Racial nationalism is not a novel phenomenon when it comes to public discourses on Chinese athletic performance in international sports. Media discourses in China tend to report on Chinese victories in international sports competitions with a highly racialized language of pride, and such racial pride is often constructed in explicit or implicit comparisons with foreign athletes racialized as “White” or “Black.”Footnote 1 For example, Su Bingtian (苏炳添) became the most famous sprinter in China during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics despite finishing in sixth place in the finals for the men’s 100-meter dash. He was dubbed “the Yellow Miracle” (huangzhongren de qiji) by Chinese media as his record of 9.83s, achieved during the semi-finals, was the best result of any East Asian athlete in history. Notably, netizens were all the prouder when they saw Su being the only non-Black competitor in the finals and celebratory remarks such as “Su beat all White men” proliferated online (Shi Reference Shi2021a). Such popular sentiments are linked to the global myth of “Black athletic superiority,” also prevalent in Chinese society, particularly in sports such as basketball and track and field (Wiggins Reference Wiggins1989, 158). In other words, Su’s exceptional and heroic Yellowness is epistemologically anchored to the assumption that his Black competitors are just naturally good at these sports. Beating the White man has thus become more meaningful for the Chinese than the impossible task of surpassing the “genetically superior” Blacks (Smith Reference Smith2007, 56).
As Xu Guoqi (Reference Guoqi2008, 61) points out, China’s race to the top in the nation’s “Olympic dream” has always been a mobilizing aspiration to shed the colonial label of the “Sick Man of Asia.” It is a dream grounded in the collective desire to “strengthen the (Chinese) race.” In fact, scholars like Lu Zhouxiang and Fan Hong (Reference Lu and Hong2014) trace China’s sport nationalism all the way back to the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–85) during the late Qing dynasty, when China faced existential crises in its encounters with Western imperial powers. Over time, such nationalistic pursuits have gradually built upon numerous racial stereotypes about various non-Chinese Others. Among them, as the popular discourses around Su in 2020 show, people of African descent racialized as Black have come to serve as a specific reference point in the national plan to self-strengthen in the realm of sports, or as President Xi Jinping puts it, the plan to “rejuvenate the great Chinese nation” (Chu Reference Chu2021, 26).
Against this background of racial nationalism in relation to competitive sports in China, this paper focuses on cultural discourses about athletes of mixed Chinese and Black/African heritage in the specific realm of unofficial online media. By examining popular digital commentaries on these public figures from the interdisciplinary perspectives of media studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, and China-Africa studies, I observe a seemingly positive framing of them as “hope for the nation” (guojia de xiwang). The main discussion sections of this paper analyze both the enabling and restrictive effects of this framing as a racial niching process and tease out how this projected affect of hope creates heightened expectations on these figures of mixed descent—expectations that have always already been entangled with racial stereotypes and gendered anxieties regarding Blackness and Chineseness. More specifically, focusing on information collected about a relatively exhaustive list of twenty-three athletes, I argue that beneath this discourse of national hope lies a complex operation of Chinese racial nationalism, underpinned by a constant interplay between racial inferiority and superiority complexes. This racial nationalism not only casts heightened expectations on these mixed-heritage athletes due to beliefs about their “Black athletic superiority” but also reveals persistent stereotypes about Black masculinity and irresponsibility.
However, it must be stressed in advance that this paper is not a sociological study grounded in quantitative, systematic research. It does not claim that the discursive analyses provided here constitute any generalized truths about the actual lived experiences of mixed-descent people. Neither is it merely an exposé of anti-Black racism in China (if anything, I am staunchly against the usual Orientalist ideological agendas and attitudes of triumphalism/schadenfreude behind such modes of Area studies conducted in the Western academe based on overwhelmingly negative data gathered from the non-Western world). Instead, the stakes of this paper lie in a call for humanistic and cultural approaches to conducting China-Africa studies to generate reflective critiques of racialized sentiments and discourses that cannot be bypassed or dismissed when addressing cultural imaginaries and their impacts on growing interpersonal exchanges in the Global South.
Before discussing the different aspects of these online media discourses, I must clarify how I identify and conceptualize the focus group of this research, which I do through theoretical explorations of its appellative specificity and complexity.
I understand that within the remit of African studies, the conflation of the racial qualifier “Black” and the geographical/cultural marker of “African” is problematic, as Africa is a diverse continent and there is no singular African culture that could be racialized in a static and universalist manner. However, despite the careful avoidance of such conceptual conflations in the official diplomatic language of China-Africa relations, this racial interpellation of Africans (feizhouren) and people of African heritage (feiyi) as “Black” (heiren) is so common and normalized in contemporary Chinese society and overseas Chinese communities in sub-Saharan African countries that its sociocultural effects cannot be ignored in a study about discourses on race and Sino-African mixedness; hence my pragmatic usage of the term “Black/African heritage” thus far.Footnote 2
Rather than perpetuating such normalization, one of the major goals of this paper is to demonstrate the exact problématique of this conflation through an attempt to theorize and promote the academic usage of the increasingly common equivalent term “Sino-African mixedness” (‘African’ in the geographic and cultural) in Chinese zhongfeihunxue (中非混血). The next two sections provide the context and operative content of such theorization, respectively. They are followed by the main analytical section, which discusses the multifaceted modus operandi of Chinese racial nationalism underlying mediated cultural discourses about the most famous figures from a compiled list of twenty-three zhongfeihunxue athletes. The paper concludes with a coda in which I highlight a new trend in Chinese media: zhongfeihunxue figures asserting their agency against persistent stereotypes and manipulating them to their advantage. Affirming the positive energy of this trend, I reiterate the value of zhongfeihunxue as not only a method to conceptualize research subjects and objects but also a dynamic perspective and an agential force in facilitating the cultural turn in China-Africa studies.
Sino-African mixedness from interdisciplinary perspectives
As Bao and Mutibwa (Reference Bao and Mutibwa2025) have pointed out in a recent volume on culture and media in China-Africa relations, the field of China-Africa studies has long been dominated by quantitative discussions on trade and economics or grand narratives about geopolitics. A cultural turn in China-Africa studies necessitates that scholars pay closer critical attention to interpersonal and intercultural interactions at the grassroots level. Race is an integral and obvious aspect of these interactions, yet it remains marginalized in the macro-discourses of the field. Similarly, in current scholarship about the role of media in China-Africa relations, the focus is either on the expansion of Chinese media companies and networks in Africa as a form of soft power, or on the historical modes and emerging trends in media cooperations between China and African countries. Race remains sidelined in such investigations on official media as state actors (Zhang, Wasserman and Mano Reference Zhang, Wasserman and Mano2016; Batchelor and Zhang Reference Batchelor and Zhang2017; Li Reference Li2017; Umejei Reference Umejei2020; Lewis Reference Lewis2024).
