DISCOURSES OF RACE
AND RISING CHINA
YINGHONG CHENG
M A P P I N G G LO B A L R A C I S M S
Mapping Global Racisms
Series Editor
Ian Law
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
There is no systematic coverage of the racialisation of the planet. This
series is the first attempt to present a comprehensive mapping of global
racisms, providing a way in which to understand global racialisation and
acknowledge the multiple generations of different racial logics across
regimes and regions. Unique in its intellectual agenda and innovative
in producing a new empirically-based theoretical framework for understanding this glocalised phenomenon, Mapping Global Racisms considers racism in many underexplored regions such as Russia, Arab racisms
in North African and Middle Eastern contexts, and racism in Pacific
contries such as Japan, Hawaii, Fiji and Samoa.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14813
Yinghong Cheng
Discourses of Race
and Rising China
Yinghong Cheng
Delaware State University
Dover, DE, USA
Mapping Global Racisms
ISBN 978-3-030-05356-7
ISBN 978-3-030-05357-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967269
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
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Acknowledgements
I want to express my gratitude to Ian Law (University of Leeds). Ian, as
an expert on global racism and the editor of Mapping Global Racism
series, and I started communication on the subject several years ago.
With his interest in the global implications of the discourse of race in
China and his suggestions in mind, I wrote the book as a contribution
to the book series. I also would like to thank Sharla Plant and Poppy
Hull at Palgrave Macmillan for their interest in the book and editorial
work on it.
I have been encouraged and inspired by scholars in different fields
and their help has guided me to the same end: an understanding of discourses of race in China in a global context of racialization and in a
domestic context of ethnic relations. I am indebted to Patrick Manning
(University of Pittsburgh), my dissertation advisor and long-time scholarly supporter, who read and commented on many parts of the book’s
manuscript. I also owe gratitude to Edward Friedman (University of
Wisconsin) for his comments and suggestions on many parts of the
manuscript as they were in the form of research articles. The communication with James Leibold (La Trobe University), an expert on
Chinese nationalism and ethnicity, was one of the most valuable
v
vi Acknowledgements
scholarly inspirations I have received for this project. I particularly want
to thank Prasenjit Duara (Duke University) for his strong support
and critical suggestions especially during the time of my fellowship at
the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in 2011
(Prasenjit was then the director of the Institute), when I began work on
several topics which were eventually all incorporated into this book. I
would like to thank Frank Dikötter (University of Hong Kong), with
whom I communicated through emails, for his groundbreaking work
in the field and his insight and critical thoughts about racial thinking
in Chinese society. Rotem Kowner (University of Haifa) and Walter
Demel (University of Federal Armed Forces, Munich) invited me to
participate in a conference and included my paper on Chinese racial
thinking expressed in pop music in their coedited Race and Racism in
Modern East Asia. The content of the paper is now absorbed into the
book. Kevin Carrico (Macquarie University) shared with me his work
on the Han Clothing movement when it was still a Ph.D. dissertation
and has provided me with many important sources on race and nationalism in China. Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi (University of Bern) also shared
with me her work on the Han as China’s diverse majority. I also want to
thank the editors and reviewers of The China Quarterly and The Journal
of Asian Studies for their feedback on my articles. The content of those
articles is now also integrated into the book.
In particular, I thank Akwasi Osei (Delaware State University) and
Marshall Stevenson (University of Maryland East Shore) who have
broadened my vision especially with their knowledge of and insights on
Africa, African-Americans, and Sino-African relations.
As a person of Chinese heritage engaged in critical studies of Chinese
society and culture, I would like to express my gratitude to my Chinese
friends in academia who understand and have supported my work in
various ways. Wu Guoguang (University of Victoria) invited me to participate in a conference and eventually included my paper in a book
he edited (China’s Transition from Communism—New Perspectives). His
comments on my paper in the book’s conclusion highlighted the political significance of the discourse of race in China’s post-Mao transition.
Yang Bin (University of Macao) has been my long-time academic colleague with whom I had numerous discussions on Chinese nationalism
Acknowledgements vii
and ethnicity. He especially alerted me to the fact that the concept of
race was misused in intra-Chinese relations until the concept of ethnicity came into being. Yao Xingyong (Jinan University) shared with me
his knowledge, life experience, and insights regarding ethnic nationalism
in China. Du Chunmei (Lingnan University) has helped me for years
with her expertise in modern Chinese intellectual history and Sinoforeign perceptions. Zhang Jianhua (Beijing Normal University) shared
with me his expertise on Russian history and racial thinking. Wang
Yuanchong (University of Delaware) helped me to understand imperial China’s ethnic and frontier visions. Zhou Lian (Renmin University)
has discussed with me race-related social and intellectual problems in
contemporary China. Liu Xiaopeng (National Chengchi University,
Taiwan) shared with me his book and articles on Sino-African relations from a race-studies perspective. Jiang Huajie (Eastern China
Normal University) shared with me his research on African students
in China and informed me of other related historical issues. Qiu Jing
(Guangdong Polytechnic University) enriched my knowledge about
China’s ethnic minorities. Fang Kecheng (Ph.D. candidate at University
of Pennsylvania) informed me of the role of social media in my research
subject. I, in particular, appreciate discussions with Tsai Mon-Han
(Chiba University) and Wang Ke (Kobe University), two historians in
Japan, which fine-tuned my analysis on modern Chinese nationalism.
Outside professional academics, I owe many individuals (many of
them are writers or work for Chinese media) who discussed with me
race-related issues in contemporary China, helped in locating important sources, or alerted me new developments. I want thank Chen
Xubin, Duan Yuhong, Gu Yinsheng, Li Xiaen, Luo Silin, Qian Lang,
Tao Xiaolu, Zhu Tianyuan, and many others for their support that I can
always count on.
I want to thank Delaware State University, my home institution, for
its research grants. I also owe gratitude to the National University of
Singapore’s Asia Research Institute and the East Asia Institute, for their
fellowships in the early stage of my work on the subject.
I especially want to thank Ying, Mimi, and Evan for their patience,
tolerance and support during the time I committed to this project.
