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Although China is globalizing, foreigners remain racialized and sexualized others. Using theoretical concepts from hate speech, ethnosexuality, and intergroup threat, this study employs a mixed-methods approach to examine online discussions regarding interracial marriage on four popular Chinese social media platforms that attract users with distinct backgrounds and perspectives, namely, Douyin, Tieba, Hupu, and Xiaohongshu. Our findings reveal that the dialectics surrounding the (un)desirability of ethnosexuality stimulate Chinese netizens’ perceptions of intergroup threat, particularly as gender-specific communities’ emphasis on symbolic threats fosters hate speech. These polarized and toxic discourses, in turn, undermine the internal cohesion of exclusionism within the romantic revolution underway as China globalizes: Black people are associated with an essentialist ethnosexual hierarchy that downgrades their value, while white people have high sexual capital. Ultimately, Chinese social media should be understood as ethnosexual frontiers that negotiate between cultural confidence and exoticization.
Jiang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.