Appartenances & Altérités
3 | 2023
Prévalence, mécanismes et conséquences
cumulatives des discriminations en raison de l’origine
Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and
the transnational circulation of racial knowledge:
On Chinese migrants in Chicago, on African
migrants in Guangzhou, and on the reconfiguration
of whiteness in China”. Interview by Dominique
Vidal and Simeng Wang. Transcriber: Nora Sahel
Shanshan Lan, Dominique Vidal and Simeng Wang
Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/alterites/426
DOI: 10.4000/alterites.426
ISSN: 1953-7476
Translation(s):
Shanshan Lan, « Recherches sur les concepts de race, de migration et sur la circulation transnationale
de la connaissance raciale : À propos des immigrés chinois à Chicago, des immigrés africains à
Guangzhou et de la reconfiguration de la blanchité en Chine ». Entretien avec Dominique Vidal et
Simeng Wang. Transcription : Nora Sahel - URL : https://journals.openedition.org/alterites/439 [fr]
Publisher
Urmis
Electronic reference
Shanshan Lan, Dominique Vidal and Simeng Wang, “Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and
the transnational circulation of racial knowledge: On Chinese migrants in Chicago, on African migrants
in Guangzhou, and on the reconfiguration of whiteness in China”. Interview by Dominique Vidal and
Simeng Wang. Transcriber: Nora Sahel”, Appartenances & Altérités [Online], 3 | 2023, Online since 15
January 2023, connection on 12 March 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/alterites/426 ; DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4000/alterites.426
This text was automatically generated on 12 March 2023.
Creative Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
Shanshan Lan, “Researching race,
migration, and the transnational
circulation of racial knowledge: On
Chinese migrants in Chicago, on
African migrants in Guangzhou, and
on the reconfiguration of whiteness
in China”. Interview by Dominique
Vidal and Simeng Wang.
Transcriber: Nora Sahel
Shanshan Lan, Dominique Vidal and Simeng Wang
1
Shanshan Lan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the
University of Amsterdam. She has been conducting researches for nearly twenty years
on Chinese migration to the United States (Diaspora and Class Consciousness: Chinese
Immigrant Workers in Multiracial Chicago, a book based on her doctoral dissertation,
published by Routledge in 2012), on Africans in the Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou
(Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging,
Routledge, 2017) and on whiteness in China, in the framework of the ERC “ChinaWhite”
project she is currently leading: “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges,
precariousness, and racialized performances” (2019-2024).
2
Her researches meet in many ways the interests of Appartenances & Altérités. First of all,
it raises the question of the transnational circulation and empirical transposability of
conceptual and theoretical frameworks formed in singular spaces and moments, such
as the debate on the meaning of race according to the fieldworks and racialized
Appartenances & Altérités, 3 | 2023
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
situations studied. Studies carried out by Shanshan Lan also show the interest of
reversing nationally situated perspectives, particularly in terms of the “majority/
minority” relationship and what is at stake around the theme of whiteness. They also
highlight, in the context of China's rise, the contrast between the different national
contexts analyzed, in other words, between the United States and China, in terms of
political regime, economic development model, migration policies for internal and
international migrants from different continents, etc.
3
In the following interview, Shanshan Lan introduces her biographical and scholarly
background, her training as an anthropologist in the United States at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and her distanced use of Western social sciences. She also
discusses several concepts that she has developed from empirical investigations: “racial
knowledge”, “overlapping racialization”, “grassroots interracial interaction”, and the
difference she makes between “white privilege” and “white skin privilege”. She also
provides several essential elements for understanding contemporary China, such as the
meaning of race, the significance of the Maoist period in the representation of Africa
and Africans, the rise of nationalism, and the possible future of immigration landscape
in the country. She also comments the social and political responsibilities of
researchers, a series of ongoing debates in the social sciences (intersectionality,
decolonial perspective), the increasing difficulties to carry out ethnographic surveys in
China under the pandemic, and new featured research programs to be undertaken,
before offering young researchers some reading advices and reflection perspectives.
Researching race, migration, and the transnational
circulation of racial knowledge: On Chinese migrants
in Chicago, on African migrants in Guangzhou1, and on
the reconfiguration of whiteness in China
Discovering everyday racism in the United States via personal
experiences
A&A: Maybe we can begin with a first question about your trajectory, your academic training. You
can introduce yourself, telling us about your scientific trajectory and how you became an
anthropologist—where you studied and how did you get started working on issues of migration
studies, particularly about race and racialization?
Shanshan Lan: Ok, I’m currently associate professor in the Anthropology
Department at the University of Amsterdam. I got my Bachelor’s degree and my
Master’s degree in English language and literature in China. I moved to the US in the
year 2000 when I was admitted into the Master’s program of East Asian studies at the
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. I stayed there one year but I didn’t like it
because all my cohort were Chinese students, we were speaking Chinese in the office
all the time. My research topic was on ancient Chinese poetry, but at that time,
I thought it had very little to do with social reality and I really wanted to go into
Social Sciences. So later I transferred to the Anthropology Department—or not really
transferred but I reapplied. I reapplied for the PhD program in the Anthropology
Department, because one of the professors who later became my supervisor,
Professor Nancy Abelmann, she had a joint appointment in both Anthropology and
Asian studies. I was encouraged by her to apply for a PhD in Anthropology, which
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
I did. Even before I applied for my PhD, my first semester I took a course on the
history of anthropology, and I really liked it. I think anthropology is the greatest
discipline in the world because you can study anything related to what human beings
are doing. So that was how I became an anthropologist, and I was very happy in the
Anthropology Department. What I didn’t know was that department was actually
among the top ten in the US, it’s a very good department. And I really enjoyed my
time there. I never regretted becoming an anthropologist.
Now I want to talk about how I discovered my PhD topic. When I started my PhD,
I was inspired by Aihwa Ong’s book Flexible Citizenship (Ong 1999), which was hugely
popular at that time. So I told my supervisor that I wanted to study transnational
mobility of Chinese businessmen but my supervisor said why don’t you do a literature
review on Chinese immigrants in the US and identify the gaps in existing literature.
