In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024), Mingwei Huang traces the transformation of global capitalism and its racial configurations at Johannesburg’s Chinese wholesale malls, also known as ‘China Malls’. Facilitated by the ongoing southward movement of Chinese migrants, capital, and consumer goods, China Malls are sites of dense interactions, friction, and interdependencies, where a new wave of Chinese entrepreneurs has come into close contact with migrant workers from southern African countries. Mingwei Huang situates the seemingly novel economic activities and social practices in a longer history of colonial violence, race-making, and dispossession. Drawing insights from fieldwork spanning almost a decade, when she worked as a shop assistant and lived next-door to Chinese traders, the author observes that these Sino-African spaces capitalise on and perpetuate—as much as they transform—existing structures of inequality, precarity, and exclusion. Even as the ‘West’ and white supremacy recede from the centres of world power, Sinocentric imaginaries, anti-Blackness, and colonial legacies shore up a new global colour line that sustains an uneven distribution of wealth and life chances under contemporary racial capitalism. If Johannesburg’s China Malls stretch the frontiers of ‘Global China’, Mingwei Huang shows that the Chinese Century must be understood in proximity to the empires that came before and the traces they left behind.
Kun Huang: Can you tell us what led you to research Chinese racial capitalism in South Africa? You mentioned that a major shift in your conceptual framework occurred as you started doing fieldwork at the China Malls. What were the initial moments that brought to light your ‘romance with solidarity and cosmopolitanism’ (p. ix) and made you turn from considerations of Afro-Asian solidarities to critiques of racial capitalism, imperial formations, and sojourner colonialism? In what ways do Global South dynamics on the ground challenge ideas of race, globalisation, and China–Africa relations that scholars in the Global North often take for granted?
Mingwei Huang: The conceptual framework of the project—empire, racialisation, racial capitalism—comes from my training in American Studies. I entered graduate school between a wave of ethnic studies scholarship on Afro-Asian solidarities and Third World internationalism and a wave of journalism and social scientific writing on China–Africa relations, which was largely framed as either a revival of Bandung-era friendship or nascent neocolonialism. I wanted to understand how China–Africa relations manifested on the ground among ordinary actors. During my first research trip to South Africa, I was immediately drawn to Johannesburg’s China Malls, the Chinese-owned wholesale shopping centres in the book. Like many informal marketplaces, they are vibrant sites of cultural hybridity, interracial mixing, and regional vernaculars, and pulsate with a frenetic energy. Initially, I read the malls as spaces of Afro-Asian solidarity and cosmopolitanism. Yet, as I spent more time at the malls, the power dynamics I witnessed exposed my romanticisation of solidarity. In my earliest interviews, I naively asked Chinese, African, and South Asian traders and workers about Sino-African friendship, but most saw friendship between states, not people. My framing changed once I began to work at the mall and live in Chinese trader communities. I became directly embedded in the everyday tensions and hierarchies between southern Africans, South Africans, and Chinese. I would hear Malawian and Zimbabwean workers call Chinese migrants their ‘friends’ as a greeting, but they also called them ‘tyrants’ as supervisors. My African interlocutors had the sharpest analysis of racial surveillance and labour exploitation. Their insights resonated with the revival of racial capitalism in American Studies and altered the course of my project.
To share an early clarifying moment, I was talking to Anita, a Zimbabwean migrant who worked for several Chinese employers, at a shop where I hung out. She casually remarked that Chinese were ‘white’. I asked her to clarify and even raised the historical friendship between Chinese and African nations during the Bandung era, but it rang hollow. In a world where there were only two races, Black and white, Chinese were on the other side of the global colour line, to invoke W.E.B. Du Bois. In hindsight, this was a formative moment of positioning Chineseness as proximate to whiteness from a southern African vantage point. Whiteness, as Zine Magubane (2004) and Jemima Pierre (2012) have theorised, is a racial position related to a set of social relations, positions of power, and ideology, not a phenotype. Even as Anita maintained a convivial banter with Chinese traders, she nevertheless aligned Chinese migrants with the white colonial project in southern Africa. Through such revelatory moments, I reconceptualise these terms—race, racial capitalism, whiteness, white supremacy, colonialism—when they are detached from ‘white bodies’ and Euro-American histories, which requires a deterritorialisation and denaturalisation of how terms are understood among northern scholars. Beyond China and South Africa, the geopolitical, economic, and racial dynamics of the ‘Global South’ are undergoing transformation and we need new analytical tools to meet this moment.
KH: In your critique of the new forms of racial capitalism that emerged from present-day encounters between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers, you also distinguish your approach from the media hype about ‘Chinese neocolonialism’ in Africa. I was particularly struck by the historical depth and complex temporal layering of your project and the ways in which it refuses simplistic substitutions of China for the West and Chinese-ness for whiteness. Although your book is primarily an ethnographic study of the China Malls and its key actors, several of your chapters take a deep dive into South Africa’s colonial past. You show that resource extraction, land dispossession, and labour exploitation—processes that started more than a century ago—provided not merely the context but also the ‘material prerequisites’ (p. 127) for contemporary regimes of racial formation and capital accumulation. How did you come to adopt this palimpsestic approach that joins the archival and the ethnographic, the past and the present?
