When China Rules the World (45 page)

Eventually, the Chinese government felt impelled to shut down these blogs and some of the sites.
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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.
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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
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- ‘the thinking that Chinese culture is inferior and the Chinese people an inferior race’
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- 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?’
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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.
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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”.’
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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.
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One of the participants in 1997, Evan Leong, then a student at the University of California, writes fascinatingly about his experiences and feelings.

Even though my great-great-great-grandfather came to the United States more than 125 years ago, I have not homogenized to become an ‘American’. No matter what people call me, what clothes I wear, what food I eat, what my tastes are, what race my friends are, or what girls I date, I still know that I am Chinese.
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He writes:

The general sentiment among both groups [US-born Chinese and those newly arrived from China] was shared - that China and Chinese people were far superior to any other race.
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The newly arrived enjoyed greater kudos than those born in the US because they were seen as more authentically Chinese, the opposite to what often happens with migrants from the developing world in the developed world. He also describes his family’s attachment to Chinese customs:

Even though I am so distant and different from my blood relatives in China, my American ancestors have continued to practice many Chinese customs. Our extended families gather together often for holidays and birthdays. We clean and prepare our houses and wear new clothes for Chinese New Year rituals. We pay our respects to my grandfather’s grave . . . during Ching Ming and other important dates.
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The cohesive ties of Chinese identity have found expression in the notion of Greater China, a cultural and civilizational idea rather than a territorial or political entity.
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Greater China is seen as embracing all Chinese, with China at the centre, circled by Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and Singapore, together with the numerous Chinese communities around the world, and has become an increasingly popular concept amongst Chinese over the last quarter century. The strength of these bonds is rooted in a shared inheritance of Chinese civilization, thereby adding a further dimension to the notion of China as a civilization-state. Despite the legacy of political differences, the overseas Chinese, especially those in Hong Kong and Taiwan, have made a formidable contribution to Chinese economic growth through huge investments in the mainland.
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In contrast, Russian émigrés chose to shun the Soviet Union, and the Indian diaspora has historically made a much less significant contribution to Indian growth than its Chinese counterpart. Strong centripetal forces operate in Greater China, as within China itself, with the Chinese, wherever they are, feeling a powerful sense of attachment to the homeland.

This found a new form of expression during the torch relay that was staged around the world as part of the build-up to the Beijing Olympics. In London, Paris, Athens and San Francisco, the celebrations were overshadowed by counter-demonstrations in protest at Chinese policy over Tibet. But elsewhere the picture was very different. In Canberra 10,000 demonstrated in favour of the Games, hugely outnumbering the protesters. In Seoul, thousands turned out in support of the Olympics, as they did in Nagano in Japan, in both cases dwarfing the number of protesters; likewise in Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City and Hong Kong. Everywhere those demonstrating their support for the Beijing Games were overwhelmingly Chinese, either students from the mainland or people from the local Chinese community.
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Not surprisingly, the overseas Chinese feel enormous pride in China’s rise. After two centuries during which their homeland was synonymous with poverty and failure, China has risen to a position of great global prominence and allure in a remarkably short space of time. Television channels the world over are pouring out programmes about China and in many countries people are signing up in large numbers to learn Mandarin. The gravitational pull exercised by China on its overseas communities has increased markedly as a result. My son’s Sunday Mandarin School decided to cancel lessons for the day in order to join the London festivities for the Olympic relay. For them China was coming home and being embraced by their adopted city. There was real delight in China’s achievement and the global recognition that the Olympics signified.

In taking to the streets in support of the Beijing Olympics in so many cities around the world and in such large numbers, the overseas Chinese proved a powerful political force in their adopted countries, as well as for the Chinese government. This kind of phenomenon, of course, is neither new nor particularly Chinese: diasporas in many countries have long played a significant role in support of their homeland, the most potent post-war example being that provided by the Jewish diaspora for Israel. The Chinese diaspora, however, has several characteristics which together mark it out as somewhat distinct. It is numerically large and spread all around the globe, from Africa to Europe, East Asia to the Americas; for historical and cultural reasons, it enjoys an unusually strong identification with the Middle Kingdom; and China is already a global power, and destined to become the most powerful country in the world. As its rise continues and Chinese worldwide interests grow, the Chinese diaspora is likely to greatly expand, become increasingly prosperous, buoyed by China’s own economic success, enjoy enhanced prestige as a result of China’s rising status, and feel an even closer affinity with China.

China will, like other great powers, see the world in terms of its own history and values, and seek to shape the world in accordance with them. The world, however, contains great diversity and difference. No country, not even one as large as China, can even vaguely be regarded as a microcosm of it. The attitude of China towards difference - the diverse cultures, histories, ethnicities, races and values embodied by other peoples - is therefore of great consequence. How will the Chinese treat people who are different from them? To what extent will a rising China respect them and seek to understand them? Will its own history allow an outlook that enables it to appreciate the very different experiences of others? These are difficult questions to answer, firstly because China has spent virtually all of its history isolated from the rest of the world - excepting its regional neighbours - and secondly because the answers obviously still lie in the future: China’s present behaviour can only be regarded as a partial indicator, simply because its power and influence remain limited compared with what they are likely to become. From the foregoing discussion, there are a number of elements that should be considered.

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).
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‘The Chinese may have different origins,’ argues Wang Xiaodong, ‘but 95 per cent of them believe they are from the same race.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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In practice, though not formally, the Han Chinese think of themselves overwhelmingly as a nation-race.