So one of the gaps that I found was family, family issues among Chinese Americans
and the other one was interracial relations. It’s really interesting how we discover
our research topics, sometimes by pure coincidence. Because in the summer 2003
I got a grant from the National Science Foundation and its purpose was fieldwork
methodology training. Its purpose was for you to go to a field site and learn how to do
ethnographic research under the supervision of a faculty mentor. So I discussed the
issue with my mentor Prof. Martin Manalansan. We decided that I could probably try
Chicago’s Chinatown. At that time, I only had a vague idea that my dissertation
research would be about Chinese immigrants in the US. I thought I was using
Chicago’s Chinatown as a laboratory, learning how to conduct fieldwork. Because
I am Chinese, it was also quite natural that I should do research in a Chinese
immigrant community, and Chicago is only two hours away from Urbana-Champaign.
And that’s something we can discuss later, the politics of knowledge production in
anthropology. It seemed at that time that what topic one can choose is largely based
on one’s ethnic background. It has both pros and cons and we can discuss that later.
So I went to Chicago’s Chinatown to learn how to do ethnographic research, but
something happened that helped me discover race and everyday racism. This is
recorded in my first book (Lan 2012). One day I was walking back from an interview
in Bridgeport, which is a historically white neighbourhood next to Chicago’s
Chinatown, and I was harassed by some white-looking kids. They were calling me
names, you know like the racial slurs against Chinese, and imitating Chinese words,
they even threatened to beat me. So I was totally devastated. I never experienced this
before. It was my third year in the US. So suddenly I was confronted with this racebased hate crime. So I tried to call a hotline, ran by a local NGO, and they asked me
“How old are you? We only deal with teenagers”, and they also asked me “Have you
any wounds or injury on your body?” I did not have any physical wounds on me, but
I was shaking with anger and fear. I was so angry because I couldn’t find any help.
And I just did not fit into any category of victims of hate crimes.
It was very emotionally challenging for me, until I started talking to the residents in
Chinatown and Bridgeport. So I was sharing with this elderly Chinese American
person and he said “hey take it easy, it happens all the time, we got used to it.” So
that became the moment when I suddenly became local, and that really opened the
door for me to see the everyday racial encounters or harassment the people in that
neighbourhood, in Bridgeport, went through. My landlord, who is Cantonese, would
say “hey, don’t worry, they are just stupid people!” That really helped me think about
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
how do people, especially Chinese migrant workers, how do they understand racial
discrimination? Is it me, the researcher, who brings this term into their life? Because
in their own terms they would say that those white kids are ignorant, they are stupid,
they don’t understand us, it’s cultural differences. So my whole dissertation project
really focuses on uncovering the different ways for Chinese migrant workers,
working class people who are working in the restaurants and ethnic business sector,
how do they make sense of this everyday racism? How do they articulate it without
using our academic terminology? They probably will talk about which part of the
neighbourhood is safe to live, which part is not. And about how you move around,
you know, the different ways of travelling, whether by foot or by car in order to avoid
some of the dangerous spots. So how space has become racialized in that
neighbourhood. That was a very traumatic incident but it really helped me find my
research project.
Transnational racial knowledge formation. From Chinese migrants
in the United States to African migrants in China
A&A: You have already evoked this question but we would like to know how you have
successively worked on the different projects on migrants from different ethnic backgrounds. Of
course we started on your PhD work on Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants in Chicago,
but then you also carried out fieldwork about the African diaspora in Guangzhou, in China (Lan
2017), and also recently in the frame of your ERC project ChinaWhite about the questions of the
reconfiguration of whiteness in China (https://www.china-white.org/). So we want to maybe go
back to these scientific trajectories of yours, so we would like to know how did you come to
move from one field to another and from one subject to another and also, behind all of this
fieldwork and empirical data, how the theoretical framework of each research has evolved?
Shanshan Lan: Thank you, that’s a great question. To go back to my Chinatown
project, I discovered race and racism. And actually, it was so traumatic I immediately
left the field. I wrote a message to my mentor saying that I couldn’t stay here any
longer and just left. But after a couple of months, you have to calm down, really do
some critical reflection. I didn’t just discover my research question on the spot. It was
through painful self-reflections, reading literature on race and racism, and
discussions with my professors. I discovered that this was a very important topic. So
studying this, for me, as a woman from China, who has no training or background in
race or ethnic studies, it was a totally new area for me but it was personally very
important for me. Fortunately, the University of Illinois has some great scholars on
race and ethnic studies. I had David Roediger, the renowned whiteness studies
historian, on my dissertation committee. I had Arlene Torres, she is an
anthropologist on Latin America and Latino studies. So I read a lot- literature on race,
racism against blacks, racism against Asian Americans. After I left the US and found a
job in Hong Kong, I had to transform myself into a China studies scholar but my
training was very US-focused, mainly on race, migration, and ethnic studies. One of
the key concepts in my dissertation is overlapping racialization. There was a
comparative perspective in my doctoral research. I focused on how the racialization
experience of Chinese migrants overlap with that of black Americans and Mexican
migrants. I consider Chinatown not as an ethnic enclave for Chinese only but a
multiracial neighbourhood where Chinese, African Americans and Mexican
immigrants rub shoulders with each other. Through these everyday interactions they
begin to develop very complex knowledge about racial differences and class
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
differences. One of my arguments is that middle class Chinese who live in the suburbs
have no everyday interactions with black people or with Mexican immigrants, they
don’t share the same values as those migrant workers who live in Chinatown and who
have on the ground multi-racial experiences. So I look at this overlapping
racialization, it’s not racialization of one group alone. It’s through these interracial
encounters that people begin to develop and also modify and change their
knowledge, or enrich their knowledge, about race.
Another key concept is racial knowledge, which I define as knowledge about racial
differences accumulated through the transnational migration experience. So one of
my arguments is that racial knowledge formation did not happen in Chinatown, it
happened even before they migrated to Chinatown. One chapter in my first book is
really about how Chinese develop knowledge about black people in China. So that
actually became the start for my project about Africans in Guangzhou. So when I was
doing archival research on that chapter about how Chinese people develop their
ideas about black people, I began to discover some works on black Africans in
Guangzhou. There were already a few articles, not academic articles because it was a
new phenomenon. So I began to notice, but I didn’t realize that later I would move
back to Hong Kong to start a new project on black Africans in Guangzhou, but there is
a connection there. The seed has already been sown in my first book.
