The semiotics of Heiren (黑人): race, everyday language, and discursive complicities in a Chinese migrant community

ABSTRACT Among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, “Heiren (黑人)” (black person/people) is a ubiquitous term with many referents, encapsulating everyone from labourers to state officials, and ranging from an ethno-racial category to an individual pronoun. In English translation, the term bears on a contentious debate regarding racialisation in Africa-China relations. In this paper, based on seventeen months of fieldwork among Chinese migrants in Tanzania, I examine racialisation in everyday discourse, and also the politics of (white) ethnographic reportage on (non-white) racism. I focus on the social lives of the word heiren among Chinese, examining how it is deployed in heterogenous social situations and discursive contexts. I argue that the use of ‘Heiren’ flattens otherwise heterogeneous experiences with and attitudes towards Tanzanians, contributing to the construction of an African other. Specifically, talking about Heiren becomes a way that economically privileged but politically vulnerable Chinese migrants talk about the tense relations they have with Tanzanians. However, I argue the significance of Heiren talk is not that it defines ‘the Chinese’ in isolation as ‘racist’, but rather how it becomes discursively complicit with global anti-blackness.