5/22/2018 In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black - China Real Time Report - WSJ

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CHINA REAL TIME REPORT

In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black

Jun 19, 2008 7 59 am HKT

A high court in South Africa ruled on Wednesday that Chinese-South Africans will be
reclassified as “black,” a term that includes black Africans, Indians and others who were
subject to discrimination under apartheid. As a result of this ruling, ethnically Chinese citizens
will be able to benefit from government affirmative action policies aimed at undoing the effects
of apartheid.

In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its
members were being discriminated against because they were being treated as whites and thus
failed to qualify for business contracts and job promotions reserved for victims of apartheid.
The association successfully argued that, since Chinese-South Africans had been treated
unequally under apartheid, they should be reclassified in order to redress wrongs of the past.

This is not the first time the classification of Chinese in

South Africa has changed. In fact, the racial status of
Chinese-South Africans has often shifted with the
nation’s political climate and its international relations.

Jacob Zuma, President of the African National

The first significant group of Chinese came to South Congress, with Hu Jintao in Beijing last week
(Reuters)
Africa in the early 20th century, before a formal system of
apartheid existed, to work in the gold mines. They were not encouraged to settle permanently
and by 1910 almost all the mine workers had been repatriated. Those who remained struggled
with racism and lived in separate communities based on language, culture and socio-economic
status.

As apartheid became enshrined in law with the ascendancy of the Afrikaner government in the
late 1940s, the Chinese were classified as “colored,” forced to live apart from whites, and were
denied educational and business opportunities along with the right to vote. But after South

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5/22/2018 In South Africa, Chinese is the New Black - China Real Time Report - WSJ

Africa established an economic alliance with Taiwan in the 1970s, Taiwanese immigrants were
welcomed as “honorary whites,” and other Chinese in South Africa began to be treated more
like whites. Although they never attained the formal “honorary white” status of Taiwanese,
Koreans and Japanese in South Africa and couldn’t vote, Chinese-South Africans were no
longer required to use segregated facilities, and in the early 1980s they were exempted from
some of the discriminatory laws that applied to other non-whites.

After apartheid ended in the early 1990s, the legal status of Chinese has remained in a gray
area, though they’ve generally been lumped together with whites and denied the post-
apartheid benefits available to other non-white groups.

South Africa has seen waves of immigrants and investment from China since 1994, and today
there are as many as 300,000 Chinese living in the South Africa. But the new court decision is
unlikely to benefit most of them or trigger another mass migration– it applies only to those
Chinese who were South African citizens before 1994 (and their descendants), a much smaller
number of around 10,000 to 12,000.

–Sky Canaves

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