Hundreds of Africans surrounded a police station in the Yuexiu District of Guangzhou on July 15, protesting the death of a Nigerian man allegedly caused by police pursuit.
According to the Guangzhou Institute of Urban Management, there are currently about 20,000 Africans applying for official residency in Guangzhou.
The Guangzhou police are said to have arrived at a local trade mart to check the residence registrations and passports of some of the African residents. A Nigerian man was pursued by the police and ended up falling to his death from an 18-meter (59-foot) building. His body was brought to the Kuangquan Police Station by hundreds of Africans during their protest.
According to Radio Free Asia, the police did not take coercive measures as they do with most petitioners; rather, they established security zones and allowed the protesters to continue to gather until eight in the evening. Representatives were sent by police station to negotiate with African representatives as well.
Some of the protesters told Hong Kong TV reporters that although they paid the appropriate legal fees to extend their stay, local officials did not provide them with necessary documents, and that the police were actually falsely accusing, pursuing, and arresting people in an attempt to extort money. They released people after receiving the money, the protestors said.
Deutsche Welle, a multi-media news broadcasting service based in Germany reports that the so-called “African streets” in Guangzhou is where the African immigrant population is most concentrated, and that Africans have become an important component of the foreign population of Guangzhou and other major cities in China.
Professor He Wenping, the director of the West Asia and Africa Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says that the Africans in China come mainly from Nigeria, Cameroon, Mali and Uganda, and are mostly engaged in businesses such as the sale of textiles, shoes, and small appliances.
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