ABSTRACT
The health crisis and its consequences will likely have a severe impact on the local, translocal, and transnational forms of mobility that informed African presence in Guangzhou, and China in general. Undoubtedly, African transnational mobilities have been cast in a new light in the wake of COVID-19. In the near future, the new regime of foreign mobility in China will be a post-pandemic one driven by the rationales of crisis and emergency. African overstayers and the thriving commercial sectors in which they insert themselves may be among the first 'victims' of the new normal in China. Guangzhou's population of legal African residents has been consistently declining, from some 16,000 individuals in 2014 to around about 4,500 in 2020. COVID-19 may not be the end of African mobility as the people have understood it since the early 20th century, but it may well be one of the last nails in the coffin of an already declining African population in Guangzhou.
