‘Our motto is —’, the supervisor chanted. ‘Meituan Delivery, punctual and helpful [美团配送, 准时好用]!’, dozens of drivers responded in unison. At 9.30 am, drivers assembled for a roll call under a bridge near a residential complex. The supervisor reminded them to clean their delivery boxes, reiterated the health and safety guidelines, and reported the rate […]

Chinese society has long been patriarchal, whereby men hold more privilege and power than women. Despite challenges and transformations over time, patriarchy has been a persistent and pervasive foundational organising principle of social and political life (Evans 2024). The ideological reinvention of neo-Confucianism as the moral standard in Xi Jinping’s China (Yan 2021) has further […]

Since the 2010s, the debate about anti-gender politics has centred on the rise of right-wing forces and ideologies that are trans-exclusionary, queerphobic, and anti-feminist—particularly hostile to queer and intersectional feminisms (Butler 2024). These movements often weaponise victimhood to uphold existing structures of power: cisgender women are portrayed as victims of transgender rights under cis-sexism; men […]

In the autumn of 1995, Ye Shuhua made a speech. During the NGO Forum at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the 68-year-old astronomer took to the microphone and called on fellow women to break the glass ceiling and realise their potentials (Ye 2023; China Science Daily 2016). The daughter […]

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 […]