However, as T. Tu Huynh and Yoon Jung Park (Reference Huynh, Park, Alden and Large2017, 159–60) stress, China-Africa scholarship must “disrupt restrictive binary constructions and ahistorical conceptions of race” to make sense of “larger global structures and processes of power which have been, are, and continue to be racialized and racializing.” Examining how Sino-African mixed-heritage athletes are discursively framed by Chinese online media necessarily re-centers race in China-Africa Studies and, more importantly, reorients the field toward a future-oriented inquisitiveness that anticipates new phases of China-Africa sociocultural engagement beyond first-generation immigration or the conception of immigrants as transitory sojourners. Furthermore, this study engages to the emerging field of critical mixed race studies (CMRS) and contributes to a transnational turn of its theoretical paradigms and objects of research.
In Anglophone academia, studies on mixed race are heavily dominated by an emphasis on the American context. They grew in significant numbers in the late 1980s as new generations of mixed-descent individuals who had grown up during the post-Civil Rights Movement era sought to challenge the enforcement of hypodescent monoracial norms institutionalized by the government. Multiracial Americans were allowed to tick more than one race identity box on the census form in the 1990s, and since 2000, they have had the option to provide write-in responses to specify their racial backgrounds. However, such strategies of securing recognition have been controversial because of their perceived proximity to whiteness and their potential anti-Black or minority-diluting implications. Against the backdrop of such contentious movements, books published in the early 2000s often placed “mixed race” in single quotation marks to emphasize the problematic essentializing tendencies inherent in the term (Ifekwunigwe Reference Ifekwunigwe2004).Footnote 3 CMRS has thus emerged in the 2010s to navigate such complex identity politics and “address the role of society and culture within a racialized and race-driven legal system” (Daniel et al. Reference Daniel, Kina, Dariotis and Fojas2014, 7).
However, despite the “global” ambition of CMRS, the field has hardly paid any attention to China-Africa interactions. Even in edited volumes with a specific focus on mixed race in Asia, China does not feature in more than one chapter, and the research is primarily concentrated on Eurasians with Chinese heritage, due to the colonial histories of places like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore (Teng Reference Teng2013; Rocha Reference Rocha2015; Rocha and Fozdar Reference Rocha and Fozdar2017; Rocha and Aspinall Reference Rocha and Aspinall2020). Compared to this rich colonial history concerning Eurasians and the continued interest in their contemporary counterpart Whasian (White-Asian mixed background), Sino-African mixedness only acquired social visibility and cultural significance in China and Africa in the last two decades or so. For people residing in Guangzhou and Yiwu, where established communities of African diasporas are present, encountering children of mixed racial backgrounds may be common.Footnote 4 But for most people in China, meeting people of Chinese and African/Black heritage in real life is still a rare event, and existing impressions are largely generated and influenced by media, hence the importance of media and cultural analyses for bridging China-Africa studies and CMRS.
In the last fifteen years or so, popular entertainment programs in China have occasionally featured individuals of Chinese and African/Black heritage. Some have built limited followings through these programs, including Lou Jing (娄婧, of African American heritage) from Go! Oriental Angel (Jiayou! Dongfang Tianshi 2009), Yu Hua (俞华, Malian heritage) from Super Vocal (Shengrurenxin 2019), and Zhong Feifei (仲菲菲, Congolese heritage) from Produce Camp 2020 (Chuangzaoying 2020). However, on top of reinforcing the common stereotype that Black people are good at singing and dancing, their participation in these programs invariably attracted racist attacks from some Chinese netizens. Among them, Lou Jing’s case is well known and has been most thoroughly investigated by scholars. During the singing competition, the host frequently commented on her darker skin tone. On Chinese social media, she was criticized for “not looking Chinese enough” and regarded as the bad consequence of mixing “the wrong bloods.” Her Shanghainese mother also suffered much online slut-shaming when people found out that Lou Jing was conceived out of wedlock (Leung Reference Leung2015, 309). As Robeson Taj Frazier and Lin Zhang (Reference Frazier and Zhang2014: 248) have pointed out, “the debates surrounding Lou Jing displayed the tendency of entertainment media to employ commoditized images of race as a means to obtain viewership while simultaneously scandalizing and exploiting neo-nationalist attitudes.” Similarly, when Zhong Feifei announced her candidacy in Chuang 2020, the most popular girl group competition show in China then, her Weibo (Chinese equivalent of X) was quickly swarmed by negative comments about her being a “pollutant” in the bloodline of “the descendants of Emperors Yan and Huang (yan huang zisun, mythical Chinese figures regarded as the original ancestors of the Han Chinese race)” (Olander Reference Olander2020).
Although these entertainment programs were popular and reached different audiences, it is in the realm of competitive sports that most public figures of Chinese and African/Black heritage can be identified in China today (see Table 1). Apart from the higher class threshold for people to enter entertainment in general, this is also because athletes are trained from a young age and those who demonstrate potential would quickly gather local fame while they are teenagers. As the migratory flows between China and Africa only intensified from the late 1990s onwards, most of these athletes are still young and upcoming, hence the common media framing of them as “hope for the nation.” In contrast to most existing research in CMRS, the study of Sino-African mixedness in this context is thus future-oriented. These mixed-descent athletes are, in both literal and metaphorical senses, the human faces of China-Africa relations, and constructive criticism about their sociocultural representation is therefore meaningful and carries practical implications.
Zhongfeihunxue public figures in Chinese sport
Table 1. Long description
The table contains six columns: Name and gender (M/F), Year of birth, Sport, Father, Mother, and Birth parents’ marriage status.
* Ding Hui (M), 1989, Volleyball. Father: Black South African; Mother: Hangzhou Chinese. Status: Father absent since birth.
* Eddy Francis (M), 1990, Football. Father: Tanzanian; Mother: Shanghai Chinese. Status: Father absent since young age.
* Zhu Mingzhen (M), 1996, Basketball. Father: Ugandan; Mother: Beijing Chinese (Mulao ethnic minority). Status: Father absent since age one.
* Taruike Jianiyou (M), 1998, Basketball. Father: Nigerian American; Mother: Beijing Chinese (Hui ethnic minority). Status: Father absent since young age.
* Adaixiu Yin Ka (M), 2003, Volleyball. Father: Bissau Guinean; Mother: Beijing Chinese. Status: Married, living in China.
* Wang Mu (M), 2003, Football. Father: Wenzhou Chinese; Mother: Tanzanian (Zanzibar). Status: Married, living in China.
* Qiao Wendu (M), 2003, Basketball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Chinese in Guangzhou. Status: Not specified.
