New Research: Theorising Racism in China

A short review of Zihuan Zhang, “Theorising racism in China: a decolonial intervention,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (2026).

A recent article by Zihuan Zhang in Ethnic and Racial Studies makes a forceful intervention into the growing literature on race and racism in China. Rather than asking once again whether racism exists in China, Zhang takes aim at some of the theoretical assumptions that have shaped how scholars have explained it.

The central argument is that racism in contemporary China cannot be understood by treating China as an isolated national space or by searching for its origins exclusively in Chinese history and culture. Zhang argues that much existing scholarship has underestimated the importance of nineteenth-century colonialism, colonial modernity and the global racial hierarchies through which modern China itself was constituted.

The article develops this argument through three main critiques. First, Zhang questions the influential idea—associated particularly with Frank Dikötter—that contemporary Chinese racism can be traced primarily to indigenous traditions of Chinese civilisation, hierarchy and difference. Zhang does not claim that racism was simply imported from the West. In fact, one of the article’s more careful arguments is that we still do not know enough about the genealogy of racism in China to confidently identify a single origin. What Zhang objects to is the tendency to minimise the transformative effects of European colonialism and racial science on modern Chinese understandings of race.

Second, the article criticises what Zhang calls “China-centrism” and methodological nationalism: the tendency to analyse racial formations as though China developed largely within a national container. This matters particularly for research on anti-Black racism. Zhang argues that studies have often concentrated on Chinese attitudes and actions while giving considerably less attention to the experiences of Black people themselves. The article revisits research on the 1988 Nanjing protests, Africans in Guangzhou and other forms of anti-Black racism to illustrate the consequences of this approach.

The third—and probably most provocative—argument concerns the relationship between Chinese supremacy and White supremacy. Zhang challenges scholarship that treats Han or Chinese dominance within China as roughly equivalent to Whiteness in Western societies. For Zhang, this misses China’s own racialisation within a global order structured by European colonialism. Chinese people can occupy dominant positions in relation to Africans and other minorities in China while simultaneously remaining positioned below Whiteness within a wider global racial hierarchy.

This produces a useful complication for thinking about anti-Black racism in China. Rather than explaining it simply through Chinese nationalism, xenophobia or supposedly ancient ideas about civilisation and barbarism, Zhang asks us to consider a racial hierarchy in which Whiteness, Chineseness and Blackness are relationally constituted. Anti-Blackness in China, from this perspective, cannot be separated from the historical prestige and power attached to Whiteness.

There is plenty here to debate. At times the article perhaps places too much explanatory weight on coloniality and White supremacy, particularly when translating a theoretical tradition developed largely from the colonial histories of the Americas into the very different historical formation of China. Some of its readings of existing scholarship are also deliberately confrontational. But this is partly what makes the article worth reading. Zhang is not simply adding another case study to an already substantial literature on racism in China; the article asks whether some of the conceptual foundations of that literature need to be reconsidered.

Perhaps most importantly, the article pushes the discussion beyond the increasingly tired debate over whether racism in China is somehow uniquely “Chinese” or simply an imported “Western” phenomenon. Zhang instead calls for what he terms a “critical synergy”: bringing decolonial approaches into conversation with existing scholarship without treating any single theoretical tradition as beyond criticism.

For those interested in Africans in China, this is an important intervention. After years of documenting discrimination, racialisation and anti-Blackness, the more difficult task is increasingly to explain how these racial formations were produced, how they connect China to global histories of race, and how Chinese, African and White positionalities are constituted in relation to one another.

Whether one agrees with all of Zhang’s arguments or not, this is precisely the kind of debate the field needs. We have accumulated considerable evidence about racism and anti-Blackness in China. The challenge now is not simply to produce more examples, but to develop better ways of explaining what we already know.