China ’s own experience of race is unique. Although once comprised of countless races, China is now dominated by what the Chinese regard to be one race, the Han Chinese, with the other races — described as ‘nationalities’ — accounting for less than 9 per cent of the population (though this is still 105 million people). [838] ‘The Chinese may have different origins,’ argues Wang Xiaodong, ‘but 95 per cent of them believe they are from the same race.’ [839] This melding is a function of China’s extraordinarily long and continuous history, the slow and long-drawn-out process by which the Han Chinese were created and came to represent and embody the overwhelming bulk of the population. The Chinese writer Huang Ping puts it like this: ‘The process by which the Chinese [within China] became hegemonic was the process which also resulted in the subordination and dissolving of ethnic difference — the process of the formation of Chineseness.’ [840] As a consequence, the Chinese tend to downplay or disregard ethnic difference, holding it to be largely transient. There is, as a result, a lack of recognition of other ethnicities, which are seen as subordinate, inferior, and not deserving of equal respect. The idea of overwhelming racial homogeneity, in the context of a huge population, makes the Chinese, in global terms, unique. As Jared Diamond points out, four of the world’s other most populous countries — India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia — are not only relatively recent creations but are also ‘ethnic melting pots’ comprising many races and languages; in contrast, China is neither recent nor a melting pot. [841] Many Han Chinese, in contrast, believe that they are not only of one race, but that they share a common and distinct origin, and that, at least figuratively speaking, they are descended from the Yellow Emperor in northern China. The perception and the ideology are quite different from anywhere else in the world and inevitably pose the question as to the ability of the Chinese to understand and respect the very different formation and make-up of other countries. The world’s other most populous countries, in particular India, the US, Brazil and Indonesia, recognize their diverse origins and the heterogeneity of their contemporary populations; indeed, in varying degrees, they celebrate their diversity. In China ’s case, there is a de facto coincidence of race and nation — except, relatively speaking, at the margins — which is simply not true of the other most populous countries. [842] In practice, though not formally, the Han Chinese think of themselves overwhelmingly as a nation-race.
China ’s own unique experience inevitably influences its perception of others. ‘Because the Han Chinese see themselves as all the same,’ argues Huang Ping, ‘is also the reason why they see everyone else, for example Indians and Africans, in the same terms.’ [843] China, in other words, faces a profound problem in trying to comprehend the nature of ethnic difference in the outside world. As we have seen, the problem is graphically illustrated by the attitude towards the Tibetans and Uighurs: the Han have pursued a policy of absorption, assimilation and settlement based on a belief in their own virtue and superiority rather than a respect for and acceptance of ethnic and cultural difference. Huang Ping argues:
China has a lot of learning to do, not least… learning who we are, where we came from and how it happened… People should not take it for granted that people are Chinese. This has been the result of a historically-constructed process. They take it as a given when it is not. We can do a bit of teaching [to the outside world], but only after we have done a lot of learning. [844]
Given how historically entrenched these attitudes are, however, any serious change is bound to take an extremely long time. In the meantime, China’s ethnic mentality will inevitably exercise a powerful influence over its attitude and behaviour towards other peoples: the Chinese will tend to see the world in terms of a complex racial and cultural hierarchy, with the Chinese at the top, followed by whites, and, notwithstanding the anti-imperialist line of the Maoist era, those of darker skin somewhere at or near the bottom.
Another notable feature of the Chinese is their enormous sense of self-confidence, born of their long history and the dazzling success of their civilization for so much of it, a self-confidence which has withstood quite remarkably the vicissitudes and disasters of the century between the Opium Wars and the 1949 Revolution. These, nonetheless, have left their mark. In a book entitled The Ugly Chinaman, which was widely circulated in China in 1986, Bo Yang, a Taiwan-Chinese, described the Chinese as constantly wavering between two extremes — ‘a chronic feeling of inferiority and extreme arrogance. In his inferiority, a Chinese person is a slave; in his arrogance, he is a tyrant. In the inferiority mode, everyone else is better than he is… Similarly, in the arrogant mode, no other human being on earth is worth the time of day.’ [845] This captures the way in which the ‘century of humiliation’ has affected the Chinese psyche, and the consequent brittleness of emotion. It would be wrong, however, to suggest, as Bo Yang does, that the Chinese have ever felt inferior to everyone: towards whites at times, but never towards those of darker skin. Nonetheless, what remain most striking are not the periods of doubt but, given the problems that have beset the country for most of the modern era, the fact that the Chinese have continued to regard themselves as being at the summit of the global hierarchy of race. True, in moments of vulnerability, the Chinese sometimes acknowledge that they are second to whites, or perhaps equal with them, but this is only regarded as a temporary situation before normality is again restored. Chen Kuan-Hsing argues:
This universal chauvinism… has provided a psychic mechanism for the Han to confront imperialist intervention and to make life more bearable and more live-able — ‘These (white) foreign devils can beat us by material force, but can never conquer our mind’ — … but at the same time, exactly the same logic of racist discrimination… can be utilized to discriminate against anyone living at the periphery of China. A sharp-edged shield can be used for self-defence, but can also be a weapon to kill… [846]
Another Taiwanese writer, Lu Liang, is unambiguous about underlying Chinese attitudes: ‘Deep down the Chinese believe that they are superior to Westerners and everyone else.’ [847] No other people from a developing country possess anything like this sense of supreme self-confidence bordering on arrogance.
[838] According to the 1999 census; Zhao,
[839] Interview with Wang Xiaodong, Beijing, August 2005.
[840] Interview with Huang Ping, Beijing, May 2006.
[841] Diamond,
[842] Jenner, ‘Race and History in China ’, p. 57.