* Zhang Zhongfei (M), 2004, Basketball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Dalian Chinese in Guangdong. Status: Not specified.
* Chen Lingjia (M), 2004, Basketball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Zhaoqing Chinese. Status: Not specified.
* Su Yuliang (M), 2005, Football. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Chinese in Guangzhou. Status: Not specified.
* Zhang Huafei (M), 2006, Basketball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Dalian Chinese in Guangdong. Status: Not specified.
* Guo Zhongfei (M), 2006, Badminton. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Jiangxi Chinese. Status: Father absent since birth.
* Feng Ao (M), 2006, Basketball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Jilin Chinese. Status: Father absent since birth.
* Huang Shenghao (M), 2007, Football. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Chinese in Guangzhou. Status: Not specified.
* Peng Hongsen (M), 2007, Basketball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Chinese in Guangdong. Status: Not specified.
* Ai Chuwei (M), 2008, Football. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Chinese in Guangzhou. Status: Not specified.
* Zhang Hongfu (M), 2008, Football. Father: Tanzanian; Mother: Jilin Chinese. Status: Father absent since young age.
* Ai Chuji (F), 2008, Basketball. Father and Mother: Not specified. Status: Not specified.
* Zhi Chengyuan (M), 2009, Sprint. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Liuzhou Chinese. Status: Married, living in China.
* Wang Feiniya (M), 2009, Football. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Guizhou Chinese. Status: Not specified.
* Shao Ziyan (F), 2010, Volleyball. Father: Nigerian; Mother: Shanghai Chinese. Status: Not specified.
* Xu Junqi (M), 2013, Wushu. Father: Central African; Mother: Liaoning Chinese. Status: Married, living in China.
* Doris (F), 2014, Sprint. Father: Black South African; Mother: Chinese in Guangzhou. Status: Not specified.
This focus on athletic figures also recognizes sports as an important analytical lens for African studies (and Chinese studies). As Bea Vidacs (Reference Vidacs2006, 337) has advocated, “sport can throw light upon issues of inclusion and exclusion and the mechanisms of these processes,” including “the question of identity formation,” race and “ethnicity,” “gender relations,” and “the articulation of the local and the global through the regional and the national.” This paper demonstrates that, beyond building sports facilities in Africa (Dubinsky Reference Dubinsky2024), China is also engaged with people of African heritage in sports on home ground, exposing much more complex issues related to race, gender, and identity formation that pertain to popular sentiments and ideas around Chineseness.
Zhongfeihunxue as theory and method
So far, I have used various phrases to describe the primary focus group of my research, including “people of mixed Chinese and Black/African heritage” and “Sino-African mixedness.” However, these English phrases are cumbersome and may not always accurately reflect the nuances of the Chinese context. In Chinese, the term zhongfeihunxue literally means “Sino-African mixed blood” and functions as both a noun and an adjective. The dominant usage of this term over other possible alternatives in China signals its theoretical significance, warranting its treatment as a dynamic method of inquiry rather than a static object of research.
As Cathryn Clayton (Reference Clayton, Rocha and Aspinall2020, 742) explains, “in Chinese-speaking societies today, ‘blood (xue)’ is the most common metaphor for the shared substance that purportedly unites all Chinese people regardless of national belonging.” In contemporary China, “Chinese (zhonghuaminzu)” encompasses fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups. The dominant Han ethnicity is often described as an “immense snowball” —a construction formed by aggregating many other ethnic groups throughout China’s asserted 5,000-year history (J. Xu Reference Xu, Mullaney, Leibold, Gros and Vanden Bussche2012, 118). According to the Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China, children of mixed parentage automatically inherit the ethnic designation of the Chinese parent when applying for a Chinese ID card. In other words, hunxue (literally “mixed blood”) is not a formally institutionalized identity in China but rather persists as a cultural concept. This explains why someone with a Chinese father and a Chinese American or Chinese Malaysian mother is usually not regarded as hunxue, despite being born in an international marriage.
The lack of institutional recognition for hunxue identities facilitates the dialectic operation of Hua/cultured Chinese and Yi/noncultured Others inherited from premodern China. On the one hand, the tradition of Hua-Yi dichotomous distinction (huayi zhi bian 华夷之辩), infused with categorical thinking about human taxonomy imported from the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, continues to guard the racialized boundaries of zhonghuaminzu against different foreigners. This means that racial optics still matter in Chinese culture today, and colorist social attitudes persist.Footnote 5 On the other hand, the assimilationist logic underpinning the legal scheme of Chinese ethnicities as inheritable nevertheless offers space for Hua-Yi transformation (huayi zhi bian 华夷之变). The default institutional recognition of hunxue’er (mixed-blood kids) as Chinese (inheriting their Chinese parent’s specific ethnicity on paper) differs from the principle of hypodescent common in Western societies and demonstrates the inclusiveness and elasticity of Hua as a racial concept. In premodern China, the Hua-Yi distinction was centered on culture, meaning that Yi could transform into Hua by learning the Chinese language and adopting Chinese customs and habits. This path of cultural transformation into Chineseness is relevant today (Y. Li Reference Li2018). Therefore, given both institutional recognition and this Sinocentric logic of cultural assimilation, hunxue’er—particularly those who have grown up in China and received a standardized Chinese education—may find it easier to integrate into Chinese society than, say, if they lived in other societies that self-perceive as mono-racial, such as Japan.
However, as mentioned, skin color still plays a nonnegligible role in how Chinese people view different kinds of hunxue’er. In accordance with the phenomenon of globalized White privilege confirmed by different case studies in CMRS, half-White hunxue’er are thought to be not only more beautiful but also intellectually superior and embodying desirable cosmopolitanism. On the Chinese internet, there are numerous tutorials and advertisements teaching people how to do the so-called hunxuezhuang, or mixed-blood makeup.Footnote 6 Chinese-White couples could easily become popular on social media by “sharenting” their hunxue babies, “whereas children from other interracial families continue to be rendered invisible through underrepresentation, algorithmic means, and dismissals of their lived realities” (Jiang Reference Jiang2024, 461). This hunxue Whiteness is so appealing that it is also not uncommon for well-off gay men from urban China to go to the US to father half-White babies through commercial surrogacy (Wei Reference Wei2021).
