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How a bad translation of ‘Black Lives Matter’ ended up enabling racist narratives on Chinese social media

· Written by Oiwan Lam

Categories: North America, U.S.A., Digital Activism, Ethnicity & Race, Human Rights, Language
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Chinese poster on #blacklivesmatter. Image from Liang Xiao Wen's Twitter.

As the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in the United States evolved into a global anti-racism movement, communities around the world were inspired to translate the protest slogan into their own languages.

The task, however, isn't always straightforward. On Chinese social media, there has been a lot of debate around what would the most appropriate translation of “Black Lives Matter” in Chinese — and the confusion contributed, perhaps unwittingly, to the spread of racist discourse among Chinese-speaking communities.

The most popular translation of the hashtag #blacklivesmatter or #BLM in Chinese is #黑命貴, which means “black lives are expensive” or “black lives are valuable.”

But describing someone’s life as expensive in Chinese usually implies that the person in question is from a privileged social class, as a few netizens have pointed out:

While some have proposed alternatives such as #黑人的命也是命 (“black lives are lives”), #黑人同命 (“black lives are the same”), and #黑命攸關 / #黑人生命攸關 (“‘black lives’ is an important issue to address”), those are rarely used.

Instead, the misleading translation seems to have caught on. @SlowZhu, a user who follows and supports the Hong Kong protests, noticed that it even appeared on a Netflix talk show, and urged the program to change it:

The “黑命贵” translation has been widely used by Chinese diaspora communities, in particular anti-CCP media outlets such as Epoch Times [9], Bannedbook.org [10], Aboluowang.com [11], and by post-1989 Chinese political dissents.

When the Chinese tag #黑命貴 appears on Twitter, the content usually includes negative views of the BLM movement.

For example, one video that appeared [12] on the top results of a search for #黑命貴 depicted a violent scene of a dark-skinned man beating up a Chinese woman in Guangzhou. The video was tagged with #BLM and in Chinese #黑命貴 (“black lives are expensive”), #黃命賤 (“yellow lives are cheap”), and #廣州 (“Guangzhou”).

Many tweets using this tag, such as this one [13] by @Sumerian0 from August 7 and this other one [14] by @lamfromorient from August 5, have resonated with supporters of the rightwing conspiracy theory that the BLM protests are organized by Antifa [15], which US President Donald Trump has threatened to designate as a “terrorist organization.” [16]

The flood of #黑命貴 (#black lives are expensive) discourse on Chinese social media has given Chinese-speaking communities around the world an impression that Chinese-Americans don't support the BLM protests.

However, there are many young Chinese-Americans who have been proactively addressing [17] the anti-black racism within their communities, sharing strategies [18] to talk about the issue with their family members, and participating in protests in the US and around the world: