According to Wyatt, at no time were Africans enslaved and brought to China by Chinese slave traders. On the contrary, there was 'a known and confirmable succession of groups that ferried Africans from west to east across the Indian Ocean into China and that profited thereby from their sale as slaves'. Śrivijayan and Javanese merchants are reported to have introduced the trade in African captives to the court of the Tang dynasty. Later, traders from the Middle East also took up the activity. Wyatt doubts that the references to slaves that appear in Chinese sources actually relate to Africans. The author questions the association of terms such as zanj with Africans and slavery among the Arabs, pointing out that in 1083, when Cengtan, a noble from Zanzibar, visited Guangzhou (Canton), this term was not associated with enslavement at all. Wyatt suggests that the term Kunlun, also thought by past researchers to be a reference to enslaved Africans, was not restricted to Africans. In sum, this contribution shows that the presence of Africans in eastern China increased considerably only in the mid-seventeenth century, when they were brought there by Europeans. Thus, in East Asia, Africans comprised a minority of enslaved peoples. China and other Asian nations with centralized power took people captive through military actions within the region itself.  
The presence of Africans in South Asia has been documented as early as the third century CE, and it increased substantially in the tenth century with the expansion of the Arab slave trade. Historians have pointed out that the diasporas resulting from the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas do not constitute a model analogous to that of the African diasporas in the Indian  
Ocean region, given that, even in the modern era, African diasporas in the latter part of the world were not solely associated with slave trafficking.