Contents
1 “Call a Spade a Spade”1
2 Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music27
3 Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National
Lineage99
4 Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese
Perception of Africa and Black Peoples161
5 Racism and Its Agents in China239
6 The “Red DNA”: How Discourses of Class and Race
Integrate295
References305
Index327
ix
Character Glossary Translation (Arranged
in Alphabetical Order in English)
海外赤子
神农
援非
海内外中华儿女
天下
屌丝
愤青
颜值
正黑鬼油
蛮夷
黑奴
黑妹牙膏
黑人牙膏
血统论
(haiwaichizi) a loyal Child of Overseas
Chinese
(shennong) agricultural God
(yuanfei) aid to Africa
(haineiwai zhonghuaernu) all sons and
daughters of the Chinese all over the
world
(Tianxia) all under heaven
(diaosi) an extremely obscene term used
to denigrate “losers”
(fengqing) angry youth
(yanzhi) appearance value
(zheng heigui you) authentic black devil
ointment
(manyi) barbarians
(heinu) black slave
(heimei yaogao) Black Girl toothpaste
(heiren yaogao) Black Man toothpaste
(Xuetonglun) blood lineage theory
xi
xii Character Glossary Translation (Arranged in Alphabetical Order in English)
血染的风采
资产阶级自由化
央视春晚
中华世纪坛
中国元素
中国爸爸
中国风
克黑鬼油
凝聚力
本草纲目
汉办
熟番
亲爱的中国我爱你
龙的传人
外交恃强 持剑经商
在非洲发现中国
鄙视链
神州
龙拳
茹毛饮血
种族民族主义
驱除智人 恢复中华
(xue ran de fengcai) Bloodstained Glory
(a song)
(zichanjiejie ziyouhua) bourgeois liberalization
(yangshi chunwan) CCTV Spring Festival
Gala
(zhonghua shiji tan) China Centennial
Monument
(zhongguo yuanshu) China Elements
(zhongguo baba) Chinese Papa (a song)
(zhongguo feng) Chinoiserie
(ke heigui you) chop blackie oil (or “conquer all black demons oil”)
(ningjuli) cohesive force
(bencaogangmu) Compendium of Materia
Medica
(Hanban) Confucius Institute Head­
quarters, Hanban
(shoufan) cooked barbarian
(qingaide zhongguo woaini) Dear China,
I Love You (a song)
(long de chuanren) Descendants of the
Dragon, also known as the “Dragon
song”
(waijiaoshiqiang chijianjingshang) diplomacy backed by force; trade with swords
in hands
(zai feizhou faxian zhongguo) discovering
China in Africa
(bishi lian) discrimination chain
(shenzhou) divine land
(long quan) Dragon Fist (a song)
(rumaoyinxue) eating meat with hairs and
blood
(Zhongzu minzuzhuyi) ethnonationalism
(quechuzhiren huifuzhonghua) expel
H. sapiens and revive Zhonghua (China)
Character Glossary Translation (Arranged in Alphabetical Order in English) xiii
驱除鞑虏 恢复中华
开除球籍
相由心生
川粉
国粉
五族共和
食物链
封杀
十五的月亮
港台爱国歌曲
再见吧, 妈妈
西部大开发
汉服运动
养昆仑奴
高端人群
历史虚无主义
圣母
圣母婊
圣母癌
游子
港台
我骄傲, 我是中国人
我爱你, 中国
皇汉
日本原人
昆仑奴
神奇的土地
蓝田人
低端人口
(quechudalu huifuzhonghua) expel northern
barbarians and revive Zhonghua
(kaichu qiuji) expelled from the Earth
(xiangyouxinsheng) face reflects the mind
(chuanfen) fans of Donald Trump
(guofeng)
fans
of
Guomingdang
(Nationalists)
(wuzugonghe) five zu under one republic
(shiwulian) food chain
(fengsha) force someone out
(shiwu de yueliang) Full Moon (a song)
(gangtai aiguo gequ) Gangtai patriotic songs
(zaijianba mama) Good Bye, Mother
(a song)
(xibu dakaifa) Great West Development
(hanfu yundong) Han Clothing Movement
(yang kunlun nu) having or feeding black
slaves
(gaoduan renqun) high-end population
(lishi xuwu zhuyi) historical nihilism
(Shengmu) holy mother
(Shengmu biao) holy mother bitch
(Shengmu ai) holy mother cancer
(youzi) homecoming or overseas wandering son
(Gangtai) Hong Kong and Taiwan
(wo jiaoao wo shi zhongguoren) I Am
Proud I Am Chinese (a song)
(wo ai ni zhongguo) I Love You, China
(a song)
(huanghan) imperial Han
(riben yuanren) Japanese Original Man
(kunlun nu) Kunlun slave or black slave
(shengqi de tudi) land of miracle
(Lantian ren) Lantian Man
(diduan renkou) low-end population
xiv Character Glossary Translation (Arranged in Alphabetical Order in English)
和亲
融合
霸道
我的中国心
我的祖国
一带一路
一百首爱国歌曲
正统
北京原人
北京猿人的原始之恋
燧人氏
种群
红色基因
红色血脉
生番
遥远的伊甸园
逆向种族主义
富强
根
根脉相连
同喜同乐
盗红绡
傻白甜
台独
不作为
三体
华奸
汉奸
纳贡
(heqin) marriage for peace-making
(ronghe) melting
(badao) military hegemon
(wo de zhongguo xin) My Chinese Heart
(a song)
(wo de zuguo) My Motherland (a song)
(yidai yilu) One Belt, One Road
(yibaishou aiguo gequ) One hundred
patriotic songs
(zhengtong) orthodox
(beijing yuanren) Peking Original Man
(Beijing yuanren de yuanshi zhi lian)
Primitive Love of Peking Man
(Suirensi) primitive people who made fire
by wood drilling
(zhongqun) racial group
(hongse yiyin) red DNA
(hongse xuemai) red-blood lineage
(sheng fan) raw barbarians
(yaoyuan de yidianyuan) remote Eden
(nixiang zhongzu zhuyi) reverse racism
(fuqiang) rich and powerful
(gen) root
(genmai xianglian) Roots and Arteries
(a song)
(tong xi tong le) same joy, same happiness
(daohongxiao) Stealing Hong Xiao
(a Peking Opera)
(shabaitian) stupid-white-sweet left
(Taidu) Taiwan independence
(buzuowei) taking no action
(santi) Three-Body Problem
(hua jian) traitor of the Chinese nation
(hajian) traitor of the Han people
(nagong) tribute
Character Glossary Translation (Arranged in Alphabetical Order in English) xv
(zhengzhon de meiguoren) true or pure
Americans
两黑一黄
(liang hei yi huang) two blacks and one
yellow (black eyes, black hair, and yellow
skin)
高丽婢
(gaoli bi) unfree Korean female servants,
the same as Xinluo bi 新罗婢
胡姬
(hu ji) unfree singing/dancing girls
赔款
(peikuan) war reparations
战狼
(zhanlang) War Wolf (a movie series)
西方左派
(Xifang zuopai) Western left
白左
(baizuo) white left
白富美
(Baifumei) white, rich, and pretty
王道
(wangdao) winning the hearts and minds
of people by benign and paternalistic
imperial policies
狼图腾
(lang tuteng) Wolf Totem (a novel)
黄种人
(huangzhongren) Yellow Race
黄俄
(huanger) yellow Russians
三宝太监西洋记通俗演义 (sanbaotaijian xia xiyang tongshu yanyi)
Zheng He’s Expeditions of the Western
Oceans
正宗的美国人
1
“Call a Spade a Spade”
Worldwide, there are numerous mythological narratives telling us how
primitive humans acquired the knowledge of fire making and how critical it was to human physical and cultural evolution. The Chinese version attributes it to 燧人氏 (suirensi, literarily meaning the one who
makes fire by wood drilling), a mythical figure who taught primitive
people to make fire by wood drilling. In addition to this simple folklore reflective of experiences common to many human groups worldwide, fire making has a more revered place in the narratives of Chinese
nationalism expressed in anthropological and scientific languages.
