HONG KONG — After 16 years in China, a Congolese businessman thought he knew what being black there entailed. He had been subjected to racial slurs and denied apartments, but he had also learned Chinese and made local friends. He loved the country; he called it his second home.
But the businessman, Felly Mwamba, had not anticipated the coronavirus pandemic, during which he would find himself sealed in his home, prohibited from leaving and eyed as a carrier of the disease simply because he was African.
“The way they are treating black people, you cannot accept,” Mwamba said by telephone. “We are not animals.”
As China tames the coronavirus epidemic now ravaging other countries, its success is giving rise to an increasingly strident blend of patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, at a pitch many say has not been seen in decades.
A restaurant in northern China put up a banner celebrating the virus’s spread in the United States. A widely circulated cartoon showed foreigners being sorted into trash bins. African residents in the southern city of Guangzhou, including Mwamba, have been corralled into forced quarantines, labeled as dangers to the country’s health.
Some of the uglier manifestations of nationalism have been fueled by government propaganda, which has touted China’s response to the virus as evidence of the ruling Communist Party’s superiority. And recriminations from abroad, including calls to make China pay for the pandemic that began there, have triggered defensiveness on the part of many Chinese.
Whipping up national pride has long been a tool for solidifying the party’s grip on power. In the short term, the nationalism may be useful to the central government as it seeks to quell lingering discontent over its early attempts to play down the outbreak.
But if left unchecked, the vitriol risks isolating China internationally just as the Communist Party seeks to use the pandemic to promote itself as a global leader. In recent days, countries that are usually friendly with China have denounced Chinese xenophobia, while business leaders have warned of difficulties operating there.
“The real risk that the nationalism poses is to foreign governments’ perception of threat from China,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at Cornell University who has studied Chinese nationalism.
China’s heightened us-against-them mentality is perhaps most apparent in its recent strictures aimed at foreigners. Although the Chinese government denounced racist attacks against Asians overseas when the outbreak was centered in China, it now casts people from other countries as public health risks.
Last month, China barred virtually all foreigners from entering, even though it had criticized other countries for closing their borders. Officials emphasize that most of China’s new cases are now imported — often without mentioning that many are Chinese citizens returning home.
Fear of imported infections has at times exploded into, or provided cover for, xenophobia.
In Beijing and Shanghai, foreigners have been barred from some shops and gyms, supposedly as part of a campaign to combat the virus. “We are temporarily not accepting foreign friends and people whose temperature is above 37.3,” read a sign in a hair salon near Beijing’s central business district.
A salon employee said she didn’t see it as discrimination. “It is an epidemic, after all,” she said.
John Artman, the American editor of a Chinese tech publication, said his office building in Beijing reopened last month after closing during the outbreak. But he was told that the building was not admitting foreigners.
By coincidence, the company was already planning to move its office. But when he tried to visit the new office two weeks later, a colleague said the new site, too, would not permit foreigners to enter. Artman is still working from home.