Social media, gendered anxiety and disease-related misinformation : discourses in contemporary China’s online anti-African sentiments

This article combines automated scraping of Weibo data and a critical discourse analysis to examine the ways in which online anti-African sentiments produce and amplify the interrelations of racial stigma, sexism and homophobia, as well as misinformation about infectious disease on Chinese social media. The paper finds that three nodal points strongly unite the online anti-African discourse: one, ‘unrestrained and promiscuous’ African men are carrying the viruses (such as AIDS and/or COVID-19); two, ‘unchaste’ Chinese women (and occasionally gay men) are receiving the virus; three, there is unidirectional transmission of these viruses from Africans to Chinese. Further, our research findings point to complicated and ambiguous relations between online racist sentiments, state censorship, and China-Africa relations.