According to this narrative, fire making is not only an important contribution the ancestors of the Chinese made to world civilization but
also is the key factor that distinguishes the Chinese as a race from other
peoples.
In 2012, the Guangming Daily, a major national newspaper, published a lengthy article entitled “Some Philosophical Thoughts
Regarding Human Evolution.” The author listed five biological and
physical features to make a claim that the Chinese are the most developed human species in the course of evolution. One of these features
involves the shape of mouth and the function of stomach. The author
© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_1
1
2 Y. Cheng
says that the Chinese mouth is shaped flatter and the Chinese stomach functions more weakly in digesting raw, cold, and hard food.
This is said to be because the ancestor of the Chinese started to use
fire earlier than the forefathers of other human groups. The food they
ate was cooked for a long time and therefore required less chewing in
the mouth and less digestion in the stomach. In this case, a less bulging mouth and a weaker stomach function testify to a more developed
and therefore more civilized way of eating, thanks to the wisdom of the
ancestors.
The newspaper published the article under the name Yong Chun,
which is a pen name of Li Changchun, a member of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) Politburo Standing Committee and the
Chairman of the Central Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee
(both positions were held from 2002 to 2012. For a fuller quotation
of Li’s argument, see Chapter 2). A career engineer known for his penchant for poetry, lyric writing, photography, and the social sciences, Li
is regarded as a tasteful literatus by Chinese media, compared to his
Politburo peers. He was in charge of propaganda, culture, and education for ten years, during which China’s nationalist politics won significant support among elites as well as commoners, not only nationwide
but also in the global Chinese diaspora.
Li’s rather bold but confident deduction that the use of fire and eating of cooked food have evolutionarily separated the Chinese from
other peoples of the world is just a tiny part of the Chinese nationalist
discourse with a strong sense of racial—much earlier it was ethnocentric—superiority. Since the time of Confucius, the Chinese language has
used an idiom to describe the barbarian way of taking food as “eating
meat with hairs and drinking the blood” (rumaoyinxue 茹毛饮血).
The barbarian foreigners who were assimilated into Chinese society
were described as being civilized from raw barbarians (shenfan 生番) to
cooked barbarians (shoufan 熟番). To help the wildest barbarians to survive in China, legend holds that cooked food had to be forcefully put
into their mouths and then they would vomit for days and nights in
order to civilize their internal organs. Contemporary Chinese anthropologists believe that the use of fire helped groups of Homo erectus
in the land of today’s China survive the last Ice Age while their peers
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 3
perished elsewhere helplessly in the cold. Therefore they claim a native
origin for Homo sapiens in China and refute the genetically-based “Outof-Africa” hypothesis for the origin of all modern humans. In recent
decades the site of Peking Man, an example of H. erectus who lived as
early as seven hundred thousand years ago in the then China and is
believed by the Chinese to be the earliest fire-using human, was held
as a shrine where torches were ignited at ceremonies for national and
international events. Popular culture and history education also portray
the use or making of fire by ancestral Chinese as evidence of moral and
spiritual strength. The flame created in the hands of the ancients is ritualized in Chinese nationalism (for a fuller discussion on the nationalist
narrative of ancestral use of fire and fire making, see Chapter 2).
The racialized mystification and ritualization of the ancient flame
constitutes part of anthropological discourse of Chinese nationalism.
Contemporary Chinese nationalism, analyzed in the theoretical and
conceptual framework of international studies of race and racism, consists of many elements combined with the anthropological one to construct the racial thinking. Some of them are intellectually sophisticated
and employ rather scientific jargon but most others use straightforward language to address concepts of blood, soil, and color. The phrase
“analyzed in the theoretical and conceptual framework of international
studies of race and racism” means China should not be viewed as an
exception in regards to the very nature of these discussions. Based on
international standards, they are racial or simply racist, which means
they are much more than “ethnic” or “nationalistic” and certainly
not just “cultural” either, although they are associated with ethnicity,
nationalism, and cultural tradition as they are in other societies.
I feel it is necessary to begin this study with such a statement because
there seems to be a politically correct attitude known as the “Chinese
perspective” that reminds us that China is so big, so historically and
culturally independent (or isolated), and has gone through such a
uniquely “East Asian” approach towards modernity that it has become
an almost self-sustaining and self-perpetuating civilization. When scholars apply universally held principles and research paradigms to China,
they have to be aware of their validity in that special country. China is
a typical case of the application of cultural relativism, postmodernism,
4 Y. Cheng
and postcolonialism on the one hand and the rejection of Orientalism,
Eurocentrism, and Western cultural hegemony on the other. One of
the most recent complaints about this Chinese perspective or viewpoint
was made by anthropologist Kevin Carrico in his book investigating the
Han Clothing Movement in China today. Instead of treating the movement as a nationalist effort to revive traditional culture as many would
do although they may be dismissive of the movement as misguided
and commercialized, Carrico finds that the movement has to be understood as part of an emerging Han racial nationalism. Avoidance of such
a harsh critical point of view—as I understand it but using Carrico’s
words—by applying the Chinese perspective, would be “not only dishonest but also patronizing,” or even worse, it “not only ironically
reproduces and reinforces the East-West binary that it claims to want to
overcome, but furthermore provides a theoretical buttress for conservative and even xenophobic nationalism.” (Carrico 2017, pp. 9–10)
China used to be a country in which both foreigners—especially
Westerners—and the Chinese themselves would find no racism or racial
thinking to talk about, at least not as a subject worthy of academic
study. This has changed to some extent as part of an international trend.
During the last three decades, as our understanding of racism has been
further emancipated from its most institutionalized, extremist, and inhuman forms (from segregation and discrimination to lynching, holocaust,
and genocide), we have begun to think about racism more in the subtle
forms of ideas and concepts and their relationship with ethnic consciousness, cultural tradition (especially religion), nationalist sentiment, xenophobia, and scientific discussions on biological differences worldwide,
and not just in a binary framework of the West and non-West or between
whites and non-whites. This trend is in part driven by an identity crisis
and ethnic nationalism in many countries, which had been suppressed by
the global politics of the Cold War as well as the fight between socialism
and capitalism but have now emerged and shown themselves. The trend
also reflects the fresh dynamics brought about by the new reality of globalization, notably international and domestic migrations. In this regard,
we are not in the so-called post-racist era yet.
