Roberto CASTILLO
Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
ABSTRACT: In this article, I examine the scramble to represent Xiaobei, a neighbourhood in Guangzhou, China, as a case of epistemic extraction within Africa–China urban encounters. Drawing on my own ethnographic fieldwork and critical analysis of scholarly, journalistic, and artistic portrayals, I argue that framing Xiaobei as an “African place” was not merely a reflection of social reality but played an active role in shaping it: racialised and intersecting representations directly influenced how the neighbourhood was policed, perceived, and ultimately transformed. The article situates these practices of knowledge production within broader debates on colonial legacies, racialised urban imaginaries, and the ethics of anthropological and media fieldwork. By interrogating how representation can reinforce epistemic inequality and legitimise state-led intervention, I call for more reflexive, reciprocal, and decolonial approaches to studying transnational communities, mobility, and urban change in contemporary Chinese and African contexts.
KEYWORDS: Africa; Africans in China; China; epistemic extraction; knowledge production; racialisation; Xiaobei
Entering a hotspot of global knowledge production
When I first arrived in Guangzhou in late 2011 to begin my doctoral research on African presence in China, I found myself drawn to a pedestrian flyover bridging Dengfeng Village to Tianxiu Building and the bustling shopping streets beyond Huangshi East Road, in Xiaobei—a site that, seemingly ordinary at first glance, would reveal the deeper dynamics of knowledge extraction, racialised representation, and global spectacle that permeated the area for over two decades. Every afternoon, the footbridge teemed with people of diverse nationalities criss-crossing in constant motion (Figure 1). Yet amidst this movement, a small group of souvenir photographers had transformed the bridge into an informal studio, offering A4-size prints to foreign passersby for 20 yuan: portraits set against the unremarkable textures of overpasses and grey urban buildings. The service was open to all, but the photographers’ primary clientele (and the ones who most often stopped to pose) were Africans. The portraits, while mundane in background, captured moments of aspiration, success, and presence—material markers of a sojourn in China, intended perhaps for family albums or remittance-driven narratives of achievement. In some images, subjects posed with subtle gestures of arrival or rootedness: touching trees, standing tall, or smiling toward the lens with quiet assertion.
Over several weeks of casual conversations with the photographers, I learned that one of them, Zeng, had amassed thousands of such images. These personal artefacts, originally exchanged in quick transactions, would soon become commodities in another economy of representation. A foreign photographer, working independently, persuaded the bridge photographers to sell their archives, promising exhibitions and a book in the West. Questions of consent, authorship, and ownership seemed distant to those selling portraits on the bridge but, for me, this encounter crystallised the deeper tensions I would continue to witness during my fieldwork: the rush to document, extract, and circulate knowledge about Xiaobei (and specifically about the “African presence” there), often without reciprocal engagement with the very people whose lives made the space dynamic.
In those early days of my doctoral fieldwork, I had not yet grasped the depth of the complexities I was about to encounter, but the ethical ambiguities of that moment lingered. My initial aim was modest: to locate the gathering spots of African communities across the sprawling megalopolis. What I found instead was a dynamic, multilayered urban landscape—a field increasingly populated by journalists, scholars, artists, and other knowledge producers, each attempting to frame Xiaobei through their own agendas and theoretical lenses. I could not have anticipated that my own presence, alongside that of many others, would soon become part of a broader scramble to represent Xiaobei, a neighbourhood that would come to epitomise both the Afro-Chinese encounter and the structural asymmetries of contemporary knowledge production. That fleeting encounter on the footbridge (which at first appeared to me as a simple moment of street-level transactions) offered an early glimpse into the dynamics of representation and extraction that would come to shape not only my understanding of knowledge production in the context of “Africans in Guangzhou,” but also the writing of this article.
Knowledge extraction and the “scramble” to publish
This article argues that between 2010 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Xiaobei emerged as a multilayered site of intensive scholarly, journalistic, and visual attention—attention frequently shaped by problematic processes of epistemic extraction. The metaphorical “scramble to publish,” as my supervisor once described it, captures the competitive, neoliberal logic underpinning these engagements. While often framed as anthropological or documentary knowledge production, this scramble frequently resembled colonial-style extraction: scholars, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, and artists (both international and Chinese and often operating through institutions in the Global North) selectively mined Xiaobei for data, images, and narratives. Within this dynamic, African and Chinese communities were rarely granted interpretive authority, remaining primarily subjects of representation rather than co-authors of knowledge.
The competitive rush to represent Xiaobei thus exemplifies racialised and extractive epistemic practices that reproduce long-standing colonial hierarchies. Operating within neoliberal frameworks, these practices commodify knowledge and imagery for scholarly prestige, institutional gain, and media visibility, reinforcing a global division of intellectual labour that privileges scholars and institutions with greater access to epistemic capital while marginalising local perspectives and participants. By presenting extraction as a neutral, or even benevolent, form of inquiry, they obscure the asymmetries they reproduce, raising urgent ethical and methodological concerns around accountability, reciprocity, and positionality in contemporary research.
To clarify my analytical approach, this article distinguishes explicitly between anthropological knowledge production and knowledge extraction. Ideally, anthropological knowledge production encompasses the generation, interpretation, and dissemination of insights through reflexive, ethical, and collaborative research practices. It recognises asymmetries of power and positionality and strives for reciprocal, transparent engagement. Knowledge extraction, in contrast, refers to practices in which information is appropriated from communities without meaningful dialogue or accountability—practices that reinforce epistemic inequalities, reducing local subjects to objects of study while privileging external interpretations and institutional agendas. In Xiaobei, these extractive practices were frequently racialised and colonial in character, exemplified by the routine imposition of Euro-American theoretical frameworks onto representations of African and Chinese lives, flattening their complexity into legible tropes for distant audiences (see Castillo 2021).
