About

Founded in 2011, AfricansinChina.net is a research and public knowledge platform documenting African lives, communities and experiences in China, as well as the wider transformations generated by growing Africa–China connections across Asia.

With more than 500 entries collected over more than fifteen years, the site brings together research, journalism, commentary, documentary materials and other resources on Africans in China. It has become a reference point for scholars, students, journalists and others seeking to understand the complexity and diversity of African experiences in China beyond the simplified narratives that often dominate public discussion.

Our Mission

The main mission of this archive is simple: to provide the resources people need to tell better stories about Africans in China.

Since its beginnings, Africansinchina.net has also been driven by a dissatisfaction with some of the ways knowledge about Africans in China—and Africa–China relations more broadly—is produced and circulated. Academic publishers continue to place much publicly funded research behind paywalls. Academic narratives too often flatten complicated lived realities into neat theoretical arguments. Researchers sometimes extract stories, experiences and knowledge from communities without making much effort to return that knowledge to the people who helped produce it.

Africansinchina.net takes a different approach. We believe that knowledge should circulate. Research about African communities in China should not remain confined to academic journals, conferences and university libraries. It should also be available to the people whose lives it describes, and to journalists, students, artists, filmmakers and anyone interested in understanding what is actually happening on the ground.

This commitment also means pushing back against simplistic, economistic and racialising narratives of Africa–China relations. The realities are messier, more diverse and considerably more interesting than many of the stories told about them.

Collaborations and Public Engagement

Our commitment to research-based public engagement has led to collaborations with journalists, artists, filmmakers and academics working on Africa–China relations and African diasporic life in Asia.

These have included an advisory role for Christiane Badgley’s Guangzhou Dream Factory, a documentary examining the lives and (im)mobilities of Africans in southern China; collaboration with Daniel Traub, Wu Yongfu and Zeng Xianfang on Little North Road (2015), a book-length photographic exploration of African and Chinese encounters in Guangzhou; and collaboration with filmmaker Kim Soyoung and the Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute on Drifting City (2015), an Inter-Asia documentary exploring diasporic lives across the region.

Through these and other projects, AfricansinChina.net seeks to foster forms of research and cultural production that move beyond simplistic economic or racialised narratives and instead take seriously the complexity of Africa–China encounters and the lives of the people who inhabit them.

Africansinchina.net is administered by Roberto Castillo. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Castillo has more than 15 years of research experience working with and around African communities in China. He has published extensively on the topic and has participated in numerous conferences, workshops, public talks, and radio and television programmes.

His book, African Transnational Mobility in China: Africans on the Move, examines the experiences, trajectories and transnational connections of Africans living in and moving through China.

A fragment of ‘Drifting City’, the documentary about Castillo’s research:

Al Jazeera’s The Stream guest participation

The story behind this website, in a documentary mode: