Emmanuel treads carefully when he leaves campus. He likes his colleagues at the University of Wuhan, but people on the streets don’t take well to people who look like him. “It’s very bad,” he says. “When they see a black guy, they see a covid thing.”

Emmanuel, a pseudonym to shield the Tanzanian PhD student from punitive measures by Chinese officials, hustled hard to get his scholarship to study for a masters in management studies eight years ago. He grew up in a village in the north of Tanzania, the son of subsistence farmers. Getting the scholarship to study in China meant that he wouldn’t have to save up for tuition fees. He was the first person in his family to leave the country.

He was assigned to a university in Wuhan. When he first stepped off the plane he was overwhelmed by the levels of development and construction work in the city. “The roads, the airports, the train stations, literally everything was just amazing,” described Emmanuel. “I was like, ‘wow, this is a good country to live in.’”

He was similarly impressed by the level of consideration he was shown when he first stepped out of the airport, speaking no Mandarin and clutching his university admission letter. A taxi driver, taking pity on this lost foreigner, drove him right to the door of the university registration office, and helped with his bags.