So that naturally transitioned to the second project. Even now my project on
whiteness, the focus is still on racial knowledge formation. How Chinese people
develop their knowledge about blackness, and about whiteness. One of my arguments
is that this development of racial knowledge is a transnational process. It is not
developed in an isolated Chinese environment, there is globalization, transnational
migration. So if you take this transnational perspective as the core of my research,
you will see the connection between the Chinatown project and the Africans in China
project. They are both about international migration and the development of racial
knowledge. The only difference is location. You know, the first is located in the US,
the second one shifts its focus to China, it’s about international migrants in China.
How this international migration is bringing something new to China, especially in
my Africans in Guangzhou project, I examined the interracial encounters between
internal migrants2, rural to urban migrants in China, and international migrants.
Those people who have never met a foreigner before. They really had no previous,
intimate knowledge about black people. So it’s an intersection of internal and
international migration. So I’m really interested in these inter-group relations. How
two groups who are very different and who had no previous contact, they suddenly
come into contact with each other in this business environment in Guangzhou. They
have to engage in buying and selling, bargaining, and business negotiation, which
I call grassroots interracial interactions. During this process of course racialization
happens, or I prefer to call it interactive racialization.
Many people like to talk about my article on the shifting meanings of race in China
(Lan 2022) but today I really want to highlight another one, “Reconstructing
Blackness in Grassroots Interactions Between Chinese and Africans in Guangzhou”
(Lan 2019). I personally like that one better because in that one I distinguish between
different groups of Chinese and I talk about the Chinese gaze. Of course the Chinese
gaze is not as powerful as the White one, and also there are multiple Chinese gazes.
You have the elite Chinese gaze, you have the grassroots Chinese gaze. So, in the
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
reconstructing blackness paper, I make the distinction between elite and non-elite
Chinese gazes. And they lead to different constructions of blackness.
So the elite gaze, actually, to a large extent, reproduces Western mainstream ideas
about blackness. It’s stigmatized but it’s also considered intellectually inferior. Well,
in the grassroots construction of blackness, one basic principle is equality. They treat
Africans as equals, the same people as themselves, not as someone who is stupid or
inferior to them. Both groups are migrants. So I make distinctions between two types
of racialization. For the elite, it’s called presumptive racialization, it’s based on
second-hand knowledge, for example, knowledge from the newspapers or Hollywood
movies. Western media contain plenty of racist images of black people. Some Chinese
online discussions about black Africans in Guangzhou cited racist publications in the
West supporting the argument that black people have lower IQ. Well if you ask a
migrant from rural China, they’ve never read that kind of book, they don’t know. All
their knowledge about black Africans are through everyday interactions. They would
also complain to me about black people, but it’s based on interactive racialization.
These two types of racialization are different because one is based on hearsay,
second-hand knowledge and the other is based on daily interactions. But this doesn’t
mean these daily interactions would not involve racialization. Chinese migrants also
complain about black people being stingy, being rude. One of the reasons for these
stereotypes can be traced back, interestingly to the Mao years. The Maoist ideology is
still very much alive today in China. Most Chinese people, whether they are rural or
not, know of the Mao ideology that the Africans are our brothers. This language of
brotherhood and this official rhetoric of Sino-African friendship is still very much
alive. However, the Mao era also had its legacy, which was not very positive. Because,
what we learned was that China was doing its best to help Africans and African
people are poor and are always in need of help. So the Maoist ideology really
perpetuates the idea that Africans are in a dire situation and they need help. But in
reality, some of the African traders who travelled to Guangzhou, they are actually
quite wealthy. But when, during the business negotiation process, when there are
conflicts, when there are some misunderstandings, some Chinese will revert to the
old stereotype that Africans are stingy, they bargain over every cent because they
have no money. White people are generous, they never bargain. I argue that this is
based on partly on the Mao era stereotypes, partly on the marginalization of both
groups in urban Chinese economy. Because the rural migrants are also fighting for
every cent since they want to make it in Guangzhou. They want to make money out of
foreigners. While the Africans, they are also at the lower end of the global value
chain. They have to bargain hard in order to make a profit when shipping the goods
back to Africa to sell. Gordon Mathews called it globalization from below. It's really
about people with small capital, who operate their business under the radar of the
state and in the grey zone between legality and illegality. They face all kind of
mobility regimes, visa and immigration control, it’s very hard to make a profit. So
both groups are marginalized, and they have to depend on each other in order to
survive in this informal urban economy.
Another reason is language barrier. Chinese migrants don’t speak English and
Africans can only speak some simple Chinese, but it’s not enough to understand very
complicated issues. My conclusion is that this interactive racialization is more openended. It may reinforce some of the stereotypes but it also has the potential to
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
changes people’s ideas and perceptions. Some of the Chinese migrants tell me “hey,
African people they are stingy but they are enthusiastic and honest, it’s very easy to
do business with them.” So as they get to know each other more and more, they
discover the bad things but also the positive values. They treat each other as real
people, right, not as some stories one heard. So I see a potential for transforming, or
impacting, people’s racial knowledge formation through these daily life interactions.
I don’t want to romanticize this grassroots interactions but I also see the positive side
of it, for example both groups, Chinese migrants and African migrants, they criticize
China’s immigration policy, because they both want real businessmen to get longterm visa so that this transnational trade market in Guangzhou can thrive instead of
disappear. Also these grassroots Chinese merchants, they acknowledge the
contributions of African migrants. They would tell me that the Sanyuanli area used to
be filled with Chinese drug dealers and there was no business but after the Africans
came, so many trade markets started to emerge and flourish. The Africans provided
business and job opportunities for Chinese. I heard that a lot, during my interviews,
but if you look at the Chinese media, they seldom acknowledge the contributions of
these petty transnational African businesspeople. Africans are merely constructed as
undocumented, illegal who are causing all kinds of problems. So this Sino-African
relationship is asymmetrical, China is acting as the big brother, “I’m helping you, you
need my aid.” At the governmental level, China is not treating African countries as its
equal. That’s why this grassroots interaction is so important because at least they are
treating each other as equals. I have one example from a Chinese Muslim man, his
name is Youssef. He kept calling Africans “barbaric”, in Chinese “野蛮的,” which,
upon first hearing it you may think, “Hey, you are a racist!” when you keep calling
Africans “barbaric”. So one day I asked him, I said, “What do you mean by barbaric?
