, of the Feminist Five), but to
admit to the legitimacy of a social criticism emanating from abroad is basically taboo unless it's a topic which the Party has designated as a legitimate target for criticism.
After all, if foreign voices were right about racism in China, they might be
right about other matters, such as Chinese human rights in general.
Racism in Chinese society won’t be discussed openly and
honestly until the CCP decides that it needs to be discussed. And I see no
reason why they would care. Perhaps if some incident truly affronted African
nations to the extent that it harmed China’s interests in Africa. Even then,
the Party would probably just roll out some slogans about how racism is bad and
point to them as evidence that racism is nearly eradicated in China (Of course,
Zhao Ziyang already claimed in 1989 that China is the only country in which racism
is not a problem). The international community tends to just believe the things
that the Party says to them in English, rather than looking to the discourse
which exists within China, so people would probably swallow it. And Chinese society would continue on in utter innocence, because sin unrecognized is no
sin at all, as long as you’re the sinner.
