Chinese student violence against Africans was racial nationalism, not vestigial xenophobia.

Evidence

Only occasionally is racial nationalism expressed in a fairly unambivalent way, as during the anti-African riots on university campuses (Sullivan, 1994). Far from being a manifestation of a vestigial form of xenophobia, these events belong to the racial nationalism which has been so diversely used in China since the end of the nineteenth century. Articulated in a distinct cultural site (university campuses) by a specific social group (university students) in the political context of the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, campus racism demonstrated how contradictory discourses of “race” and “human rights” could be harnessed together in politicized oppositions to the state: six months after their mass demonstrations against Africans in Nanjing, who were alleged to have violated the purity of Chinese girls, students were occupying Tiananmen Square in the name of the nation. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3353

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to theories of nationalism as a modern constructed project (Gellner, Anderson) rather than an atavistic survival.