This article examines how Chinese international students develop a complex understanding of race and racism from a transnational perspective. Through semi-structured interviews and follow-up exchanges with 21 Chinese international undergraduates at a US public research university, the article argues that students’ racial learning was jointly shaped by their upbringing in mainland China and by racial encounters in the US. The findings reveal that Chinese students held contrastive views on race and racism before and after their arrival, due to the disjuncture between ideological impact in the home country and experiential exploration in the host country. Specifically, Chinese students’ lived experiences in the US dramatically shifted their conceptualization of race from a nationality-based identity to the phenotype-based imposed category of ‘Asian’. They also revised their understanding of racist practices from mostly violent and explicit to mostly subtle and implicit. This study contributes to the broader literature on transnational racialization.
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