The April 2020 Anti-African Racism Crisis in Guangzhou, China

In early April 2020, as China moved to contain a feared second wave of COVID-19 infections carried by people arriving from abroad, authorities in Guangzhou launched a targeted campaign against the city’s African residents that quickly drew international condemnation. Guangzhou is home to the largest African community in China, a diaspora built over roughly two decades of trade between African importers and the city’s wholesale markets, and it became the epicenter of what African governments and human rights groups described as a coordinated pattern of racial discrimination rather than an even-handed public health response.

Local officials ordered mass testing of Africans specifically, regardless of travel history or known contact with confirmed cases, and directed many to self-isolate or quarantine in designated hotels at their own expense, even when they had no symptoms and no record of recent travel. Landlords, reportedly acting under pressure from local authorities, evicted African tenants from their apartments with little notice, leaving some people sleeping on the street because hotels also refused to house them. A US Consulate security alert at the time stated that Guangzhou police had instructed local businesses not to serve people “who appear to be of African origin.” One especially widely circulated image showed a laminated notice posted at a McDonald’s restaurant in the city stating that Black people would no longer be allowed to enter; McDonald’s China issued a public apology and said the sign did not reflect company policy. Separate video footage that circulated online in mid-April appeared to show physical altercations and further mistreatment of Africans in the city’s streets, adding to the sense that the campaign had moved beyond bureaucratic overreach into open hostility.

The response from African governments was swift and unusually unified. The foreign ministers of Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Uganda each summoned China’s ambassador to formally protest, and a group of more than a dozen African ambassadors based in Beijing sent a joint letter to China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, demanding an end to the practices and protection for their citizens. The African Union’s Commission chairperson, Moussa Faki Mahamat, also expressed concern and called for the immediate end of discriminatory treatment.

Chinese officials and state-aligned media pushed back on the characterization of events. Guangzhou’s local government denied that its health measures were discriminatory, framing them as a uniform response to imported infection risk. Some Chinese Communist Party-aligned outlets went further, suggesting the reporting was exaggerated or manufactured, at points attributing the narrative to foreign media bias or to pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Independent verification undercut that framing: Human Rights Watch documented the evictions and denial-of-service incidents directly through interviews with affected residents, and reporting from the Guardian and other outlets in the following weeks confirmed that discriminatory treatment, including refusal of service and continued suspicion toward Black residents, persisted even after the initial wave of international criticism. The episode became one of the more visible strains on China-Africa relations in recent years, prompting diplomatic apologies from some local Guangzhou officials while leaving lasting distrust among many members of the city’s African community.