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.
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 Citation2020; Castillo Citation2021; Lyons, Brown, and Li Citation2012). 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 Citation2018; Liang Citation2014; Zhou, Shenasi, and Xu Citation2016). 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.