Building on this, I propose an additional distinction between “knowledge extraction” (i.e. the appropriation of narratives, data, or cultural content) and “epistemic extraction,” which points to deeper structural processes through which dominant institutions and actors assert control not only over what is known, but also over how knowledge is defined, valued, and legitimised (Alcoff 2022; Grosfoguel 2019). This distinction enables an examination not only of what was taken from Xiaobei, but of the epistemological conditions making such extraction both intelligible and profitable.
Methodology and reflexive positioning
This article draws on a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, anthropological vignettes, archival research, and critical literature analysis grounded in a reflexive engagement with my own role in the field. My aim is not simply to discuss how social life in Xiaobei was documented, but to interrogate the processes by which representations of the neighbourhood were extracted, constructed, made relevant, and disseminated.
As noted earlier, my initial fieldwork began in late 2011, extending over multiple visits during an 18-month period, and included participant observation, informal conversations with traders, residents, and knowledge producers, as well as extensive fieldnotes. As a brown Mexican male researcher based in Hong Kong, proficient in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, and conversant in Mandarin, I occupied an ambiguous position: simultaneously insider and outsider to the social worlds I navigated. My linguistic repertoire and racialised (and gendered) presence shaped perceptions of my identity, influencing both my interactions and access. This positionality provided unique insights but also structured the scope of my engagement, the forms of trust available to me, and my interpretations of local dynamics. Although the active fieldwork phase eventually concluded, my ongoing critical reflection and scholarly engagements with Xiaobei have continued for over fifteen years, deepening my analytical perspective.
Alongside fieldwork, the arguments presented here rely on a critical literature analysis of over a hundred academic articles, journalistic pieces, and books referencing Xiaobei, Tianxiu, Dengfeng, and Sanyuanli. I employed thematic coding techniques (initially using NVivo software, later supplemented by cross-referencing and theme-generation with NotebookLM) to identify recurrent framings, conceptual tropes, and gaps in this extensive literature. Rather than citing each source individually, I synthesise broader narrative patterns and epistemic tendencies that have collectively shaped the representation of Xiaobei in both academic and media discourses. My approach aligns with traditions of Foucauldian discourse analysis and critical discourse studies, methodologies attuned to the ways language not only reflects but also actively produces regimes of knowledge and power. By examining how key terms and concepts are articulated, circulated, and legitimised, I highlight the structural and ideological foundations underpinning representational practices. While my critique highlights systemic patterns of epistemic extraction, it does not assume uniformity of intent across the literature. The reviewed materials span authors based in Western, Chinese and, more marginally, African institutions, illustrating that complicity in extractive representation is not reducible to geography but shaped by positionality, institutional pressures, and uneven epistemic authority. An appendix listing all academic and media sources reviewed is provided at the end of the article.
Given my own participation in earlier processes of knowledge production about Xiaobei, I was complicit in the very epistemic asymmetries I now seek to critique. Writing from a vantage point more than a decade after my initial engagements, I adopt a reflexive stance that interrogates not only external representations but also my earlier practices of knowledge production. In doing so, I foreground accountability, ethical responsibility, and methodological humility, concerns that extend beyond the historical specificities of the 2010s.
In the sections that follow, I critically trace Xiaobei’s emergence as a site of global imagination, first through an analysis of an ethnographic and artistic controversy involving the photographers in the pedestrian bridge described earlier, and subsequently through a critical review of academic and journalistic portrayals of the neighbourhood. I argue that such portrayals (constructing Xiaobei as a transnational trade hub, an ethnic ghetto, a site of contested sovereignty, a zone of policing, and a locus of public health anxieties) contributed directly to the neighbourhood’s regulation, transformation, and gradual erasure. The article concludes by linking these insights to broader theoretical discussions about knowledge production and epistemic extraction.
The photographic archive controversy: knowledge extraction in practice
The archive becomes art: the foreign photographer’s project
The informal and ephemeral economy of bridge photography, alluded to in the introduction, took an unexpected turn when Daniel Traub, a Mandarin-speaking American photographer of Chinese and European descent, began to frequent the footbridge. Presenting himself as a documentarian interested in the social life of Xiaobei, he soon convinced the souvenir photographers to collaborate with him. His proposal was simple yet far-reaching: rather than allowing their daily images to vanish, overwritten by new ones at the end of each day, the photographers would begin to preserve them. He provided them with portable hard drives, asking them to save as many photographs as possible.
The photographer’s stated goal was to curate a visual archive capturing a pivotal moment in the history of China and Afro-Chinese relations. From thousands of daily transactions, he amassed what he described to me in one of our early conversations as a corpus of over ten thousand images, portraits of Africans framed against the mundane backdrops of urban Guangzhou. These photographs, which may have been originally intended as intimate souvenirs for family and friends back in Africa, were recontextualised as documentary evidence of transnational encounters, migration, and the precarious cosmopolitanism of a globalising China.
In the years that followed, Traub published a photobook (Little North Road,[1] English for Xiao Bei Lu), blending his own photographs of the bridge and its surroundings with those taken by the souvenir photographers. He also curated exhibitions based on this archive in prominent galleries in the United States and China. Presented as an artistic project, the photobook framed Xiaobei through a lens of human connection, marginality, and urban transformation. The transformation of ephemeral, transactional images into globally circulating artworks raises profound questions about knowledge extraction, ownership, and the racialised politics of representation. As the project gained acclaim abroad, the subjects of these images (Africans who had once posed on a bridge in Guangzhou) remained largely unconsulted and unacknowledged in the processes that turned their likenesses into objects of scholarly and artistic fascination.
