Flowing without Roots: The Identity Crisis of Foreigners’ Descendants in Mainland China
In 2009, a woman named Lou Jing, born to a Chinese mother and an African American father, went on a TV show in China and declared herself a proud and patriotic Chinese person (Leung 2015). Her remarks ignited a firestorm online as people debated whether a mixed-race person could be considered truly, properly Chinese. Supporters argued that she was born and raised in China, educated within the Chinese system, and therefore naturally Chinese. Nonetheless, many others claimed that someone with dark skin and of African heritage could never be counted among the ‘descendants of the Yan and Yellow Emperors’ (炎黄子孙)—the mythical ancestors of all Chinese people (Frazier and Zhang 2014; Leung 2015). While the controversy surrounding Lou Jing was never fully resolved, it raised an important question with broader implications: can people born to non-Chinese parents but raised in China be recognised as ‘properly’ Chinese? As China opens itself to the world, can the descendants of foreigners in China (外国人子女) also be considered part of the thriving new Chinese youth?
Few such foreigners’ descendants had their identities examined as intensely as did Lou Jing. Nevertheless, the question about the boundaries of Chinese-ness persists, continuing to puzzle descendants of immigrants to China who live outside the limelight. This growing community reflects China’s deeper global engagement. Since the start of the Reform and Opening-Up policies in the late 1970s, China has joined the global market and opened its doors to foreigners. According to national census data from 2010 and 2020, the number of long-term foreign residents in the country nearly doubled during this decade, rising from 371,475 to 684,226 (NBS 2010, 2020). Over time, this growing group has become part of an increasingly globalised Chinese society, with many settling in the country and even marrying Chinese citizens.
Even though they seldom make the news, there are many young people like Lou Jing who quietly struggle with their identity. Despite their small number compared with the total population in China, these descendants of foreigners increasingly stand out in a rapidly changing Chinese society because of the way they look, speak, and live. They were raised in China, so they are fluent in the Chinese language, immersed in Chinese culture, and educated in Chinese schools, sharing a similar upbringing to typical Chinese youth. However, despite these commonalities, the foreigners’ children face unique identity crises because they are rarely regarded by most Chinese people as being ‘properly’ Chinese. Yet, research on this group remains sparse, especially regarding how they navigate their sense of belonging. To address this gap, in 2024, I conducted 38 interviews with the descendants of foreigners in China as part of my PhD research.
Is China Ready to Accept the Offspring of Foreigners?
Since the emergence of the concept of the Chinese nation (中华民族) as proposed by thinkers such as Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen in the Republican era (Zarrow 2012), debates have persisted in China about two fundamental questions: How is this Chinese nation defined? Who can be considered Chinese? Over time, the Chinese public developed various answers to these questions. Some have argued that anyone holding Chinese nationality is Chinese. Others advocate a Han-centric or bloodline-based view, asserting that only those with Han ancestry qualify as Chinese. Yet others propose a culturalist stance, maintaining that identification with Chinese culture is sufficient (Watson 1993; Zhao 2004; Rae and Wang 2016). However, these debates have largely centred on relations among citizens of different ethnicities within the People’s Republic of China, where China and hence Chinese-ness are perceived as bound by a geographical territory. Yet, as previously noted, the dramatic increase in the number of foreigners living in China over the past decades since Reform and Opening has given rise to new forms of ethnic and cultural mixing. This expansion inevitably extends the original question into a new one: can the descendants of foreigners also be accepted as Chinese?
Based on my fieldwork, the answer appears to be negative. Descendants of foreigners living in China face challenges that are strikingly like those experienced by the offspring of immigrants around the world, who encounter persistent barriers in their efforts to integrate into local mainstream society. This has caused confusion among my interviewees: should they see themselves as Chinese when others refuse to?