Can you explain it to me?” And he said it means someone who has a bad temper, who
likes to fight, who likes to argue, just like himself. So he is not aware of the racial
connotation of calling a black African barbaric. The meaning of the term for him is
more like quarrelsome, belligerent, aggressive. It’s like himself because Youssef also
quarrels a lot with his African clients. But I can see that even he didn’t realize himself
that he was placing those potentially troublesome African clients on the same level as
himself. His reasoning was different from the elite Chinese perspective, which
presumes Africans are inferior or lesser human beings.
Racism, color prejudice, and the importance of cultural context
A&A: We would like you to speak more about your research in Guangzhou. In your article “The
shifting meanings of race in China: a case study of the African diaspora communities in
Guangzhou” (Lan 2016), you point out that the “existing literature on race in China is generally
divided into two camps. The first believes that the discourse of race and racism has a long
history in Chinese culture, while the second emphasizes distinctions between traditional Chinese
ways of constructing difference and the Western pseudo-scientific notion of race” (p. 300). Could
you elaborate on the distinction you make between “racism” and “color prejudice” following the
book of St. Clair Drake (Drake 1987)? Could you also go back to the discourses on the “yellow
race” in China since the end of the 19th century?
Shanshan Lan: I think that racism has a history, an origin. It originated from the
West. It’s related to colonialism, there was the global slave trade, white supremacist
movements in Western countries. I personally do not think that race is a universal
construct. Although I think racialization can be universal. Racialization can happen
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
in different countries, but race has a history. Colour prejudice can be related to
racism, if people are racists, you know they can also practice colour prejudice but
colour prejudice can also be detached from racism, separated from racism. That’s
what St. Clair Drake’s book is about. He studies the black diaspora in different parts of
the world. The book really moves beyond the US context in defining race and
blackness because you know whenever we talk about blackness, the black power
movement, it’s very US-centric, the understanding of race and racism. So St. Clair
Drake adopts this transnational framework. He argues that in some black
communities beyond the US even black people have colour-based prejudice, they will
even say that a certain darker skin colour is less beautiful, but he made a distinction
between this and anti-black racism practiced by white people. Colour prejudice
practiced in the black community is a little bit hard for people to understand. That’s
because the definition of race and blackness has been so hegemonic, it has been
established by Western discourses. It’s very hard for people to come up with
alternative ways of understanding any other discussions of blackness and whiteness.
Let me give you an example. During the 2018 Chinese New Year gala show, a Chinese
actress performed an African mother by wearing blackface. This is a highly
controversial case. The comments are divided into two camps. The majority of the
English language media are saying, “Look, this is an example of Chinese racism.” And
the other is saying that you have to take the Chinese cultural context into
consideration. This controversial shows the hegemonic meaning of blackface
performance. Because in the US context, blackface performance is considered racist.
You know, white people putting on blackface is considered racist and it has a long
history in the US. However, when you see blackface performance in Japan or in China,
does it still mean the same thing as in the US? Or are people allowed to interpret it in
a different way?
We need to take into consideration the historical and cultural context in China to
understand the specific meanings of blackface performance in China. During the Mao
era the actors and actresses in the cultural troupe, they would perform blackface to
ordinary Chinese. It’s really for educational purposes, to show how our African
brothers were suffering so much and we needed to help them. It was used as political
propaganda to serve anti-colonial, anti-imperialist purposes. It has a totally different
political meaning than the blackface performance in the US. There are also scholars
who research hip-hop in Japan such as Ian Condry. In the US, hip-hop was used as a
counterculture to fight against anti-black racism, urban poverty, and ghettoization.
Well in Japan, hip-hop was appropriated by Korean-Japanese artists to fight against
class differences. So there has to be a space for the same cultural format to be
appropriated in a different cultural and political context for a different purpose.
Right now this space is very limited because you have the mainstream voice who says
that any blackface performance is racist. I prefer to call this kind of accusation an
attempt to diagnose racism. We try to diagnose what is racism and what is not based
on a narrowly defined US definition. Hey, I catch you, you are a racist. So it really
wouldn’t serve the long term agenda for anti-racist struggle. It will close the
conversation, with people being panic and saying, hey I’m not a racist, I don’t want to
discuss this. So the irony of the Chinese New Year gala performance is that the
purpose was really to glorify Sino-African relations and how China is trying to
strengthen this relationship but it ended up being criticized because of the blackface
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Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation...
performance. So I‘m not sure that the actress herself has the knowledge about the
history of blackface performance in the US to really understand the complexity of the
situation.
But I want to mention a more recent controversy about the slanted-eye Chinese
model. Both BMW and also a Chinese brand Three Squirrels have images of Chinese
models with slanted-eye in their advertisements. It caused a huge uproar in China.
People in China are calling these advertisements racist because they highlight the
smaller eyes of Chinese. Some even said, “there are so many beautiful Chinese
women, why do you choose this one with small eyes, it really reproduces racial
stereotypes of Chinese in western countries.” Personally I think the controversy is
both a good and a bad thing.
On the one hand, it shows that Chinese people, ordinary Chinese people, are
becoming more sensitive to these Western discourses about race and racism, right,
they quickly recognize “Hey, this is problematic, it may reproduce racial stereotypes
against Chinese.” You know, the slanted-eye stereotype has been discussed a lot in
Asian American studies literature, but not so much by Chinese scholars or among
Chinese internet users. So now things are changing. It really shows that, with more
and more Chinese studying abroad, with globalization, Chinese people are also
developing this sensitivity towards issues of race. On the other hand, I think they also
overdid it. It has a lot to do with the recent rise of racial nationalism in China which
is embedded in the official rhetoric of the Chinese Dream. There is also a rise of
popular nationalism during the Covid-19 pandemic, with all the western critiques of
China’s Covid-19 containment policy, and racism against Chinese people in the
western world. Also the US-China trade war. All these really helped the development
of nationalistic sentiment in China. So anything against China will be labelled as
racism or China-bashing, it’s a very complicated phenomenon. So overall I think
there should be more space for different interpretations of race-related subjects
instead of just one voice, which reinforces the Western hegemonic meanings of race.
I realize that I didn’t answer the yellow-race question. I really want to answer that
question. So the yellow race issue is in chapter two of my first book. It’s a great
example of how Western racial discourse interacts with local discourse of ethnonationalism. The idea that Chinese people are yellow was actually introduced by
Western missionaries. If you read Frank Dikötter’s book, The Discourse of Race in
Modern China, he cited one example (Dikötter 1992). It’s a small story but it’s very
interesting. A missionary asked a Chinese boy “what colour are Chinese people?” and
the little boy said “human colour”, because Chinese had no idea of this white/black
distinction, you know, and the missionary said “no, Chinese people are yellow, you
are yellow people” and so that was the moment when Chinese encountered the
pseudo-scientific notion of race and the division of the world into five different
colours.
