Research Questions

Race and racism remain largely unspeakable topics in China, partially due to the Chinese party-state’s denial of the existence of racism (Cheng, 2019). However, race plays a vital role in China’s education field, particularly in the English Language Teaching (ELT) industry. My study examines Chinese women teachers’ struggle to establish their legitimacy in the ELT industry where whiteness is the norm. The study finds that the ELT industry is more than a field of language teaching and learning. It is a field that commodifies whiteness, asserting a workplace racial hierarchy that affirms the racialised and gendered subordination of Chinese female teachers in relation to White male teachers. This study highlights a need to theorise race and English language education in China, given the growing role and impacts of European migrant teachers in China’s flourishing ELT industry. It also enables greater dialogue with the global English-language education community on the challenges and possibilities of diversity and inclusion.

The global spread of English as a lingua franca is historically associated with Western imperialism and colonialism (Phillipson, 1992) and shapes a ‘common sense’ that English is the property of white people (Jenks, 2017; Kubota & Lin, 2006; Rivers et al., 2013). Over the last two decades, China has become the world’s largest ELT market (Sohu, 2019). The intertwining of English and whiteness has translated into a massive demand for foreign teachers, particularly White people from Euro-American countries, to teach English in China, regardless of their professional backgrounds (Leonard, 2019). The industry accommodated over 400,000 foreign teachers in 2017, but two-thirds were reported unqualified who cashed in on their perceived closeness to White native English speakers (Pan, 2019). The racial hegemony in the ELT field formed by linguistic differences (Curtis & Romney, 2019; Von Esch et al., 2020) marginalises qualified teachers of color who are stereotyped as “inferior linguistically, economically and culturally due to their non‐white skin colour” (Author, 2019).

Race is not the industry’s only distinct category but also intersects with others, including gender and class, when constructing teachers’ subject positions. This study therefore explores Chinese women’s intersectional racialised experiences in China’s ELT industry. More specially, the study asks the following research questions:

1)    How do Chinese women teachers describe and interpret their intersectional experiences in China’s ELT industry?

2)    How do Chinese women teachers construct themselves in relation to other stakeholders in China’s ELT industry?

3)    What are the affective dimensions of intersectional experiences on Chinese women in the ELT industry?

Theoretical Framework: Women of Colour Feminism

Following women of colour feminism (Hooks, 2000), this study develops theoretical concepts grounded in Chinese women teachers’ lived experiences. I employ intersectionality as a ‘sensitising concept’ (Blumer, 2017) to explore the complexity of interconnected identities and power relations that shape ELT teachers’ marginalisation and agency. I use interdisciplinary theoretical tools to place indigenous theoretical concepts, developed from teachers’ accounts, into academic conversation on affect theory, racial capitalism and possessive investment in whiteness. This allows for a greater insight into Chinese women teachers’ encounters with whiteness, revealing how race, gender class and the English language intersect to contribute to the inequalities present in ELT. For example, since intersectionality has been criticised for neglecting to consider factors that cannot be seen or heard (Falcón & Nash, 2015; Puar, 2020), this study uses affect theory along intersectionality. ‘Affect’ is not a personal emotion but a ‘felt’ power relationship (Pavlidis & Fullagar, 2013) involved in producing actions (Bogic, 2017; Puar, 2018), and this study use affect to understand what are the conditions that are producing certain emotions that reflect the ‘structure of being’ (Puar, 2018, p. 207) for Chinese women English-language teachers.

This study adopted a women of colour feminist qualitative inquiry design (Freeman, 2019) to investigate the lived intersectional experiences among 18 Chinese women English-language teachers who have worked closely with foreign teachers in the ELT industry. A purposive sampling approach was adopted to select information-rich participants. The selected Chinese teachers met the following criteria: 1) Self-identified as a Chinese woman teacher or teaching assistant of the English language 2) Worked with foreign teachers for over one year in a private-school context 3) Willing to share their experiences of navigating problems and countering discrimination when working with foreign teachers in the ELT industry The study employed a semi-structured interview method and followed a feminist interview approach to collect data on women teachers’ experiences. Each participant was interviewed twice in interviews lasting one-to-two hours. Informal conversations were conducted with participants to clarify ideas, expressions, themes and concepts emerging from interview narratives that informed the interpretation of the collected data. Apart from interviews, this study also used the innovative emotional map-making method to understand participants’ emotional world in relation to social conditions. A reflexive research diary was also used as a means of reflection on ‘self, process and presentation’ (Sultana, 2007). This study adopted feminist grounded theory (Olesen, 2007) for its data analysis. As no one has foregrounded Chinese women teachers’ perspectives on their experiences in the ELT industry, the study described and interpreted how these teachers articulated their experiences, without imposing my own priorities. I therefore allowed themes and theories to emerge from my interviews with teachers by following an iterative process of multiple readings and by constantly comparing data at each stage of analysis to identify patterns and differences through coding and memo writing, attending to the complexities of the situation of inquiry. By following grounded theory methods to analyse interview data, I provided the empirical evidence and conceptual tools needed to understand Chinese women teachers’ experiences from ‘their lives, relations, actions and words’ (Mathison, 2005), as grounded in their own narratives. The study’s analysis detailed how Chinese women teacher participants made meanings from their experiences based on their social positions and how they understood diversity and inclusion in the industry.

Chinese women English-language teachers construct the mothers of their students as ‘braindead mama fans’ who idolise and invest in White male teachers and dismiss Chinese women teachers as nannies. These Chinese women English-language teachers have observed how schools commodify whiteness and use managerial violence to differentiate English-language teachers based on race, gender and nationality, as it frequently assigns overqualified Chinese women teachers to teaching assistants positions, making them feel, in the words of several teachers, like “second-class citizens”. Chinese women English-language teachers also liken their unqualified and unreliable White teaching colleagues to “time bombs” and managing these time bombs produces the shared feelings of fear, anger and exhaustion. These findings tell whiteness as power structure in the industry which conditions Chinese women teachers’ professional life. Up against whiteness, these women teachers seek different ways to resist intersectional racism in the ELT industry, including withdrawal from caring and emotional work, negotiation for better working conditions, and solidarity with teachers of colour. The study situates the framework of intersectionality into the Chinese context to conceptualise the women teachers’ lived intersectional experiences in the ELT industry. It highlights an urgent need to theorise and disrupt intersectional racism in China’s English-language education systems and calls for diversifying teaching staff and fostering an equal collaborative relationship between Chinese teachers and European teachers, drawing policymakers’ attention to the sustainable growth of this industry. The study also contributes to broader academic discussion on education institutions’ commitment to social justice, diversity and inclusion when participating in the global English-language education sector.

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