Within this context of differential sociocultural treatment based on colorist ideologies, zhongfeihunxue must be specified as such precisely because the default reference of hunxue in China remains Eurasian/Whasian. As with the term’s everyday usage, scholars researching Chinese-White families often use hunxue without specifying the particular racial combination in question (Teng Reference Teng, Mullaney, Leibold, Gros and Vanden Bussche2012; Jiang Reference Jiang2024). In contrast, zhongfeihunxue is never merely described as hunxue when it constitutes the primary focus of the discussion. The term heirenhunxue (literally “Black mixed blood”) may also be used in sensationalist media and everyday discourses when people are not sure about the background of the non-Chinese parent, reducing the interpellation to a generic racial impression of Blackness. Although Shanshan Lan (Reference Shanshan2016, 309) has cautioned that “it is premature to argue that institutional racism against black Africans is well-developed in China,” many anthropologists engaged in China-Africa studies have confirmed that Sino-African couples living in Guangzhou frequently encounter racial profiling from different local institutions and racist micro-aggressions from Chinese people, not to mention the scandalous discrimination targeted at them during the COVID-19 pandemic (Matthews, Lin and Yang Reference Mathews, Linessa Dan and Yang2017; Qiu Reference Qiu2021; Wang, Hoang and Jordan Reference Wang, Hoang and Jordan2023).
As Frank Dikötter (Reference Dikötter1992), Johanna Hood (Reference Hood2011), Shu-mei Shih (Reference Shih2013), and Yinghong Cheng (Reference Cheng2019) have all argued (albeit with their own biases and generalizations), anti-Blackness is, to a large degree, embedded in the making of Chinese modernity itself. More recently, Binxin Zhang (Reference Zhang2024, 934) has also pointed out that this anti-Blackness results from Chinese people’s inferiority complex vis-à-vis the White West as they “adopted a social Darwinist world view, using Western modernity as the yardstick by which to rank different peoples and societies in a racial hierarchy.” This anti-Black racism is further entangled with sexism when Chinese netizens attack African migrants’ Chinese wives for “conjugating with an inferior race” characterized by “criminality” and “low suzhi,” or civic quality, and see their zhongfeihunxue children as “pollution and a threat to the unity and purity of Chineseness” (Huang Reference Huang2020; Cai Reference Cai2023, 380; Zhou Reference Zhou2024, 228; Sier and Barabantseva Reference Sier and Barabantseva2026, 87).
In dialogue with these established findings on anti-Blackness in Chinese culture, the imperative to theorize zhongfeihunxue and treat it as a research method unfolds as a fourfold process. Zhongfeihunxue is first and foremost about acknowledging the global nature of White supremacy and anti-Blackness as well as the prevalent local heteronormative patriarchies with which they often intersect (Mills Reference Mills1997; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2017; Huang Reference Huang2024). Second, they are often intersected with which they often intersect with racialized ideologies and social structures is based on the understanding that the Chinese context is specific, and terms like “Blasian,” “mulatto/a,” “mestizo,” “hafu,” “hapa,” and “métis” are not suitable labels as they are all tied to American contexts (both North and South Americas) including the historical and ongoing American military occupation of various Asian countries and regions such as South Korea and Okinawa (Washington Reference Washington2017, 6). Moreover, while “Blasian” relies on the overt US-centric racialization of both Blackness (the so-called “one drop rule”) and Asianness (a term Chinese people rarely use to refer to themselves racially in Chinese), zhongfeihunxue offers more flexible parameters to include ethnic Chinese heritage (“zhong” as “zhonghua” or pan-Chinese) and African descent (“fei” as pan-African) without necessarily restricting their interpretations to race or nation.
Third, and most importantly, zhongfeihunxue is the term people of such mixed backgrounds living in China would most likely adopt to self-identify. Recognizing this agency of self-identification and the possibility for future community formation, scholars should undertake critical work that “can do justice to both the specificity and elasticity of the blood metaphor” in Chinese (Clayton Reference Clayton, Rocha and Fozdar2017, 46). Such work should analyze the metaphor’s modus operandi in cultural discourses to tease out the complex blend of positive affect and negative stereotypes embedded therein. In other words, as theory and method, zhongfeihunxue does not simply confirm the existence of local Chinese versions of global anti-Blackness but takes these versions seriously so that they form a particularly poignant lens through which China-Africa relations could be examined heuristically and humanistically.
Lastly, as a specific method of contextualization, zhongfeihunxue is in line with the consensus in CMRS that “a shared consciousness of multiraciality that transcends state borders” is still hard to come by (Morning Reference Morning, King-O’Riain, Small, Mahtani, Song and Spickard2014, 13). On the one hand, the term’s root in the Chinese language confirms its specificity bound to the larger hunxue identity vis-à-vis evolving notions of the Hua-Yi dialectic and Chineseness. On the other hand, as a Latinized Chinese term, zhongfeihunxue has inherent translational potential to become a common loanword in English and other languages and, in this process, acquire transcultural significance. To treat it as theory and method is to sublimate this mixture of sociolinguistic specificity and transcultural potentiality. I hope that this fourfold explication of zhongfeihunxue will encourage more scholars in the humanities and social sciences to adopt it as a more specific yet inclusive and flexible conceptual framework for studying Sino-African mixedness, thereby avoiding the problems caused by cumbersome English phrases that often require excessive explanation and justification.
Heightened expectations, reinforced stereotypes, and intersectional anxieties
Having established zhongfeihunxue as a working conceptual framework, this section serves as the analytical core of this paper by examining how public figures of mixed background in sports are discussed in unofficial Chinese online media. In a country where the official media are generally expected to toe the (Communist Chinese) party line, the standard practice is to frame China-Africa relations as a form of South-South collaboration while eschewing any negative news that might undermine the pragmatic management of such relations at the official level.Footnote 7 However, the Chinese internet, despite being heavily regulated as well, accommodates a far more diverse range of opinions on the sociocultural and interpersonal aspects of China-Africa relations. Unofficial online media are therefore used in this paper instead of official media channels because of their sociocultural influence and their reflection of popular ideologies. Unofficial media repeatedly present certain cultural discourses and are illustrative of the broader civic and banal sentiments associated with racial nationalism in Chinese society (Billig Reference Billig1995). The primary information about the athletes discussed in this paper has been obtained by searching for the term “zhongfeihunxue” on the most popular Chinese websites and social media platforms, including Baidu, Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu. Specific names of public figures identified in the first round of searching (conducted from early 2023 to early 2024) were then gathered, re-searched, and re-examined (throughout 2025) to analyze the various reports on each zhongfeihunxue athlete. Recurring discourses are subsequently grouped for thematic analyses.
