After the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests across the United States, Chinese multimedia journalist Daisy Xu wanted to find out more about how her compatriots regard Black people in China. This is an especially poignant issue given the spasm of anti-Black discrimination that occurred in April in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou where African and other Black residents were evicted from their homes and hotels and forced to sleep out on the streets for several days.

“While the global conversation on race is booming, China is just beginning its own mainstream debate,” she said in her report that revealed a far more complex portrait of Chinese-Black race relations than what is widely perceived by outsiders.