However, I would argue that Chinese reformers in the late nineteenth century, they
took this idea of yellow but totally transformed its meaning. So in the Western racial
system, yellow means inferiority or not as good as white. However the Chinese notion
of yellow is endowed with Chinese cultural meanings. So instead of a symbol of racial
inferiority, it became a symbol of ethnic pride because the colour yellow belongs to
the emperor. In Chinese culture only the emperor can wear the colour yellow. It
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became a symbol of authority, power, majesty, and royalty. And also it evokes the
image of the yellow river, which is the cradle of Chinese civilisation. It also is related
to the yellow emperor, who was a mythological, or semi-mythological figure, and has
been worshipped as the ancestor of all the Chinese people. So this idea of the “yellow
race”, in my book I call it “yellow race- lineage”, in order to distinguish it from the
Western notion of yellow race. Because it’s a mixture of both Western and Chinese
ideas, it’s race/lineage. If you think of the yellow emperor mythology, it’s really
about descendance. We are all descendants of the yellow emperor. It draws on the
Chinese idea of lineage and bloodline, the family, the clan. So it’s not the same as the
Western idea of race because if you study the work of Liang Qichao (梁启超), a
Chinese scholar and reformer of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), he used the Chinese
term “黄族”, “族” means lineage or clan, “黄” meaning yellow color. Frank W. Price’s
English translation of Sun Yat-sen’s work invariably translated Chinese terms such as
人种 and 民族into the same English word “race.” But within the Chinese language we
do not have a word for race. We have two words. One is “种”, one is “族”, and they
have lots of meanings. “种” means “type”, “seed”, “species”, if you read Dikötter’s
book, you will find there is no exact equivalence between the Western word of race
and the Chinese term 种族. That’s why I keep arguing that race in China is not the
same as race in the West, but we don’t have a new language to express it. If you use
the same language as the race word, you run the risk of reproducing existing
hegemonic ideas.
Theoretical framework and legacy
A&A: So, could you tell us what is your relationship to post-colonial studies and de-colonial
perspective because it has to do with the issue of Western social sciences.
Shanshan Lan: Yes, I acknowledge my work has been heavily influenced by my
academic training in the United States. But I don’t think I am just passively receiving
Western theory and trying to use it as a model to try to explain what’s happening in
China right now. Instead, I think I am trying to de-construct or challenge the
universalism of Western theory. It’s like a game. You first need to learn the rules of
the game to be able to critique it. In order to criticize the West, you have to speak the
language of the Western academia. One thing that I’m trying to show in my works is
that race and racism in China is different from that in Western countries. One really
needs to take into consideration changing historical, political, social, and cultural
contexts to understand the re-articulation and the re-construction of racial meanings
in China. Race is dynamic and relational. When it is introduced to the Chinese
context, its meanings will change. That’s something I’m struggling to find out.
I did not use post-colonial theories in my work, because, one major reason is because
China has never been fully colonized by any Western country and there is no colonial
institutional legacy in China. Scholars like James Farrer wrote about the post-colonial
nostalgia of old-generation expats in Shanghai. That was just one article. Pauline
Leonard wrote about the persistence of social privileges associated with whiteness in
post-colonial Hong Kong. But Hong Kong’s case is very different from Mainland
China.
However, I want to emphasize that my current project is an ongoing project and I’m
open to suggestions for new theoretical frameworks. In my most recent article
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published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, I was using DuBois’ concept of
double consciousness (Lan 2022-a). Basically I argue that white migrants in China also
developed a kind of double consciousness under the disciplinary power of multiple
Chinese gazes. On the one hand, they became highly aware of their whiteness, in the
West it’s invisible but in China they became highly aware that they are white. But on
the other hand, they also know that this whiteness is no longer associated with a
majority identity with structural domination. They become a minority. This
whiteness, white privilege, becomes conditional, limited and precarious. That’s my
argument on privileges and precariousness of whiteness.
The other scholar I used is Ann Stoler. Ann Stoler’s book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial
Power (Stoler 2002). I really like it because it demonstrates the fuzziness of the
boundaries of whiteness and how, you know, the interstitial position of poor white
people and white women really fleshes out the internal tensions and contradictions
within the white population. The definition of whiteness, even in the colonial era,
was really messy and was not clearcut. That is tremendously useful to me to study the
heterogeneity and stratification, the different layers, of whiteness in my work.
A&A: In your book Mapping the new Africa Diaspora in China (Lan 2017), you say China is a
key site of transnational racial knowledge production. Could we speak of a desire to decentralize
the knowledge production from the West on your part? Or a will to propose an alternative way of
approaching “race and racialization”? I think you partly answered that question but maybe you
could give us more information about that. What do you think of the place of China and studies
about China and Chinese migrants all over the world as a sight of production of knowledge?
Could you also tell us more about the meanings of white privilege and white skin privilege in your
work?
Shanshan Lan: I think that by trying to use a new term “white skin privilege” I’m
trying to move beyond the Western model, I’m trying to come up with new languages
to talk about whiteness in China. As I said before, there is this difficulty of
terminology, if you use existing terminology, you run the risk of perpetuating
existing West-centric knowledge structure. So this is actually happening in some of
the literature I cited in my recent article published in American Anthropologist (Lan
2022b). Even though they are talking about the decline of white privilege in Asia, by
using the term “white privilege” they seem to take for granted that it means the
same in Asia and in the West. So I’m really questioning that. Should we use the term
“white privilege” without questioning it’s culturally-specific meaning in China? Or
should we use a different term? Because it’s well known that white privilege means
structural domination in the western context. But when white people migrate to
China they are no longer the majority, they no longer enjoy structural domination.
They still enjoy some level of privilege, due to the transnational circulation of white
supremacist ideology in local media or the local educational system. But they also
encounter lots of limitations to this privilege.
