Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

The Japanese have long sought to distinguish themselves from other races in East Asia, especially the Chinese. In manga comics and animation films, the Japanese portray themselves in a highly Westernized manner, with big (sometimes blue) eyes, brightly coloured — even blond — hair and white skin, even though black hair, narrow brown eyes and a yellowish skin are more or less universal. [377] [377] Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (London: Bantam Press, 1995), pp. 683-4. Generally lighter than the Chinese, they like to see themselves as white; certainly not yellow, which is how they perceive the Chinese and Koreans. For both the Japanese and the Chinese, black skin has a highly negative connotation and it is not uncommon to see black people portrayed in a derogatory way. [378] [378] John G. Russell, ‘Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture’, in Treat, ed., Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture , pp. 17–19, 29–32; also Leo Ching, ‘Yellow Skin, White Mask: Race, Class and Identification in Japanese Cultural Discourse’, in Chen Kuan-Hsing, ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 65–86. A popular advert for San Miguel beer in Hong Kong around 2000 featured a black person as little more than an imbecile. According to Mei Ling, ‘They don’t like to see black skin, only white skin, in the make-up catalogues that I am responsible for compiling.’ [379] [379] Interview with Mei Ling, Taipei, March 1999. A senior executive for one of the top American film studios told me that there was little demand in the region for Hollywood films or TV series with black stars. The most popular look on Japanese or Chinese television or in film might best be described as Eurasian — Japanese or Chinese with Western features. Jackie Chan is a case in point. For both Japanese and Chinese women, white boy-friends can enjoy a certain cachet, but the same is certainly not true of black or brown partners: they are an extremely rare sight and any such decision would require great courage.

The Western form — above all, skin colour, the defining signifier, but also other Caucasian features such as fair hair, large eyes and height — has had a profound and enduring impact on East Asian societies over the last two hundred years. It is something that is rarely commented upon and yet it is more pervasive, more psychologically far-reaching, and more fundamental in terms of identity, than most questions normally discussed in this context. For a Japanese to look in the mirror and wish to see a white person, or to emphasize those features which resemble those of a Caucasian — not easy given the profound physical differences between the two — is a powerful statement of self-image, of how a person feels about him or herself, of their sense of place in the world. It is not uncommon for the Japanese to feel physically inadequate in comparison with Westerners, complementing the sense of national inferiority and insecurity discussed in Chapter 3. The Chinese harbour similar emotions about their physical appearance, but this is less common than amongst the Japanese.

It would be wrong to regard the predilection in East Asia for whiteness, however, as simply a product of Western influence. The desire to be white also has powerful indigenous roots. For both the Japanese and Chinese, whiteness has long carried a powerful class connotation. If you are dark, it means you work on the land and are of a lower order; such a prejudice is deeply embedded in their respective national psyches and has been accentuated by modernization and urbanization, with white a symbol of urban living and prosperity and brown a metaphor for the countryside and poverty. Perceptions of different skin colours are used to define and reinforce national differences, as well as relations between races in the same country, and even between different shades within the same race. Since the Meiji Restoration, skin colour has been used by the Japanese to distinguish them from their Chinese and Korean neighbours. More widely, this hierarchy of colour is reproduced in the relationship between the fairer North-East Asia and the darker South-East Asia, and within South-East Asia between the indigenous population, the Chinese diaspora and the smaller Indian diaspora, for instance. More or less everywhere in East Asia, skin colour is a highly sensitive subject that arouses powerful feelings, perceptions and prejudices, with a near-universal desire to be fairer. The power of the Western racial model is precisely that it reinforces and interacts with very long-established indigenous views about colour. I will return to these themes in Chapter 8 in the context of China.

It is fashionable to cite the spread of McDonald’s in East Asia as a sign of growing Westernization. In 2008 there were 950 McDonald’s stores in China (the first being opened in Shenzhen in 1990) and in 2004 there were approximately 3,500 in Japan and 300 in Malaysia. Starbucks, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut also have numerous outlets in the region: in 2008 KFC had more than 2,200 stores in China and in 2006 Pizza Hut had 140. A 1999 memo on fast food by McCann Erickson, which handled the advertising account in China for McDonald’s, set out its appeal as follows:

It’s about modernity. The fast-food restaurant is a symbol of having made it. The new ‘Western’ fast-food restaurants (though predominantly the Golden Arches) become status symbol locations for the new middle class. It becomes initially their link with showing that they can live the Western (read usually ‘American’) lifestyle. [380] [380] Pulse Bites: Consumer Insights Around the World , 1 April 1999, p. 4; ‘In China, a Big Appetite for Americana ’, International Herald Tribune , 26 February, 2002.

The combined total of all US fast food stores, however, represents a very tiny fraction of the restaurants and eating places in these countries. They may attract a great deal of publicity but this gives a distorted picture of eating habits in East Asia. The overwhelming majority of people continue to consume the food indigenous to their country. Almost everyone taking lunch or dinner in Beijing or Chongqing will invariably eat Chinese food; the same can be said of the Japanese. Western fast food — including the most popular Western fast food of all, the sandwich — lives at the margins of mass eating habits. Nor do Western-style eateries enjoy a monopoly of the idea of fast food. On the contrary, Chinese and Japanese fast food restaurants — familiar to Westerners in the guise of sushi bars and noodle bars, for example — are infinitely more common.

In his seminal study Food in Chinese Culture , K. C. Chang suggests that ‘the importance of food in understanding human culture lies precisely in its infinite variability — variability that is not essential for species survival.’ [381] [381] K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 3. People from different cultures eat very differently; even within the same culture there is usually considerable variation. [382] [382] Ibid., p. 3. Furthermore, people display enormous attachment towards the food that they have been brought up on and with which they are intimately familiar. The instincts are tribal: in the food hall at the National University of Singapore, I was struck by how the Chinese students ate Chinese food, the Indians ate Indian, and the Malays ate Malay, with little crossover. The same can be said in the West: we might like the occasional Indian, Chinese or Mexican meal, usually heavily adapted for the local palate, but our staple diet is Western — breakfast, lunch and dinner.