Africans in a major Chinese city face evictions and harassment from local officials and businesses fearful of a coronavirus outbreak, a scandal that has created a backlash on the continent at the very moment China is working to build inroads there and outflank the United States.

“It definitely has sent outrage through African governments,” George Washington University’s Jennifer Cooke, who directs the Institute for African Studies, told the Washington Examiner.

Senior Chinese officials maintain that they have “zero tolerance for discrimination,” but Africans in the port city of Guangzhou have been subjected to "inhuman treatments," according to a joint rebuke issued by African ambassadors in Beijing. The offending practices include forced quarantines, enhanced coronavirus testing, and forced evictions.

"I've been sleeping under the bridge for four days with no food to eat,” Ugandan exchange student Tony Matthias told AFP. “I cannot buy food anywhere. No shops or restaurants will serve me.”

Guangzhou officials also ordered all Africans in the city to go into quarantine “regardless of their previous circumstances or how long they have been in Guangzhou.” They plan to monitor compliance by placing “a device on their door, and once they open the door, we will be alerted.”

A bloc of African ambassadors responded by declaring that the policy “has no scientific or logical basis and amounts to racism towards Africans in China” in a Friday statement. That’s a sharp rebuke of Chinese diplomats, who accused President Trump’s administration of “fear-mongering in a xenophobic way” during a dispute over the origins of the pandemic.

“Chinese engagement in Africa has always been really limited with its primary focus on African political elite and not the people,” former Liberian Public Works Minister W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, tweeted Monday. “Even corrupt African elite will respond to pressure from their people.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team added to the chorus of rebukes over the weekend. “The U.S. consulate general advises African Americans or those who believe Chinese officials may suspect them of having contact with nationals of African countries to avoid the Guangzhou metropolitan area until further notice,” the State Department advised Saturday.

That warning drew a complaint from China’s diplomatic corps. “This is neither moral nor responsible,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Monday. “Attempts to use the pandemic to drive a wedge between China and Africa are bound to fail.”

Yet the African diplomats also warned of consequences for such behavior. “We would also want to bring to your attention the possible backlash in our home countries of this obvious human rights violation,” the group of African ambassadors in Beijing said in a joint rebuke on Friday.

China has made good relations with Africa a priority in recent years, turning to the continent for natural resources as well as access to strategically significant transportation infrastructure. The close partnerships with the governments of developing countries have also enhanced China’s clout at the United Nations, to the chagrin of the U.S.

“It's kind of where that soft power battle is,” Cooke told the Washington Examiner. "China appeals to its rhetoric of ‘solidarity’ with the developing world: ‘Win-win: We treat you as equal partners. We're not imperial overlords. We don't have the same history of colonialism,’ for example. So those kinds of appeals to solidarity with African states has been an important part of their diplomatic outreach — to win friends and alliances, which in turn translates into votes and so forth.”

Those efforts could suffer due to the anger over the discriminatory policies, but Cooke and other analysts cautioned that economic ties and the authoritarian nature of some African governments could protect Beijing from major setbacks.

“They can always bribe their way into a contract in corrupt African autocracies,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin told the Washington Examiner. “When it comes to African democracies, however, any government that signs a deal with Beijing may very well find themselves out of office at the next election.”

Cooke, who observed that Trump’s team has not devoted as much attention to Africa as previous American administrations, suggested that the coronavirus pandemic might create “an opportunity” for the U.S. to fortify friendships in the region.

“The COVID crisis provides a huge opportunity for resetting engagement with Africa,” she said, noting that the U.S. is the leading international patron of African health systems. “How it handles the recovery from the crisis here but also in Africa — there are opportunities there, I think, to catch up on some ground that has been lost. And with China kind of making bad bungles like this one, there's an opportunity.”