Petty Annoyances?: Revisiting John Emmanuel Hevi’s An African Student in China after 50 Years

This article reappraises John Emmanuel Hevi’s “An African Student in China”, a 1966 book that complained about Chinese racism towards Africans but has received scholarly criticism that, for instance, petty annoyances had been overly exaggerated. In an attempt to construct images of Africans in China during Mao’s era and to re-analyse whether Hevi’s work was truly based on “petty annoyances”, the author, using declassified official files, studies the circumstances that Hevi and his peers confronted on educational campuses and in Chinese society.