Religion and perceived attitudes among African immigrants in Guangzhou, China

ABSTRACT

Motivated by the fast-emerging literature on African immigrants in new destinations, this paper examines the role of religion in the African immigrants’ perceived attitudes of Chinese people toward them. Building on the triple-market model, we identify different ways Islam and Christianity influence African immigrants’ perceived attitudes in Guangzhou, the most popular gateway city for African immigrants to China. Using both survey and in-depth interview data, we find that Muslim Africans tend to perceive better attitudes of local Chinese toward them than their Christian counterparts. African-dominated congregations, where Christian Africans are used to participating, are negatively associated with African immigrants’ perceived attitudes. We argue that the mechanism underlying the relationships reflects how religion influences immigrants’ social experiences in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• perceived attitudes
• triple-market model
• African immigrants in China
• mixed method

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Chin-Han Chan for his instructions on cartography. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the 2022 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

IRB statement

Both the survey and the interviews have received IRB approval (#16-E-245-01) from the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Notes

1 Whether Africans are immigrants in China is still debateful. Some scholars are against the immigrant/migration paradigm because they find African traders do not have intentions to permanently live in China (Amoah, Hodzi, and Castillo 2020; Castillo 2021; Lyons, Brown, and Li 2012). However, others still use the term “African immigrants” to emphasize their status of being in a country other than their home country (Liang and Le Billon 2018; Liang 2014; Zhou, Shenasi, and Xu 2016). In this study, we also use “African immgrants” to indicates that they are (relatively) new to Chinese society, but we are also aware that they are different from typical immigrants in Western societies, in most cases that they do not have official permanent resident status.

2 Roberto Castillo is a professional researcher on African immigrants in China. He is an Assistant Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China. This estimation was reported on his academic blog: https://africansinchina.net/2013/09/30/how-many-africans-are-there-in-guangzhou-if-you-really-want-to-know-you-must-read-this/comment-page-1/#comment-3823.

3 All interviewees were anonymous with pseudo-IDs assigned. This pseudo-ID consisted of two parts. The letter part refers to the location of the interview conducted. The digit part refers to the case number of the interviewee.

Additional information

Funding

The project is supported by Chiang-chin Kou Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (USA) (#RG008-A-14), China National Social Science Foundation [grant number 18ZDA133], Global Religion Research Initiative (International Collaboration Grant), University of Notre Dame, with funding from John Templeton Foundation (Zai Liang, Principal Investigator).