For instance, Sarah, an Arab-Chinese woman who holds Chinese citizenship and has lived in China her entire life, complained to me about how her Chinese identity was still regularly questioned: ‘My identity is already deeply rooted in China, yet they [the Chinese] still try to push me away … How am I supposed to prove it? I am absolutely a Chinese, and I’m very patriotic!’ Sarah is not the only one who told me that her Chinese identity was denied by others. In fact, nearly all my interviewees expressed a deep love for China and believed they were genuinely Chinese. Having spent most of their lives in the country, they saw Chinese culture and China itself as inseparable parts of who they are. However, their attempts to identify as Chinese were rarely recognised by the people around them, regardless of how strongly they wished to define themselves that way.
Among the various factors contributing to this exclusion, race stands out as an important symbolic boundary between the immigrant descendant and their local counterparts (Lamont 1995). For those who do not look ‘Chinese’, their experiences can be highly racialised. The Chinese public often closely examines the physical appearance of these descendants of foreigners, focusing on attributes such as skin tone, hair and eye colour, height, and even more nuanced features such as so-called facial bone structure (骨相), in search of visible hints of perceived ‘foreignness’. The perception of such foreignness can cause the descendants to be treated as outsiders even when they possess Chinese heritage and/or citizenship. Therefore, my interviewees were generally in agreement that a fundamental threshold to be considered properly Chinese is that one must look Han Chinese. In the words of Xiaoyu, a young Chinese-Dutch woman:
They [her classmates] believe that since everyone has yellow skin, black hair, and black eyes, you must be different and therefore surely have something wrong with you. In current terms, it’s like saying: ‘If you’re not one of us, your intentions must be wickedly different [非我族类, 其心必异].’
This is a vivid example of how exclusion and hostility draw on racial characteristics. The emphasis on yellow skin and black hair and eyes reflects the early construction of the Chinese nation based on blood ties and the discourse of social Darwinism in the early twentieth century. After the First Opium War in 1840, China suffered a series of defeats against Western colonial incursions. These repeated losses prompted certain intellectuals of the time, such as Liang Qichao, Yan Fu, and Sun Yat-sen, to reflect on the causes of China’s weakness and to turn to Western ideas, including the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’, as part of their effort to understand and address the crisis. Taking the language from Western racial discourse, they were convinced that the ‘Yellow’ race was in competition with the White, Black, and Brown races for collective survival, and that Western imperial aggressions in China were in essence attempts by the White to enslave and even eliminate the Yellow race, as they were attempting with the Black and Brown, so it was necessary to develop a united Chinese nation to resist Western forces. Here, the non-Chinese races played the role of the other to delineate the Chinese self (Dikötter 1994; Duara 2009; Zarrow 2012; Rae and Wang 2016). In other words, race has been a fundamental criterion in shaping the boundaries of the Chinese nation, the margins of which are further complicated by the classification and inclusion—sometimes by force—of non-Han ethnicities.
The essentialisation of a unified Chinese race and the othering of the rest make the identities of mixed-heritage descendants suspect (Lamont 1995). Having Chinese heritage does not necessarily reduce the sense of difference felt by foreigners’ descendants. On the contrary, it leads to more serious doubts about the purity of the nation. That is, the interviewees were not recognised as a part of ‘us’ but were further discriminated as a kind of degraded Chinese. In the example of Lou Jing, she was attacked due to not only her black skin per se, but also her mixture with the Chinese bloodline, which was seen as a sort of genetic pollution (Leung 2015). My interviewees also suffered from such insults due to their mixed heritage. For instance, Lion, a young Chinese-Russian woman, told me: ‘Someone called me “Chuan Chuan’er” [串串儿] which is also not a good term for someone of mixed heritage, as it is commonly used to refer to mixed-breed dogs.’
Similarly, Dasha, another young Chinese-Russian woman, told me:
They think mixed people like us are inferior and say awful things, like calling us ‘mongrels’ [杂种] and similar insults. I’ve also met girls who, whether out of ignorance or on purpose, said I had leukaemia [in Chinese leukaemia is translated as ‘white blood disease’ (白血病)].
