“Neutral” vs. “pure” accents: the racialization of Filipino and EuroAmerican teachers in China’s online education industry during the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The early Covid-19 pandemic intensified the employment of online English teachers in China’s private educational market. White EuroAmerican English teachers have long been idealized by offline schools. However, the rising number of Filipino teachers employed by private companies online led to a more competitive field of English teaching, where companies tried to promote their teachers’ English accents in relation to their racialized identities in order to attract consumers from other platforms. Based on online ethnographic research, this article uncovers the marketing and management strategies of two major Chinese online educational companies, one focusing on the recruitment of Filipino teachers, and the other on EuroAmerican teachers; these companies developed their strategies partially in competition with each other. This article demonstrates how Chinese online education companies have competed to associate English-language accents with “race” through the teachers they employ.

Keywords:

• Whiteness
• racialization
• raciolinguistics
• English language teaching
• Covid-19

Introduction

China has been the largest national market for private English teaching since 2012 (Liu 2018), and Chinese education companies have been increasingly influential in redefining the work of their online foreign English teachers. To date, scholarship on English teaching in China has explored how whiteness is commodified by schools to attract clients (Liu and Dervin 2022, Henry 2020). This article further investigates how this commodification practice became a relational process for online Chinese education companies who were promoting either EuroAmerican or Filipino teachers to their clients. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 greatly expanded the significance of online education in China when it temporarily became the only option for many students and teachers. This article examines how North American teachers were represented as ideal English teachers in online classes as a part of an inter-company competition which intensified after the Covid-19 pandemic began.

The Covid-19 pandemic, in combination with massive investments in digitization, created new business opportunities for private English education companies, but many foreign companies, such as Disney English, failed to adapt to this educational digital turn in China (Sundararajan 2020). However, Chinese private education companies who already had online schools saw an average of 154% growth in 2020 (Morales 2020). The increasing demand for online foreign English teachers in China was primarily met by teachers from the US and the Philippines (Arlene 2019), two of the world’s largest English-speaking countries by population. The two companies studied in this article drove the development of online English education within China by hiring Filipino and North American teachers. The first case study is Speak2Me¹, which was founded in 2011 and hired online Filipino teachers. The second case study is Superstars, which hired only North American teachers when it incorporated in 2013. Customers came to associate Speak2Me and Superstars with the different groups of foreign teachers they hired.

In the late 2010s, online English education became the new normal in China: 86% of Chinese families wanted to try online English classes by 2019 (Zhang 2019). Online English education had “broken down the space-time restriction” to foreign teachers for Chinese students (Manegre and Sabiri 2020, 2). Many Chinese students had not earlier had a chance to learn with a foreign teacher due to the high cost of offline foreign teachers. Prices for Chinese consumers seeking private foreign English teachers generally fell into three cost brackets: Expensive offline EuroAmericans, cheaper online EuroAmericans, and, most affordable, online Filipinos. While Filipino teachers were appealing to price-conscious Chinese consumers, many Chinese parents preferred to hire online North American teachers because of a widespread belief in the higher quality of EuroAmerican English.

Online English teaching also became a timely opportunity for many Filipinos and North Americans experiencing job insecurity following the coronavirus pandemic. Filipino service industries diminished in 2020 and many Filipinos had specialized educations that were becoming less in demand (Ortiga 2021). The flexibility of online gig work was appealing to both Filipinos and North Americans who had to care for family at home during the pandemic. The pandemic increased the number of students and teachers in online English and also the competition between the companies who hired Filipino or North American online teachers.

In 2016 the Chinese government started requiring all offline education institutions to hire only native-speaker foreign-language teachers (Service System for Foreigners Working in China 2017). Work visas for English teachers in China were limited by country of origin and did not include nationalities where English is spoken due to colonial education, as in the Philippines, rather than because of EuroAmerican settlement, as in North America. Filipino teachers became widely popular in China for online education because online private schools could circumvent this legal barrier, which had prevented large-scale offline employment of Filipino teachers in China: online teachers do not need working visas.

Filipino teachers were for half a decade (roughly 2011-2016) the more common type of teachers in the expanding field of online English teaching because with Filipino teachers more Chinese customers could afford foreign English instruction. But coming into the Covid era in 2020, Superstars was growing faster than Speak2Me. Speak2Me announced on Filipino media in July 2020 an ambitious goal of having 60,000 teachers by 2021. In the beginning of 2021, they in fact had just under 40,000 teachers. By that point, Superstars, the younger of the two companies, had surpassed the 100,000-teacher mark. I will show in this article that these two companies popularized their English education services in China by using competing ideas about ideal foreign English teachers to promote their brands, with different degrees of success.

