Recruiting Mubai: Race turning into qualification in China's private English language education

Abstract Native speakerism in English language teaching (ELT) has become associated with Whiteness. However, how this association is sustained in everyday practices within China's unique socio‐cultural‐political context remains underexplored. This study examines the raciolinguistic construct of Mubai, a central recruitment criterion in China's ELT industry, and analyses how Mubai codifies the explicit conflation of Whiteness and English nativeness, persistently privileging Whiteness over qualifications through a highly prescriptive recruitment process, which undermines teaching quality, produces unsustainable labor practices, and perpetuates structural racism often unacknowledged in Chinese public discourse. It highlights how Mubai both sustains and destabilizes racialized ideologies of English in China.