Since the early 1990s, discussions regarding race-related issues in
China have formed a small but distinctive stream merging into the
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 5
enormous ocean of international Chinese studies, despite dissenting
voices cautioning people against an understanding of Chinese concepts
on their own terms, and insisting on the global influence of the hegemonic power of European-American discourses of race. Many scholars
have engaged the issue of race in their more general studies of Chinese
history since the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), although the definitive
meaning of race may be a subject of debate, given the premodern and
non-Western context in which the term is applied. For one thing, they
stress the signs of a sharpened sense of ethnic difference between the
Manchu rulers and their Han subjects and the subsequent ideological
quest for political legitimacy. Prasenjit Duara, for example, considers
that “the Manchu search for its own separate identity may be traced
back to a narrative which privileged ‘race’ as a definer of community”
(Duara 1996, p. 53).
In terms of focused studies, Frank Dikötter’s The Discourse of Race in
Modern China (1992, revised 2015) has remained the only monograph
on the subject. Through an intensively textual analysis of elite writings,
Dikötter identifies a line of racial thought in ancient Chinese cultural
discourse concerning the identity of the people and the distinctiveness
of the civilization. It does this with an emphasis on a social hierarchy, a
belief system, and the differences between the Chinese and non-Chinese
determined by perceived ancestry, lineage, color, and blood, among
other things. It was this native intellectual and cultural tradition that
came to meet and integrate with the Western discourse of pseudoscientific racism and social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century to
form a system of global racial hierarchy. This discourse manifests itself
in statements of politicians and political organizations, patriotic literature, school textbooks, popular science writings, and other forms of cultural production, which have had a significant influence on the Chinese
perception of the Self and the Other ever since. This perceived racial
hierarchy, as a result of an identity crisis caused by forced transformation from a self-centered empire to a semicolonial nation state, placed
the whites on the top and the Chinese (yellow people) second, as both
were believed to be strong and intelligent, while most other peoples
were seen as hopeless losers in the social Darwinist struggle. Dikötter
highlights the dynamic correlation between this racialized discourse
6 Y. Cheng
and Chinese nationalism since the late Qing dynasty that has often
identified the nation with the race, as the then popular phrase “nation
destroyed and race annihilated” (wangguomiezhong 亡国灭种) revealed.
Patriotism was therefore not just about defending the nation but also
protecting the race. In presenting the case of the Chinese, Dikötter
argues strenuously, especially in his later publications involving other
cases that racism is not merely a “Western invention” imposed upon
the world but—at least—has cognitive roots deeply embedded in many
non-Western cultures. The development of global racism, or global
racialization, as he argues, does not therefore follow a diffusion paradigm but is rather an interactive model (Dikötter 2012).
A salient example of this interactive model is the Chinese acceptance and propagation of the concept of the yellow race. According to
Michael Keevak, the concept of yellow color or yellow race has a long
and complicated history in the European racialization of the world. It
did not necessarily denote the Chinese in the first place and later had
derogatory and even vicious connotations. However, this ambiguous and ill-intended color-based concept was met with enthusiasm in
very late nineteenth century China. “The Chinese could appropriate
the Western term because it fit preexisting myths about their own civilization” (Keevak 2011, p. 130). These preexisting myths included
the perceived color of the Yellow River, the soil, and the imperial or
royal majesty, but now the Western invention of a yellow race inspired
Chinese intellectuals to give their nation a noble place in the racialized
world that was reified by skin color. Yang Ruisong, a scholar in Taiwan,
further analyzed how the late Qing intellectuals adopted the concept of
a yellow race but almost reinvented it as a discourse of a race with racial
quality equal to the white but superior to all other non-white races.
These intellectuals even envisioned a race war between the white and
the yellow as these two superior races would eventually be competitors
for global power (Yang 2010, pp. 84–91). The construction of a global
racial hierarchy with the white and the yellow at the top and a rather
hypothetical scenario of a race war between the two superior races—
established right after the concept of race was introduced into China—
proves a spirited interaction rather than a passive acceptance between a
foreign idea and its local comprehension. In short, a long-existing sense
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 7
of Sinocentric superiority and a civilization vs. barbarianism world view
found their modern manifestation in biological form and were compromised to the reality of Western dominance.
Other scholars have integrated the issue of race as an important
factor in their interpretation of Chinese national identity politics.
Although race is not their main priority, the way they link it to their
particular topics helps to locate those junctures at which the idea of race
enters and enhances the more general, popular, and mainstream discussions, and even racializes them. It has become clearer to many China
experts or attentive observers that without engaging the concept of race
and racial thinking at least to some extent, their interpretations of the
strength of contemporary Chinese nationalism is somehow weak or
even flawed. One example is Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the
World (2009, pp. 244–255) in which the author synthesized earlier discussions on the roots of contemporary Chinese racial thinking and especially anti-African racism.
James Leibold’s many articles and book chapters characterize the
scholarly connection between racial thinking and Chinese nationalism in a consistent manner. Leibold argues that the key problem in
constructing a Chinese nation state in its formative years (the early
Republican era) was to establish a common identity for a national community consisting of heterogeneous peoples inherited by the Republic
from the Qing Empire. For this task, the Han political and intellectual
elite exploited the social science disciplines of history, archaeology, and
ethnology to establish the centrality of the Han blood and ancestors in
the process of creating a common origin (tong yuan 同源) of the Chinese
people and “melting” (ronghe 融合) branches or marginal groups into
this Han-centered Chinese nationhood. Leibold also shows how the
nationalist leaders and the government, from Sun Yat-sen to Chiang
Kai-shek, intervened in the discussions on Chinese history, archaeology,
and ethnology to valorize the concept of a blood-centered race-state at
the most critical moments of the republican revolution and the resistance against Japanese invasion. Sun Yat-sen himself defined a bloodbased Chinese nation and elaborated such a national consciousness,
while the government-affiliated nationalist ideologues passionately contended with heretics in the 1930s, albeit only a few, who demonstrated
8 Y. Cheng
evidence for a culturally diverse and ethnically/racially heterogeneous
origin of Chinese civilization and the Chinese people. As the SinoJapanese conflict escalated to a total war after 1937, even those heretics
withdrew their nonconformist interpretation of a polygenetic origin of
the nation and supported a more monogenic one, since it helped in the
promotion of morale in a nationalist crisis (Leibold 2006).
