On Being Black in China

Not to minimize the overall message, to be fair, those students would probably would complain about a ethnic Chinese English teacher.

Just like how non-Chinese expats in Hong Kong get higher salaries and packages including housing allowance, whereas oversea born Chinese are treated as locals despite being expats.

This author has an incredibly solipsistic worldview:

  Mao issued another statement of support in April 1968 after 
  the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But despite 
  these expressions of support, there is scant evidence to 
  prove Mao or any other Chinese political leader at the time 
  would have been willing to align themselves actively with 
  the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Chinese foreign policy 
  in the 1960s mirrored much of that of the West, due in part 
  to the Sino-Soviet split and the coming détente with the 
  U.S.

  After the deaths of Mao and Zhou Enlai, the era of 
  alignment with the developing world and oppressed peoples 
  gave way to Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic plan for economic 
  development epitomized by his statement, "To get rich is 
  glorious." From the 80s to the present, this new mantra has 
  fueled a single-minded devotion to the pursuit of wealth, 
  leaving little room for concern with past ideals. 

The "past ideals" promoted by Mao included the mass murder of tens of millions of Chinese and almost thirty years of terror and poverty, from the Great Leap Forward through the Cultural Revolution. Not even a single mention or nod to this in the paragraph, which would have you believe that a mass murderer who gave lip service to the US civil rights movement is preferable to a man who brought a billion people out of darkness.

One might even call such a view - that all that matters is a person's professed attitude towards a black American - culturally imperialist. As the author notes in passing, post-Deng China is substantively doing a lot more for people of African origin via trade than Maoist China ever did. But all that matters are the "past ideals". A modern expression of the modern American religion: thou shalt not be saved through works, only through lip service towards MLK alone.

The passage you quote seems fairly neutral to me, and you appear to bring more baggage to the conversation than the author himself.

There was in fact a qualitative change in popular Chinese outlook from Mao to Deng, never mind the damage Mao inflicted on the country. China became more materialistic, less ideological, less idealistic. White people were associated with rich and powerful western nations, so their prestige increased. Black people were associated with poor African nations, so their prestige decreased. This was independent of any preferences for light and delicate features.

And I think this was one of the author's points, that shifts in popular outlook have affected Chinese perceptions of black people. What might once have been an asset (perception of shared suffering under capitalist/imperialist oppression) is now a liability ("we're poor but not as poor as you!").

You see some of the opposite here in America. For some reason or another, people tend to prefer an Asian-looking kung fu teacher to a Caucasian or African-American one.

The present-day East Asian cultures have become strangely obsessed with image. There was one Taiwanese pop star, I think her name was Jolin or something, she's rumored to have had 3 different plastic surgeries in the last however many years, and come out looking quite different in each one. It's supposedly kind of scandalous now in Korea, when a husband and wife marry and then the kids turn out looking nothing like the parents.