Several studies have shown that being a white expatriate in China can serve as an advantage, offering increased visibility and even privilege in the form of better treatment both socially and professionally (Schein 1994; Camenisch 2022; Lan 2022a). However, quotes such as these show that, perhaps counterintuitively, being of mixed white and Chinese heritage does not always bring advantages. With nationalistic sentiments surging in recent years, the portrayal of white people has gradually become more negative in Chinese political discourse (Leonard and Lehmann 2019; Lan 2022b). As a result, this deterioration has also extended to white and mixed-race descendants, leading to exclusion and hostility directed at them.
This was most evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, a Chinese-Russian interviewee was physically and verbally assaulted in 2022 simply because she was perceived as a foreigner due to her appearance. While taking the metro in Beijing, she was shoved by some Chinese strangers, spat on in public, and humiliated with slurs such as ‘virus’ and ‘Go back to your home country’ (滚回你老家). This was not an isolated occurrence. Rather, she experienced similar harassment several times during the pandemic, which contrasted sharply with how she had previously been treated in China. As she recalled, she had generally been treated well by Chinese people and she thought she was just a ‘regular Chinese person’ (就是一个中国人). Some white American interviewees also mentioned similar experiences. Once they were revealed to be American, they were furiously called ‘American imperialists’ (美帝) by some Chinese nationalists and asked to go back to America.
Ultimately, the experiences discussed above reflect the racialisation of identity—a process in which individuals are othered based on perceived physical racial differences. However, even descendants with East Asian heritage, who might ‘pass’ as Chinese in appearance, are not necessarily better off as their experiences and self-identification are significantly affected by domestic and international politics, which makes them vulnerable to Chinese nationalism. Among the most egregious examples were two violent assaults in 2024 targeting the offspring of Japanese immigrants in Suzhou and Shenzhen that caused the death of a Chinese school-bus attendant and a Chinese-Japanese child (Liang 2024; Marsh 2024).
As for my interviews with youths of Chinese-Japanese heritage, they often experienced heightened hostility during national memorial days commemorating events such as the Nanjing Massacre or the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937, which marked the beginning of the full-scale Japanese invasion of China. One Chinese-Japanese interviewee had a hard time after the Diaoyu (Senkaku) Island dispute in 2012. His teachers used to be very kind to him because he was a top student, but after the dispute they became cold and indifferent and would scold him harshly if he made a casual utterance in Japanese. He claimed that during a fieldtrip to the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, his classmates looked at him in a very strange way, as though he were to blame for the tragedy.
Other interviewees with Japanese heritage also expressed a sense of helplessness when confronted with anti-Japanese propaganda on Chinese television or social media, where Japan and Japanese people are often portrayed as one-dimensional villains. The Japanese interviewees came to realise that a part of their heritage is perceived by many in China as inherently hostile or even shameful. As a result, they became especially cautious about their behaviour, careful to hide their Japanese background. This constant vigilance made them feel that full integration into Chinese society was difficult.
Likewise, interviewees with Korean heritage also encountered growing coldness and social distance in their daily interactions after the South Korean Government agreed to deploy the US military’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defence system in 2016. The interviewees observed a rise in negative Chinese social media posts, such as accusations that Korea had stolen from Chinese culture or that the South Korean Government was a puppet of the United States. Each time they saw such slander online, it was a reminder that they were perceived as outsiders in Chinese society. For instance, Yuna, a Korean descendant, complained to me: ‘I tried not to mention anything political, but sometimes you can’t avoid it. Even though I could understand their unfriendliness thanks to my upbringing in China, it’s always extremely embarrassing when it came to THAAD or Chinese-Korean politics, etcetera.’
Whether the exclusion is racially or politically motivated, the experiences of the descendants reflect the intolerance of Chinese society to perceived differences. According to an interviewee with Serbian heritage: ‘A feature of Chinese culture is that it’s like the speed of light. You can get infinitely close to it, but you can never catch up.’ In other words, for the foreigners’ descendants, the best they can aspire to is to be Chinese-alike.
Flowing without Roots
Since their integration into Chinese society has not been smooth, foreigners’ descendants face a serious identity crisis. Although it seems that they still have a backup option—to embrace their other ancestral country—that alternative is rarely viable because most often they lack direct knowledge of or lived experience in that country. This leaves them in a limbo in which they cannot develop a firm sense of belonging or identity in China or in their ancestral country.
