Racist AI Fantasies Are Spreading on China’s Internet – Anti-Black videos speak to popular prejudices.

>Anti-Black videos are the most pervasive, but anti-Indian videos peddling strikingly similar tropes are also shared. These videos are easy to find on social media platforms, including WeChat; Kuaishou; and TikTok’s Chinese version, Douyin, despite China’s generally strict controls on content.

>Regulations introduced in 2023 even specifically ban using AI to create racist content. While most videos don’t reveal which AI tools were used to make them, the watermarks on a few show that they were made using domestically developed products such as Alibaba’s Qwen or ByteDance’s Doubao and Jimeng.

>These videos come in three broad genres.

>The most common is “Chinese woman follows her African partner home and has a bad time.” These videos universally depict Africa (never a specific country) as desperately poor, socially backward, and rife with physical and sexual violence.

>The second type is rage-bait in the form of depictions of happy interracial couples—usually, but not always, Chinese women with African men.

>The third type is “Chinese woman rejects a Black man.” A common scenario is a woman rejecting a man who asks for her phone number while riding the subway. Often, it’s specified that it’s the subway in Guangzhou—a city with a sizable African community that’s repeatedly been the focus of racist anxiety.

Chinese Canadian here. Anti black prejudices are fairly common within the diaspora here but for whatever reason, it’s even more focused on Indians around where I live. Some of that makes sense since they are more direct competitors in schools and at jobs in Canada but it’s something I encounter even with my parents far more often than racism against black people.