Writing about race in Africa–China relations is contentious. On the one hand, there is an audience which assumes anti-Black racism in China to be self-evident and regards efforts to contextualise if not downplay it to be puzzling and problematic. On the other hand, there are those who consider discussions of anti-Black racism in China to be unreflectively imposing Western frameworks and contexts on a distinctively Chinese context. This essay argues that this tension is related to other contentions about the nature of political economic asymmetries in Africa–China relations, and the politics of knowledge production regarding who is speaking about whom.

In Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China (Canongate Books, 2023), Noo Saro-Wiwa investigates the experiences of economic migrants from Africa in today’s China. While the countries of Europe and North America and others in the Global North have established substantial roadblocks to commerce with African nations and African people, China […]

World, Meet World is the title of this brief intervention. When considering what to call this, I was thinking of that quip I heard retold by a weary African thinker leaving a forum: ‘China comes to Africa to talk about trade, culture, and investment. The West comes to Africa to talk about China.’ I enter […]

Just as China emerged as a revolutionary trope in interwar Black internationalist imaginaries, Shanghai-based journals started to introduce African American writing to Chinese readers. This essay traces early translations of Black literature in Republican-era China and unpacks the parallactic visions as the Harlem Renaissance travelled across the Pacific. Literary Blackness built on and expanded the […]

Ranging from the personal, political, and intellectual affinities between W.E.B. Du Bois and Mao Zedong to multiracial groups of muscular male revolutionaries on the front lines of the global charge against US imperialism, the iconographic and historiographical representations of Afro-Asian solidarity prioritise men’s internationalist activism and homosocial bonds, rarely question the long-normalised link of heteromasculinity […]

This essay deconstructs the high tide of encounter between China and African American liberation movements. While Chinese narratives in the 1960s promoted a linear vision of Black militancy that would join forces with the white working class, Black Power activists engaged with Maoism as a framework for a politics of racial nationalism that did not always aspire to interracial and anticapitalist coalition-building as its goal. As the project of Afro-Chinese solidarity lost political importance in the post-Mao era, state representatives and official channels within China no longer championed anti-racism to counter potential popular expressions of prejudice.

I was leaving New York City’s Chinatown one day after fieldwork when a friend pointed to a subway entrance off Canal Street. ‘You’re writing about Black and Chinese stuff, right? This is a perfect example,’ they said as we descended into the station. ‘These Black men hold the emergency exit open for the Chinese aunties, […]

Since the turn of the millennium, the proliferation of Africa–China encounters—Chinese investment in and migration to Africa and African migration to the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—has spurred new global racial discourses. In the 2010s, numerous high-profile incidents of anti-African, antiblack racism in the PRC made international headlines. For instance, in the infamous 2016 Qiaobi […]

What are the future possibilities for Chinese civil society? Practitioners and academics speak of optimism or pessimism—whether ‘spring’ will soon come or whether civil society organisations (CSOs) will remain in the depths of ‘winter’ (Zhu and Lu 2022). The tougher it seems for CSOs to survive, the more common such language becomes. In recent years, […]