When China Rules the World (42 page)

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, under growing threat from the European powers and Japan, the Qing dynasty was increasingly obliged to operate according to the rules of a nation-state-based international system. The haughty view that it had previously maintained of its elevated role in relation to that of other states foundered on the rock of European superiority. The ‘land under Heaven’ was brought down to earth. The Middle Kingdom became just another state, now with a name, China, like any other. An elite and a people schooled in the idea of their cultural superiority entered a prolonged crisis of doubt, uncertainty and humiliation from which, a century and a half later, they are only now beginning to emerge. China, besieged by foreign powers, was forced to begin the process of defining its frontiers with the same kind of precision as other states, though such was the length of these borders and the number of its neighbours that even today those with India remain unresolved.

The belief in their cultural superiority shaken and undermined, the Chinese began a long and agonized search for a new sense of identity as circumstances grew more precarious and desperate at the end of the nineteenth century. It was during this period that the nationalist writer Zhang Taiyan introduced the term ‘Han people’ (
Hanren
) to describe the Chinese nation, and it rapidly acquired widespread popularity and usage.
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‘Qin Chinese’ might have been chosen, but Han was preferred, probably because the Han dynasty, which immediately followed the Qin (the first unified Chinese empire), lasted much longer: 400 years compared with a mere fifteen. The term ‘Han Chinese’ was an invention, nothing more than a cultural construct: there was no such race; the Han Chinese were, in reality, an amalgam of many races.
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The purpose of the term was overtly racial, a means of inclusion and exclusion. It was used as a way of defining the Chinese against the Manchus, who formed the Qing dynasty and who, after 250 years in power, increasingly came to be seen, as their rule began to crumble, as an alien and objectionable presence. It was also directed against the Europeans, who controlled most of the treaty ports and who were seen as undermining the fabric of China and Chinese life. The deep resentment against Europeans, who were increasingly referred to in derogatory racial terms, was graphically illustrated by the xenophobic and nativist Boxer Uprising (1898-1901),
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which marked the early beginnings of a popular Chinese nationalism, though it was not until the Japanese invasion in 1937 that this became a genuinely mass phenomenon. There are many expressions of Chinese nationalism today, most notably directed against the Japanese - as in the demonstrations in 2005 - and also against various Western powers, especially the United States; as a result, it has become commonplace to refer to the rise of Chinese nationalism. The problem is that this suggests it is essentially the same kind of phenomenon as other nationalisms when, in fact, Chinese nationalism cannot be reduced to nation-state nationalism because its underlying roots are civilizational. Imperial Sinocentrism shapes and underpins modern Chinese nationalism. It would be more accurate to speak of a dual phenomenon, namely Chinese civilizationalism and Chinese nationalism, the one overlapping with and reinforcing the other.

Racism is a subject that people often seek to avoid, it being deemed too politically embarrassing, any suggestion of its existence often eliciting a response of outraged indignation and immediate denial. Yet it is central to the discourse of most, if not all, societies. It is always lurking somewhere, sometimes on the surface, sometimes just below. Nor is this the least bit surprising. Human beings see themselves in terms of groups, and physical difference is an obvious and powerful signifier of them. It is but a short distance to ascribe wider cultural and mental characteristics to a group on the basis of visible physical differences: in other words, to essentialize those physical differences, to root culture in nature, to equate social groups with biological units.
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There is a widely held view, not least in East Asia, that racism is a ‘white problem’: it is what white people do to others. In both China and Taiwan, the official position is that racism is a phenomenon of Western culture, with Hong Kong holding a largely similar view.
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This is nonsense. All peoples are prone to such ways of thinking - or, to put it another way, all races harbour racial prejudices, engage in racist modes of thought and practise racism against other races. Racism, in fact, is a universal phenomenon from which no race is exempt, even those who have suffered grievously at its hands. Each racism, however, while sharing general characteristics with other racisms, is also distinct, shaped by the history and culture of a people. Just as there are many different cultures, so there are also many different racisms. White racism has had a far greater and more profound - and deleterious - effect on the modern world than any other. As white people have enjoyed far more power than any other racial group over the last two centuries, so their influence - and their prejudices - have reached much further and have had a greater impact, most dramatically as a result of colonialism. But that does not mean that other peoples do not possess similar attitudes and prejudices towards races that they believe to be inferior.
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This is certainly the case in East Asia. Although rarely recognized, in many parts of the region, especially in North-East Asia, the notion of identity is highly racialized. Many terms have been used in China and Japan since the late nineteenth century to represent these countries as biologically specific entities. In China these include
zu
(lineage, clan),
zhong
(seed, breed, type, race),
zulei
(type of lineage),
minzu
(lineage of people, nationality, race),
zhongzu
(breed of lineage, type of lineage, breed, race),
renzhong
(human breed, human race); while those used in Japanese include
jinshu
(human breed, human race),
shuzoku
(breed of lineage, type of lineage, breed, race) and
minzoku
(lineage of people, nationality, race).
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Even in South-East Asia, which is racially far more heterogeneous, racial identities remain very powerful. In short, a racialized sense of belonging is often at the heart of national identity in East Asia.
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The importance of racial discourse in China and other Confucian societies like Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam begs the question of why this is the case. The answer is almost certainly linked to the centrality of the family, which has been a continuing and crucial thread in the Chinese tradition (as in all Confucian societies), and which, together with the state, is the key societal institution. The family defines the primary meaning of ‘we’, but the family is also closely linked to the idea of lineage, which serves to define a much larger ‘we’. People in China have long had the habit of thinking of people with the same name as sharing a common ancestry. Since the Ming dynasty, it has been common for different lineages with the same surname to link ancestors and establish fictitious kinship ties through a famous historical figure, as in the case of the Yellow Emperor. ‘The entire Chinese population,’ suggests Kai-wing Chow, ‘could be imagined as a collection of lineages, since they all shared the same Han surnames.’
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And the fact that there are relatively few surnames in China has served to magnify this effect. In Chinese custom, lineage, like the family, is intimately associated with biological continuity and blood descent (an idea which enjoys core cultural significance in Confucian societies) as is, by extension, the nation itself.
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This is reflected in the notion of citizenship, with blood the defining precondition in all these societies: indeed, it is almost impossible to acquire citizenship in any other way.
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Far from racism being a Western invention, it has ancient roots in both China and Japan. There is written evidence cited by Jared Diamond going back to at least 1000 BC which shows that the Chinese regarded themselves as superior to the non-Chinese and that the northern Chinese saw those in southern China as barbarians.
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In ancient China, the ruling elite measured groups by a cultural yardstick according to which those who did not follow Chinese ways were considered to be barbarians, though the latter could subsequently be reclassified depending on the degree of their cultural assimilation.
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Within the Middle Kingdom, the barbarians were typically divided into two categories: ‘raw barbarians’ (
shengfan
), who were seen as savage and resistant, and ‘cooked barbarians’ (
shufan
), who were regarded as tame and submissive.
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Cooked barbarians were deemed as on the cusp of being civilized, raw barbarians as being beyond assimilation. Those living outside the borders of China were regarded as either raw barbarians or, worse, as akin to animals. The distinction between man and animal in Chinese folklore was blurred, with alien groups living outside China frequently regarded as savages hovering on the edge of bestiality and often described by the use of animal radicals (radicals are a key component of written Chinese characters), thereby identifying different non-Chinese peoples with various kinds of animals.
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It is clear from this that the Chinese sense of superiority was based on a combination of culture and race - the two inseparably linked, the relative importance of each varying according to time and circumstance.
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Frank Dikötter, who has written the major study in the English language on Chinese racism, argues:

