A first reading of the “China” column by John Matshikiza (“Hoe’s my China nou?“, January 19) was offensive, but we didn’t want to overreact — perhaps he was being facetious, perhaps we weren’t meant to take his more xenophobic points to heart. But after reading his second “China” piece (“Sleaze: strictly for ‘Chinese’“, February 23) we are convinced of his anti-Chinese stance and, perhaps more importantly, concerned that your editorial board has fallen asleep.
The columns exhibit factual inaccuracies, prejudice and racism bordering on hate speech, as well as a good dose of sexism. Furthermore, he concludes the second piece with an incitement to (non)violence.
These columns reveal a break with journalistic ethics and a disappointing trend in recent Mail & Guardian articles more concerned with headlines than with more intelligaent pieces of carefully researched journalism.
Among the various factual inaccuracies, we give just two. First, CyrilÂdene is not the Chinatown. In fact, the various Chinese/Chinese South African communities of Johannesburg acknowledge two Chinatowns, one on Commissioner Street in the CBD and the newer one in Cyrildene.
Second, Matshikiza’s quip about the “reversal of the old days and whites are now honorary Chinese or something” is a common error. Legally, the Chinese were never “honorary whites”. Under the various pieces of apartheid legislation, the Chinese were classified as non-white until 1994, when, for the first time in their long history in this country, they were granted the vote. Only visiting Japanese had the “honour” of being “white” and that was only under the Group Areas Act.
The more serious issues raised by Matshikiza have to do with his racism and scaremongering. To measure the depths of his xenophobia and incitement to violence, merely substitute “Zulu” and Zulu analogues for “Chinese” and Chinese analogues in his January 19 diatribe: “This new Zulutown is a different story altogether. The suburb is owned and run by hardcore Zulus from KwaZulu-Natal itself. The lingua franca is Zulu, or whatever they speak out there. English is a foreign language … No use putting on a bunch of bravado and telling the dude, “Hau!” If you don’t sound like Shaka himself, you’re toast.”
Particularly ironic is his mockery of new Chinese immigrants’ inability to speak English, as if English were the mother tongue of most South Africans!
This is the kind of prejudice that stokes race riots; it brings to mind the demagoguery that preceded the terrible Cato Manor massacres of the 1950s, as well as earlier diatribes against Chinese in South African newspapers from as early as 1876. Despite his nostalgia for the familiar “mysterious fah-fee traders and inscrutable hawkers in fish and chips and chopsticks”, Matshikiza incites a new “yellow peril”. He warns his readers to be “aware”, “terrified” and “scared” of this new-wave of “hard-core Chinese from China itself”.
Matshikiza’s columns also show a lack of broader understanding. Many new Chinese immigrants are economic migrants, and many Chinese women, including those “scrawny Chinese girls”, have been tricked or coerced into coming to South Africa, trafficked here and forced to work as “masseuses” or sex workers.
Of course there are some Chinese (and white, African, Indian and coloured) racists. But is the M&G the appropriate place to out these people or incite violence? Or is this special treatment set aside for new Chinese immigrants only? And while there are some real concerns about China’s growing interests throughout Africa, Chinese triad activity in South Africa, Chinese South African exclusion from affirmative action legislation and Chinese as (potentially) targeted victims of economic crimes, Matshikiza doesn’t even begin to touch on these more pressing and controversial issues in any intelligent way. Why has the M&G allowed him to abuse his journalistic position?
Tu Huynh is a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University, New York. Yoon Jung Park is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Sociological Studies, University of Johannesburg