If the price (or pay off) is high enough, or the sense of humour crude enough the possibilities are endless.
It’s this exact boundless freedom, plus a deeply ingrained racist ideology that has made an online Chinese industry I’ve spent the last year investigating possible.
The concept behind this industry isn’t such a foreign one – you pay to receive a video of someone from a land, world or reality far away from your own reading out a personalised greeting – made just for you.
Perhaps it’s your favourite actor from the noughties, commissioned to wish you a happy birthday. Or maybe it’s a greying politician congratulating you on exam success! It’s big business, and designed to connect ordinary people to the public figures they admire.
But the stars of this particular online show aren’t celebrities. They’re Africans. Men, women, and most disturbingly children.
For half a dollar a day, children are made to film such videos. They’re then sold for anything from 10 to 70 usd per 30-second video.
As a customer, you simply submit your order and requirements to the video maker or one of his numerous agents in China:
“This video is for friends who are about to get married, I hope the children can be energetic/pumped up! They shouldn’t shout the last line”, one such order reads.
To me, it’s a human zoo of sorts, reimagined for this new, digital, socially-distanced age. Where humans, from elsewhere in the world can gawk at the foreignness and often visible poverty of the Africans featured – all through the comfort of their Iphones and favourite social media and messaging apps. It places a distance between customer and costumed-performer that allows the former to avoid questions around the morality and regulation of this trade.
But in February 2020 one particular video exposed the even uglier underbelly of this industry.
A group of 15 or so African children are dressed in red uniform, standing around a blackboard bearing a Chinese phrase. A voice, off camera, then instructs them to repeat this phrase in Chinese: “I’m a black devil,” the kids chant, still smiling happily, “and my IQ is low!” They’re then made to cheer a celebratory “yeahhhh!” and flail their arms, before the video comes to an end. If you’re reading this, I implore you to open a new tab, and google the word “Hei gui” – it can be translated as Black monster or Black devil, but in practice, it’s no different in intended use to the N-word.
