Africa–China intimate encounters: embodied patriarchal anti-Black racism in Sino-Congolese marriages

Based on an ethnographic study in Congo (DRC), this paper examines the experiences of eight Chinese migrant men married to Congolese women, and analyzes how they assert dominance within unequal conjugal power relations. In these unions, Chinese husbands occupy dominant positions reinforced by translocal patriarchal systems and intersecting racial regimes—including global and Chinese anti-Black racism, the racialization of Chinese people in Congo as ‘fake Whites’ (perceived as wealthy yet powerless), and their partners’ internalized racial ideologies. This paper argues that Chinese husbands’ dominance, as a gendered embodiment of anti-Black racism, manifests not only in their control over finances, decisions, and labor division, but also in how they regulate their wives’ daily lives, bodies, and child-rearing, in an attempt to shield them from Chinese racial prejudice against Black people. However, this embodied patriarchal racism by Chinese men reinforces the marginalization of Black women. By demonstrating how geopolitics, racial ideologies, and patriarchal structures shape power dynamics within Sino-Congolese marriages, this paper offers deeper insights into the racial contours of Africa–China intimate encounters amid China’s global rise, and further illuminates how the reconfiguration of global geopolitics and racial ideologies shapes intimate relations in postcolonial Africa.