MH: The neocolonial question was always at the heart of my interest in China–Africa Studies. I found the debate too reductive, as though China’s history with Western and Japanese imperialism nullified the usage of colonialism to describe the Chinese presence on the continent in all its nuanced varieties. I needed a way to recognise the likeness between Chinese and European regimes of extraction and exploitation that are commonly shorthanded as (neo)colonialism, but without collapsing them or ‘applying’ analytical categories in an ahistorical, equivocating, or isomorphic manner. I use the metaphor of the palimpsest to argue that Chinese racial and imperial forms overlay Euro-American ones, not displacing them but building on and interacting with the traces of ongoing ‘posts’—of apartheid, colonialism, and socialism—that sediment. The palimpsest helped me through this impasse by making explicit my transposition of Chinese over European racial and imperial forms, while drawing linkages between past and present that are not causal or continuous. For instance, like sheets of vellum paper, Chinese racial discourses and labour regimes build on what came before and become recognisable when read through European examples. While I am not trained in history, anthropology, or historical anthropology, I relied on archival research and historical analysis to situate my ethnography in a longer time frame. I drew inspiration from layered history—‘one stacked with sedimented meanings and compounded politics’ in which ‘older meanings and politics [remain] through newer layers’ (Thomas 2020: 235), as well as Black feminist historiography on the afterlives of slavery (Hartman 2008) and genealogical and relational histories of the present (Lowe 2015).
The idea for the palimpsest came from China City, the ‘mining belt mall’ located in Johannesburg’s old mining belt, itself a layered geological formation. The history of gold is everywhere. The mall sits on an exhausted gold reef. Although it initially seems unrelated, the Sino-African world and dynamics between Chinese and African migrants are embedded in the history of gold mining. After the closure of deep-level mines in the 1980s, the mining belt underwent transformation. In the late 1990s, newly arrived Chinese entrepreneurs set up malls on reclaimed mining land, while Chinese traders arrived with hopes of finding fortune. Southern African workers at China Malls often come from long lines of mineworkers who came to Johannesburg under the migrant labour system. When I was doing fieldwork, I had not wrestled with the significance of this location. I took it as ‘context’, not as an active world-making force. Through the mining-belt mall, contemporary Chinese migration is recast through a longer history of extraction, white settlement, Black dispossession, and apartheid. In this way, South African histories play an active role in the making of Sino-African worlds—a corrective to the tendency to overemphasise Chinese actors in China-in-Africa scholarship.
To return to the political stakes of the neocolonial question, the palimpsest gave me a way to talk about Chinese and Euro-American hegemonies not as neatly demarcated epochs but as connected in the past, present, and future. The palimpsest also addresses the complicity of Chinese actors who benefit from ongoing histories that they did not create, such as the continuation of labour migration after the migrant labour system. Chinese actors may not be enacting exploitation on the same scale or to the same degree as their Euro-American counterparts, past or present, but they still participate in extending colonial legacies, even if they were also oppressed by them.
KH: I find it fascinating that while southern Africans made sense of the Chinese presence through the colonial past, the Chinese entrepreneurs you interviewed were largely clueless about what came before them. They inhabit a space of structural ignorance and epistemological rupture that stands in stark contrast to the embodied struggles of an older generation of Chinese South Africans, who lived through the apartheid era and fought against discriminatory policies alongside Black and other ‘Coloured’ South Africans. In the book, you take great care to unpack the multiple ‘Chinas’ in the Global South—problematising the Cold War–influenced discourse about the ‘Chinese Century’, while also criticising the violence of Sinocentric world-making. You show readers that there is no single ‘China’ in South Africa, but rather a composite of positionalities, regional belongings, languages, nationalities, and political visions. As a Chinese American researcher, you also had to navigate your own Chinese-ness as an insider–outsider. Why do these multiple ‘Chinas’ matter to you? How is ‘China’ lived, experienced, and practised by those whose life or livelihood is intimately structured by its unacknowledged heterogeneity and complexity?
MH: In the book, I was interested in probing what the Chinese presence in South Africa meant at the turn of the millennium. ‘Chinese-ness’ is a heterogeneous identity but is often represented as a monolith. In South Africa, Chinese goods of all types and qualities are derisively called ‘Fong Kong’—a colloquial term for ‘cheap’ or ‘fake’ Chinese goods. Chinese people, who came from varied class and educational backgrounds, cities, rural towns, and provinces (Fujian, Guangdong, Hubei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and others), were reduced to ‘Chinese’. Meanwhile, Chinese migrants, despite their differences, referred to themselves as huaren (华人),a shared racial, ethnic, and national minority identity in South Africa. To further complicate identification, South Africans commonly misread South-Africa–born Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kongese as ‘new’ Chinese migrants, ignoring the roots they planted over generations. South Africa’s diplomatic relationship with ‘China’ also shifted from Taiwan during apartheid and to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after 1998. As a Chinese American researcher, my positionality was marked as an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ depending on context. Chinese migrant traders read me as a young woman on her own in a ‘dangerous’ city and took me into their community under this racial, ethnic, and gender pretext, but also recognised the global and class privileges afforded by my parents’ immigration to the United States. Meanwhile, African migrants read me as ‘Chinese’ but more accessible and politically empathetic than their Chinese employers. In short, ‘Chinese-ness’ is not a stable identity and is highly differentiated and relational.