In analyzing a more contemporary, grassroots case, Leibold addresses
the conceptual affiliation between racial thinking and Han supremacism, a very popular and strong ethnic ideology among many Han
Chinese today. Based on a perception of a pure Han blood lineage among contemporary urban youth, this ideology not only helps
Hanists (as Leibold labels them), but also has led to a heightening of
tension between Hanists and other nationalists. This Hanist development displays a bottom-up and virulent trend of ethnic nationalism.
One dramatic incident of such a confrontation was a Hanist slapping
the face of a famous scholar at his book-signing ceremony, a move
planned to set off public outrage. Yan Chongnian, the scholar, was
known for his praise of the Qing dynasty’s contribution to the Chinese
nation, for example its territorial expansion. For many Hanists, however, the Manchu people—the barbarians of the time—not only committed the genocidal mass murder of a large number of Han people
during their conquest of China, but were also held responsible for
China’s national humiliation in the dynasty’s later stages, due to its
stubborn resistance to political reforms for fear of losing its power to
Han elites (Leibold 2010).
Other scholars have also discussed contemporary Chinese racism by
expanding the scope of their investigation to mythology, popular culture, and science. Barry Sautman concisely identified “the dragon as
primal ancestor,” “the yellow emperor as racial founder,” and “Peking
Man as Chinese everyman,” as key components in post-Mao Chinese
racial nationalism. For Sautman, the dynamics between a racialized
identity and official nationalist politics were clear. As he put it, “[w]ith
the resurrection of the ideal of a racially-based state, through the myth
of a Chinese people of the same ‘race, blood and culture’ … myths of
descent from the dragon and the Yellow Emperor are a basis for a racial
nationalism that posits primal biological and cultural bonds among
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 9
China’s ethnic groups. These bonds, in turn, are thought to require a
common adherence to state nationalism” (Sautman 1997, p. 83). Since
this racial nationalism excluded ethnic minority Chinese, for Sautman
it had the potential to provoke tensions of ethnic nationalism between
Han and non-Han Chinese people at a time when the world was
observing ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia. Sautman also examined the Chinese paleoanthropological discourse that rejected the global
monogenic origin of modern humans, a consensus among the international paleoanthropological community. He argued that the Chinese
claim of an independent origin of H. sapiens in China was driven by a
racial belief that served a nationalist agenda. This “valorized antiquity
plays a role in the construction of nationalist myths that PRC elites are
again using as a mobilizatory device for international political competition” (Sautman 2001, p. 96).
Among those discussing racism in China, M. Dujon Johnson
stands out distinctively with his life experience in both mainland
China and Taiwan as an African-American. Johnson adopted analyses and critiques articulated in the aforementioned literature to interpret his daily encounters with racist attitudes towards black people.
Undoubtedly, his African-African identity directly consigned him
into such a social environment, sharpening his feelings and sensitizing
his perceptions. The most ridiculous case of racial bias against black
people was that when recruiting English teachers from foreign countries, some Chinese and Taiwanese schools would rather hire white
Russians than black Americans. Johnson explained why race and racism in China were so rarely discussed (his book was published in 2007
when racism in China was then indeed a much more untouchable issue)
by Chinese and foreign scholars. He argued that in China and Taiwan
it was because racism was “universally accepted and justified behind
the veil of Asian cultural values.” These values were held to be “unassailable,” no matter how inaccurate or offensive to other races. Living
in both mainland China and Taiwan, Johnson met with similar racial
bias and discrimination, and that experience convinced him that racism in Chinese society had little to do with the system of government,
political ideology, and the availability of information regarding peoples
of the world beyond the “Chinas.” He deplored the fact that “within
10 Y. Cheng
the Chinese mindset it would be a waste of time to address an obvious fact of darker-skinned people’s inferiority” (Johnson 2007, p. 45).
Among foreign scholars who seemed indifferent to the issue of racism
in China, according to Johnson, most of them were white and some of
them criticized Johnson’s then ongoing research as being painted “with
too broad a brush.” These scholars in general acknowledged Chinese
“bigotry and racism” against darker-skinned people, but they seemed to
allow “a sole cultural prerogative and privilege for Chinese people alone
to exhibit.” They “implicitly convey the message that even if racism in
the Chinas is not okay … it is culturally acceptable” (Johnson 2007,
pp. 5–6). He postulated that since raising the question of racism in
China would be offensive to Chinese nationalism, and the Chinese
racial hierarchy perceived white European-Americans more favorably,
many white European-Americans not only avoided criticizing racism in
China but also distanced themselves from black foreigners there.
While all the above scholars are experts on China, scholars of
international studies of race have joined the discussion from their
perspective. Ian Law’s Red Racism investigates racism in former, post,
and present communist countries, and places more stress on policies
and practices instead of on rhetoric and ideologies. The book presents
the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies (and the states that
have succeeded those regimes), along with Cuba and China, and finds
the existence of racism in all of them in various forms to be the result
of state policies. From a comparative perspective, Law distinguished
a racism with Chinese characteristics (as I prefer to name it) that had
broader implications for our understanding of major types of racism.
As he put it, unlike the “exterminationist logics”, “segregationist logics”
and “exclusionist logics” that we have seen since the start of the twenti­
eth century worldwide, “the logic of Chinese racial domination involves
assimilation by coercion and is akin to post-racial positions in its denial
of any shred of raciality” (Law 2012, p. 97). This categorization is theoretically as meaningful as Dikötter’s argument of an interactive model vs.
a diffusion paradigm in our discussion on racism’s global manifestations.
“Assimilationist logics” are the state policies designed for “racial sinicization” that involves the “aggressive, state-led, promotion of Han
culture, language and identity, and the concomitant dissolving of the
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 11
culture, language, and identity of non-Han groups and the social disappearing of the groups into the mass of the Chinese nation” (Law
2012, p. 97). These efforts were accompanied by state-funded economic
projects and migrations of Han people into these regions. More recent
evidence supportive of Law’s argument of sinicization is typified by government policies promoting intermarriage especially between Tibetans,
Uyghurs, and Han Chinese. Policies designed for such interethnic-marriage families and their children include preferential treatments and
even privileges—and in reality are discriminatory towards those who
stay away from such a marriage—in education, employment, joining
the communist party and the army, opening one’s own business, and
receiving various honorable titles from the party and state (People’s Daily
2014). Believing the notion that blood is thicker than water, such policies were announced as the “ultimate and the strongest” tie to bind the
various ethnic groups in China. Although the success of such policies
has remained uncertain, from the perspective of critical race and ethnic studies, however, its expected result will be the gradual ethnocide of
those minority peoples.