That’s why I use the term “white skin privilege.” I want to show that whiteness is
reduced to skin-deep, you know, so it’s really white looks, white appearance that
matters. Or they say “somatic whiteness”, “physical whiteness.” You probably know
this interesting phenomenon of “white face jobs” or “white monkey jobs.” This is
really a type of commodification of white bodies, which leads to the de-valuing or
depreciation of professional skills among some of the white knowledge migrants, for
example, white English teachers. So I try to use this “white skin privilege” to really
show that there is a shift of power relations, there is a shift of cultural context. It’s no
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longer the white privilege in the Western sense. I hope this is a small step. I’m not
sure this contributes to an alternative way to research race or racialization because
I’m worried that if you overthrow a hierarchy and you might replace it with another
one. There is a danger in the claim that China is this key knowledge site, this Chinese
way of understanding race is the only way. Then it becomes hegemonic and
problematic again. So what I’m advocating is the diversification of racial meanings.
There should be multiple ways, there should be a space, a space should open up for
more diverse interpretations of racialization based on specifical historical political
cultural and social contexts. That’s what I say in my American Anthropologist article.
It’s the pluralization of the meanings of whiteness. There shouldn’t be only one way
to understanding whiteness, i.e. whiteness means wealth, prestige, upward mobility.
Because there are also different types of white people—poor whites studied by Ann
Stoler, the Western English teachers studied by me and many other scholars, so they
can perform multiple versions of whiteness, which point to the diversification of this
racial formation process in different parts of the world. On the other hand, we should
also not forget the persistence of white supremacy and it’s spreading in different
cultural contexts. That’s why some scholars they would say the way Han Chinese
treats the minorities are racism, with which I disagree. Of course it’s very bad, but it’s
Han chauvinism within the Chinese context. It never spread all over the world. it
never became a global trend. It doesn’t really constitute a transnational structural
domination. It’s not comparable with this racism originated from the West, which has
really impacted this global hierarchy in the business field, in the educational field, in
the field of international migration. Today when we talk about migrants, we usually
mean migrants from the global South. That’s why my ChinaWhite project is so
important, because I am treating white people, the so-called privileged white expats,
as migrants, incorporating them into the migration paradigm. It really helps us to
rethink racialization in our knowledge structure, the way we formulate research
questions.
A&A: You did fieldwork in Chicago. Many European students and scholars still focus on the first
Chicago school of sociology. In your eyes, what remains interesting about the first Chicago
School for understanding questions of race and racialization today, in Chicago as in the rest of
the world?
Shanshan Lan: The Chicago School is important, you know, because if you consider
the historical pioneers, they pioneered the focus, they turned their attention to
immigrants, to feature immigrants as the most important part of their study and they
regarded the city as a laboratory. A very meticulous study of different immigrant
communities. It’s a model for community studies, which is very inspirational but
I have to be honest, I’m trained as an anthropologist, not a sociologist. Basically I’m
not a big fan of the assimilation paradigm. Robert E. Park, his race relation cycle is so
influential, the contact, conflict, accommodation, assimilation cycle. Personally, I’m
really not a big fan of the assimilation model. My intellectual heritage is in
anthropology, so my focus is on racism against migrants. It’s OK to study
assimilation, but I think we put too much burden on migrants. It seems that it’s
entirely the migrants’ responsibility to deal with all the challenges in the postmigration period, and to adjust to the new environment, with assimilation as the
final goal. It’s a very teleological argument.
What I’m interested in is the anthropology of the State and also anthropology of
immigration, for example, Nicholas De Genova’s work on the legal production of
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illegality. I’m interested in the unequal power relations in structural institutional
arrangements, which make it difficult for migrants to develop a sense of belonging in
the host country. Like immigration law, like global mobility regimes. Why is it so
easy, for example, for these young Western college graduates to come to China to
teach English? Why is it so difficult for the Syrian refugees to enter Europe? There is
the issue of race and our immigration policy is racialized. It targets certain groups as
desirable and other groups as problematic. So I’m more interested in these
institutional inequalities which create opportunities or challenges for migrants in
their daily life struggles, which is kind of different from the sociological perspective.
A&A: The book from your PhD dissertation puts “class consciousness” before other social
relations including race. What do you think of intersectionality approaches in relation to studies
on overseas Chinese and China?
Shanshan Lan: I think I am using an intersectional approach but I didn’t really
announce it directly and say “Hey I’m using intersectionality as my theoretical
framework.” The Chinese migrants in Chicago project and the Africans in Guangzhou
project, they both flesh out class, class and place of origin. My recent article in the
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, that one deals with intersectionality (Lan 2022a). It discusses the intersection of nationality, gender, and the field of employment
(the public sector versus the private sector), and how that really impacted the
formation of white identities in China. So it’s embedded in my research but it’s not
highlighted. Also I recently edited a special issue, it’s called “Precarious Whiteness in
Pandemic Times in China” (https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/raan20/21/3) and
some of the papers by my PhDs dealing with gender and sexuality, nationality,
Chinese language skills. Overall, I think intersectional analysis is very important to
my research.
And how it is related to my study about overseas Chinese. Right now, my study about
overseas Chinese is mainly about Chinese students who are studying abroad. One
recently published article is Pacific Affairs is on rural origin Chinese students in South
Korea. In that article, I did mention intersectionality (Lan 2021). It’s about the
intersection of class, place of origin, whether you are from urban China or rural
China, and gender. That really helped mediate the different study abroad experiences
of two groups of students, rural origin students and students from urban middle class
backgrounds.
Future of immigration in China and scholarly responsibilities
A&A: Our next question is about migration policies implemented in China. What would be the
future of immigration in China, especially in relation to the aging of Chinese population, and the
status of foreigners in China?
Shanshan Lan: Well, I’m not sure I can predict the future, but I think in the future
there will be more diversification of foreign populations. Not just Africans or white
Westerners. I think there will be more Asian-Americans who have bilingual skills.
They are in great demand in these transnational companies With the aging of the
Chinese population, there will be more migrant labour, especially from Vietnam,
Southeast Asian countries. There was also talk about China introducing Filipino
workers as domestic helpers and English teachers. So the foreign population in China
will become more and more diversified.
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Another trend will be the continuous decline of white skin privilege. White people,
while they are still valued, there will be a depreciation of the value of white skin.
Because in the past when you see a white person in the street, many people would go
to them, taking photos, etc. Being white was exotic in China. But now, when I was
doing research among some of the foreign English teachers in Beijing and Xi’an, we
were sitting in Starbucks and nobody paid any attention to us. So people got used to
seeing foreigners in China everywhere, so it was no longer a spectacle.
