China "Beat The Black Devils!"

By Sandra Burton/Beijing

Officially, China is a champion of black-African interests. The government has denounced South Africa's policy of apartheid and devoted the lion's share of its scanty foreign aid to assisting 45 friendly African states. Beijing also gives scholarships to 1,600 black students each year to study at Chinese universities. Unofficially, though, many Chinese consider blacks racially inferior and question their government's aid to Africa when citizens at home are tightening their belts.

Last week those resentments flared into a weeklong upheaval involving some 5,000 demonstrators in the eastern city of Nanjing. The turmoil began on Christmas Eve, when a fracas broke out between a small group of African students and a security guard at the gate of Hehai University, which has the most black students of any Nanjing campus. According to official accounts, which were contested by foreign students, the Africans refused to register the names of their Chinese dates at a party. Chinese students heard a false report that the foreigners had killed the security guard and rampaged through the Africans' dormitory, looting expensive stereo equipment and smashing furniture. At least 13 people were injured in the melee. The Chinese then went on a hunt for the black students, filling the streets and shouting, "Beat the black devils!"

On Christmas Day, 70 Africans sought -- and got -- police escorts to the Nanjing train station so they could file complaints with their respective embassies in Beijing. As they marched through the streets, the Africans rallied foreign students from campuses of other universities along the way. At the station, riot troops herded roughly 150 foreign students, including four Americans, onto buses and confined them in a hotel 50 miles away. At week's end they were being held incommunicado while diplomats negotiated with Beijing officials for their release. Meantime, some demonstrators demanded that provincial-government leaders "punish the ruffians to promote the country's honor," while other Chinese students marched on the railway station, not knowing the foreigners had already been taken away.

Racial trouble has been brewing at Hehai since last November, when the authorities erected a wall around the African students' dormitory, ostensibly to "protect" the foreigners and their possessions from theft by jealous Chinese students. The Africans objected in a letter to university officials, denying any need for protection. Then they tore down the wall. The Chinese deducted the cost of the damages from the $75 state stipends that the black students collect each month. In reply, 54 African students occupied the campus bank that handled the penalty transaction, dispersing only after the university president promised full reimbursement.

Late in the week the mass protests showed some signs of subsiding. Officials denied the incidents had anything to do with racial discrimination, but the scars from the confrontation could prove to be lasting. "I'm actually glad I saw this side of China before I go," said Elizabeth Morrison, one of four American students released from the hotel in response to U.S. pressure. "Otherwise I would have left with a completely different impression of the country."