The article is structured as follows: In the theory section I elaborate on the relational racialization of English teachers and the commodification of English-teacher labor. In the section on management I show how each company disciplined their group of teachers differently because they were part of a racialized hierarchy in the English-teaching industry. In the section on marketing I describe how both companies marketed their teachers’ labor to consumers to elevate the teachers’ relative status in that racialized hierarchy. In the conclusion I argue that these companies were both trying to change the inclusivity of English in their industry in contrasting ways in order to make their own brand of teachers more popular.

Relational racialization in online education

In this section, I draw from literature on racialization and raciolinguistics to explain changes occurring to racial hierarchies within online private English companies. Murji and Solomos (2005, 1) describe racialization as “the processes by which ideas about race are constructed, come to be regarded as meaningful, and are acted upon.” It is not based on personal beliefs alone but constructed and made meaningful by multiple actors in discourse and in action. Not all racialization processes are equally impactful throughout the globe, nor can every act of racialization be equated with the unique historical contexts of EuroAmerican racism. EuroAmerican racism is rooted in a binary ideology of white superiority and black inferiority and was acted out in multiple transnational colonial regimes through skin-color-based slavery and second-class citizenship.

China has a distinct history of racialization. In pre-modern China, lighter skin tones were associated with becoming literate, in contrast to manual labor (Dikötter 1992, 31). The high status of calligraphic and literary education laid a groundwork for social distinction in working indoors rather than outdoors (Kipnis 2011, 81). In China’s modern history, foreign ideas of race were introduced as part of a foreign threat discourse; the self-racialization of Chineseness emerged in opposition to EuroAmerican and Japanese colonialism of the 19^th century. These transnational colonial projects were based on European and Japanese supremist racial ideologies. Modernist Chinese revolutionaries rallied against European and Japanese colonialism by asserting Chinese nationalism (Law 2012, 130) in terms of “racial preservation” (Dikötter 1992, 97). Nation, race, and language were reimagined as interlocking tools for defining and preserving Chinese personhood. Reformers and politicians developed and now continue to draw from nationalism based on essentialized Chineseness to promote political unity (Cheng 2019). The social construction of Chineseness makes it possible to describe a parallel foreign identity, but white foreigners are often perceived in China as the default group of “foreigners.” In contrast, black foreigners are often singled out (Lan 2022, 122).

In the study of raciolingustics, racialization has been further understood as part of a back-and-forth process through which racial and linguistic categories can be culturally co-constructed (Alim 2009). Racialization is part of how people learn to see and hear others as “looking like a language, sounding like a race” (Rosa 2019, 1). Henry (2020, 176) observed how private Chinese schools have profited from associating white teachers with their commercial brands of English education by co-constructing the sounds of English with images of whiteness. In English-teaching fields in China, racial discourses take on multicultural meanings: EuroAmerican educators have promoted linguistic standards for English education which devalue the English of people they racialize as non-white (Lippi-Green 1997), and Chinese English-language educators incorporate both local and foreign standards for English that privilege white teachers (Henry 2020). In this article I look at the practices of online teaching companies in their co-construction of ideas of whiteness and English.

Scholars of English education have taken note of the privileged position of white English teachers in acquiring teaching jobs regardless of their professional qualifications because students so often assume white teachers are native English speakers (Kubota and Lin 2006; Lan 2011). Being seen by students and colleagues as a native speaker is a prized category in English teaching, which has frequently led to workplace respect and higher pay for white teachers and to disrespect and lower pay for non-white teachers over a wide range of professional encounters (Amin 2000). In the 1990s-2000s English proficiency became a key indicator of both individuals’ professional career opportunities and national development in China (Bolton and Graddol 2012). Offline private English schools flourished, and most consumers preferred to hire EuroAmerican teachers if they could afford their services. The popular definition of EuroAmerica in China, which I use throughout this article, is a region defined by Western culture, English language, and a majority of white people (Baike 2020). Under this definition, North American English teachers are a subgroup of EuroAmericans. Chinese companies learned to promote teachers’ labor by constructing them categorically as EuroAmerican, which is coded as being Western, native English-proficient, and white, even when some of their teachers do not self-identify with one or more of those categories. Filipino English teachers have been frequently treated as a disposable labor group at risk of being replaced by EuroAmerican teachers within China's offline English teaching fields (Docot 2019, 5). Philippine English is closely related to American English, going back to the American colonization of the Philippines in 1898 (Borlongan 2016)², but language fluency alone does not wholly determine how students and schools evaluate their language teachers.