As there were around a hundred online articles and videos related to zhongfeihunxue athletes identified through the searches (using their names with or without zhongfeihunxue as keywords), it is impossible to cite every source individually. I therefore adopt a summative approach that includes close analysis: key information about the public zhongfeihunxue athletes is summarized and compiled in Table 1, but when an illustrative incident or recurrent idea is discussed in detail and with quotations, the web link to the specific article is provided in the endnote (and due to limited space, not all online articles discussed are listed with links in the reference list). This practical approach, combining media studies and critical discourse analysis, is well established in recent studies on Blackness in Chinese media, including Cai (Reference Cai2023), Zhou (Reference Zhou2024), Jiang (Reference Jiang2024), and Sier and Barabantseva (Reference Sier and Barabantseva2026). As this paper is primarily concerned with theorizing zhongfeihunxue as part of a cultural turn in China-Africa studies, my aim is not to claim that the discourses presented in this section are representative of Chinese society as a whole, as some of these studies do. In contrast, I would readily acknowledge the boundaries between reality and the virtual world and emphasize that the paper merely seeks to note the recursive presence of certain cultural discourses on the Chinese internet as worthy subjects for research. From the perspective of cultural studies, the fact that these discourses exist and circulate on the Chinese internet without being censored already warrants critical attention and close reading.
As Table 1 shows, my searches have yielded results on twenty-three athletes aged from twelve to thirty-seven (by 2026), and the majority of them are young male adults with an African father.Footnote 8 The different levels of fame these athletes have achieved correlate with the varying prestige of the sports organizations they have served and the performances they have delivered in major competitions. The higher the level of their sports team, the more media coverage they receive. Among them, the most widely covered athletes are Ding Hui, Eddy Francis, Zhu Mingzhen, and Taruike Jianiyou, not only because they are older and have therefore been active for longer, but also because they are the first hunxue’er to be selected for the Chinese national teams of their respective sports. In addition to their ages and the sports they play, Table 1 presents information on their family backgrounds, as Chinese online media tend to fixate on this aspect of zhongfeihunxue athletes. Expectedly, the more famous the athletes are, the more information is available about their family backgrounds, particularly regarding their parents’ nationalities, racial and ethnic identities, and marital statuses as well as their own romantic lives. Relevant information is included in the table only when multiple media sources report it. Since I have not personally contacted any of these athletes, I have marked the information as “-” if it has not been discussed in multiple articles or confirmed by reliable quotes from the athletes themselves in their reported interviews or social media posts.Footnote 9
Three major thematic concerns in online media discourses about these zhongfeihunxue figures emerge from my searches, including their athletic talent and physical abilities, narratives about single-parent upbringing and absent fathers, and their dating lives and relationships. As Myra Washington (Reference Washington2017, 92) has summarized “the realm of sport is where narratives of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability are unambiguously linked to a culture of … mass consumption.” It is therefore unsurprising that each concern in these media discourses is shrouded by intersecting layers of Sinocentric racial nationalism, and together they produce a seemingly positive racial niche relating to collective “hope” (xiwang) for these athletes. However, this racial niche is predicated upon heightened expectations and reinforced stereotypes and reveals persistent cultural anxieties about Blackness, especially Black masculinity, in Chinese society. The following subsections examine each thematic concern with specific examples of its racialized expressions.
“Black Athletic Superiority” as “Hope for the Nation”
As noted at the outset of this paper, the global myth of “Black athletic superiority” is prevalent in Chinese society and almost every online article and video centered on zhongfeihunxue athletes draws on this idea (Wiggins Reference Wiggins1989, 158). Phrases like “hunxue genius” (hunxue tiancai), “hunxue warrior” (hunxue zhanjiang), “hunxue new star” (hunxue xinxing), “future star” (weilai zhi xing), and “Black bloodline” (heiren xuetong) frequently feature in their titles. In the actual content, the so-called “Black physical quality” (heiren shenti suzhi), “Black bodily condition” (heiren tige tiaojian) and “Black sport cells” (heiren tiyu xibao) are normalized as “innate advantages” (tiansheng youshi) to fuel the anticipatory tone of the articles, portraying them as “hope for the nation” (guojia de xiwang).Footnote 10
Such national aspirations are constantly projected onto athletes who become the first hunxue or half-Black members of provincial or national teams. Even for young girls like Shao Ziyan and Doris, who are still in their teens, the national hope rhetoric was immediately applied to them when they participated in schoolwide or districtwide competitions and performed well. The media spotlight on the racial novelty zhongfeihunxue athletes bring into sports is often coupled with preemptive explanations about how they are not “foreign aid” (waiyuan) but “domestic production” (guochan), as the former refers to foreign athletes competing for Chinese teams and the latter Chinese athletes born and bred in China. In other words, both their Chinese national identity and Black racial identity are integral to the sensationalist media construction of the national hope rhetoric.
The duplexity of this racial nationalism is well illustrated by the array of labels given to different zhongfeihunxue athletes in these online articles. If the athlete participates in a sport not among China’s traditional strengths, he or she will be hailed as the Chinese version of a world-famous Black athlete in that sport. For example, Zhu Mingzhen has been called “the Chinese Klay Thompson,” Wang Mu “the Chinese Paul Pogba,” Su Yuliang “the Chinese Kylian Mbappé,” Zhang Hongfu “the Chinese Virgil van Dijk,” and Shao Ziyan “China’s own Paola Egonu.” If the sport is one of China’s traditional fortes, then the zhongfeihunxue athlete is often hailed as the Black version of the most famous Chinese athlete in that sport. For example, Guo Zhongfei is often dubbed “black-skinned” (heipi) Lin Dan (林丹), and Adaixiu Yin Ka is often compared to Jiang Chuan (江川), the star leader of China men’s national volleyball team.
