They don’t differ materially from American views of the continent.

By Warner Brown

China’s ambitions in Africa are well documented. Its annual trade with the resource-rich continent recently surpassed $200 billion, and Chinese agencies and firms have invested heavily in building badly needed roads, railways, and public buildings. Meanwhile, more than one million Chinese have reportedly left home to seek their fortunes in African nations.

Those ties may be drawing China and Africa closer, but that doesn’t mean everyday Chinese understand the continent terribly well. For example: “Why does South Africa have so many white people?” is the leading autocompleted result for queries about that country posed to Baidu, China’s largest search engine. Baidu’s autocomplete feature works similar to Google’s: when someone begins typing into the search box, an algorithm displays a list of suggested ways to finish the query, in part by combing the engine’s archives for previously popular searches. Those automatic suggestions often have the added benefit of sifting through layers of online discourse to uncover the profound and (often amusingly) mundane questions that often lead people to search for answers.

Below, Foreign Policy plots and translates the most common Chinese-language Baidu query associated with each African country onto the map below:

The leading queries for many African countries indicate that Chinese web users’ feelings about the continent mirror those of Westerners — they often associate it with violence, poverty, disease, and exotic dining habits. This is evident in country-by-country results but also is clear in searches about Africa as a whole.

Read more: Map: China’s Stereotypes of Africa, from ‘Chaotic’ Somalia to ‘Awesome’ Gambia

Source: FP