In response to the visit of Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, to Beijing in 2005, there was a flurry of racist postings on the various nationalist websites. The veteran Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo was moved to write in protest:
I have browsed China ’s three biggest portals’ BBS articles [blogs] about Rice’s six-nation visit… Just take Sina as an example. I examined over 800 BBS articles… excluding repetitions, there were over 600 articles. Among them, there were nearly 70 articles with racial discrimination, one-tenth of the total… There were only two with a gentle tone, the rest were all extremely disgusting. Many stigmatized Rice as ‘really ugly’… ‘the ugliest in the world’… ‘I really can’t understand how mankind gave birth to a woman like Rice’… Some directly called Rice a ‘black ghost’, a ‘black pig’… ‘a witch’… ‘rubbish of Humans’… Some lament: Americans’ IQ is low — how can they make a ‘black bitch’ Secretary of State… Some, of course, did not forget to stigmatize Rice with animal [names]: ‘chimpanzee’, ‘bird-like’, ‘crocodile’, ‘a piece of rotten meat, mouse shit, [something] dogs will find hard to eat’. [818]
Eventually, the Chinese government felt impelled to shut down these blogs and some of the sites. [819]
The rising tide of popular nationalism in the late nineties, as evinced by the various The China That Can Say No books, the student response to the US bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy, and the nationalist outpourings on leading websites, also contained a significant racial dimension. [820] One of the most influential nationalist writers has been Wang Xiaodong, who co-authored China’s Path under the Shadow of Globalization, published in 1999, which became a bestseller. Wang argued that the rise of Chinese nationalism represented a healthy return to normality after the abnormal phenomenon of what he describes as ‘reverse racism’ in the eighties [821] — ‘the thinking that Chinese culture is inferior and the Chinese people an inferior race’ [822] — when, according to him, many Chinese intellectuals looked to the United States for inspiration and denigrated their own culture. Bizarrely, Wang argues that such reverse racism ‘is not very different from Hitler’s racism’, a remark which suggests that his own view of what constitutes racism is highly idiosyncratic and betrays little understanding of Nazism. [823]
Wang argued, in an article published after the embassy bombing in 1999, that conflict between China and the United States was inevitable because it would be racially motivated: in the eyes of the Americans and West Europeans, ‘oriental’ people are inferior, and he predicted that the ‘race issue will become even more sensitive as biological sciences develop’.
the United States might manufacture genetic weapons that would successfully deal with those radicals who are racially different from Americans and who commit acts of terrorism against the United States. Because it is genetically much easier to differentiate Chinese from Americans than to differentiate Serbians from Americans, genetic weapons targeting the Chinese most likely would be the first to be made. [824]
In similar vein, Ding Xueliang, a Hong Kong-based Chinese scholar, has argued that racial and cultural differences between the United States and China, together with their different political systems and national capacities, would mean that the United States would see China as its major enemy. [825] Such examples are a powerful reminder that race remains a persistently influential factor in Chinese thinking and underpins much nationalist sentiment.
OVERSEAS CHINESE
The overseas Chinese have suffered from widespread racism in their adopted countries, including the United States, Australia and Europe, and are rightly very sensitive about the fact. A notable characteristic of the overseas Chinese is the extent to which they tend to keep to themselves as a community. Notwithstanding the serious racism that they have historically experienced in the United States, they did not join with black Americans in the major civil rights campaigns. [826] The most important and largest Chinese communities are in South- East Asia, where they often constitute sizeable minorities — most notably Malaysia, where they account for over a quarter of the population. Historically the overseas Chinese in South-East Asia have suffered various forms of discrimination and this has been a continuing problem since these countries acquired independence following the Second World War. It is important, however, to see the wider context. The Chinese in this region invariably control a large proportion of the non-state economy, often more than half, and enjoy on average a rather higher standard of living than the indigenous ethnic majority. It is common for them to look down on the majority race, and even avoid mixing with them more than is necessary, although many in my experience do not share such prejudices. There are, thus, two sides to the coin: the Chinese, as a minority, experience various forms of discrimination, but at the same time regard themselves as superior to the indigenous majority, hold chauvinistic attitudes towards them, and use their economic power to favour their own and discriminate against the ethnic majority. [827] Indonesian-Chinese writer and successful businessman Richard Oh described the attitude of the Chinese towards Indonesians: ‘The Chinese community tends to recoil from society and makes very little effort to integrate. Although frightened, they are very arrogant and haughty. Where do they get this feeling of being a superior race?’ [828] He volunteered that he preferred the company of Indonesians for this reason.
[818] This was published on www.ncn.org. See also Martin Jacques, ‘The Middle Kingdom Mentality’,
[819] Johnson,
[820] Zhao,
[821] Wang Xiaodong, ‘Chinese Nationalism under the Shadow of Globalisation’, lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 7 February 2005, p. 1.
[822] Quoted in Zhao,
[823] Wang Xiaodong, ‘Chinese Nationalism under the Shadow of Globalisation’, p. 1.
[824] Quoted in Zhao,