Like the ‘Chinese Century’, ‘China’ is a future-oriented symbol. For many South Africans, the proliferation of all things Chinese signalled an exciting or foreboding change in the global order. Among my Chinese interlocutors, the PRC’s global ascendance maintained their hopes as they worked an ocean away from home. They wished to return to China after making enough money abroad, which was an ever-moving target. Among African workers, ‘China’ represented potential prosperity, personal and continentwide. Working with Chinese entrepreneurs promised a head start, no matter how difficult the present. In both situations, the cruel optimism of a Sinocentric future closed the gap between aspiration and reality.
However, monolithic notions of ‘Chinese’ incite Sinophobia, which must be situated alongside xenophobia directed at poor Black foreign nationals, such as the southern African workers at China Malls, in the post-apartheid era. ‘The Chinese’ have been simultaneously praised for expanding consumer markets and scapegoated for South Africa’s economic problems that are rooted in economic liberalisation and deindustrialisation. Chinese traders have been smeared in the media for ‘flooding’ South African markets with low-cost goods and ‘taking away’ manufacturing jobs. As it did worldwide, Sinophobia intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Chinese Association of Gauteng won a case in the High Court for online hate speech accusing Chinese of selling donkey skins. Even as I write about Chinese racism, it is important to not lose sight of the ways Chinese are racialised through enduring yellow peril tropes that are reconfigured in the time of Global China. While the Chinese economic presence can be celebrated, public sentiment can quickly turn to racial hatred.
KH: While ‘Chinese-ness’ remains a multifaceted and racialised category in South Africa, you also show us that the self-perception of Chinese traders as potential victims of crime can intensify technologies of surveillance and control over their African employees. It also exacerbates the criminalisation of Blackness—a transnational racial discourse that is palpable in China regarding Africans in Guangzhou. In other words, we are dealing here not with singular or unidirectional forces of racialisation, but with processes that respond to and build on each other. Being susceptible to racialisation does not necessarily lead to greater understanding or solidarity, but it can activate and reinforce other racialisation structures already in place. Contrary to the optimistic view that tensions and misunderstandings would subside as people-to-people interactions increased, the affective labour of paranoia among Chinese traders in South Africa intensifies practices of separation and community-making along racial lines. How do you tackle the complex dynamics of race in this context, where multiple racialisation processes interact and intersect?
MH: Studying race in the Sino-African context is challenging because of the global dimensions of race, different lexicons for ‘race’ across contexts, and multiple vectors of racialisation that connect and interact through the hyphen. The ‘dominant absence’ of whiteness drops out of the equation but remains a structuring force in linking the two: the racialisation of Chinese in South Africa and the Chinese racialisation of South and southern Africans. As I described, in South Africa, Chinese migrants are embedded in histories of Asian racialisation from the colonial period to the resurgence of Sinophobia since Covid-19. In the other direction, Chinese migrants racialise Africans through long histories of racial thought about ‘Africa’, ‘Africans’, ‘Blackness’ (黑), and ‘Black labour’ (黑工)—work that scholars such as Rebecca Karl (2002), Derek Sheridan (2022), Roberto Castillo (2020), and you (Huang 2020) have done.
Through ethnography, I show how enduring racial ideas become meaningful through their transnational circulation and everyday interactions. As you show, heteropatriarchy and Han racial nationalism intersect to create anxieties about Chinese women, African men, and the multiracial family in China (Huang 2020). I explore similar anxieties about interracial intimacies that play out among Chinese migrants in South Africa. I examine how Chinese anti-Black racism is forged through the transnational circulation via social media of racial stereotypes of the African city as unsafe and African migrants in China as criminals. In Johannesburg, cash-carrying Chinese traders are vulnerable to petty theft and violent robberies, which sometimes involve African employees. Although the fear of crime was outsized, robberies gave credence to stereotypes and deepened distrust between Chinese traders and African workers. Distrust and distance exacerbated existing frictions and the racial Otherness of ‘the Chinese’ among southern Africans. As you point out, these vectors of racialisation multidirectionally circulate, intersect, and multiply in uneven fields of power shaped by long histories of racial capitalism and empire, while also remaking them in ways we cannot yet anticipate.
Kun Huang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the role of race, Blackness, and Afro-Asian intimacies in the cultural formations of Global China. Her scholarly and public-facing writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of World Literature, Made in China Journal, and positions politics. She is also a Chinese translator of Toni Morrison’s and Saidiya Hartman’s works.
Mingwei Huang is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College, USA. She is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024). An interdisciplinary scholar of Afro-Asia/Africa–China, she holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She was previously affiliated with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her research appears in Scholar & Feminist Online, Radical History Review, Public Culture, Verge, and Made in China Journal.
This interview first appeared in Global China Pulse 1, 2025.
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