THE CHINESE AND RACE
Racism is a subject that people often seek to avoid, it being deemed too politically embarrassing, any suggestion of its existence often eliciting a response of outraged indignation and immediate denial. Yet it is central to the discourse of most, if not all, societies. It is always lurking somewhere, sometimes on the surface, sometimes just below. Nor is this the least bit surprising. Human beings see themselves in terms of groups, and physical difference is an obvious and powerful signifier of them. It is but a short distance to ascribe wider cultural and mental characteristics to a group on the basis of visible physical differences: in other words, to essentialize those physical differences, to root culture in nature, to equate social groups with biological units. [750] There is a widely held view, not least in East Asia, that racism is a ‘white problem’: it is what white people do to others. In both China and Taiwan, the official position is that racism is a phenomenon of Western culture, with Hong Kong holding a largely similar view. [751] This is nonsense. All peoples are prone to such ways of thinking — or, to put it another way, all races harbour racial prejudices, engage in racist modes of thought and practise racism against other races. Racism, in fact, is a universal phenomenon from which no race is exempt, even those who have suffered grievously at its hands. Each racism, however, while sharing general character-istics with other racisms, is also distinct, shaped by the history and culture of a people. Just as there are many different cultures, so there are also many different racisms. White racism has had a far greater and more profound — and deleterious — effect on the modern world than any other. As white people have enjoyed far more power than any other racial group over the last two centuries, so their influence — and their prejudices — have reached much further and have had a greater impact, most dramatically as a result of colonialism. But that does not mean that other peoples do not possess similar attitudes and prejudices towards races that they believe to be inferior. [752]
This is certainly the case in East Asia. Although rarely recognized, in many parts of the region, especially in North-East Asia, the notion of identity is highly racialized. Many terms have been used in China and Japan since the late nineteenth century to represent these countries as biologically specific entities. In China these include zu (lineage, clan), zhong (seed, breed, type, race), zulei (type of lineage), minzu (lineage of people, nationality, race), zhongzu (breed of lineage, type of lineage, breed, race), renzhong (human breed, human race); while those used in Japanese include jinshu (human breed, human race), shuzoku (breed of lineage, type of lineage, breed, race) and minzoku (lineage of people, nationality, race). [753] Even in South-East Asia, which is racially far more heterogeneous, racial identities remain very powerful. In short, a racialized sense of belonging is often at the heart of national identity in East Asia. [754]
The importance of racial discourse in China and other Confucian societies like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam begs the question of why this is the case. The answer is almost certainly linked to the centrality of the family, which has been a continuing and crucial thread in the Chinese tradition (as in all Confucian societies), and which, together with the state, is the key societal institution. The family defines the primary meaning of ‘we’, but the family is also closely linked to the idea of lineage, which serves to define a much larger ‘we’. People in China have long had the habit of thinking of people with the same name as sharing a common ancestry. Since the Ming dynasty, it has been common for different lineages with the same surname to link ancestors and establish fictitious kinship ties through a famous historical figure, as in the case of the Yellow Emperor. ‘The entire Chinese population,’ suggests Kai-wing Chow, ‘could be imagined as a collection of lineages, since they all shared the same Han surnames.’ [755] And the fact that there are relatively few surnames in China has served to magnify this effect. In Chinese custom, lineage, like the family, is intimately associated with biological continuity and blood descent (an idea which enjoys core cultural significance in Confucian societies) as is, by extension, the nation itself. [756] This is reflected in the notion of citizenship, with blood the defining precondition in all these societies: indeed, it is almost impossible to acquire citizenship in any other way. [757]
Far from racism being a Western invention, it has ancient roots in both China and Japan. There is written evidence cited by Jared Diamond going back to at least 1000 BC which shows that the Chinese regarded themselves as superior to the non-Chinese and that the northern Chinese saw those in southern China as barbarians. [758] In ancient China, the ruling elite measured groups by a cultural yardstick according to which those who did not follow Chinese ways were considered to be barbarians, though the latter could subsequently be reclassified depending on the degree of their cultural assimilation. [759] Within the Middle Kingdom, the barbarians were typically divided into two categories: ‘raw barbarians’ ( shengfan), who were seen as savage and resistant, and ‘cooked barbarians’ ( shufan), who were regarded as tame and submissive. [760] Cooked barbarians were deemed as on the cusp of being civilized, raw barbarians as being beyond assimilation. Those living outside the borders of China were regarded as either raw barbarians or, worse, as akin to animals. The distinction between man and animal in Chinese folklore was blurred, with alien groups living outside China frequently regarded as savages hovering on the edge of bestiality and often described by the use of animal radicals (radicals are a key component of written Chinese characters), thereby identifying different non-Chinese peoples with various kinds of animals. [761] It is clear from this that the Chinese sense of superiority was based on a combination of culture and race — the two inseparably linked, the relative importance of each varying according to time and circumstance. [762] Frank Dikötter, who has written the major study in the English language on Chinese racism, argues:
[750] Dikötter, introduction, pp. 1, 5.
[751] M. Dujon Johnson,
[752] Martin Jacques, ‘Global Hierarchy of Race’,
[753] Dikötter, introduction, p. 3.
[754] Ibid., p. 2.
[755] Kai-wing Chow, ‘Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han “Race” in Modern China’, in Dikötter, ed.,
[756] Sautman, ‘Myths of Descent’, pp. 79–80; Lucian W. Pye,
[757] Dikötter,
[758] Diamond,
[759] John King Fairbank, ed.,