Digital technology has changed the commodification of teachers’ racialized labor. Online English teaching is a type of commercial activity where companies release digital platforms which continuously broker sales of labor, much like with ridesharing or food delivery (Van Doorn 2017). The commodification of English teachers is a feature of private education in which “market forces operate according to societal belief systems” (Jenks 2017, 534), including about categories of teachers and their languages. Companies act as mediators between teachers and consumers. They are not monolithic in their roles as mediators: In this study they had different approaches to brokering labor depending on whether they managed Filipino or North American teachers. After the Covid-19 pandemic many online Filipino English teachers transferred from professions that involved training for “global” English, such as in nursing and call centers. While white teachers are associated by their students with English-language culture (Kubota and Lin 2006), Filipino teachers are associated with transnational service work (Lorente and Tupas 2013).

In Anna Guevarra’s (2018, 749) study of robots in South Korea who are voiced by Filipino English teachers, she found that when the robot was given a white-faced avatar, the teacher’s accent emerging from the robot was described by students as “American” but the same Filipino teachers who voice the robots were perceived to have accents when their faces were visible to students. Both Filipino and EuroAmerican English teachers have had their labor commodified by online private education companies, but the commodification process has favored EuroAmerican teachers over Filipino teachers because they are already a part of an unequal racialized hierarchy.

Expanding on existing studies that have looked at the racialization of EuroAmerican and Filipino English teachers as separate fields, this study argues that because Chinese companies and consumers are comparing the labor of online Filipino and EuroAmerican teachers, they are highly related fields of racialization that should be studied together. This article shows how the labor done by Filipino and EuroAmerican teachers is managed and promoted in two online Chinese companies that have been competing by reinforcing or subverting the raciolinguistic boundaries their clients have made between Filipinos and Americans.

Methodology

This study is a netnography, an entirely online ethnographic study in which the researcher participates in online communities through observations, discussions and interviews (Kozinets 2015). The primary data comes from my participant observations and interviews with teachers and students. I worked for 6 months in 2020 as an online teacher at the company Superstars, which connected me to company news and colleagues’ blogs.

While working as an online English teacher, I was able to compare differences between the two competing companies of this study through 24 interviews. I conducted sixteen interviews in English with eight Filipino and eight North American teachers, and eight interviews in Chinese with Chinese consumers of these companies. Because I am a Canadian citizen, I could participate directly in the North American teaching context but not in the Filipino teaching context, and I drew from interviews and public blog posts to learn about Speak2Me. The interviews between Filipino teachers and myself were centered on comparing our experiences, because although we were all English teachers, students, companies, and colleagues treated us differently. I transcribed these interviews and coded them using grounded themes that emerged in our comparative discussions about our experiences.

I followed both written Chinese and English discussions about the two companies online. For Chinese discussions I drew from the social media websites Zhihu and Douban, where consumers reviewed their products and services, including the education companies with Filipino or North American teachers. For English discussions I drew from the social media websites Facebook and Reddit, where teachers shared their work experiences and advice in peer groups. I analyzed public comments on 60 public social media webpages using the codes from the interviews. I identified the most active period for posts about online education on Chinese social media as starting from January 2020 at the beginning of the Covid-19 period in China with the first lockdown, and then in March 2020, when the pandemic began to impact North America and the Philippines. I collected interview and online data from January 2020 to December 2020. These periods saw an unprecedented rise in the number of both teachers and students at classes in both companies because offline schools temporarily closed.

Racialized management practices

This section shows how Superstars and Speak2Me discipline teachers through company rules to define how EuroAmericans and Filipinos should act differently as teachers for Chinese clients. Both companies have the same basic professional requirements: a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certification and a post-secondary degree. The teachers they hire are limited by nationality to categories that consumers can identify, either North American or Filipino. Interactions between teachers and students are managed by companies indirectly through hiring procedures and disciplinary rules. Therefore, although both teachers and consumers interact more with each other than with the company, these companies can largely define those interactions by hiring and managing their teachers.

I first describe how Speak2Me hires Filipino teachers, and then show how it is radically different from how Superstars hires North American teachers. Speak2Me’s hiring process is intensive and dependent on multiple evaluations to ensure that job candidates are qualified teachers. Speak2Me has a 6-step procedure over a week with around 50% of applicants being hired. These are the steps as described by a Filipino teacher working at Speak2Me:

1. Computer systems check with IT.

2. Pre-service orientation with HR in groups of around 20 applicants.

3. Day 1 training in groups of around 15 applicants, six hours of English lessons to deprogram common “Filipinisms” (Philippine English), and a test with a Filipino evaluator.