On the one hand, a claim to cultural universalism led the elite to assert that the barbarian could be ‘sinicized’, or transformed by the beneficial influence of culture and climate. On the other hand, when the Chinese sense of cultural superiority was threatened, the elite appealed to categorical differences in nature to expel the barbarian and seal the country off from the perverting influences of the outside world.
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For the most part, however, the expansive rather than the defensive view prevailed.

Skin colour assumed an early significance. From the most ancient times, the Chinese chose to call themselves white, with a light complexion highly valued and likened to white jade.
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By the beginning of the twelfth century, the elite attached a heightened meaning to being white, with colour consciousness amongst the elite sensitized by the maritime contacts established during the Southern Song dynasty (AD 1127-1279). During this period even the newly popular image of Buddha was converted from a ‘swart half-naked Indian to a more decently clad divinity with a properly light complexion’, rather as Jesus was whitened in the Western Christian tradition.
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Of course, not all Chinese had light complexions. In particular, those who laboured long and hard in the fields under a fierce sun were weather-beaten and dark-skinned. The symbolic distance, and distinction, as represented by class, and made visible in skin colour, was thus projected by the Chinese elite onto the outside world as they came into growing contact with other peoples and races. White was regarded as the centre of the civilized world, embodied by the Middle Kingdom, while black represented the negative pole of humanity, symbolized by the remotest parts of the known world. As the Chinese became familiar with more distant lands during the Ming dynasty, notably through Zheng He’s voyages to Africa and South-East Asia in the fifteenth century, so their perception of skin colour and physical difference became more variegated, with Africans and aboriginals invariably placed at the bottom, and Malays and Viets just above them.
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During the Qing dynasty, racial categories became a central and explicit factor in the characterization of the barbarian. This represented an important shift from the cultural norms that had previously tended to prevail, even though the racial element had always been significant.
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New racial taxono mies and classifications were elaborated, stimulated by the bloody wars of expansion that the Chinese fought in the west, which had brought them into contact with peoples very different from themselves who, throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century, they struggled to subdue, with only partial success.
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But it was the increasing presence and power of Europeans following the Opium Wars, and the growing crisis of the Qing dynasty that this provoked, which was to prove the rudest shock of all and produce the biggest change in Chinese attitudes, not just amongst the elite, but also at a popular level. From the 1890s, the cultural racism of ancient China was articulated into a new and popular racist philosophy by a rising class of academics and writers, who were influenced by the racial theories and social Darwinism prevalent in the West at the time. Racism now became an integral part of popular thinking, articulated in a whole range of widely circulated publications, especially amongst the urban population of the treaty ports. The new racial discourse covered every aspect of physical difference, from skin colour and hair to height, size of nose, eye colour, size of feet and body odour: no racial stone was left unturned, each physical detail explored for its alleged wider mental and cultural significance. Barbarians had routinely been described as ‘devils’ since earlier in the century, but now they were distinguished according to their skin colour, with Caucasians referred to as ‘white devils’ (
baigui
) and those of darker skin as ‘black devils’ (
heigui
), terms that are still in common usage. Not all devils were regarded in the same way, however: white devils were perceived as ‘rulers’ and black devils as ‘slaves’.
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The literature of the treaty ports was filled with contempt for those from Africa and India.