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After the Korean War, when the first African-Americans arrived in our northern New Mexico valley to work in the sawmills, and their children enrolled in school, they had to be identified in the available categories: White, Hispanic, or Indian. Well, they obviously weren't Hispanic or Indian, so that just left White. I think everyone got a good laugh out of it.
SA that paragon of the people's struggle against The Man, is still essentially a racist country where 'black' = 'citizen'. It gets harder to take Zuma and the ANC seriously with each day.
Anyway it has more to do with diplomatic and military alliances with China than it does with any insane notion that Chinese = black. SA and China have some fairly close and strategic ties right now.
There is a very old -- thank god -- court case in California in which the issue was whether a witness was competent to testify as a witness in a criminal trial. Blacks (not the word they used in the case) were by law not competent witnesses under the circumstances. The witness in this case was Chinese. The court ruled that the witness was black and therefor could not testify. So I guess there is actually some precedent.
When I read this case in law school it was at once one of the most disturbing things I had ever encountered in my naive young life, and it was also very enlightening in a dark sort of way. I never looked at the world the same after that. It was bad enough that anyone could not be a witness because of race, but that a judge could use such twisted logic and not even seem to be embarrassed, blew me away.