4. Day 2 training in groups of around 10: lessons about online teaching and practice demonstrations with a Filipino evaluator.

5. Full demonstration lesson with a Chinese evaluator to determine the salaries of different applicants, which fluctuated by around 40%, from 50 to 71 Philippine pesos (1.03-1.46 USD) per 25-minute class.

6. On-board training regarding use of the platform and scheduling.

In Day 1 at Speak2Me, the company preempts Chinese consumer concerns about Philippine English by training teachers to minimize Filipino accents. This is just one small step in the overall hiring process, but it is a big part of how Filipino teachers experience pressure to adapt at international education companies like Speak2Me. They are told to modify their language away from Filipino speech in order to become English teachers, for example, by pronouncing the letters v and b as more distinctly separate sounds than is standard in the Philippines.

The idealized native or neutral accents were described in interviews with Filipino teachers as a form of English speech that combines British and American English styles, and ironically may not have any native speakers because it combines multiple topolects (regional dialects). Since it is associated with American and British people, Filipino teachers find creative strategies based on association to those places to convince their clients that they are speaking neutral English. One Filipino teacher described watching American movies and mimicking the dialogue to acclimatize himself before an interview with Speak2Me. Another Filipino teacher described avoiding her parents before applying for the job so she wouldn’t think in their speech patterns. In both cases Philippine English was described as a style “only Filipinos understand” as opposed to British or American accents and linguistic stylings, which both teachers and clients understood as universal.

Since North American teachers are associated by Superstars with EuroAmerican English, they were not expected to cultivate neutral accents. Before applying for the job, the North American teachers whom I interviewed focused entirely on their pedagogical skills and not their speech patterns, apart from one teacher whose Southern accent was stigmatized by other Americans as being lower class/rural. In my work as a teacher at Superstars, I found that all my colleagues and myself passed only two repeatable steps to be hired:

1. a five-minute video submission.

2. a 10- to 15-minute live demo with a North American evaluator.

While my Filipino counterparts were paid 1.03-1.46 USD per 25-minute class and had evaluations with Chinese employers, I was paid 7.50-11.00 USD per 25-minute class without evaluations from Chinese employers. North Americans are thus paid 5-11 times more than teachers from the Philippines. Many teachers and clients explained this difference by citing demand, claiming that North Americans speak English in a way that is worth 5-11 times more than Filipino teachers in terms of the perceived benefits they bring to students. Clients form these commercial demands because they have learned to associate English with EuroAmericans. As we saw in Guevarra’s (2018) study, EuroAmerican teachers, most often white, are often seen as embodying neutral accents while the visual representation of Filipino teachers evokes the impression of hearing a non-standard accent, even if their English is exactly the same as that of EuroAmerican teachers, and this is reflected in these companies’ hierarchical hiring practices and wages.

Speak2Me attempted to discipline their Filipino teachers to be more popular among Chinese consumers by shaping them to become more neutral or standard in speech, and also in appearance. Speak2Me teachers receive uniforms to promote on-camera consistency whereas wearing a uniform is not required for Superstars teachers. Filipino Speak2Me teachers are required to print out a company tarpaulin (fabric video background) for their teaching at their own expense, but American teachers were allowed to use any background they liked. The teacher who discovered this discrepancy called on colleagues at Speak2Me to “please have some self-respect and be assertive if you want to be treated with the highest respect as the American teachers are.” While Speak2Me subjects its Filipino teachers to more disciplinary procedures than does Superstars towards its North American teachers, I argue that this cannot be explained simply by anti-Filipino prejudice among managers within Speak2Me. Rather, it is part of a promotional strategy by Speak2Me’s leadership to attempt to convince clients that Filipino teachers are professional speakers of neutral English.

Marketing an American accent as exclusive or as inclusive

This section describes how companies market teachers’ labor in reference to their accents and how those accents are connected through marketing to teachers’ appearance. Both companies claimed that their teachers have American(ized) accents; but Superstars implied that American accents exclude Filipino teachers. That exclusivity is disputed by Speak2Me, which has tried to extend the idea of American English education to become more inclusive of Filipino teachers. Their marketing of accents involved displaying teachers’ appearances to convince potential customers to hire their English teachers.

