Recruiting Mubai
Race turning into qualification in China's private English language education
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7473671 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shuling Wang (0000-0003-0641-1495, Cambridgeshire County Council), Raviv Litman (0000-0001-9789-5346, Xiamen University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1055-1360 • E-ISSN: 1548-1395 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/jola.70043 |
| OpenAlex | W7118164399 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 44 |
Native speakerism in English language teaching (ELT) has become associated with Whiteness. However, how this association is sustained in everyday practices within China's unique socio‐cultural‐political context remains underexplored. This study examines the raciolinguistic construct of Mubai, a central recruitment criterion in China's ELT industry, and analyses how Mubai codifies the explicit conflation of Whiteness and English nativeness, persistently privileging Whiteness over qualifications through a highly prescriptive recruitment process, which undermines teaching quality, produces unsustainable labor practices, and perpetuates structural racism often unacknowledged in Chinese public discourse. It highlights how Mubai both sustains and destabilizes racialized ideologies of English in China
Conflation · Construct (python library · Context (archaeology · Ideology · Race (biology · Racism · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · China's Global Influence and Migration · Multilingual Education and Policy
The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods
“Now We Are No Longer Needed!”
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy
Language Learning as Linguistic Entrepreneurship
The Problematic Concept of Native Speaker in Psycholinguistics
Multilingual Realities, Monolingual Ideologies
The Linguistic Imperialism of Neoliberal Empire 1
Challenging the Native and Nonnative English Speaker Hierarchy in Elt
Hiring native-speaking English teachers in East Asian countries
Diaspora and Class Consciousness
Whiteness
The Discourse of Race in Modern China
Discourses of Race and Rising China
Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality
Whiteness Isn’t about Skin Color.” Challenges to Analyzing Racial Practices in a Norwegian Context
White profitability
Racist nativist microaggressions and the professional resistance of racialized English language teachers in Toronto
Globalization and native English speakers in English Programme in Korea (Epik)
The employability of non-native-speaker teachers of EFL
Contested racial capitals of English teachers in China
Racializing Esol Teacher Identities in U. S. K—12 Public Schools
Race and Tesol
White Native English Speakers Needed
Neutral” vs. “pure” accents
Using thematic analysis in psychology
Racism in China's English Language Teaching Industry
Popularizing racial discourse
Immigrant China
Angloscene
Complicating raciolinguistics
White Privilege, Language Capital and Cultural Ghettoisation
We are cheaper, so they hire us
Unsettling race and language
Qualitative Quality
World Englishes and applied linguistics
The Shifting Meanings of Race in China
Between privileges and precariousness
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |