New Research: When Is Racism Not Racism? Chinese Football and the Politics of Naming Race

A short review of Zesheng Yang and Zizhong Zhang, “Silenced, condemned, and redirected: How racism in Chinese football is discursively negotiated on social media,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport (2026).

For those of us who have followed discussions of race in China for years, one response to apparently racist incidents has become remarkably familiar: racism is not really what is happening.

It is cultural misunderstanding. Nationalism. A quarrel between two individuals. Bad behaviour. Internet humour. Or perhaps simply an inappropriate attempt to impose Western understandings of race on China.

A new article by Zesheng Yang and Zizhong Zhang, published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, examines versions of precisely this process in an unexpected but revealing arena: Chinese professional football. Rather than simply documenting racist incidents, the authors ask what happens afterwards, when clubs, players, media and football supporters attempt to explain what has happened and decide whether it should be understood as racism at all. (Sage Journals)

Drawing on Critical Race Theory and critical discourse analysis, Yang and Zhang examine discussions of racism circulating through Chinese social media. They identify three broad ways in which racial incidents are negotiated: silenced, condemned and redirected. (Sage Journals)

The first is perhaps the most familiar. Racist incidents can be minimised by reframing them as misunderstandings or simply part of the normal antagonism of competitive sport. Racialised expressions consequently become absorbed into the supposedly ordinary language of football conflict rather than recognised as racism.

But this is not the only response. Clubs positioned as victims, state-affiliated media and what the authors describe as morally engaged fans also explicitly condemn discriminatory behaviour and demand greater institutional accountability. This is important. The article does not reproduce the rather tired argument that racism is somehow invisible or universally denied in China. Chinese actors themselves recognise racism, debate it and sometimes demand action against it. (Sage Journals)

The third response is more complicated. Discussions beginning with racism can be redirected towards regional prejudice, xenophobia and other social antagonisms. Race does not simply disappear in these conversations; it becomes entangled with other ways of drawing boundaries between insiders and outsiders. On social media, these processes are further shaped through memes, jokes and vernacular forms of online communication. (Sage Journals)

This makes the article useful well beyond football.

Research on Africans and Blackness in China has developed considerably over the past two decades. Earlier scholarship by researchers including Adams Bodomo, Heidi Østbø Haugen, Gordon Mathews and Shanshan Lan documented African lives, mobility and racialisation in Chinese cities, particularly Guangzhou. A more recent body of work has placed race itself much more explicitly at the centre of the analysis, examining anti-Blackness, Chinese racial formations, social media and the relationship between racism in China and wider global racial hierarchies.

Yang and Zhang’s article belongs to this newer conversation. Its significance is not that it discovers racism in China through football. We no longer need another case study merely to establish that racism exists in China. The more interesting contribution is its attention to the discursive work required to make racism appear—or disappear—as racism.

That distinction matters.

For many years, discussions about racism in China have been caught between two equally unsatisfactory positions. One treats racism as essentially foreign to Chinese society and therefore explains apparently racial phenomena through nationalism, cultural difference or individual prejudice. The other sometimes takes categories developed primarily through European and North American histories and applies them to China as though racial formations operate identically everywhere.

Neither is particularly convincing.

Yang and Zhang frame their intervention partly in terms of developing a more “de-Westernizing” understanding of racism in global sport. (Sage Journals) There is something valuable in this. Racism in China should not simply be treated as an imperfect Chinese version of American or European racism, and Chinese histories of ethnicity, nation, region and difference obviously matter.

But there is also a danger here.

De-Westernising the study of racism cannot mean disconnecting China from global histories of race.

Chinese racial formations have never developed inside a sealed national container. Colonialism, racial science, imperial encounters, global hierarchies of Blackness and Whiteness, socialist internationalism, postcolonial solidarities and China’s changing position within global capitalism have all shaped the ways difference is understood and negotiated. Recent scholarship—including work by Shanshan Lan and Zihuan Zhang—has increasingly pushed us to think about precisely these intersections rather than choosing between a supposedly indigenous Chinese racism and one imported wholesale from “the West.”

Football provides a particularly interesting place to see these dynamics because the sport itself is profoundly transnational. Chinese clubs, African and other foreign players, international football institutions, global media discourses and Chinese online publics intersect within the same space. When a racial incident occurs there, deciding what it means inevitably draws upon several overlapping vocabularies of difference.

For those of us who have been following African experiences in China for years, perhaps the most interesting implication of Yang and Zhang’s research is therefore not about football at all.

It concerns the politics of naming.

Calling something racism is never a neutral description. It identifies certain histories and relations of power as relevant to understanding what happened. Calling the same incident a misunderstanding, sporting rivalry, xenophobia or regional prejudice does something different. Sometimes that alternative explanation may genuinely illuminate the situation. At other times, it can make race conveniently disappear.

Yang and Zhang show that Chinese social media contains both processes: racism is denied and normalised, but it is also recognised, condemned and contested. That is a considerably more interesting picture than either claiming that Chinese society refuses to recognise racism or assuming that every racialised encounter can be explained through categories developed elsewhere.

After years of asking whether racism exists in China, perhaps the more productive question is becoming a different one:

When something racial happens in China, who gets to decide what it should be called—and what becomes possible once we call it racism? (Sage Journals)

Read the article in International Review for the Sociology of Sport