Consumers’ choice between Filipino or North American teachers was mostly limited to the moments when they choose between companies. Superstars marketed their North American online teachers as having “pure accents” (chunzheng kouyin) on their website and in their ads and as “giving mom peace of mind” (rang mama fangxin) about their children's education. Parents brought up this feeling of insecurity about providing their children with a “correct” English accent at an early age in interviews when I asked how they choose between online companies. In one case a father chose to hire a Filipino teacher for himself and a EuroAmerican teacher for his young daughter, because he was more concerned about her English accent than about his own.

In response to these common concerns about the language and accent of Filipino English teachers, Chinese social media commentators who state that they are customers of Speak2Me positively reviewed Filipino English teachers by identifying their fluency in terms of American English (translated from Chinese):

“[The Philippines is] the third largest English-speaking country in the world.”

“[The Philippines has] 94.6% English fluency.”

“During the American colonial rule [in the Philippines], an English-only education policy was adopted.”

These quotes from media influencers sponsored by Speak2Me describe English in the Philippines as a national language, spoken throughout the country, and associated with American education. The exact percentage of fluent English speakers in the Philippines is disputed amongst linguists (Borlongan 2016). However, the general message of these claims is accurate: The Philippines is a significant global source of English expertise and their national English is closely related to American English. The reviewers who made these comments present factual statements to connect the history of Philippine English with American English.

The company Speak2Me has tried to promote this knowledge of Filipino English fluency in China through social and mass media advertisements; part of Speak2Me’s marketing campaign for the years 2011-2020 was to elevate the professional status of Filipino teachers among consumers in China. Its founder stated in a 2020 TV interview in English that “after nine years’ efforts, we made a lot of people in China actually realize that Filipino teachers are very friendly, they can speak very fluent English, and they are well liked by lots of our students…. We believe that Filipino teachers are the best English teachers in the world.” Speak2Me’s claim that Filipino teachers are “the optimal choice in the world” (quanqiu youxuan) a slogan found on their marketing materials, positions them as better than North American teachers at Superstars, a possibly implausible claim given the far lower wages paid to Filipino teachers.

Superstars was founded two years after Speak2Me, and their marketing campaigns often responded to the goals of Speak2Me, the market leader at that time. Superstars claimed that they had “100% pure North American foreign teachers” (100% chunzheng beimei waijiao) to differentiate their online teachers from their established Filipino competition. Who in fact has “pure accents,” as Superstars has branded their teachers’ accents in their marketing materials, quickly became a point of debate among Chinese consumers of online English. The terms “pure accent” (chunzheng kouyin) or “pure English” (chunzheng yingyu) were picked up by bloggers when making claims that Filipinos are inferior English teachers. The following series of comments are from bloggers who state that they switched from hiring Filipino teachers to North American teachers; they are responding to earlier assertions by customers of Speak2Me that Filipino teachers are of high quality (translated from Chinese):

“‘South Pacific accents,’ could they influence kids’ English?”

“Kids can develop a non-standard accent [from Filipino teachers]”

“I think we Chinese are learning English for the purpose of learning pure English, so I don’t recommend choosing foreign teachers from the Philippines.”

Parents of students at Speak2Me whom I interviewed often could not differentiate whether their teachers were Filipino, Indonesian, or Thai or from elsewhere because the course material and the teachers did not promote Filipino culture or relate to Filipino people as Superstars related to American culture and people. In interviews and in forum posts parents most often referred to Filipino teachers as Southeast Asian teachers.

One Chinese parent whose son I taught at Superstars, Caroline (a pseudonym), switched from a Filipino teacher to a North American teacher for her child. Caroline was satisfied by the Filipino teacher’s English fluency, but over time she began to find the Filipino teacher’s accent to become a problem when she compared it with teachers at other companies she saw in ads and from friends’ social media posts (companies encourage their clients to post images and videos online for referral bonuses). Caroline switched to a North American teacher after finding a lesson package from Superstars on sale. She described to me her son’s first North American teacher’s appearance and accent as “beautiful.” Caroline had grown up idolizing Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, and she transferred feelings of American beauty to the voice and appearance of the young American woman who taught her son.

Superstars’ marketing materials primarily focus on their hiring only teachers with Canadian or American citizenship. While whiteness is not explicit in this claim, it exists implicitly within the company’s promotional materials. The company has promoted the image of its teachers as collectively “not Filipino” by featuring teachers in ads which their clients can visually associate with EuroAmerica: Superstars’ teacher in ads can be identified by clients as white by featuring models with light-colored hair and eyes (Figure 1). The association of stereotypical white EuroAmerican looks with English services is shown alongside language describing them as exclusively “excellent North American foreign teachers,” (youzhi beimei waijiao) in contrast to Speak2Me’s emphasis on the professional qualifications of their teachers, who are referred to as “good foreign teachers” (hao waijiao) (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Sales ad on Superstars’ website. Accessed April 10 2021. The URL is not included because it contains identifying information.