The academic controversy: pushback and defences
The archive created through these transactions would eventually attract the attention not only of the art world but also of academic networks concerned with research ethics and representation. As the American photographer prepared to publish the photobook and curate exhibitions, he circulated an announcement within an international academic research network that I am part of. In his message, he framed the project as an artistic exploration of migration, memory, and globalisation of Chinese cities, showcasing the collected photographs alongside his own documentary images of Xiaobei.
Initial responses from network members (particularly African and European scholars) raised significant concerns. Central to their critiques were questions of consent, representation, and ownership: had the individuals in the photographs granted permission for their images to be publicly displayed or repurposed for artistic consumption? Could an artistic rationale absolve the photographer of the responsibilities typically incumbent upon ethnographers or social researchers? What ethical guidelines, if any, should govern transnational projects operating at the intersection of art, anthropology, and documentary practice? And crucially, who owns a set of images taken in China, portraying non-citizen African subjects, curated by an American, and published in Europe? At the time, these concerns were voiced by academics and practitioners who argued that the project’s framing glossed over the power asymmetries inherent in its production—between those who sold their labour for daily survival, those who posed for the images, and those who curated, exhibited, and profited from them within global art and academic circuits.
Traub defended his project by positioning it outside the purview of academic research ethics. As an artist, he argued, he was not bound by the same consent protocols that governed anthropological fieldwork. He asserted that the photographs captured public life not private moments, and that the collaboration with the souvenir photographers constituted sufficient local engagement. His responses revealed a fundamental tension between different epistemic traditions: while anthropology, particularly in its postcolonial iterations, demands reflexivity and accountability toward research subjects, documentary art often claims broader latitude under the banner of creative freedom.
Despite sustained criticisms, the project moved forward. In a late-stage effort to block the project, a group of Chinese academics based at Western institutions formally challenged the German publisher set to release the book, arguing that the publication violated both Chinese and German laws on image rights and lacked sufficient ethical grounding. They contended that the souvenir photographers lacked the authority to transfer consent on behalf of the subjects and that the original purpose of the images (as personal mementos) was being distorted through their public exhibition. The publisher, backed by its legal team, ultimately dismissed these concerns, and the book was published in 2016.
It is my contention that this controversy highlights the colonial underpinnings of contemporary knowledge extraction. It exposes how Western institutions (academic, artistic, and commercial) continue to claim authority over the representation of non-Western subjects, even against objections from scholars and individuals originating from the places and communities being represented.
Extraction, ethics, and racialised knowledge production
The story of the souvenir photographers and the foreign-curated archive vividly exemplifies the processes of knowledge extraction that this article seeks to interrogate. The photographers’ images, produced within an informal, precarious economy of survival, were recontextualised into an archive, an exhibition, and a book—objects of prestige within global artistic and academic circuits. Yet the individuals who appeared in those images, and even those who created them (internal migrants themselves) remained structurally marginalised in the narratives crafted about them. Their agency, consent, and intentions were subordinated to broader artistic, documentary, and theoretical agendas.
This process of extraction did not unfold in a political vacuum. It relied on structural inequalities that enabled Western actors to appropriate, frame, and distribute representations of African and Chinese individuals without meaningful participation from those depicted. Moreover, it mirrored historical patterns of colonial epistemic extraction, where information, images, and experiences from marginalised populations were gathered, classified, and circulated for metropolitan audiences without reciprocity or redress.
The racialised dimensions of this extraction are particularly stark. The visual archive, the photobook, and the exhibitions overwhelmingly focused on African bodies, reinforcing a long-standing tradition in which blackness is rendered hyper-visible, exoticised, and marked as foreign. In furthering the narrative construction of Xiaobei as an “African enclave,” the project reproduced the racial logics that frame blackness as otherness, while simultaneously erasing the area’s broader multicultural composition: including Middle Eastern, South Asian, and diverse Chinese presences.
Through this case, the complexities and tensions of knowledge production in Xiaobei become unmistakable. The bridge photographers’ images, the foreign photographer’s project, and the academic controversy that ensued collectively expose the blurred lines between documentation and exploitation, between representation and objectification. They compel us to ask difficult but necessary questions: Who has the right to represent others? Under what conditions is knowledge produced, extracted, and circulated? Whose interests are served by the commodification of lived experiences?
In this context, this controversy does not simply illustrate an isolated ethical lapse. It reveals the broader dynamics of epistemic inequality, racialised representation, and colonial continuities that structure contemporary forms of anthropological and journalistic engagement with spaces like Xiaobei. It highlights how the very acts of seeing, recording, and narrating are never innocent, but are always entangled with histories and structures of power.
Framing Xiaobei as an “African place”: knowledge production and racialisation
The dynamics surrounding the photographic archive serve as a microcosm of the broader patterns that characterised anthropological knowledge production about Xiaobei throughout the 2010s. While the footbridge controversy revealed how everyday encounters could become global spectacles, it represented just one among numerous instances in which narratives about Xiaobei were crafted, circulated, and contested, in similar ways.
In what follows, I examine how these representations collectively contributed to the epistemic construction of Xiaobei as an “African place”—a racialised and extractive framing that not only oversimplified complex social realities but had tangible effects on the neighbourhood’s socio-political trajectory. Throughout the 2010s, the epistemic construction of Xiaobei emerged through an expansive archive of scholarly and media materials. Hundreds of academic articles, books, documentaries, and journalistic pieces sought to document the African and broader foreign presence in Xiaobei. However, these accounts frequently simplified the neighbourhood’s multifaceted socio-cultural landscape, fitting it into predetermined theoretical frameworks such as ethnic enclaves (Li, Lyons and Brown 2012), informal economies (Giese and Liang 2018; Lan 2015), and low-end globalisation (Carrier and Mathews 2020), along with popular media narratives of “Chocolate Cities” (Castillo 2014; Bodomo 2012) and “Little Africas” (Gillet 2013). Such selective interpretative frameworks obscured the diverse and multilayered interactions among transnational and Chinese internal migrants, directly contributing to the racialisation of Xiaobei, which was often depicted as an unregulated zone of foreignness and blackness within a major Chinese city (see Lan 2015). By reinforcing reductive narratives that emphasised blackness, exoticism, and illegality, knowledge producers actively influenced public perceptions and state responses, reshaping Xiaobei’s physical and social landscapes.
This framing was not merely descriptive but instrumental: it advanced specific academic, media, and policy agendas by emphasising foreignness and blackness. Conversely, acknowledging the neighbourhood’s majority Chinese demographic would have diminished the narrative appeal and explanatory power offered by the “Africans in China” script within global discourses on migration, “race,” and urban transformation. Rather than accurately representing the area’s complexity, these accounts selectively curated aspects of Xiaobei’s multicultural environment, highlighting its African presence while marginalising others. My critical engagement with literature and media coverage reveals how reductive narratives of ethnicity, mobility, migration, trade, and sovereignty converged to solidify Xiaobei’s image as an enclave of blackness and foreignness within the Chinese urban imaginary. These editorial choices by journalists and scholars had material consequences, translating into policy rationales, surveillance practices, and popular perceptions that ultimately contributed to the transformation and decline of Xiaobei’s once-vibrant transnational spaces. I include myself in this critique: during the early stages of my research, I participated in forms of representation that retrospectively contributed to the very dynamics I now interrogate. As noted earlier, my intention here is not to assign blame to individual actors but to critically analyse how discursive formations (such as the “Africans in Guangzhou” one) emerge, circulate, and gain traction within uneven terrains of global knowledge production.
Xiaobei as a transnational trade hub
From the outset, Xiaobei was frequently depicted in both academic and journalistic narratives as a vibrant node of transnational commerce linking China to Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia (Li, Lyons and Brown 2012; Gilles 2015; Carling 2017). In this framing, the neighbourhood appeared as a space where globalisation materialised in everyday forms: where African traders sourced goods for resale in their home countries, and where informal networks of commerce thrived beyond the regulatory oversight of the state (Haugen 2019; Kohnert 2016). Scholars such as Mathews, Lin, and Yang (2017) and Marfaing and Thiel (2015), among many others, stressed Xiaobei’s position within circuits of “low-end globalisation,” emphasising the entrepreneurial dynamism of African traders navigating a globalising Chinese economy (Carrier and Mathews 2020; Elochukwu 2019).
While this narrative acknowledged the agency of African traders as economic actors, it also carried with it selective emphases and omissions. In the broader academic and journalistic literature, the informal and often precarious nature of trade in Xiaobei was frequently highlighted, while broader patterns of mutual interdependence between African traders and Chinese internal migrants were largely underexplored (Bork-Hüffer et al. 2016; Hu 2019). The portrayal of Xiaobei as an informal trade hub often leaned into an exoticising language that implicitly marked the area as existing outside the norms of regulated, “legitimate” economic activity. In doing so, these narratives naturalised a vision of African entrepreneurship as existing on the margins, reinforcing perceptions of informality, risk, illegality, and otherness.
More significantly, the focus on transnational trade, while empirically grounded, functioned as a selective epistemic construction. It privileged a reading of Xiaobei through the lens of material circulation and exchange but often neglected the complex sociocultural affective dynamics that underpinned these interactions: the cohabitation of African, Middle Eastern, and diverse Chinese communities; the struggles over legal status, local belonging, identity, and aspiration; and the negotiations of everyday life in a contested urban environment. In this way, the image of Xiaobei as a transnational trade hub, while ostensibly celebratory of global flows, ultimately contributed to an epistemic extraction that rendered the neighbourhood as a spectacular node of exotic commerce, rather than a deeply entangled site of multicultural negotiation, aspiration, and urban transformation (Kohnert 2016; Carrier and Mathews 2020).
Xiaobei as a migrant enclave and ethnic ghetto
Another dominant narrative in academic and media portrayals was the framing of Xiaobei as a migrant enclave, often inflected by racialised metaphors of ghettoisation. Labels such as “Chocolate City” (Li, Lyons and Brown 2012) and “Little Africa” (Gillet 2013) circulated widely, casting Xiaobei not merely as a transnational trading hub but as a racially distinct and socially bounded space. This imaginary was reinforced through references to Xiaobei as “the most African neighbourhood” in China (Mathews, Lin, and Yang 2017), a characterisation that spatially encoded blackness and otherness into the urban landscape. Sensationalised and unsubstantiated claims also circulated widely in online forums and media, alleging that up to 500,000 Africans were living in Guangzhou despite a lack of credible demographic evidence (see Castillo 2021).
These representations often borrowed heavily from North American urban sociology, particularly theories of ethnic enclaves and inner-city ghettoisation developed in relation to African American and immigrant populations (Zhang 2008). However, applying such models to the Chinese context overlooked the specific socio-historical processes shaping Guangzhou’s urban transformations. In particular, the legacy of chengzhongcun (urban villages) and internal migration dynamics complicate straightforward readings of ethnic concentration. As Lan (2017) and Liu and Li (2021) note, the social geographies of Africans in Xiaobei were shaped as much by visa regimes and informal housing access as by cultural cohesion or community agency.