A French-Chinese girl named Ella described this condition as being a ‘dual foreigner’, as she was called laowai (老外, a moniker for foreigners) in China and la petite Chinoise (‘the little Chinese’) in France. Being a ‘dual foreigner’, she felt that she had nowhere to call home. Mary, a Chinese-Korean woman, complained that she was just like a foreigner who could speak perfect Korean when she was back in Seoul. She did not understand the local slang, trending TV series, or music; also, people there did not care much about what was happening in China. She was therefore unable to socialise with her Korean counterparts, let alone effectively integrate into Korean society or start a career in the country. She felt disappointed and confused about her identity; it was as though both homelands had abandoned her.
This reminds me of an English expression popular among Chinese international students in the United Kingdom, such as myself: ‘I am rooted but I flow.’ It shows a contradiction between a static ‘root’ in China and a dynamic momentum of ‘flowing’ overseas. This tension manifests in reverse on the foreigners’ descendants in China. Born as direct products of their parents’ global mobility, they embody a foreignness that has become an obstacle to their integration into mainstream Chinese society. They are forced to find new ways to self-identify. Perhaps the condition of these descendants can be described as: ‘I have to flow because I cannot take root.’
For those who are willing and able to move abroad from China, they would flow to places where their presence is welcomed. As Junxing, a young Chinese-Thai woman, told me: ‘My aim is to be a global citizen … Belonging doesn’t really matter to me. I belong to and love whichever country brings me a better life.’ Or, as Yuna, the Chinese-Korean woman we met above, said: ‘My identity flows. I don’t belong anywhere, yet I belong to everywhere.’
It is somewhat ironic that these foreigners’ descendants would finally feel at ease by becoming ‘proper’ foreigners in the United States or Europe, where their otherness is mostly taken for granted and not in tension with their sense of belonging. Yet, there are many other descendants who choose to remain in China. They do not passively accept the prejudices they face in their daily life from the Chinese people around them. Instead, they take the initiative to assert their identity. A common practice is to make their identity contextual and contingent, depending on the specific situation and the person with whom they are communicating. For instance, Zhizhi, a Chinese-Papua New Guinean woman who grew up in many places in China, told me that she has realised her identity is constantly changing: ‘Sometimes I’m a Northeasterner [东北人], but sometimes I can be a Shandong person [山东人], whereas I’m both Chinese and Papua New Guinean. I’m all of them and I can’t divide them up.’
Some individuals have developed the ability to sense social expectations and adopt strategies to present themselves in ways that align with what others want to see. For example, some descendants have become internet influencers and often highlight their foreignness on social media, since a Chinese-speaking but foreign-looking person tends to attract more attention. When I interviewed them, they referred to this strategy as the ‘secret code to social exposure’ (流量密码), which increases their visibility and can potentially lead to higher income through commercial partnerships and ad placements.
Wherever they move and whatever they choose as a form of self-definition, the fluid identity of these descendants reveals their ongoing struggle for acceptance in China. Whether these enterprising young people can truly be considered Chinese youth by the Chinese public remains an open question.
To Be or Not to Be Chinese
While research on this emerging yet expanding group remains limited, foreigners’ descendants in China face a widespread identity crisis and struggle to overcome misunderstandings and exclusion, despite their efforts to forge a reconciled identity and live harmoniously within Chinese society. At the same time, the lack of recognition of these descendants reflects the fact that Chinese society is not yet prepared to accept foreign ethnicities into the broader family of the Chinese nation. These individuals live in China, speak its languages, and follow its social norms. However, their lives often remain suspended between inclusion and exclusion. They move within the mainstream but feel rootless, embodying a condition of cultural in-betweenness. Nevertheless, as interactions between China and the rest of the world continue, so too does the integration of foreigners and their offspring into Chinese society. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s classic idea that a nation is an imagined community, perhaps it is time to update our collective imagination of what it means to be part of the Chinese nation, and to let those who flow take roots in this land.
Featured Image: Lotus Flower, Source: Patrick Sledz (CC), Flickr.com.
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