Whiteness of a Different Color?: The Racialization of Russian English Teachers in China’s Private ELT Industry

China’s private English Language Teaching (ELT) industry is notorious for its fetishization of white native speaker teachers and racism against black teachers. Yet little academic attention has been given to white non-native speaker teachers, who are often paid less yet frequently hired in second and third-tier cities to perform native speaker whiteness in front of Chinese clients. Due to the commodification of white looks in China’s profit-driven ELT industry, many schools and job recruitment agents find it more cost effective to hire Russians as English teachers. Positioned between white native speaker teachers and black teachers in the ELT job market, Russians are subjected to multiple layers of racialization based on their skin color, nationality, non-native speaker status, gender, and Chinese language proficiency. Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the racialized experiences of Russian English teachers in three Chinese cities: Beijing, Chongqing, and Zhengzhou. I argue that the Russian case study exposes the gaps and fissures in whiteness as a racialized identity in China due to the marginalization of Russian teachers in the white category. Yet their stigmatization as less white or second-class white people also reinforces hegemonic whiteness as a transnational power structure. This research adds nuances to whiteness studies by interrogating the geographically specific ways of white racial formation and the tension between homogenization and differentiation in the contested process of the reproduction of white hegemony in China’s neoliberal consumer culture.