New Research: Seeing Africans in China

A short review of Xuemeng Li, “Seeing Africans in China: comparing forms of racism and identifying controlled and less controlled environments,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2026).

A recently published article by Xuemeng Li in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies adds to the growing literature on race, racism and African presence in China. Based on interviews with 21 Chinese citizens conducted in 2023, the article asks an important question: what happens to racial attitudes when Chinese people actually interact with Africans?

One of the more interesting findings is that contact does not necessarily do what we might expect it to do. Li focuses particularly on three interviewees who had interacted with African students in Chinese universities: a former classmate, a laboratory colleague and a university professor. All three could recall positive encounters with individual Africans. Yet these experiences did not necessarily unsettle broader racialised ideas about Africans as a group.

This contradiction produces some of the strongest material in the article. One participant speaks positively about African classmates but remembers feeling anxious when encountering a group of Black men near a subway station. Another worked closely with a Kenyan colleague for several years and admired his abilities, but continued to reproduce stories about African men as a potential danger to Chinese women. Perhaps most strikingly, a university professor who had taught African students for years praised particular students while simultaneously describing African students as poorly disciplined, African art as “primitive,” and African men as morally suspect.

Li uses these contradictions to distinguish between what she calls “controlled” and “less controlled” environments. In institutional settings such as universities, where positive China–Africa relations are institutionally encouraged and interactions take place within professional norms, racism is more likely to remain subtle or coded. Outside those environments—or when people speak within their own social circles—racialised ideas can become considerably more explicit.

This is a useful argument because it moves the discussion away from the increasingly unproductive question of whether racism “exists” in China. After more than two decades of research on Africans in Guangzhou, African students, anti-Blackness and racialisation in China, there is little analytical value in continuing to treat that as an open question. The more interesting questions concern how racism works, where it becomes visible, how it intersects with institutions and power, and why positive interpersonal encounters so often coexist with deeply racialised understandings of Africans and Blackness.

At the same time, some aspects of the article deserve further discussion. Much of its theoretical apparatus comes from scholarship developed around race and racism in the United States, particularly the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Joe Feagin. Li is aware of the problem and repeatedly asks how far concepts developed through the history of white supremacy in the United States can travel to China. Yet the article sometimes seems caught between insisting on the specificity of Chinese racial formations and returning to American frameworks to explain them.

There is also a methodological limitation worth keeping in mind. Although the study includes 21 participants, the central argument rests heavily on three cases. The sample itself is overwhelmingly female, highly educated and middle class, with many participants having overseas experience. This does not invalidate the findings, but it makes the article better read as a close exploration of particular racialised narratives than as a picture of “Chinese public opinion” more generally.

Perhaps the most productive contribution of the article is therefore not simply further evidence of anti-Black racism in China. We already have considerable evidence of that. Rather, it shows how racialisation can coexist with familiarity, professional contact and even admiration. Knowing an African person does not necessarily dismantle ideas about “Africans.” Positive encounters with individuals can sit quite comfortably alongside racialised narratives about the group.

For those of us who have followed African presence in China for many years, this is an important point. The question is no longer simply whether increased contact between Africans and Chinese produces greater mutual understanding. The harder question is why, after years of contact, certain racialised stories about Africans remain remarkably difficult to dislodge.