To avoid HTML escaping of text children when calling React.createElement, we use the dangerouslySetInnerHTML prop.

For instance, we write

const Component = () => (
  <span dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: "&gt;&lt;" }} />
);

ReactDOM.render(<Component />, document.getElementById("container"));

to create the Component component that renders the "><" as raw HTML by setting it as the value of __html in the object that we set as the value of the dangerouslySetInnerHTML prop.