Racialised mobilities in China

The scholarship on how race and mobilities intersect and interact has emerged mainly from the Western context, such as the UK and the US. Minimal to no research has examined this relation within Global South settings. As an emergent destination country for international migration, China offers an in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Sociological review (Keele) 2025-01, Vol.73 (1), p.63-80
Main Author: Wang, Zizhen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
College students
Foreign students
Hierarchies
Ideology
Internal migration
Local population
Migrants
Migration
Mobility
Race
Racial identity
Racialization
Racism
Scapegoating
Skin color
Social norms
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Summary:The scholarship on how race and mobilities intersect and interact has emerged mainly from the Western context, such as the UK and the US. Minimal to no research has examined this relation within Global South settings. As an emergent destination country for international migration, China offers an interesting case to research the mechanisms through which foreign migrants’ mobilities are racialised and hierarchised by the local population. This article thus examines how race and racism affect foreign students’ negotiation and interpretation of daily rules of movement and social norms of mobility, and how the racialisation of mobilities, in return, reshaped their foreignness in China. Based on ethnographic data from in-depth interviews with 21 foreign students in an elite Chinese university and participant observation, this article shows how the hierarchy of access to everyday mobilities is established through the logic of racial ideology, scapegoating and institutional design. Mobilities are also intertwined with the intersections of race, gender and skin tone, alongside the construction of misperceived racial identities from the locals, which goes on to produce further immobilisation among foreign students.
ISSN:0038-0261
1467-954X
DOI:10.1177/00380261231214957