RACISM IN CHINA

China and Africa have built an increasingly powerful relationship based on trade, investment, infrastructure, education, business, and diplomacy. Chinese companies operate across Africa. African students study in Chinese universities. African traders and entrepreneurs travel to Guangzhou, Yiwu, Shenzhen, and other Chinese cities in search of opportunity.

But beyond the diplomatic speeches and billions of dollars in trade lies another story.

The story of the African who discovers that being a foreigner is one thing-but being a Black foreigner can be something very different.

RACISM IN CHINA takes readers inside that experience.

From university campuses and apartment buildings to restaurants, workplaces, streets, television screens, and Chinese social media, this book examines the discrimination, stereotypes, mockery, suspicion, and rejection that Africans have reported encountering in China.

It explores:

• The historical roots of anti-Black attitudes in China
• Why Africans travelled to China and why many continue to stay
• Guangzhou and the development of China's African communities
• The stereotypes surrounding the Black and African body
• Blackness in Chinese television and popular culture
• Anti-Black racism and racial hostility on Chinese social media
• The experiences of African students and the anti-African protests in Nanjing
• Policing, immigration enforcement, and the controversial treatment of African migrants
• Discrimination in housing, employment, restaurants, transportation, and everyday life
• Stereotypes surrounding Black men, Black women, sex, marriage, and interracial relationships
• The way race intersects with class and immigration status
• The extraordinary Guangzhou crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic
• African evictions, quarantine, service refusals, and reports of people sleeping on the streets
• The response of African governments and the Chinese authorities
• The contradiction between China-Africa diplomatic friendship and the experiences of Africans living in China
• What China and African governments must do to confront discrimination
• And the uncomfortable question: Is China racist?

But this is not a book about declaring every Chinese person racist.

There are Chinese people who have welcomed Africans, defended them, employed them, befriended them, and married them. There are Africans who have had excellent experiences in China. There are Africans who have built successful businesses, earned degrees, raised families, learned Mandarin, and come to regard China as a second home.

Those stories matter too.

The African experience in China is therefore not simply a story of victims and villains.

It is a story of opportunity and discrimination. Friendship and suspicion. Business and exclusion. Scholarships and protests. Economic partnership and racial tension.

At the centre of this book is a larger question about the future of China-Africa relations:

Can China and Africa build a genuinely equal partnership if the people who connect them do not always experience equality on the ground?

The answer will not be found only in Beijing, Abuja, Nairobi, Accra, or diplomatic conference rooms.

It will be found in the ordinary encounters between Chinese and African people-in a classroom, an apartment, a workplace, a restaurant, a business transaction, a bus, a marriage, and increasingly, on the internet.

RACISM IN CHINA examines those encounters and asks the questions that diplomacy often avoids.