Furthermore, the “ethnic enclave” designation has been critically assessed for its analytical limitations. Jin, Bolt, and Hooimeijer (2021) argue that applying this model to Africans in Guangzhou obscures both the multi-ethnic character of neighbourhoods like Xiaobei and the structural constraints (such as racial profiling and regulatory marginalisation) that produce spatial clustering. As Huynh and Park (2018) highlight, African migrants often found themselves cast as the “quintessence of foreignness,” with blackness functioning as a visual marker of non-belonging and urban disorder.
This racialised framing of Xiaobei, as a bounded site of African presence, was not only discursive but material. Huang (2020) demonstrates how blackness in Guangzhou came to signify rurality and low suzhi (“quality”), echoing the exclusionary logics faced by internal rural migrants. As a result, African residents were not only segregated spatially but also symbolically distanced from modern urban citizenship. Even the vibrant multi-ethnic interactions and commercial dynamism of the area were routinely eclipsed by narratives of social isolation and foreign illegality. In privileging racial and cultural difference as the defining feature of the “ghetto” at the centre of Guangzhou, knowledge producers reinforced the epistemic construction of the area as an “African place”: a framing that distorted empirical realities and fed into broader processes of marginalisation, surveillance, and exclusion.
Xiaobei as an extraterritorial zone and site of sovereignty contestation
As narratives of Xiaobei evolved, a recurrent theme in both academic and media portrayals was the depiction of the neighbourhood as an extraterritorial zone—an exceptional space imagined as operating beyond the normative reach of Chinese state authority. In this framing, Xiaobei appeared not only as a node of foreign presence but as a “borderland within the city”: a liminal zone where racialised foreignness, informality, and perceived illegality converged to challenge the state’s capacity to govern urban space (Wilczak 2018; Giese and Liang 2018; Huang 2019).
African traders, in particular, were portrayed as carving out semi-autonomous social and commercial spheres that resisted state oversight. Popular narratives underscored recurring visa inspections, intensified surveillance, and periodic crackdowns on the sanfei (“three illegals”) : illegal entry, residence, and employment, contributing to the securitisation of the neighbourhood (Lan 2019; Huang 2019). Scholars traced how state anxieties over sovereignty and urban order were compounded by moments of political sensitivity, such as police raids that triggered protests by Africans in Guangzhou in 2009 and 2012, the 2014 Ebola crisis, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (Castillo 2016; Mathews, Lin, and Yang 2017; Castillo and Amoah 2020).
Within academic discussions, this representation of Xiaobei as a quasi-extraterritorial zone is linked to overlapping and contested territorial regimes. Giese and Liang (2018) describe the area as an “African territory” constituted through quotidian practices, market logics, and state–migrant power constellations. Here, African traders’ spatial agency is neither autonomous nor apolitical—it is continually recalibrated in response to shifting state strategies, from informal tolerance to formal suppression. Migrant infrastructure (such as hospitality networks and informal logistics chains) once seen as evidence of entrepreneurial adaptation (Haugen 2019), came under heightened scrutiny, with state responses often targeting the very materialities that enabled mobility and cross-border exchange.
Rather than a zone detached from governance, Xiaobei was in fact subjected to an overdetermined form of governance—what Huang (2019) terms “racialised policing”—in which the visibility of blackness became entangled with the presumed threat of disorder. The expansion of immigration controls, the criminalisation of overstaying, and intensified raids reflected not only state responses to unauthorised migration but also deeper efforts to reassert symbolic and territorial control (Hu 2019).
The perceived erosion of state authority in Xiaobei thus invited not only administrative interventions, but epistemic ones. State actors, scholars, and journalists alike participated in reconstructing Xiaobei as a sovereignty problem, reinforcing tropes of chaos, illegality, and racialised disorder. This construction had material consequences: successive rounds of policing, urban renewal, and demolition reshaped the area physically and socially, displacing traders, discouraging congregation, and diminishing the informal infrastructures that once sustained transnational mobilities (Lan 2017, 2019; Gilles 2015).
In this light, Xiaobei’s framing as an extraterritorial enclave obscured the very real and uneven forms of governance that operated within it. The neighbourhood did not escape the state—it was folded into an intensified regime of racialised control and spatial discipline that applied to both foreigners and internal ethnic minorities. These dynamics illuminate how sovereignty is not merely asserted at borders but continuously produced and contested within urban everyday life. Far from being a space of legal ambiguity, Xiaobei became a symbol of how global racial formations and national sovereignty anxieties intersect under the conditions of China’s urban transformation and global entanglement. By selectively highlighting narratives of disorder and foreignness, knowledge producers (perhaps unwittingly and even paradoxically) helped legitimise state practices of surveillance, policing, and urban restructuring, deepening both epistemic and material inequalities.
Xiaobei as a policed and controlled space
A prominent thread in both academic and journalistic representations of Xiaobei concerns policing, surveillance, and the broader mechanisms of social control. As portrayals of Xiaobei solidified around the tropes of the African enclave and the extraterritorial zone, they were accompanied by accounts of systematic state monitoring and immigration enforcement, particularly targeting African residents and traders. Reports detailed regular visa inspections, targeted raids, the presence of special patrols, and increasingly restrictive measures aimed at individuals perceived as overstayers or sanfei migrants (Huang 2020; Lan 2017).
Scholars documented how Xiaobei became one of Guangzhou’s most heavily policed areas, not due to an exceptional incidence of criminal activity, but as a result of its symbolic association with foreignness, blackness, and illegality. Huang (2020) argues that this racialised governance was structurally incentivised by the Public Security apparatus, which targeted black bodies as a visible proxy for immigration enforcement. These practices were further legitimated through spatialised discourses of disorder that cast Xiaobei as a zone of risk, despite its role as a site of coexistence and economic dynamism (see Castillo 2014).
Accounts of daily inspections, arbitrary passport checks, and raids that disproportionately focused on African communities were substantiated by multiple sources (Elochukwu 2019; Bork-Hüffer et al. 2016). Migrants without legal documentation often avoided public spaces entirely, fearing detention or deportation. Lan (2017) showed how these practices formed part of a larger racialised security regime, wherein urban governance frameworks incorporated policing, spatial surveillance, and informal cooperation with religious and community organisations to manage migrant populations.
Crucially, the construction of Xiaobei as a policed and dangerous space was not an empirical inevitability but an epistemic project. It involved the selective amplification of isolated incidents (such as the 2009 crackdown and attempted escape by African traders) into broader claims about lawlessness and threat. These narratives served to naturalise aggressive policing strategies and helped produce an urban imaginary in which African presence was both hypervisible and pathologised (as noted by Huang 2020; and Lan 2017).
In reducing the complexity of Xiaobei’s social world to one of criminality and irregularity, media and scholarly portrayals eclipsed everyday forms of negotiation, resilience, and coexistence that defined life in the neighbourhood. Once again, knowledge production (media, academic, and state-driven) participated in reinforcing a racialised discourse of security that justified exclusionary state practices, deepened material vulnerabilities, and reified Xiaobei as a space to be contained rather than understood.
Xiaobei and public security health concerns
Health crises in the last decade contributed to the entrenchment of racialised imaginaries of Xiaobei as a space of danger, disorder, and contagion. During the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and again during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Africans in Guangzhou, particularly those in Xiaobei, were discursively linked to public health threats. These associations revived long-standing colonial tropes that conflated blackness with disease, criminality, and illegality (Castillo and Amoah 2020; Huang 2020).
Even in the absence of epidemiological evidence, local media and online forums played a central role in amplifying fears about African communities as potential carriers of HIV/AIDS or Ebola (Lan 2017). These narratives were not new: earlier portrayals had already established a racialised grammar that marked African bodies as vectors of threat, often bundled with allegations of drug use, sex offences, and overstaying visas (Lan 2017; Huang 2020). The criminalisation of blackness intersected with pathologisation, fusing moral panic with disease anxiety.
As Huang (2020) has shown, officials openly cited public health as one of the reasons for intensifying immigration control against African “illegals”. In public discourse, health and hygiene concerns became a palatable register for expressing deeper racial anxieties, allowing punitive measures to appear rational and necessary. This framing justified exceptional interventions: African residents were subjected to mandatory quarantines, evictions, and public suspicion during both crises—even when the broader epidemiological risk was not rooted in their communities.
These narratives extended and intensified existing patterns of surveillance and exclusion. In treating Africans as latent threats to public health, the state and media helped legitimise repressive policing tactics and everyday forms of discrimination. Rather than fostering structural understandings of vulnerability, transnational mobility, or the uneven effects of global health crises, these portrayals reasserted a racialised logic that rendered Xiaobei not only foreign, but toxic.
In this context, health crises functioned as discursive accelerants within an already racialised urban field. The portrayal of Xiaobei as a potential epidemiological time bomb bolstered the epistemic framing of the neighbourhood as unregulated, risky, and alien. Through selective amplification of fear, knowledge producers across media and institutional domains helped to dismantle the social legitimacy of Xiaobei’s transnational spaces. What was once a vibrant, if precarious, site of Afro-Chinese exchange was gradually transformed into a target of suspicion, control, erasure, and research.
Racialised knowledge production and urban mediatisation
The thematic portrayals of Xiaobei (as a transnational trade hub, a migrant enclave, a site of sovereignty contestation, a zone of intensified policing, and a locus of public health anxiety) collectively reveal that knowledge production about the neighbourhood has never been neutral. These narratives relied on selective amplification, representational shortcuts, and epistemic filtering that racialised and flattened a dynamic urban space. By emphasising tropes of blackness, disorder, and exceptionality, media and academic accounts rendered Xiaobei legible to global audiences through frames that obscured its multiscalar entanglements, internal diversity, and everyday social life.
These representational practices were not merely symbolic; they carried material consequences, shaping how Xiaobei was governed, policed, and ultimately transformed. The symbolic casting of Xiaobei as an “African place,” especially when circulated through extractive scholarly and journalistic registers, contributed directly to its marginalisation. Narratives that exoticised or pathologised Afro-Chinese urban presence helped legitimise surveillance, redevelopment, and exclusionary state interventions. In this sense, the tensions explored in the photographic archive controversy reverberate across the broader field of media and scholarly representations of Xiaobei: acts of documentation that simultaneously extract, racialise, transform, and displace.
Here, the notion of “urban mediatisation” (adapted from Tornberg and Uitermark’s (2022) discussion of “planetary gentrification”) helps illuminate the entangled dynamics between representation and spatial transformation. They describe mediatisation-as-transformation as a process that “tilts balances over place and destabilises existing land-use arrangements by allowing urban space to be experienced and consumed at a distance” (Tornberg and Uitermark 2022). Viewed through this lens, Xiaobei’s trajectory was shaped not merely by observation but by a process in which journalistic, visual, and academic attention rendered the neighbourhood hypervisible and symbolically saturated. As noted earlier, over more than two decades, dozens of media and academic reports—both within China and abroad—repeated the inflated claim that 500,000 Africans lived in the neighbourhood. This visibility triggered concrete interventions: intensified policing, targeted redevelopment, and displacement. Mediatisation, in this context, was not a by-product of representation—it was a driver of urban change.
