Between Privileges and Precariousness Remaking Whiteness in China’s Teaching English as a Second Language Industry

This research examines the multiple and contradictory racialization of white identities in China's booming ESL (English as a second language) industry. China represents a new geography of whiteness studies beyond Euro-America due to the transformation of corporeal whiteness into a minority identity as a result of international migration. This research makes distinctions between white privilege as a form of structural domination in Western societies and white-skin privilege as a form of embodied racial capital in China, which can be easily transformed into white-skin vulnerability. It interprets the tension between white-skin privilege and precariousness as a concurrent and mutually constitutive process that foregrounds the open-ended nature of white racial formation in China. By focusing on the intersections between global white supremacist ideologies and local Chinese constructions of self/Other relations, this project explores new forms of racialization beyond the Black/white, superiority/inferiority binaries in the Western context.