Since the early 2010s, a growing body of book-length research and writing has examined African migration, mobility, trade, education, race, language, community and everyday life in China. The books below approach these questions from anthropology, cultural studies, migration studies, education, sociolinguistics and travel writing.
The list is arranged from the most recent publications to the earliest and will continue to be updated as new books appear (if you have any updates to suggest, please leave it in the comments).
Wen Xu — Linguistic Entrepreneurship in Sino-African Student Mobility (2024)
Xu examines the experiences of African international students in Chinese higher education through the lens of language. Drawing on interviews, the book explores investment in Chinese-language learning, linguistic hierarchies, identity and aspiration, asking how African students negotiate the changing value of Chinese and English within wider geopolitical and economic transformations. Springer
Noo Saro-Wiwa — Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans in China (2023)
Nigerian-British writer Noo Saro-Wiwa travels through China meeting African migrants and documenting their lives, ambitions, relationships and encounters with racism and cultural difference. Written for a general audience rather than as an academic monograph, Black Ghosts brings together stories of traders, professionals, overstayers and African-Chinese families while reflecting on belonging and everyday encounters across cultural boundaries. noosarowiwa
Benjamin Mulvey — Mapping International Student Mobility Between Africa and China (2023)
Mulvey shifts attention from traders and entrepreneurs to African international students. Drawing on interviews with students enrolled at Chinese universities, the book examines who moves to China, how students make mobility decisions, their experiences while studying there, and how education in China shapes their future aspirations and post-graduation trajectories. Springer
Roberto Castillo — African Transnational Mobility in China: Africans on the Move (2021)
Based on long-term ethnographic research in Guangzhou, this book approaches African presence in China through the concept of transnational mobility rather than conventional models of migration and permanent settlement. It examines trade, food, fashion, music, placemaking, aspiration and racialised imaginaries while exploring how mobility, precarity and structural constraints shape African lives in Guangzhou. The book also questions how mobile African populations have themselves been represented and made into objects of knowledge. Routledge
Gordon Mathews, Linessa Dan Lin and Yang Yang — The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global Marketplace (2017)
An ethnographic account of Guangzhou as a centre of what the authors call “low-end globalization.” African traders are central to the book’s analysis of Xiaobei, informal commerce, logistics networks, immigration status, religion and interracial encounters. The book situates African mobility within a much broader transnational marketplace populated by traders and migrants from across the world. BiblioVault
Shanshan Lan — Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging (2017)
Based on multi-sited ethnographic research in China and Nigeria, Lan places race and racialisation at the centre of the analysis of African migration to South China. The book examines trade, immigration control, interracial relationships, religion, community networks and everyday encounters between Africans and Chinese people, while exploring how Blackness and racial difference are produced and negotiated in contemporary China. Routledge
Adams Bodomo — Africans in China: A Sociocultural Study and Its Implications on Africa-China Relations (2012)
One of the foundational books in the field and among the first book-length studies devoted specifically to Africans in China. Based on research with Africans in Guangzhou, Yiwu, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Macau, Bodomo examines why Africans travel to China, what they do there, how communities develop, how Africans and Chinese communicate, and the opportunities and difficulties migrants encounter. The book helped establish African migration to China as a research field in its own right.
Related Books
The following books are not devoted exclusively to African migration from the continent to China, but provide important broader contexts for understanding migration, race, Blackness and China–Africa encounters.
Heidi Østbø Haugen and Bingyu Wang, eds. — Handbook on Migration to China (2025)
This wide-ranging handbook examines historical and contemporary migration to China, including immigration policy, education, labour, family life, race, urban communities and border governance. Edited by Heidi Østbø Haugen and Bingyu Wang, it places African migration within the wider transformation of China into a destination for international migrants. Edward Elgar Publishing
Li Anshan — China and Africa in Global Context: Encounters, Policy, Cooperation and Migration (2022)
A broad study of China–Africa relations covering historical encounters, Chinese policy toward Africa, development cooperation and migration. Although the book extends far beyond African migration to China, its treatment of migration and diaspora situates African mobility within the longer history of China–Africa relations. Google Books
Pauline Leonard and Angela Lehmann, eds. — Destination China: Immigration to China in the Post-Reform Era (2018)
One of the earlier edited volumes to examine China as a destination for international migration. The book brings together research on different migrant populations and includes Heidi Østbø Haugen’s chapter, “Residence Registration in China’s Immigration Control: Africans in Guangzhou,” examining African migrants through the workings of China’s immigration and registration system. Springer
Aaron A. Vessup — Black in China (2017)
A memoir by a Black American educator who moved from Los Angeles to China and built a life there as a teacher. Vessup reflects on race, identity, education and everyday encounters, comparing his experiences of Blackness in China with the racism he had experienced in the United States. The result is an unusually personal account of contemporary China viewed through the experiences of a Black American resident. Earnshaw Books
Robeson Taj Frazier — The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (2014)
Frazier examines the encounters of African American radical intellectuals and activists—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, William Worthy, Vicki Garvin, and Mabel and Robert Williams—with revolutionary China during the Cold War. The book explores how Black radicals understood Maoist China through struggles against racism, imperialism and colonialism, while also examining the political uses and limits of Black–Chinese solidarity. Duke University Press
Clarence Adams — An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (2007)
The memoir of an African American soldier captured during the Korean War who chose to remain in China rather than return immediately to the United States. Adams studied at university, married in China and worked in Beijing before returning to the United States in 1966. His account offers an unusual perspective on race, Cold War politics and Black life in Mao-era China, shaped by his experiences of racism in the United States and his hopes for a different life in China. umasspress.com
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