According to Johanna Hood’s study (Reference Hood2011, 97) on Chinese media discourses about AIDS, the Blackness of Africa and Africans tends to be superimposed on the idea of yuanshi, or primitiveness, of the continent. However, in sports reporting on the Chinese internet, this racist denial of coevality toward Blackness is transformed into a kind of “racist love” for Black bodies, which are mystified and fetishized as naturally superior in strength and durability and thus regarded as the perfect human vassals of neoliberal athleticism. To appropriate what Leslie Bow describes about the desire for “Asian things” in the United States, such “racist love” is “rooted in the reductive structure of typing” in which “attraction masks anxiety” and “apprehension manifests itself as overestimation” (Bow Reference Bow2022, 7–8).Footnote 11
Moreover, what is interesting to note is that within this “reductive structure of typing,” these zhongfeihunxue athletes’ Chinese racial heritage is viewed with paradoxical ambivalence. It is sometimes viewed as a liability that obstructs the full development and exploitation of their “Black athletic superiority,” and yet it is also sometimes hailed as the foundation of a “mixed-race exceptionalism” that combines the best of both races (Washington Reference Washington2017, 107). In these media discourses, one can observe the intertwinement of an inferiority complex and a superiority complex regarding Chinese people’s racialized self-perceptions vis-à-vis their othering imaginaries of Blackness. For example, some articles label Taruike Jianiyou as “Chinese produced Eric Moreland with low configurations” (guochan dipeiban molande) to downplay his potential to become the leader of his team, especially when he had not performed well in competitions.Footnote 12 But for younger athletes like the Zhang brothers (Zhang Zhongfei and Zhang Huafei, whose names literally mean “China-Africa”), who are still upcoming and have a good record of performances in local competitions, they are said to embody the perfect racial balance: “Zhang has his Black father’s explosive strength, great elasticity, and fast speed, and at the same time he has inherited the bodily coordination, dexterity and sense of control from his mother, who is of the Yellow race.”Footnote 13
The “racist love” cast upon “Black athletic superiority” essentially produces heightened expectations in online Chinese media discourses for zhongfeihunxue athletes to live up to entrenched ideas about their racial “potential (qianneng).” The nationalist desire for them to surpass the imagined racial limit of Chineseness/Yellowness with their “African genes” (feizhou jiyin) in certain sports can easily collapse into anti-Black sentiments when they do not live up to such heightened expectations.Footnote 14 On the one hand, as they age, most of these zhongfeihunxue athletes do not always outperform their peers and a few articles have already appeared online expressing disappointment with figures like Zhang Zhongfei and Feng Ao. The authors of these articles are not interested in debunking racial myths about “Black athletic superiority” as such but rather seek to blame zhongfeihunxue athletes for “not training their skills well” (quefa jishu) and “failure to obtain a certain mystified intelligence pertaining to sport strategies” (meiyou lingxing).Footnote 15 Such blame consolidates another common stereotype about Black athletes—that they are all “brawn” but no “brain” (Cranmer, Bowman and Goldman Reference Cranmer, Bowman and Goldman2017, 78). On the other hand, although no zhongfeihunxue athlete has yet secured top positions for China in major international events, in the comment sections under online articles and videos already show some Chinese netizens fretting over the potential racial implications of such victories in the future. For example, responding to a video introducing zhongfeihunxue basketball players, which has been viewed more than 56,000 times on Bilibili, some commentators remarked that “It is not okay for a group of Black people to represent China in international sports competitions.” One bigoted commenter even asks the question: “Does this still count as Team China? Damn!”Footnote 16 Naturalized foreign athletes competing for China also receive similar nationalist backlashes, especially when they do not have any Chinese heritage (Han and Zhao Reference Han and Zhao2024).
Ultimately, the Chinese sport nationalism displayed by these online media articles and associated commentaries is undergirded by a series of inherently racialized ideologies. It operates within these prevalent and banal cultural discourses to subject zhongfeihunxue athletes’ physical traits, professional performances, national loyalties, and racial representativeness to constant scrutiny. The best athletes in any sport from any country must possess exceptional talent and train hard, and yet the heightened expectations on zhongfeihunxue athletes form a slippery slope from optimistic wishes to oppressive forces of double marginalization. If they do well, it is because of their Blackness, and it is only how it should be. If they do not do well, they fail to live up to their Blackness, and they must not have worked hard enough. If they perform exceptionally well, their racial legitimacy to represent China is then doubted. If they do not secure any major achievements and fade into oblivion (as the older ones already have), their categorical usefulness to China is also called into doubt. As long as the myth of “Black athletic superiority” persists, the “hope for the nation” discourse around zhongfeihunxue athletes will remain a fundamentally racist structure of feeling, subtended by thin lines between aspiration and disappointment, praise and blame, popularity and scandalousness, and strategic racial inclusion and racist exclusion.
The absent father and the beautiful girlfriend
In the comment section of the Bilibili video mentioned above, some viewers challenged the narrator’s optimistic assessment that zhongfeihunxue basketball players would break Chinese records. They remarked that only when the mother is Black can an athlete inherit the “real sport prowess of Africa,” which is itself a warped scientific myth commonly found in discussions on international sports (Rosbrook-Thompson Reference Rosbrook-Thompson2020). Similar comments can be found in articles about the footballer Wang Mu, the only zhongfeihunxue athlete with an African mother (that I could confirm through the searches) in Table 1. A small number of commenters have cited the unusual gender/race combination of his parents as the reason why Wang Mu could be the real “hope for the nation.”Footnote 17 At first glance, this line of thinking may contradict the finding of scholars like Benson Zhou (Reference Zhou2024, 232) that, unlike White women, Black women are not perceived as “genetic improvers” in Chinese society. Nevertheless, the possible “genetic improvement” Black mothers may provide for Chinese sports is confined to the body (again, “brawn over brain”) and does not mean that zhongfeihunxue is viewed as racially superior in an overall sense.
In fact, the entire comment section of the Bilibili video serves as confirmation for Zhou’s (Reference Zhou2024, 223) observation that “patriarchal racism” permeates Chinese social media when it comes to interracial couples and hunxue families. There are numerous sexist comments fixated on the fact that many of the zhongfeihunxue athletes have African fathers who left them before they were born or when they were just babies. Many online articles highlight this particular family background in their titles, such as “Guangdong Basketball Player: Zhongfeihunxue Abandoned by African Father (Guangdong Nanlan Yundongyuan: Bei Fuqin Paoqi de Zhongfeihunxue),” “Abandoned by Black Father, Great Talent Wishing to Serve China (Bei Heiren Fuqin Paoqi, Tianfu Chuzhong yao wei Zhongguo Xiaoli),” and “Black Mixed-Blood Athletes in Chinese Sports, Most of Whom are Orphans or with Single Parent, Dream to Join Team China (Zhongguo Titan Heirenhunxue Qiuyuan, Duo Shi Gu’er he Danqin, Mengxiang wei Guojiadui Pishang Zhanpao).”
