Racial marker, transnational capital, and the Occidental Other: white Americans’ experiences of whiteness on the Chinese mainland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the underexplored white Americans’ experiences of whiteness in such predominantly non-white contexts as the Chinese mainland, juxtaposing transnational white migration, postcolonial imaginations, and notions of Otherness. Thirty-two white Americans living in mainland China were interviewed between 2015 and 2016, and their narratives were analysed under the guidance of grounded theory. The results revealed that the white Americans in this study experienced the curious and admiring Chinese gaze as a whiteness-centred Othering, which visually consumed them as objects and transformed them into commodities with the qualities desired by many Chinese locals. In this context, these Americans experienced whiteness as a racialisation process in which they adopted various strategies to negotiate their white Otherness in mainland China at the intersection of geography, gender, class, nationality and occupation. Subject to the dominant Chinese gaze, the interviewed Americans felt prey to Occidentalism that displaced, dislocated, and even excluded them as the privileged yet marginalised Occidental Other on the Chinese mainland.