Figure 2. Sales ad on Speak2Me’s website. Accessed April 10 2021. The URL is not included because it contains identifying information.

We can thus see how both companies used marketing strategies to endorse their own teachers. In the case of Superstars, the boundaries between EuroAmerican and Filipino teachers are reinforced in order to raise their own teachers’ exclusivity among consumers. In the case of Speak2Me, the status of their Filipino teachers is raised by informing consumers that they are professionally qualified to teach English through exposure to the US through colonial education. In each case a relational racial discourse of English is promoted, albeit to different ends.

Conclusion

As was earlier discussed, previous research on the commodification of whiteness in Chinese schools has shown the co-construction of whiteness with English proficiency (Liu and Dervin 2022, Henry 2020). This article has further demonstrated how online foreign English teaching involves the commodification of both EuroAmerican and Filipino teachers’ labor, and that these are linked though competition over and comparisons by their clients. I have shown why Chinese private education companies in the Covid-19 era intensified two different racializing practices around English when promoting either Filipino or North American teachers’ labor to consumers. The early Covid-19 pandemic intensified the competition between online Chinese education companies because they were expanding in that period and sought to convince consumers to choose their platforms over their competition. Speak2Me promoted the idea that Filipino teachers speak neutral English because of their intensive training and knowledge. Superstars promoted the idea that North American teachers have more pure English accents than Filipino teachers by reemphasizing the association between racialized speech and looks. Speak2Me and Superstars hired foreign teachers for nominally the same type of work; but their practices in hiring and training foreign teachers varied according to whether they were hiring Filipino or EuroAmerican teachers, as we have seen.

With more choices for hiring teachers online during the pandemic (one Chinese parent compared finding an English teacher to speed dating), the system of platform-based private education was more elastic than its offline counterparts, and hiring patterns rapidly shifted. By early 2021 Speak2Me and Superstars were both hiring both EuroAmerican and Filipino teachers to offer in-house first- and second-choice packages to consumers. Speak2Me started a separate program to hire American teachers and raised its prices, while Superstars started a separate program for Filipino teachers to offer discount classes for when their North American teachers were overbooked. Both programs indicated an industry compromise towards a new stable racial hierarchy for online foreign teachers in China. The emerging status quo was one in which Speak2Me succeeded in making online Filipino teachers popular in China while Superstars succeeded in keeping North American teachers as the first choice because of their exclusive association with “pure” American accents.

However, subsequently things changed once again, and the industry collapsed. The Chinese state introduced new policies in late 2021 which sought to greatly reduce the commodification of education by private companies and ended the legal employment of foreign teachers for online English classes taught to children.³ Nonetheless, the ways these companies developed raciolingustic ideologies in their marketing and management strategies had already reached national recognition in China. Before the pandemic, whiteness and English proficiency were closely associated; but when online classes grew popular, comparisons between North American and Filipino teachers became more common. These comparisons were used by companies like Speak2Me to emphasize the English proficiency of their Filipino teachers and were disputed by companies such as Superstars emphasizing the pure English—and implicitly, whiteness—of their online EuroAmerican teachers. This raciolinguistic competition continues in China today. Scholars of whiteness studies should continue to pay close attention to the power of Chinese and other non-EuroAmerican companies to change the commodification of whiteness to serve their competitive and diverse commercial interests.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme, European Research Council (CHINAWHITE 817868).

Notes on contributors

Raviv Litman

Raviv Litman is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam in the Department of Anthropology. He works in the Chinawhite research project at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. His research focuses on whiteness, raciolinguistics, and hierarchies of private English-language education.

Notes

1 The names of the companies and individuals researched in this article are pseudonyms.

2 American colonization lasted from 1898-1946 and had ongoing effects on the economy and education system of the Philippines after independence (Rodriguez 2010). The exploitation of Filipino labor by American colonizers required national English-language education in the Philippines. The universal English education and preference for English-speaking labor by companies in the Philippines has continued until the present.

3 The government of China introduced new regulations in June 2021 to relieve academic pressure by reducing study hours and banning foreign instruction for students under 15 years old (http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/moe_1777/moe_1778/202107/t20210724_546576.html).