Posted on 10/17/2022 7:44:18 AM PDT by TigerClaws
It is not possible to understand China without understanding race and racism. Specifically, without understanding whiteness.
Yet far too often the conversation around the rise of this new superpower is in predominantly geo-political terms, about authoritarianism versus democracy, about human rights — or whether we will go to war.
But race sits at the heart of it all.
We were reminded this week when China described the AUKUS agreement — between Australia, the UK and the US – as a race-based military bloc of white countries.
China's Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, says that's how it appears to people in other countries. What he means are non-white countries.
A man wearing a suit and tie. China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, characterised the AUKUS agreement as a race-based military bloc of white countries.(ABC New: Ian Cutmore) A history of humiliation
The Chinese Communist Party has a deep racial consciousness. It is there in the reminder to its people never to forget the hundred years of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers — of white powers.
Yes, that humiliation was at the hands of the Japanese, too, but the Japanese themselves cannot be separated from the project of whiteness.
In his book, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, scholar Michael Keevak traces how the Chinese stopped being white.
He says in early interaction between Europeans and Asians, the Chinese were actually described as white.
This was before racialised thinking was popularised in the 18th century.
It was then that scientists started to divide the world up into groupings of colour. Colour denoted civilisation. At the top were white Europeans, at the bottom black people and all others, graded on a sliding scale.
Keevak says Asians — including the Chinese and Japanese — began to "darken".
They lost their whiteness, he says, "when it became clear they would remain unwilling to participate in European systems of trade, religion and international relations".
The fall of the Qing Empire in the 19th century hastened a racial reckoning for the Chinese.
This was a dark night of the soul; it would tip China into a century of upheaval, revolution, and violence on an industrial scale.
And it also brought China face-to-face with white power. The Qing Empire was humbled by Britain, a tiny island that now occupied Chinese territory.
Nineteenth-century writer Yan Fu was influenced by European liberal thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill and the father of economics Adam Smith, and saw China's future emulating Western liberalism.
Perhaps the most influential thinker of all, Liang Qichao, also looked to the Western idea of history as a march of progress — and progress meant modernisation.
Liang is known as the godfather of Chinese nationalism whose acolytes included the Chinese Communist revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong.
He coined the phrase "the sick man of Asia" to refer to China's fallen state. He said they were awoken from a thousand-year-long dream.
As Liang embraced Western ideas, he also advocated for the unity of the "yellow race". He used the term "minzu" to describe the people of the nation.
Seeds of resentment and 'yellow peril'
World War I was another reckoning. At the Paris peace talks, China felt abandoned. German-occupied Chinese territory was not handed back to China but to Japan.
The seeds of resentment were sown.
Historian Jerome Ch'en writes: "From 1842 to 1942, China had been treated by the West with distrust, ridicule, and disdain…"
Liang Qichao — who had looked to the West — now turned sour. He was an official observer in Paris, but returned believing that following the West would lead China to catastrophe.
At the same time, the world was warning of the "yellow peril".
Australia had its own whites-only policy, excluding non-white races from the country.
Racial politics was also shaping China's great foe, Japan.
The Japanese derided the Chinese as "yellow". As Michael Keevak points out, Japan saw itself on par with Western powers.
Its imperialism mirrored the imperialism of white colonisers.
In the West, the Japanese were still seen as "coloured people", Keevak says, but "maybe not as yellow as the Chinese".
For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal.
China, like so many other non-white nations, has felt the sting of white imperialism.
The end of whiteness?
Chinese leaders have seen their struggle in racial terms. Mao Zedong styled himself as a revolutionary leader of the non-white world.
His military strategies have been adopted by the Viet Cong, the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Islamic State.
Deng Xiaoping travelled to Europe as a young man and saw the racial discrimination against Chinese people. His economic revolution was built on beating the West at its own game.
Xi Jinping lectures the West on its own hypocrisy. He is still fighting the Opium Wars against Britain, the fall of the Qing — the great humiliation. His dream is to return China to the apex of global power.
China today is seen as a threat to the West. A threat to the so-called global rules-based order that is itself rooted in a race-based order.
So much of the commentary around China ignores the question of race. So many of the commentators discussing China — predominantly white voices — do not have the racial literacy to begin to understand how race and racism inform China's rise.
In some ways, Xi's China may represent the end of whiteness. Except that the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness.
The irony is Xi has also become what he opposes. He is a Han nationalist — his idea of Chinese power is ethnic Han superiority — persecuting non-Han, non-white people in his own country.
If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion.
The continuation of white power, in darker skin.
Saw another story that white racism will be kept alive by lighter skinned blacks in the future.
Now we have white Chinese. Go figure.
Btw, both Sky News and - surprisingly- 60 Minutes Australia are based. They both have many stories on the danger China poses to Australia.
BS article with many factual inaccuracies. Chinese propaganda from the party organ to guilt the west. No, we will not be fooled by the Marxist bastards of the Mainland.
