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

Liu, Yang; Dervin, Fred

doi:10.1080/1369183x.2020.1763785

Cited by 26 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Classifying foreigners on the basis of their whiteness usually coincides with ascribing to them a Western ethnicity and cultural background (Liu and Dervin, 2020) – before it is known that they are indeed from a country commonly seen as part of the West. 2 Pieke (2012) explains this by pointing to the immigration trends to China in the 1970s and 1980s, when foreigners originated mostly from Western countries.…”

Section: ‘Othering’ Along Racial and Ethnic Boundaries: Becoming A Wh...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Like Anton, all but two participants can be characterised as ‘Caucasians’. In Switzerland, they belonged to the invisible racial majority ( McIntosh, 1988 ) and then became ‘white’ by migrating to China and instantly marked as non-Chinese ( Liu and Dervin, 2020 ).…”

Section: ‘Othering’ Along Racial and Ethnic Boundaries: Becoming A Wh...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they found that this did not apply to some of the social relations they had with Chinese individuals which they had initially interpreted as friendships. What they had believed was a relationship of mutual emotional comfort seemed to serve these Chinese ‘friends’ primarily as a means of gaining cosmopolitan capital and ‘face’ in the eyes of other Chinese ( Liu and Dervin, 2020 ) and was thus experienced as an unequal bargaining of resources.…”

Section: Navigating Positionalities Of White Foreignnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies of the experiences of Westerners in China have been mostly conducted in a single city, such as Shanghai ( Farrer, 2019 ; Stanley 2013 ), or Xiamen ( Lehmann, 2014 ), or are focused on specific professional groups like English ( Leonard, 2019 ; Stanley, 2013 ) or international teachers ( Poole, 2019 ), or they have investigated the specific experiences of US Americans ( Liu and Dervin, 2020 ). This article examines how Europeans are positioned and how they navigate their position against shifts in the dynamic, now they are no longer granted automatic elite status as white Westerners in China.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Middling whiteness: The shifting positionalities of Europeans in China

Camenisch

2022

Ethnicities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing on ethnographic research, this article explores the multifaceted, situational and shifting social boundaries in the translocational positionalities of middle-class Swiss migrants in China. The analysis unpacks the central role of whiteness and Western ethnicity under the ‘Chinese gaze’, intersected by nationality. However, while they are marked by continuities of white privilege, the resulting racialised positionalities of the foreign white ‘others’ are characterised by a simultaneous elevation and subjugation, equally shaped by a ‘Chinese ascendancy’. European migrants’ self-positionings meander between this ambiguous ‘outsiderness’ and a propensity for integration as they navigate the multifaceted middle positions they occupy. Contextualising the findings in research on white migration movements from the West, the conclusion suggests that the class-based notion of middling migration should be refined by including economic, social and cultural ways of being ‘of the middle’.

show abstract

Section: ‘Othering’ Along Racial and Ethnic Boundaries: Becoming A Wh...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: ‘Othering’ Along Racial and Ethnic Boundaries: Becoming A Wh...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Navigating Positionalities Of White Foreignnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Middling whiteness: The shifting positionalities of Europeans in China

Camenisch

2022

Ethnicities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The same post-Cold War mobility underlying Hunchun's Sino-Russian contact has seen PRC citizens move throughout the world, and since work on the resulting day-to-day relationships generally sidelines state-related concerns, the present study offers a new paradigm. Intercultural communication scholar Yijia Huang (2008: 12-13) notes that differential accommodation of "culture" poses problems in potential friendships between U.S.-based Chinese students and their American counterparts, while reciprocal American objections to being "foreign friends" have been documented in China itself (Liu and Dervin 2020). Such work would benefit from consideration of the role that the Sino-U.S. relationship plays in delineating how notions of "culture" are constructed on each side, all the more so at this time of growing trans-Pacific tension.…”

Section: Soviet Friendship Against the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Differences over Difference: Sino-Russian Friendship at Interstate and Interpersonal Scales

Pulford¹

2021

Comp Stud Soc Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Relations between states are usually framed in human terms, from partners to rivals, enemies or allies, polities and persons appear to engage in cognate relationships. Yet whether or not official ties and relationships among people from those states actually correspond remains less clear. “Friendship,” a term first applied to states in eighteenth-century Europe and mobilized in the (post)socialist world since the 1930s, articulates with particular clarity both the promise and the limitations of harmonized personal and state ties. Understandings of friendship vary interculturally, and invocations of state-state friendship may be accompanied by a distinct lack of amity among populations. Such is the case between China and Russia today, and this situation therefore raises wider questions over how we should understand interstate and interpersonal relationships together. Existing social scientific work has generally failed to locate either the everyday in the international or the international in the everyday. Focusing on both Chinese and Russian approaches to daily interactions in a border town and the official Sino-Russian Friendship, I thus suggest a new scalar approach. Applying this to the Sino-Russian case in turn reveals how specific contours of “difference” form a pivot around which relationships at both scales operate. This study thus offers both comparison between Chinese and Russian friendships, and a lens for wider comparative work in a global era of shifting geopolitics and cross-border encounters.

show abstract

(Re-)encountering

Dervin,

Tian

2023

Critical and Reflective Intercultural Communication Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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

Cited by 26 publications

References 35 publications

Middling whiteness: The shifting positionalities of Europeans in China

Middling whiteness: The shifting positionalities of Europeans in China

Differences over Difference: Sino-Russian Friendship at Interstate and Interpersonal Scales

(Re-)encountering

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About