Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

Eventually, the Chinese government felt impelled to shut down these blogs and some of the sites. [819] [819] Johnson, Race and Racism in the Chinas , p. 91.

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] [820] Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction , pp. 139- 46, 156-7; and Hughes, Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era , pp. 111-12. 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] [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. — ‘the thinking that Chinese culture is inferior and the Chinese people an inferior race’ [822] [822] Quoted in Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction , p. 153. — 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] [823] Wang Xiaodong, ‘Chinese Nationalism under the Shadow of Globalisation’, p. 1.

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] [824] Quoted in Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction , pp. 154- 5.

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] [825] Ibid., p. 155. Such examples are a powerful reminder that race remains a persistently influential factor in Chinese thinking and underpins much nationalist sentiment.

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] [826] Johnson, Race and Racism in the Chinas , pp. 123, 125, 132- 3, 137. 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] [827] Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (London: William Heinemann, 2003), pp. 28–46. 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] [828] Interview with Richard Oh, Jakarta, February 2004. He volunteered that he preferred the company of Indonesians for this reason.

Such is their sense of Chinese being the norm, and every other race being a deviation from that norm, that the overseas Chinese frequently refer to the host population as foreigners. The British author and journalist James Kynge cites a fascinating example of a Chinese community newspaper in Prato in northern Italy, which ran a front-page story about ‘three foreign thieves’ responsible for various burglaries in the local Chinatown. When Kynge rang the editor he discovered that not only were the ‘foreign thieves’ actually Italian, but that anyone who was not Chinese was automatically regarded as a foreigner, and that the same convention was used in all Chinese-language papers around the world. [829] [829] James Kynge, China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), p. 203; and Lovell, The Great Wall , p. 87. Lucian Pye explains: ‘The Chinese see such an absolute difference between themselves and others that even when living in lonely isolation in distant countries they unconsciously find it natural and appropriate to refer to those in whose homeland they are living as “foreigners”.’ [830] [830] Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics , p. 56.

A particularly striking feature of overseas Chinese communities is the extent to which, wherever they are living, they seek to retain their sense of Chineseness. In many South-East Asian countries, Chinese often prefer to send their children to a Chinese rather than a local school, with the Chinese community often sponsoring a large number of such schools. In many Western countries, where their relative numbers are much smaller, the Chinese community organizes Chinese Sunday schools at which their children can become conversant in Mandarin and familiar with Chinese culture. In San Francisco, which has a large Chinese population, there is an extensive ‘Roots’ project, where Chinese-Americans visit their ancestral villages in China in order to find out about and hopefully meet their distant relatives. [831] [831] Chinese Cultural Center, San Francisco, conference ‘In Search of Roots’, 28 February 1998. One of the participants in 1997, Evan Leong, then a student at the University of California, writes fascinatingly about his experiences and feelings.