Like gentrification and touristification, phenomena increasingly animated by digital imaginaries, urban mediatisation reorganises space through circuits of mediated attention. What began in Xiaobei as fieldwork, photography, or documentarian curiosity evolved into an apparatus of visibility that legitimised state action and infrastructural overhaul. These dynamics, embedded in asymmetrical flows of capital and epistemic authority, often mirror the extractive logics of coloniality: the commodification of space, the displacement of communities, and the reconfiguration of urban life through regimes of consumption and control. In this sense, the circuits that framed Xiaobei as exceptional, foreign, and racialised were not neutral—they participated in its undoing, sharing a strong structural affinity with broader colonial formations of place-making, spatial (re)appropriation, and profiting.
This mediatised transformation—what we might call a condition of epistemic overexposure—is central to understanding the racialised and extractive dynamics that shaped Xiaobei’s global legibility and, eventually, its fate. To emphasise: Representational circuits did not simply reflect Xiaobei; they actively participated in its undoing. Understanding these dynamics requires interrogating not only what is said about places like Xiaobei, but how representational power circulates within global systems of knowledge production. The racialised and securitised construction of Xiaobei reveals a broader condition within contemporary anthropology and media work: the deep entanglement of knowledge production with forms of epistemic and spatial dispossession. In the following section, I explore the theoretical and ethical implications of this entanglement, advocating for a critical reorientation—one that highlights accountability, resists representational monopolies, and remains attentive to the material stakes of how field sites are framed, theorised, and consumed.
Coloniality, power, and the global politics of knowledge
Drawing on critiques of extractive practices, and on foundational interventions by Tuhiwai Smith (2021), Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), and Tuck and Yang (2012), I situate the knowledge production observed in Xiaobei within a longer genealogy of colonial and racialised epistemic formations. As Tuhiwai Smith (2021) argues, Western research traditions have historically framed indigenous and subaltern communities as knowable, mappable, and extractable—subjects of inquiry without reciprocal entanglement. Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) similarly trace how the Global South has served as an empirical reservoir for metropolitan theory-making, reinforcing epistemic hierarchies even within ostensibly critical disciplines (like contemporary anthropology, or even cultural studies). Grosfoguel’s (2019) formulation of “epistemic extractivism” deepens this critique by showing how even postcolonial research often appropriates knowledge in unilateral ways, divorced from dialogue or recognition. This resonates with Tuck and Yang’s (2012) indictment of “damage-centered research,” which highlights marginality and trauma in ways that serve institutional prestige rather than community empowerment.
The photographic archive controversy, as discussed earlier, was not an isolated ethical lapse but a sharp expression of broader structures of epistemic inequality that have long shaped anthropological, journalistic, and artistic engagements with racialised urban peripheries. The commodification of Xiaobei’s visual and social life exemplifies what Alcoff (2022) and Grosfoguel (2019) identify as “extractivist epistemologies”—frameworks that detach knowledge from the relationships and conditions that produce it, transforming marginalised communities into raw epistemic materials for global circulation and consumption. What is extracted is not only knowledge but the very conditions of knowing: its intimacy, its relationality, and its political embeddedness. In other words, this form of extraction turns a photograph—shot by a precarious bridge-side photographer and depicting a transnational trader or foreign student—into “art,” displayed in a coffee table book that now sits in a living room, perhaps somewhere in upstate New York, severed from its social and political origins.
In Xiaobei, epistemic extraction operated on multiple fronts: the visual appropriation of migrant life (as in the photobook), the racialised framing of the neighbourhood as a zone of exception (as reviewed earlier), and the imposition of Euro-American theoretical grids that flattened its multiscalar complexities. One moment that sharpened this last point for me occurred during a seminar on “African immigration to China” in 2014. When audience members questioned the use of the term “immigrant,” noting the absence of legal settlement pathways and the transient nature of many African trajectories, the speaker replied: “I call them immigrants because there is no other word to describe them, and I use these frameworks because I need to connect with the existing literature.” The candour of that response was striking. It laid bare how representational convenience and the demands of scholarly legitimacy can override empirical nuance, forcing mobile African subjects into conceptual containers shaped by long-standing Global North paradigms. As exemplified by this interaction, such representational practices do more than misname—they actively participate in the making and remaking of the subjects and places they describe, as I have been arguing. In the case of Xiaobei, the global imaginary shaped by such narratives legitimised intensified surveillance, urban redevelopment, and the gradual erasure of Afro-Chinese social life. These outcomes were not collateral; they were dialectically entangled with the very process of knowledge production—that is, knowledge producers did not simply describe these changes after the fact, they participated in producing them.
More important, however, is to note that extraction in the case of Africans in Guangzhou was not merely symbolic or discursive: it was infrastructural—that is, embedded in the institutional and material conditions that govern knowledge production. As Lu and Huang (2018) observe, the majority of scholars working on Africa–China relations are institutionally rooted in the Global North, where access to funding, visas, and academic legitimacy remains unequally distributed. African and Chinese researchers, by contrast, often face structural exclusion from fieldwork opportunities, conferences, and publishing circuits. Adebayo (2020, 2022) describes how African scholars in particular encounter racialised visa regimes and institutional suspicion when attempting to conduct research in China—what might be described as a form of racialised gatekeeping embedded within global knowledge economies.
My own fieldwork unfolded within these uneven terrains of access and legitimacy. As a Latin American researcher based in Hong Kong, I occupied an ambiguous position—neither fully marginalised nor entirely privileged. I recall an encounter with a white American Hong Kong-based anthropologist who, while sipping tea in his Xiaobei hotel lobby, remarked: “I have much more money than you to do research about what is going on here: research assistants, translators.” I never quite understood why a renowned senior scholar would say that to a PhD researcher—was he marking territory, signalling epistemic dominance, rejoicing in his extractive power, awkwardly trying to be comradely, unaware of his privilege, or simply stating a fact? Either way, the moment clarified something for me: institutional capital does not just grant access; it structures the research terrain itself, shaping which questions can be asked, whose stories are elevated, and which representations gain epistemic traction. These hierarchies raise deeper concerns: what are the epistemic costs of extraction, not just for those being represented, but for the knowledge we claim to produce? When fieldwork is detached from relation, when knowledge becomes something to be mined and exported rather than co-produced and situated, it risks reproducing the very colonial logics it purports to critique.