For many Chinese netizens, the absent father of zhongfeihunxue athletes, interpellated interchangeably as “African” or “Black,” has almost become a racist meme. In the comment sections of the aforementioned video and articles, netizens often allude to the popular Chinese reality show called “Dad, Where Are We Going” (Baba Qu Na’er) to label African and/or Black men as irresponsible partners unsuitable for serious relationships and deride Chinese women who go out with them as promiscuous race traitors. These discursive tropes of racial nationalism are also frequently noted in sociological studies of Sino-African couples in China (Matthews, Lin and Yang Reference Mathews, Linessa Dan and Yang2017; Huang Reference Huang2020; Wang, Hoang and Jordan Reference Wang, Hoang and Jordan2023). Some extreme comments even suggest that these Chinese women, labeled with the derogatory term “married-out woman (waijianü),” and their zhongfeihunxue kids should rescind their Chinese nationality and be sent to Africa.Footnote 18
This obsession with digging up the family backgrounds of zhongfeihunxue public figures and the insistence on confirming the racialized meme of the absent father have persisted since Lou Jing (singer/actress) and Ding Hui (volleyballer) entered the public eye in China in 2009. Although most online articles about zhongfeihunxue athletes adopt a positive tone, praising their mothers as dedicated single parents who have dutifully taught their children to identify as fully Chinese, many netizens are more interested in these Chinese women’s marital status than in anything else. In my online searches, I found that even for less famous zhongfeihunxue athletes such as the Zhang brothers, multiple public inquiries have been posted on different sites asking whether their parents are divorced. Similarly, after Zhang Hongfu’s mother posted pictures of the family celebrating Team China’s victory in the EAFF (East Asian Football Federation) U15 Men’s Championship 2023 game, various online media accounts quickly reposted those photos, noting that Zhang’s father had never appeared in his mother’s social media posts. One of these articles attracted more than 300 comments, many of which expressed racial worries about China becoming “Africa’s womb” (feizhou zigong) and the nation’s “Blackened” (heihua) future.Footnote 19 However, neither the articles nor the comments care to mention the institutional difficulties Sino-African couples face in China in terms of obtaining long-term visas and securing stable employment to remain (Lan Reference Shanshan2016; Su, Lin and Zhou Reference Su, Lin and Zhou2022). Instead, the figure of the absent father (almost always racialized as “Black”) is repeatedly evoked to suggest that such marriages are doomed from the beginning and that African men are fundamentally unreliable partners for Chinese women.
Such intersectional anxieties about race and gender relations—specifically about Black masculinity and exogamous Chinese women—also subtend many online articles and commentaries on the older male zhongfeihunxue athletes, which often take a particular interest in their romantic lives. Zhu Mingzhen and Eddy Francis have become the most targeted zhongfeihunxue public figures in this regard. Many online media reports repost photos from their social media accounts and exclaim how beautiful their Chinese partners are. Some article titles even feature phrases like “high level of attractiveness (gao yanzhi),” “nice figure (hao shencai),” “Black-white match (heibaipei),” and “Yellow-Black match (heihuangpei).” The “whiteness” of their Chinese partners’ appearance is often mentioned not as a racial, but physical, feature, as whiter skin is widely regarded as a beauty indicator for Chinese women. One article on Zhu even praises his girlfriend by saying “She looks even whiter standing next to Zhu in the photos.”Footnote 20 Like the commentaries on zhongfeihunxue athletes’ parents, the generally positive reportage on their romantic lives via such objectifying gazes upon the Chinese girlfriends is countered by numerous racist and sexist remarks in the comment sections, warning Chinese women to stay away from “licentious” (wanwande) and “irresponsible” (meiyou zerengan) Black men.Footnote 21
In the ideological schemata of racial nationalism emanating from these comments, Zhu’s and Eddy’s Black masculinity overwhelm their Chineseness and mark them as pertinent targets of anti-Black rhetoric. Tabloid journalism and fake news about their personal lives are often spread online to instigate specific anti-Black reactions from Chinese netizens.
For example, before Eddy married his current partner, a few articles dug up his romantic history and suggested that his relationships with Chinese women had caused him to underperform in key competitions, thereby implying that his involvement in dating and perceived lack of professionalism rendered him unfit to represent China.Footnote 22 Since his marriage in 2021, this voyeuristic attention has shifted toward his daughter. One article notes that, despite his Chinese wife’s white skin, Eddy’s “powerful genes” (qiangda jiyin) have given their daughter dark skin and curly hair, which are regarded as unattractive traits by Chinese standards of femininity.Footnote 23
Though not yet married, Zhu has been in an exclusive relationship with his girlfriend since high school, and yet the couple has had much worse experiences with online racism compared to Eddy and his family. In March 2020, a picture of Zhu and his girlfriend was disseminated online to spread fake news about a female Chinese university student contracting AIDS from her Black boyfriend. This misinformation had such a negative influence that Zhu had to post a statement of clarification on his Weibo to clear his name. One online article published in 2024 praised Zhu’s action and his commitment to his girlfriend, but it nevertheless concludes with a section that indulges in eugenic speculations. Citing the Russian poet Pushkin as an example, it reassures readers that Zhu’s offspring will no longer stand out as Black after several generations of intermixing with Chinese people.Footnote 24 In other words, at least for the author of this article, it appears that Zhu is only welcome to join the harmonious Chinese society if he can be racially cleansed to preserve the imagined purity of Chineseness in the long run.
As Myra Washington (Reference Washington2017, 94) describes, sport is “a magnifier of society” because it often “re-creates the relations of dominance and subordination” and exposes “sexist, racist, classist, homophobic” ideologies prevalent in it. The media interest in and public scrutiny of zhongfeihunxue athletes’ family backgrounds and personal lives go hand in hand with the heightened expectations for them to excel professionally. Especially for male adult athletes who are expected to demonstrate their Black masculinity in sport (stereotyped as superior physical strength) and at the same time restrain it in daily life to mitigate any possible threat they may pose to Chinese masculinity as romantic and genetic rivals. The reinforced stereotypes and intersectional anxieties embedded in the online articles, videos, and comments discussed in this article are illustrative of the persistence of White supremacist and nationalist (and thus anti-Black) ways of thinking in Chinese society, with the intertwinement of a racial inferiority complex and a racial superiority complex constantly at play.
Coda: Towards an agentic racial niche in “a shared future”
As noted in the introduction, this paper is not just an exposé of “Chinese racism” against zhongfeihunxue public figures. I take seriously Huynh and Park’s (Reference Huynh, Park, Alden and Large2017, 168) warning that reifying the idea of “Chinese racism” as something exceptional in China-Africa relations is dangerous as it easily devolves into China-bashing of China-bashing. I have made sure that the phrase does not appear anywhere else in this paper as it risks reducing the diversity of voices in Chinese society to an essentialized impression of exceptional anti-Blackness. There are also plenty of messages promoting tolerance and diversity in sports on the Chinese internet. By all means, the “hope for the nation” discourse is far more progressive than the “Black Peril” discourse that circulated online in the years before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (Shi Reference Shi2021b, 629).
Despite President Xi Jinping’s promotion of the idea of “all-weather China-Africa community with a shared future (Quantianhou Zhongfei Mingyun Gongtongti, 全天候中非命运共同体),” academic scholarship in mainland China has not caught up and has been reluctant to confront the issue of anti-Blackness in different realms of Chinese society. Scholars still tend to dismiss cyber-racism as “ignorance” and therefore unworthy of serious investigation (A. Li Reference Li2016).Footnote 25 However, rather than shying away from these issues, the cultural turn in China-Africa studies requires us (scholars and consumers of culture alike) to take President Xi’s idea seriously and carefully examine the social interactions and cultural imaginaries in we engage, especially how they could either facilitate or damage mutual perceptions of Chinese and African peoples in the process of building a “shared future.” As living embodiments of such a “China-Africa community,” people with multiple heritages can bring rich experiences and unique perspectives that might help bridge the gap between the lofty political ideals of South-South collaboration in official discourse and divergent public opinions and sentiments at the grassroots level.