Kuan-Hsing Chen, a Taiwanese scholar of social and cultural studies,
has made a very cogent and judicious critique of the Chinese variant of
the discourse on race. Chen’s critique of racism in Chinese society was
originally motivated by an investigation into the death of Hari Jacque,
wife of Martin Jacque—Chen’s friend—in Hong Kong (1999). Because
Hari had “south Asian features” (darker skin) she experienced racial
discrimination in Hong Kong and there were charges that the hospital failed to provide prompt and proper treatment because of her race.
The incident triggered a campaign for racial equality among foreign
communities in Hong Kong. For Chen, all of these are plain facts: that
racism exists in China and had existed long before Western influence,
that Chinese racism is Han racism, and that this racism is pervasive not
only in Chinese societies but also in their interactions with their Asian
neighbors (Chen 2010, pp. 259–260). Chen was not arguing whether we
should call this racism a racism, or what kind of evidence could attest
the label. Rather, he went much deeper to find the logic of such a deepseated and sustained racism, which he saw as “the epistemological foundation of the Chinese empire,” or “the Imperial Order of Things” that
12 Y. Cheng
was “embedded deeply in the psyche and practice of Han Chinese.” He
named this phenomenon the “imperialization” of the China-centered
world. It developed a multilevel imperial language strategy: demonizing
non-Chinese Others, animalizing non-Chinese Others, and humanizing
non-Chinese Others. The last term means “pushing the Other through
a ‘humanization’ project while forever maintaining a superior position
in the social hierarchy” for the more civilized Han Chinese (Chen 2010,
pp. 260–261). For Chen, this strategy was perceived as turning “raw
barbarians” into “cooked barbarians,” and was “intrinsic to the functioning of colonialism.” In my opinion, Chen’s argument psychologically decodes what Law calls “assimilationist logics.”
This “Han-centric imaginary” constructed with the imperial order of a
civilized China and its barbarian surroundings is “a useful place” to begin
consideration of the problem of racism in China. As Chen reiterated,
“I will argue that Han Chinese racism is historically grounded in a cultural hierarchy that is embedded in the mindset and worldview of many
Han Chinese” (Chen 2010, p. 264). In today’s domestic and international politics, Chen believes that this “mindset and worldview” has created problems between Han and non-Han Chinese, as well as between the
Chinese and their Asian neighbors, although it has not yet spread to the
global stage at this time. The Chinese world therefore needs a profound
“de-imperialization,” meaning a critical reexamination of ideas, concepts,
and propositions that Chinese societies have inherited from the imperial past and which have been reinforced by the current growing national
strength. Chen therefore urges Chinese intellectuals both domestically and
internationally face this imminent undertaking (Chen 2010, p. 258).
It seems to me that among all the analyses and comments aforementioned, what Chen argues is intuitively more insightful, convincing, and—with a vision of a broader Chinese world—confirms what
Johnson experienced in Taiwan and China. As a cultural insider, what
Chen did is simply adopting universally valid principles to the Chinese
reality by identifying and removing socially constructed epistemological
barriers between the two. The intense critical disposition of a culture
in which one was politically socialized has led to an attitude of “calling
a spade a spade,” which many scholars and ordinary readers would be
hesitant to adopt.
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 13
From my point of view, for both foreigners and Chinese, such an
attitude of avoidance is based on a conscious or subconscious Chinese
exceptionalism when it comes to issues of race and racism. It is also a
relativist mindset. During the time of my own research and writing
on the subject, in both Chinese and English languages and beginning
roughly in 2010, I have encountered this Chinese exceptionalism too
many times when people responded with confusion and doubt to my
explanation or argument that racism also exists in China. Many of
them, including very open-minded liberal intellectuals, almost instinctively avoid the term racism in a Chinese context. The most common
response is “what you are talking about in the Chinese context is culture,
not race.” Or, “that’s ethnic.” If the case is undeniably racial or racist
against a non-Chinese or non-Han Other, the response would be “that’s
because we don’t know much about them … in any case we didn’t mean
that.” What they acknowledge is ignorance and what they insist is innocence, rather than an informed bias or constructed discrimination. In
other words, even if it is a racist attitude, it is an ignorant and innocent one. This plausible explanation is typically reflected in the attitude
towards Africa and black people, which will be historically debunked in
Chapter 4.
The denial seems to involve a psychic and epistemological problem
rejecting any connection between the Chinese and racism. On some
occasions I had to draw a historical parallel regarding concepts originally rejected as Western but eventually accepted as Chinese. The concept of social class, for example, was rejected as nonexistent in China
when it was introduced by Marxist theorists in the early decades of the
twentieth century. Many argued that in Chinese society individuals
were identified by familial or clan relations, origins of home-place or
province, occupation affiliation, social dependency network, or even age
cohort. Class was a Western concept and had no equivalent in Chinese
society. When the concept of gender entered social and academic discussions in post-Mao China, many regarded it as a Western notion
and doubted its relevance in China, because China already advocated
women’s liberation and equal rights for males and females. However,
gender and gender-based concepts are today taken as an analytical
framework or approach that is more comprehensive and useful than the
14 Y. Cheng
old-fashioned and narrowly defined socialist concepts of women’s liberation and equal rights. China is not exceptional in terms of class and
gender, and it shouldn’t be held exceptional in terms of race either.
In recent years the terms race and racism have certainly appeared
much more frequently in the media in response to situations in which
China was implicated with race-related criticism. It is an inevitable
result of China’s engagement in globalization and the unfolding tensions of domestic ethnic relations. The most notable examples are the
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s responses to questions about
racist attitudes towards black people and Africa reflected in commercial advertisements and official propaganda. Apparently these official
denials have failed to exonerate China. To the contrary, they only prove
that race-related consciousness in China has “come out of the closet”
to raise public and international concerns and the government feels
compelled to issue clarification. As of August, 2018, a web search for
“racial discrimination” and “racism” on baidu.com, arguably the most
popular internet server in China, returned more than twelve million
and six million relevant hits, respectively. Although it is impossible to
decide exactly how many of them are concerned with situations outside or inside China, it is safe to say that a significant number of them
were connected to domestic situations. In contrast to the official denials
of racism in China, on social media people are not only talking about
whether racism exists in China but also treating racism as a somehow
inevitable and natural—and therefore acceptable—response to certain
groups of the inferior Other. There are also debates on whether China
needs a racism or a Han racism to serve the national or the Han interest. For many, racism, just like nationalism, also has its good and bad
variants. In a defiant or nonconformist gesture, they believe that they
are speaking truth to hegemonic political correctness.