Chinese people are also developing more nuanced knowledge about different groups
of foreigners. They know that some white people are not highly skilled, or highlyqualified. Especially in the English-teaching sector. There was this EF scandal, English
First, which is the biggest English language training company in China. Some of their
teachers were discovered to be taking drugs. That scandal really tarnished the image
of foreign English teachers in China.
So, immigration policy. I think there is a tendency for China to learn from the West,
to really tighten immigration control and to make distinctions between different
groups of foreigners based on their desirability. It’s already happening.
A&A: As an academic and a citizen, how would you assess the current political situation in the
world, notably the rise of nationalism, or nativism, and the rise of racist violence? How do you
think social science academics could and should contribute to the future of society?
Shanshan Lan: That’s a difficult question, it’s also a big question. I think what I can
do is to contribute to knowledge production. As an academic, you can use your
writing to educate people, to disseminate knowledge. I feel very sad because you
know, racism is still a severe problem. If you see the Black Lives Matter movement,
people are still dying from racist violence. You see that old-fashioned hardcore
racism is still on the rise with issues of immigration being politicized. So, it also keeps
me motivated to do research because what I’m doing is important. Maybe not
immediately important but also through teaching students. Most of my students are
white Dutch. At least I’m trying to raise awareness to help them reflect on this
racialized knowledge structure in Anthropology and help them realize that what they
are learning is not the whole picture. And even, as a Chinese, I’m probably their first
Chinese teacher. I’m a living example to challenge those orientalist stereotypes about
Chinese people and Chinese culture. I’ve told them many personal stories and they
would say “wow! It’s like that, I never realized it.” So students, especially those
educated in the Western system, they really need to know, to hear, a different
perspective.
So, this is getting personal but it’s also important. I’m the only Chinese woman in the
Anthropology Department teaching a white majority student body and I just feel…
you’re hugely burdened with this responsibility to tell them what you know about
Chinese society. I had to tell them that I don’t really know Confucianism. When I was
working in Hong Kong, I was once asked to give a lecture on traditional Chinese
culture to a group of visiting students from the US. I had to go to the internet to learn
more about Confucianism myself before preparing the lecture. Some of my Dutch
students were just shocked by what I told them. You know I have to tell them that
women in China have lots of rights. When I went to school I had the same
opportunities as my brother. I even did better in school than my brother. Some of
them still think that women in China are oppressed and have little rights. China is so
big, of course in some rural areas, this is true, but you have to give students a more
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balanced picture instead of what they read in the news or watched on TV. So even
these small steps, I think, is quite useful. It’s quite important. It kept me motivated as
a scholar, and as a teacher.
Challenges in conducting ethnographic research in pandemic times
A&A: Thank you so much for sharing. So the next question is about the Covid impact on
scientific knowledge production. How do you and your ERC team conduct your research localized
in China? Do you carry out online ethnographies? Do you think the pandemic will have an impact
on the way ethnographers will invest in distant fieldwork or conduct transnational fieldwork?
Shanshan Lan: Yes, of course. That’s the biggest trouble for my team now. One of my
PhD students, she cannot go to China because China’s borders are closed to
international travellers. I didn’t do any online ethnography because I did some
research just before Covid so I’m still writing articles based on that set of data, but
my PhDs and postdocs, they did some online research. This special issue I co-edited
with my two postdoctoral researchers, it’s mostly based on online ethnography. It’s a
crisis moment but also an opportunity, I think. For example, this article I co-authored
with my PhD Christina Kefala, who studies young Western entrepreneurs and their
experience of leaving China because of the outbreak of Covid-19 (Kefala & Lan 2022).
So it’s about their experience of leaving China and returning to Europe, and how that
impacted their “China dream,” their future career expectations, and their identities
as transnational migrants. I personally think it is a very interesting article.
Also another piece by my PhD Ke Ma, she studies white Western vloggers in China
(Ma 2022). They post videos on Chinese websites sharing their daily life, also sharing
their opinions on Covid and on anti-Chinese racism in Western countries. The paper
examines how they perform white masculinity, and how that white masculinity is
evaluated by Chinese youth. So Covid opens up a new field, like this digital
ethnography and also shifts our research site to the online domain. But our major
research question remain more or less the same. It’s really about the social
construction of whiteness in China and the changing meanings of whiteness in China.
Another PhD Raviv Litman did online participant observation research. He worked as
an online English teacher, teaching English to students in China. Through this
process he learned the business models of the online English teaching companies in
China, how whiteness is valued or exploited in this process (Litman 2022). So those
are really productive aspects of the projects. But, in order to graduate as a PhD in
anthropology you have to do some “real” fieldwork and this is a challenge.
New research agendas and advices for young scholars
A&A: What are the three books/articles that you consider essential and that you would suggest
to young researchers working on issues of race and racialization in the context of China and
Chinese diasporas?
Shanshan Lan: The first one would be Frank Dikötter’s book The Discourse of Race in
Modern China (Dikötter 1992). It’s a controversial book. I don’t agree to all his
arguments, but it’s the only monograph dealing with racial discourse in modern
China and it can serve as a good background reading. Another is by Kowner and
Demel, they are two historians, they edited two volumes. The name is Race and Racism
in Modern East Asia. Volume one is called Western and Eastern Constructions, volume two
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is called Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage. For me, volume two is more
interesting, but the two edited volumes contain several pieces about race in China,
which can be highly interesting. And I also agree to the two author’s major
arguments. They acknowledge that there is racism in Asia but they also note that
racism in Asia is different from that in the West. I highly recommend these two
edited volumes.
The third one would be Ann Stoler’s book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race
and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Stoler 2002). It’s not about China but it can serve as a
good theoretical foundation, especially for students in China studies who have no
knowledge about race. Because Stoler, she does a beautiful job in really showing the
messiness of racial categorization. Race is not stable, it’s changing all the time. There
are all kinds of tensions and dilemmas in this colonial racial categorization which
really push students in race studies to rethink unequal power relations embedded in
institutional categorization practices. I love the book and my PhDs they also like the
book.
A&A: We would like to ask what topics are important for you today? If you were a young PhD
researcher what would you study?
Shanshan Lan: I would join the ChinaWhite team. I think it’s really important to
study the global circulation of “white privilege” because, I keep coming back to this,
but it’s based on my personal experience of being a woman of colour, being a Chinese
woman, living among groups of white people and white colleagues and my white
students. I’m highly conscious of my identity as, what you call an outsider, or a
racialized body. Because it creates, you know, a unique perspective for me to study
this white culture, this white institution, and white knowledge structure, so I really
love this project. I hope it can generate important findings and it can make an impact
in the field of race and migration studies.