When everyone has their KKK hoods on, you can’t tell which ones are white and which ones aren’t. All you can tell is that they are white supremacists.
A great example of only looking at data from a period of time that confirms the author's theory. A more comprehensive view of history shows that power has been wielded by just about every racial and cultural group. Genghis Khan is one example, as are the many other powerful Asian leaders. The same is true in Africa.
Of course anyone who has to resort to assigning "whiteness" as some aspect of Chinese culture is just showing their own cultural bias and racially centered thinking.
The CCP will use the West’s woke, racial self-flagellation against it whenever it can in external, foreign affairs.
Its actually a strange and even hypocritical notion for average Chinese though - because their whole system of nationhood and national identity is built almost entirely on race (Han), and they actively look down on others not of their race, particularly blacks.
Thus this use of “woke” propaganda is only used by the government, in its foreign propaganda. None will ever leak into domestic culture or politics.
I’m darker than most Chinese people I know..................🤷♂️
Too f'n bad.
“Scientists inspired by Darwin and his eugenics theories.”
What eugenic theories?
Good post - spot on.
“It was then that scientists started to divide the world up into groupings of colour. Colour denoted civilisation”
Scientific?
More like Fauxcy “Science”.
Wouldn’t that be yellowness?
This is a bunch of bunk. If the author knows any Chinese, he misses the possibility that the Chinese are merely playing the ‘color-card’ for the possible bonus points it wins with liberal idiots like the writer.
Reality is, Chinese favor fair (i.e. light) skin. This is why the Chinese women always have umbrellas and use skin lightening products to keep their skin milky white even into old age. They don’t ‘tan’ themselves like Western Women do, and the result is why so many middle-aged Chinese women appear to be in their 20s.
I will barely mention the Chinese distaste for black people.
An acquaintance of mine who was born in China's Kwangtung Province has a last name that is common in both China and Korea. His office is a few blocks from Koreatown in LA, but he has no Korean patients. He says that when potential Korean patients call him, they hang up when they find that he's Chinese.
Read Darwin's Origin of Species (it'd probably be banned if I posted the full title of his book). In it he noted things like that red ants used black ants as slaves and that, in his view, the red ant colony would cease to exist without the black ant slaves.
For those who couldn't piece together how his natural selection fit into keeping non-whites in their place, Darwin wrote a sequel to his book a decade or so later. In Descent of Man he gets really ugly about how whites evolved in a way superior to non-whites, how life is better off if the whites out-produce the non-whites, and that it can be best achieved by if whites keep non-whites too poor to survive and thrive (the argument being thriving leads to more babies).
Yes this.
Darwin’s theories were accepted widely in America in the eugenics movement. This led to sterilization of the mentally handicapped and they were also the first to be exterminated by the Nazis.
Darwin’s connection to the Final Solution has been either ignored or rewritten by his leftist supporters. Aryan theory of superiority owed as much to Darwin as Nietzsche. The “lesser races” were a threat to the more evolved and, therefore, it was proper to dispose of them. Jews were viewed as inferior as they had intermarried with blacks while in captivity in Egypt.
Amazing Americans have no clue about history but it is by design.
The following are the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People’s Republic of China (39 in 1954; 54 by 1964; with the most recent addition the Jino people in 1979).
The Han as you say are at the top of the heap!
Term for Europeans - Gweilo original meanings are ghost man, white devil even sick old man
Adherents to the West’s self-flagellation are called Baizuo. From Wikipedia (and accurate considering the source!) Baizuo means refers to those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT rights and the environment”, but lack a concept of “real problems in the real world”. It is also used to describe those “hypocritical humanitarians who advocate political correctness just to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority”. Some used this word to indicate those “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.
And the Rape of Nanjing by Japan. Japan views Chinese (and all other Asian races) as inferior.
Racism likely exists as a survival mechanism in humans. Gather in groups for safety and fight against the “other.” African tribes kill and slaughter each other. Asians. Whites. Look at Russia and Ukraine who are essentially brothers killing each other by the thousands. Part of depravity of human nature.
But - ironically racist to do so - whites are all evil to the media and our institutions. So anyone evil is, by definition, guilty of “whiteness.”
Blame Darwin’s cousin, not Darwin.
Darwin would have been appalled by Sovial Darwinism.
...Social Darwinism...
This was a dark night of the soul; it would tip China into a century of upheaval, revolution, and violence on an industrial scale.
But the Chinese celebrate the fall of the repressive, corrupt and incompetent Ch'ing* dynasty, which was run by the Manchus, a minority group who lorded it over the Han Chinese, who makes up most of the country's population. On Taiwan, October 10 (10/10--Double Ten), the anniversary of the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911 is celebrated as a national holiday. Last week, I sent my Chinese dentist friend, whom I mentioned earlier, a message wishing him a happy Double Ten.
*I insist on using the Wade-Giles system for Romanizing Chinese words, and not the Pinyin system, which the Chicoms created.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.