However, race and racism in China have remained virtually taboo
in academic discussions and there hasn’t been any monograph or
research article focused on such issues in contemporary China. Among
the possible explanations, there is obviously a political one: the party-state has maintained its official position that neither an anti-foreign
nor a Han racism exists in the People’s Republic. Although occasionally, when responding to some sensational incidents, the government
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 15
acknowledges the existence of some ethnic bias or racially discriminatory views among certain sectors of society. However, the nature of a
socialist state and the history of a peaceful and benign civilization, as
the official narrative relates, exonerate China from criticism or accusation associated with racism of a larger extent. Politically, the official
position is Chinese exceptionalism. Given the condition of state-controlled research funding and publication, undertaking a research project
on such issues is certainly out of the question for Chinese scholars.
From a more scholarly point of view, I would like to stress a blind
spot in the studies of modern Chinese history among many Chinese historians. In general, the existence of racial thinking or the term racism
itself is not only recognized but also discussed, but only in the context of
late Qing and early republican history (roughly the 1890s–1920s). The
anti-Qing republican revolutionaries—overwhelmingly Han people—
racialized their political struggle against the Qing dynasty, which was
dominated by non-Han Manchu elites. For the reason of revolutionary
propaganda and mobilization they exaggerated differences between the
Han and the Manchu, making ethnic differences racial distinctions. It is
quite understandable that at the time race was a sweeping concept used
in explaining significant differences among population groups and the
concept of ethnicity was yet to be established. The Manchu people were
believed to be racially inferior to the Han (mainly due to their previous barbarian status resulting from living beyond the Great Wall and
their different bloodline from the Han) and held responsible for China’s
decline and vulnerability when confronting the intrusions of foreign
powers, which pushed China to the edge of national destruction and
racial extinction. After the republican revolution, however, the Manchu
people were officially integrated into the concept of the Chinese nation
as an important ethnic group, and were no longer regarded as an enemy
of the Han people, although anti-Manchu sentiments have to some
extent survived and even been revived since the 1990s as Hanism has
resurfaced.
However, the discourse of race constructed during the time of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century had another aspect: the
racial hierarchy of the world in which China racially identified itself and
categorized various racial Others. This world view admitted the racially
16 Y. Cheng
dominant role of Westerners (white) but assigned the Chinese (yellow)
a racially superior place above all other non-Western peoples worldwide
(mainly categorized as the brown, the red, and the black). It treated
the West with a mixed feeling: the enemy of the Chinese nation but an
admirable racial equal—or superior—to imitate. Articulated in a variety
of rhetoric (political, cultural, and scientific) and significantly assisted
by social Darwinist logic, this racial world view permeated society.
The anti-Qing Hanist racism and a racial hierarchy of the world are
the twin of the discourse of race in modern Chinese history. Like any
other racial discourse in the world, they reflect power relations in reality but construct imaginary orders for a racially ideal—or “natural”—
world. The problem for Chinese historians, and other social scientists
and scholars of humanity in general, is that most of them only acknowledge the former and take it for granted that after the fall of the Qing
dynasty and the integrating of the Manchu people into the conceptual
Chinese nation, the concept of and discussion on race in China basically lost ground. Or they can still discuss racism but only in the context of the Western and Japanese racisms against the Chinese. Of the
two parts of the discourse on race, the anti-Manchu variant was more
political and historical while the racial order of the world is more cultural and social. It is the latter that has accommodated the traditional
Sinocentric view of the world with modern and scientific terms and
has survived by embedding itself in the psyche and mindset of Chinese
nationalism, as Chen and Johnson detected. Many people may point to
the fact that after 1949 racism was officially condemned, but that critique was a political condemnation of Western colonialism and imperialism, and it was never meant to be a critical self-reflection of Chinese
society, culture, and nationalism. In the meantime and in the same way,
social Darwinism was denounced and criticized but its logic was somehow hidden in a mixture of the Marxist theory of social evolution and
progress, the notion of Hanist civilizational superiority, and a sense of
the “survival of the fittest” in Chinese nationalist discourse.
More broadly and society-wide, the absence of discussions on race in
China involves the fundamental misunderstanding and misperception of
racism. For many Chinese, due to the influence of anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist education and propaganda, racism is a very political
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 17
concept that refers to institutional, systematic, and legal treatments
often carried out by force against a particular racially defined group.
Slavery, segregation, holocaust, and genocide, are all racism. Therefore
racism is never relevant to Chinese history and Chinese society, they
believe, because they find no such practices and target groups in China.
What never occurs to this perception is that those cases of institutionalized and violent racism are extremist racist practices. Racism is not only
a more mundane affair and attitude, but also, first of all, it is a concept
and a world view that not only essentializes differences between human
groups but also explains the natural and the human worlds accordingly.
Such an essentialization may take many forms, among which biological
and physical ones have been common, but cultural and social characteristics may also be essentialized if they are portrayed as being uniquely
associated with the identity of a particular human group. Essentializing
differences is key to racial thinking. It is precisely this conceptual racial
thinking that has existed in modern Chinese history and society. Today,
it has shown itself in Chinese nationalism and has been embraced
by many, from the top leaders to cultural and intellectual elites and
ordinary citizens as the most cohesive element for a Han-centered multiethnic nation.
The popular perception of the group components of the Chinese
nation is a highly ethnic and racial homogeneity centered in Han-ness,
which is also shared by many foreigners to a great extent. It tends to
forget a long and complicated historical process which eventually establishes Han dominance and ignores the fact that both historically and
presently the geographical regions inhabited by non-Han peoples are
bigger than those of the Han people. It is this problematic perception
that helps to create another erroneous view, which is that race has never
been an issue in China simply because we don’t have it.
Many Chinese believe that although group-specific violence, mistreatment, and discrimination occurred throughout Chinese history, for
example political persecutions and discriminations against the so-called
class enemies under Mao, with a similar practice based on race never
having happened. Such a belief is the result of misinformation brought
about by Chinese historical education and the official historical narrative. It is also attributed to the misconception of the difference between
18 Y. Cheng
ethnic and racial groups, seeing no gray areas between the two and only
emphasizing the existence of the former in China. Although we may
need to exercise more caution in identifying specific incidents by nature
and by manner as we apply concepts such as racial discrimination or
racial violence in China, there existed cases of foreign slaves identified by their racial features and unfree social status as early as the Tang
Dynasty between the sixth and ninth centuries. Large-scale conflicts and
mutual massacres between Han and Muslim Chinese as well as other
non-Han southwestern minority people happened, particularly in Qing
and Republican China in the vast western regions. Contemporarily,
cases of tensions and violent conflicts between Uyghurs and Muslim
migrant workers and Han Chinese have increased alarmingly during the
last two decades. Current anti-terrorist policies profile Uyghur travelers
and domestic immigrants based on their racial identity. By international
standards, all of these have shown a clear and acute consciousness of,
and attitude towards, not only ethnic but also racial identities.