A&A: Finally, we have one more question about the legitimacy for a researcher to choose a
particular research topic, because when you started to present your PhD topic choice, you
mentioned a hint made by your professors about the connection between the topic to be studied
and your ethnic background. We would therefore like to know more about your opinion on the
legitimacy of choosing a research topic for researchers with a migration background.
Shanshan Lan: It also reflects the racialization of knowledge production in
academia. I don’t know, it’s a hard question. I don’t think the professors who told me
to study Chinatown intentionally meant anything unkind. Actually I think they were
being very kind. And I also don’t know if I chose another topic I would do better. It’s a
dilemma. You know, on the one hand, it’s called native anthropology, because you
already have the language skills and it could be easier for you to study people from
the same ethnic background as you. Because in the good old past it was mainly white
Westerners who went to study the so-called indigenous people, usually in nonwestern societies. It took many years for them to learn the language in order to
conduct fieldwork. Of course it was related to colonialism and unequal power
relations. But nowadays people can study their own society, their own culture. You
don’t have to learn the language. You have the bilingual skills, you have the cultural
knowledge, it can also be a plus. But the minus is that it’s very hard to achieve this
de-familiarisation. You can take things for granted and miss a lot of interesting
findings.
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I had a PhD, Willy Sier, she already graduated. She’s a Dutch lady who studies rural to
urban student migrants in Wuhan. When I read her writing, it was so inspirational,
because what she discovered are all the things I took for granted. I thought, hey,
I never thought about it this way. You need a new pair of eyes, a new perspective, an
outsider’s perspective to discover new things. So I’m not against native anthropology,
but I think there should be a healthy combination of scholars from different
backgrounds, with more space for them to choose what they want to do instead of
you know, their imagination of the future possible topics being limited by their
ethnic background, that can be problematic. Like, if I were a young PhD now, if
I wanted to study French people eating some kind of fancy food, I should be
encouraged to explore the feasibility of the project instead of being told, “Hey, this is
not your topic. You should choose a topic related to China.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dikötter, Frank. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst.
Drake, St. Clair. 1987. Black Folk Here and There. Los Angeles: Center for AfroAmerican Studies,
University of California.
Kefala, Christina and Lan, Shanshan. 2022. “End of the China dream? Young Western
entrepreneurs’ trajectories of leaving China during Covid-19.” Asian Anthropology 21(3): 197-210.
Kowner, Rotem and Demel, Walter. 2013. Race and Racism in Modern East Asia. Western and Eastern
Constructions. Leiden: Brill.
Lan, Shanshan. 2012. Diaspora and Class Consciousness: Chinese Immigrant Workers in Multiracial
Chicago. New York: Routledge.
Lan, Shanshan. 2016. “The Shifting Meanings of Race in China: A Case Study of the African
Diaspora Communities in Guangzhou.” City & Society 28(3): 298-318.
Lan, Shanshan. 2017. Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of
Belonging. New York: Routledge.
Lan, Shanshan. 2019. “Reconstructing Blackness in Grassroots Interactions Between Chinese and
Africans in Guangzhou.” Anthropological Quarterly 92(2): 481-508.
Lan, Shanshan. 2021. “Finding a Chulu (Way Out): Rural-origin Chinese Students Studying Abroad
in South Korea.” Pacific Affairs 94(4): 661-681.
Lan, Shanshan. 2022-a. “The foreign bully, the guest and the low-income knowledge worker:
performing multiple versions of whiteness in China.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48(15):
3544-3560.
Lan, Shanshan. 2022b. “Between Privileges and Precariousness: Remaking Whiteness in China’s
Teaching English as a Second Language Industry.” American Anthropologist 124(1): 118-129.
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Litman, Raviv. 2022. “‘Neutral’ vs. ‘pure’ accents: the racialization of Filipino and EuroAmerican
teachers in China’s online education industry during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Asian Anthropology
21(3): 224-237.
Ma, Ke. 2022. “Transnational white masculinity on Chinese social media: Western male vloggers’
self-representations during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Asian Anthropology 21(3): 211-223.
Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham NC: Duke
University Press.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule.
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
NOTES
1. TN: The city of Guangzhou (广州) is usually known as “Canton” in the West.
Nevertheless, we have chosen to write it in Roman characters as it is pronounced in
standard Chinese. This choice results not only from the growing use of “Guangzhou”
well beyond China's borders, but also from the desire to rectify the frequent error,
originating in the mid-19th century, of confusing the province of Guangdong (广东,
whose pronunciation in standard Chinese is close to “Canton”) where Guangzhou is
located, with this city of Guangzhou itself.
2. TN: It is question of the complex and often conflictual relations between Chinese city dwellers
and migrant workers (mingong) who come from the countryside to work in urban areas. The
latter suffer, on the one hand, from social prejudices that describe them as backward and
inferior, and, on the other hand, from a difference in institutional treatment, particularly in
access to social rights. Chinese law considers that an individual can only benefit from certain
public services (such as health and education for children) in the administrative area where he or
she was registered at birth. According to the 2021 Migrant Workers Follow-up Survey Report
(2021年农民工监测调查报告) released in 2022 by the National Bureau of Statistics of China,
292.51 million people are counted as mingong. Source: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/202204/
t20220429_1830126.html.
ABSTRACTS
Shanshan Lan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Amsterdam. She has been conducting researches for nearly twenty years on Chinese migration to
the United States, on Africans in the Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou and on whiteness in
China. In the following interview, Shanshan Lan introduces her biographical and scholarly
background, her training as an anthropologist in the United States and her distanced use of
Western social sciences. She also discusses several concepts that she has developed from
empirical investigations: “racial knowledge”, “overlapping racialization”, “grassroots interracial
interaction”, and the difference she makes between “white privilege” and “white skin privilege”.
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INDEX
Keywords: race, racism, whiteness, concepts, circulation, migration, Chinese migrants, African
migrants, China, Chicago, Guangzhou
AUTHORS
SHANSHAN LAN
University of Amsterdam
DOMINIQUE VIDAL
URMIS - Unité de recherche Migrations et société
Université Paris Cité
SIMENG WANG
CNRS
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