As one African interlocutor once told me, “A black man never tells the same thing to a white man that he would tell to another black man.” He also noted that while he knew I was not white, in the eyes of many sub-Saharan Africans, I might be seen as white—or perhaps as a Maghrebi—which, according to him, placed me in an ambiguous position among Africans in Guangzhou. In this sense, ethnographic knowledge is never simply gathered—it is negotiated, mediated, withheld, or shared within affective ecologies of trust, risk, recognition and belonging. The challenge, then, is not one of better methods but of epistemic reorientation. Scholars like Elie (2012) have called for “post-exotic anthropology,” grounded in relational accountability. Chua (2015) emphasises attentiveness to the consequences of scholarly presence. Others, including Santos (2018) and Mignolo (2000), have urged a shift toward “inter-epistemological dialogue”—forms of knowing that are co-produced rather than extracted, forged through uneven but potentially transformative encounters.
Following these critiques, I argue that research in sites like Xiaobei must move beyond extractivist epistemologies. It must resist the logic of reducing lived complexity into portable data for theoretical frameworks. It must interrupt representational monopolies that silence more than they reveal. And it must take seriously the ethical and political stakes of knowledge production as a practice shaped by histories of power, complicity, and struggle. Ultimately, cases like Xiaobei demand not only a rethinking of the frameworks through which anthropological, journalistic, and artistic knowledge is produced, circulated, and consumed, but also a return to a foundational insight advanced by scholars such as Rosaldo (1989), Abu-Lughod (1991), and later Tuhiwai Smith (2021): that fieldwork is never merely “being there,” but always entangled in structures of power, privilege, and epistemic violence. While this may seem like week-one material in an anthropology 101 course, what unfolded in Xiaobei reminds us that it is a lesson that must be continually re-learned.
By way of a conclusion
The case of Xiaobei (and the representational strategies it attracted) reveals how knowledge production can become implicated in racialised urban transformation and global structures of epistemic inequality. Far from offering neutral documentation of transnational life, scholarly, journalistic, and artistic engagements with Xiaobei enacted a competitive scramble to represent the neighbourhood—one that, in its extractive urgency, evokes the colonial logic of the “Scramble for Africa,” albeit in epistemic rather than territorial terms. Indeed, what was framed as knowledge about Xiaobei emerged from asymmetrical structures of mobility, institutional power, and global hierarchies of epistemic legitimacy—privileging certain voices while silencing others.
This article has shown that the epistemic construction of Xiaobei as an “African place” was not simply a matter of observation, but the outcome of layered, extractive representational practices. It is important to note that these practices operated dialectically: representations shaped material interventions, and those interventions in turn reinforced particular imaginaries. In this way, knowledge production and urban transformation became mutually constitutive—enabling securitisation, legitimising urban renewal, and facilitating the disarticulation of Afro-Chinese social spaces. Representation, in this context, was not merely discursive; it was infrastructural. Knowledge did not just describe Xiaobei—it participated in its remaking.
More broadly, the case of Xiaobei prompts a fundamental rethinking of the ethical and methodological foundations of contemporary anthropological, journalistic, and artistic fieldwork. It invites knowledge producers to reconsider extractive models that treat marginalised communities as empirical sources while excluding them from theorisation and interpretive authority. Attending to the global racialised architectures that structure access, recognition, and narrative legitimacy remains crucial. Doing so involves practices grounded in reciprocity and reflexive accountability—sensitive to the political and affective stakes embedded in every phase of research, from encounter to representation. Finally, future research—whether through collaborative archiving, co-authorship, or locally grounded theorisation—will need to account for the epistemic inheritances it draws upon and the consequences of the knowledge it produces.
Funding
The work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong. RGC Ref No.: 13607523.
Notes on contributor
Roberto Castillo is an Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research explores transnational cultural flows, media representation, “race,” and migration/mobility, with a focus on South-South connections and the global circulation of diasporic imaginaries. His past work has examined African mobilities in China, China-Africa relations in popular culture, and the racial politics of knowledge production. He is the author of African Transnational Mobility in China: Africans on the Move (Routledge, 2021). More recently, he has turned to investigating transnational gentrification, Asian influencer cultures in Latin America, and storytelling in video platforms across Africa, Asian and Latin America.
Contact: rocas@ln.edu.hk
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Appendix: reviewed materials
[While not individually cited, the following publications formed part of the analytical corpus reviewed for this article. They illustrate broader discursive patterns and framings analysed thematically.]
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Note:
[1] While I refer to the photobook by name for clarity, I do so with the express intention of analysing it as a case within broader structural dynamics of epistemic extraction. The focus of critique is not individual culpability but the systemic conditions that enable such projects to unfold and gain legitimacy. In the early stages of my research engagement, I contributed an essay to the photobook that eventually emerged from this project, for which I received an honorarium. At the time, I regarded this participation as a professional engagement aligned with my research interests. However, my retrospective reflections, shaped by subsequent developments in the field and critical debates around epistemic extraction, have led me to reassess the ethical and political implications of that collaboration. Rather than positioning myself outside the extractive dynamics I critique, I acknowledge that my early (and perhaps on going) involvement forms part of the entangled history of knowledge production that this article seeks to unpack.
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