China’s plan to relax immigration rules spurs all sorts of hateful comments from nationalistic Chinese
In a move to attract overseas professionals, China’s Ministry of Justice has unveiled a set of regulations designed to expand the scope of foreigners eligible for permanent residency in the country. The draft legislation has been met with fierce opposition underpinned by racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.
“I don’t want to see China becoming a country like America in a hundred of years, a place where people of different colors live together,” a Weibo user wrote (in Chinese), adding that if the labor force is seriously depleted, China should completely abandon its family-planning policies to boost its birth rate instead of easing its immigration restrictions.
The news amplified racism against black people living in China. One of the most disturbingly bigoted comments on Weibo reads (in Chinese), “I’m strongly against introducing black people to our country. It scares me thinking about our offspring being mixed with black.”
To make things worse, an army of misogynists who fear that foreign men would “steal” Chinese women from them found a sneaky way to insert their prejudice into the discourse. Gathering around the hashtag #中国女孩 (zhōngguó nǚhái, “Chinese girls”), they made overly sentimental promises to protect Chinese women from what they saw as “intruders.”
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—Jiayun Feng