In this sense, this paper has demonstrated that online discourses about zhongfeihunxue public figures in China offer rich grounds for scholars to reflect on the role of culture in the humanistic development of China-Africa relations. By “humanistic,” I mean that zhongfeihunxue, as a means for specific identification and possible transcultural community-building, is both a natural and progressive consequence of the intensified human interactions between Chinese and Africans. At the same time, it provides an empathetic impetus to understand China-Africa relations not only as a set of geopolitical and economic topics or a subdiscipline of international relations but as a sociocultural realm where human stories and feelings are constantly generated. To facilitate the organic growth of this realm, honest critiques of racism and stereotypes in unofficial discourses are as necessary as the earnest and effective promotion of friendship and collaborations via official channels. In the same vein, to treat zhongfeihunxue as theory and method necessarily requires that we rethink how our digital spaces are governed and how we can respect the digital agency of zhongfeihunxue public figures.
In my searches for information on the athletes listed in Table 1, I found that while racist and sexist comments are commonplace on the Chinese internet, some articles reporting on particular athletes’ experiences of racism in their teams or organizations have been deleted. The titles of these articles still appear in search engines, but the pages are blank when one clicks on them.Footnote 26 This phenomenon lays bare much bigger problems concerning racial sensitivities in Chinese digital governance. It does not really align with Yinghong Cheng’s (Reference Cheng2019, 214) assertion that the Chinese are “super-sensitive” when it comes to anti-Chinese racism but “super-insensitive” about “China’s own racism.” As such selective censorship shows, regulators of the Chinese internet are sensitive enough to detect the damage that anti-Black ideologies and incidents could do to China’s image but deliberately suppress both their exposure and anti-racist critiques while maintaining a laissez-faire attitude towards cyber-racism. If anything, the super-sensitivity/super-insensitivity dyad is only a deceptive symptom of the common ostrich policy used to (not) deal with racism in contemporary China. However, as with the infamous 2016 Qiaobi detergent advertisement and the blackface skit from the 2018 Chinese Spring Festival gala that previously caused significant international controversy, the lack of critique and reflection on Sinocentric racial nationalism will always backfire on China’s image and reputation in Africa and worldwide (Castillo Reference Castillo2020). Therefore, it is worth stressing again that a cultural turn in China-Africa studies must overcome dismissive attitudes toward racist (under-)currents in Chinese society and take anti-racist research seriously. After all, only by taking such self-reflections seriously can we genuinely “increase mutual understanding and affinity between our peoples,” to quote Wang Yi, the minister of foreign affairs of China, in his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the ministerial meeting of coordinators on the implementation of the follow-up actions of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in 2025.Footnote 27
From the thematic analyses presented in the earlier sections, it can be observed that zhongfeihunxue athletes are afforded a special racial niche in the Chinese mediascape. This niche manifests as the seemingly positive affect of “hope for the nation,” which is projected onto them and functions as a thin veil over a multilayered Chinese nationalism entangled with entrenched ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality. This racial niche thus falls between the oft-whitewashed South-South narratives promoted by official media and the straightforwardly anti-Black stereotypes against African and Black peoples circulating in Chinese society via cultural products and online discourses.
However, from Lou Jing to Zhong Feifei, the rise of social media has also given zhongfeihunxue public figures more agency to navigate this racial niching process to their advantage. For example, when Feng Ao declined a scholarship offer from the Joe Tsai Foundation to study in the United States in 2022, many Chinese basketball fans were angry with him. They found out that Feng had already signed a contract with Xinjiang Flying Tigers when he applied, and his careerist choice meant that some other athletes’ opportunity to go to the NBA to train was wasted (as the scholarship quotas for Chinese athletes were extremely limited and nontransferable). Feng and his coach then took to social media to respond to such criticisms, explaining that their rejection of the offer was solely motivated by their strong patriotic will to keep working in China.Footnote 28 Whether we take their words as truthful or more cynically interpret them as strategic manipulation of nationalist discourses to disguise personal pursuits, as a media event, the story demonstrates that zhongfeihunxue athletes are not mere passive victims of Chinese racial nationalism but able to carve out different spaces for survival and work within the racial niche. This is even more the case for Adaixiu Yin Ka, better known as Lele (乐乐) or Xiuge (琇哥) by Chinese netizens. Together with his sister Nina (妮娜), who is by far the most famous zhongfeihunxue public figure in China due to her funny short videos, Adaixiu has gained a large fan base beyond the usual sports audience. Through his social media platforms, he appropriates popular Chinese terms such as “tanned jock” (heipi tiyusheng, literally ‘black-skin sports student’) and “brown alpaca” (zongse yangtuo) to label himself, effectively combining humor and racialization to boost his attractive and cute image. Like Blasian celebrities in the United States, Nina and Adaixiu actively participate in “self-branding processes … contesting and challenging media constructions of their identities” (Washington Reference Washington2017, 17).
In light of this agentic engagement with their racial niche in the Chinese mediascape, I conclude this paper by returning to an earlier point regarding the “transcultural potentiality” of zhongfeihunxue as a form of self-identification. Though most scholars in CMRS agree that understandings of multiraciality will remain bound to different national contexts, zhongfeihunxue athletes are just as mobile as any Chinese person, if not more so, in today’s globalized world. Ding Hui spent four years studying in the United States, which, as he told the media, has only made him feel more Chinese.Footnote 29 Wang Mu moved to Portugal and joined the Sport Clube Lusitânia in 2023. Also in 2023, Su Yuliang signed a contract with RFK Grafičar Beograd and started training in Serbia. Both are seeking to achieve career breakthroughs before returning to China.Footnote 30 Their experiences as zhongfeihunxue living overseas have surely shaped their identities in different ways. These experiences may reinforce their Chineseness, as they did for Ding Hui, or this younger generation of zhongfeihunxue may find it meaningful to form coalitions with other mixed people in those societies in order to gain a comparative understanding of their identity beyond the Hua-Yi dialectic. As I have stressed in the theory section, zhongfeihunxue is a future-oriented concept that is still evolving and open for diverse interpretations and deeper sociocultural investigations. One can only hope that the upcoming generation of zhongfeihunxue in Table 1, especially the female athletes, will live in a future where anti-Black racism does not hamper their career development as it did for the older male athletes. However, before a Chinese Tiger Woods or zhongfeihunxue Eileen Gu comes around, Chinese media, academia, and society still have much reflection to do on the issue of racial nationalism.
