China is not “racist” in the American legal sense. It has no formal racial caste or slave code. What it does have is a strong, open preference for light skin and for white foreigners, and routine contempt for darker-skinned people—especially Black Africans—that would be socially unacceptable in most Western countries today.

White or white-passing foreigners are often treated as status symbols: easier housing, better service, English-teaching jobs that explicitly ask for “white native speakers,” and dating-app advantage.

Darker-skinned foreigners, particularly Africans, regularly report the opposite—refused rentals, hotel bans, viral online abuse, and public suspicion. During COVID, African residents in Guangzhou were singled out for forced testing and eviction in a way other foreigners were not. Chinese media and ads have also used blackface and “wash the black off” tropes with little backlash at home.

That is colorism plus Han-centric xenophobia, not the antebellum United States. Pre–Civil War America had chattel slavery written into law. China does not enslave Black people. The comparison that holds is social: open racial hierarchy is still normal in everyday Chinese life in a way it no longer is in the postwar West. https://t.co/9YU8uErzt6