Throughout years of conducting research on the subject, I have come
to understand the factors that have led to the denial of the existence
of racism or racial thinking in China. They are actually not a uniquely
Chinese phenomenon, but this Chinese perspective may help us to
comprehend what racism is and how it is still rampant in many societies after having acquired a notorious reputation over many decades.
Theoretically, racism or racial thinking involves three interrelated concepts: that the social and cultural differences between human groups
are biologically and physically essentialized (including the concept of
the environment such as land and soil and can sometimes also be subtly addressed in cultural terms); that such essentialized differences constitute a natural and social (including moral) hierarchy of superiority
and inferiority; and that this hierarchy determines power relationships
among human groups—or, if in reality the power relationship is distorted and does not therefore reflect the natural order, then it has to be
changed.
The most direct and logical result of the complex of these three concepts is an imagined Self, an identity, rather than an outright attitude or
behavior toward others. If one group of people believe they are uniquely
cultured, civilized, smart, creative, and benevolent, and has survived in
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 19
the same bloodline since the beginning of evolution or civilization, then
that is racism at least in cognitive terms. Whether they have a particular Other to discriminate against or even persecute is situational: when
you racialize yourself, it is just a matter of circumstance under which
you racialize Others. Perhaps you have already racialized them without
your acknowledgement because your understanding of racism is erroneous and you are therefore not aware that your thinking and behavior are
racist.
Another important but often ignored fact is that there hasn’t been a
“pure” racism in world history. Racism shares grey areas in perception
as well as in practice with other identity-related ideologies such as ethnocentrism, nationalism (turning ethnic traits or national characteristics
into racial features has happened too often), and xenophobia. It is not
only a “scavenger ideology” intellectually (Solomos and Back 1996, pp.
18–19, 213) but also a politically parasitic lesion that can grow with
any sociopolitical movement defending or challenging existing power
relations between different cultural or ethnic groups. Such a symbiosis
can result in racism hijacking the entire country’s ideological agenda.
Antisemitism and anti-black racism, the two most notorious cases of
racism, both evolved from an attitude toward religious, cultural, and
ethnic strangers to a racially essentialized Other. The dynamic behind
such transformations took the form of changes in power relationships
between these two groups and other people surrounding them, while
the biological and physical features of these two groups remained the
same. The perception of the Chinese in America, to add a case of racism familiar to many Chinese people, also underwent a similar transformation between the 1850s when the Chinese arrived as desirable labors
and 1882 (when the US Congress passed The Chinese Exclusion Act) as
more Chinese workers arrived while American society was experiencing
a socioeconomic crisis, resulting in the scapegoating of Chinese immigrants as an essentially unassimilable and therefore un-American race.
As General Robert Lee put it in response to the question of whether
the postbellum South should allow more Chinese into meet the labor
demand in the aftermath of emancipation: “We not only need reliable
laborers, but good citizens whose interest and feelings should be in unison with our own” (Davis 2014, p. 485). I emphasize these historical
20 Y. Cheng
facts since I often heard defenders or apologists of Chinese racism insisting that they were hostile towards this or that type of racial group not
because of their race but because of some political or socioeconomic
circumstance that involved them, therefore their attitude had nothing
to do with racism. Such an argument assumes that there exists a “pure”
racism, a racism for racism’s sake.
The purpose of this book is to reveal and analyze such a selfracialization of the Chineseness in contemporary Chinese nationalist
identity politics. It is a case of racism in the so-called post-racial era, in
which a significant amount of literature is devoted to new forms and
specific state policies regarding racial Others reflected in issues such as
poverty, crime, migration, social welfare, education, demographic trends,
refugee crises, etc. Despite the fact that most of these issues also exist
in China, I am more concerned with the development of a discourse of
race that seems to be a living fossil of the classical racial ideologies of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The dynamic behind the construction of such a discourse is also to find an ideology more cohesive
and powerful than nationalism and patriotism. Also similar to the racial
ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the state—a party-state in the Chinese case—plays a pivotal role in such a development,
with many other agents from cultural elites to ordinary citizens participating in the process to make it a popular phenomenon or movement.
For decades, China has claimed its national characteristics as distinctive political and economic approaches towards the goal of national
revival and global power rooted in a culture and civilization of unique
features. In the meantime, less known to the world is an assumed physiological national character that has also been invented and popularized
among Chinese people. This Chinese character manifests itself in various forms ranging from official rhetoric to scientific jargon, cultural and
artistic representations, and to a rough and vulgar popular vernacular
in everyday language. On the one hand it is a conglomerate of loosely
defined concepts, symbols, metaphors, analogies, and myths that lacks
a central, theoretical, and cohesive manifesto. On the other hand, precisely because of this form of presentation, racial thinking can address
itself freely and pervasively under various circumstances, more accessible
to ordinary people on a day-to-day basis, and it can invite spontaneous
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 21
participation with little public resistance or even an awareness of being
racially explicit.
I would argue that an understanding of contemporary Chinese
nationalism without its racial aspect is flawed. This book joins international discussions on China’s rise from a new perspective that considers the significance of race and identity politics since the 1980s. It
shows how, as nationalism claims preeminence in China, a symbiotic
racial discourse has risen to interpret the nation’s rapid ascendancy and
justify nationalist pride by employing biological, historical, scientific,
and cultural languages to engage the majority Han people. This book
argues that instead of manifesting itself through institutions and policies
against chosen racial or ethnic groups, as racism is often assumed to do,
the expression of this racism is so far mainly a proclamation of a racially
defined Chineseness, more of a presumed Han identity. Such a racialized concept about “who we are” especially helps Han people to find
a common belonging in order to overcome discrepancies generated by
economic, political, regional, provincial, and ethnic distinctions heightened by the rapid social transformations in post-Mao China. Like many
racial ideologies, this discourse is also a belief system that has made
Chinese nationalism more passionate. In this way the discourse becomes
a very effective component in forming a “cohesive force” (ningjuli 凝聚力),
a political agenda of the CCP regime with the purpose of maintaining a
façade of national unity. An equally significant application of this racial
discourse is its appeal to the massive overseas Chinese community from
which the CCP regime has drawn invaluable support. While heightening a Han-based nationalism, such a discourse nonetheless projects
and hardens ethnic fault lines, both geopolitically and psychologically,
between the Han and some non-Han peoples with long-term implications for political stability in the PRC.
After an introductory first chapter, the second chapter focuses on
the creation and popularization of patriotic songs with explicit racial
content as a result of a collaboration between the party-state and the
pop culture industry of capitalist Hong Kong and Taiwan (shortened
as Gangtai, 港台, in the Chinese world). The Gangtai patriotic songs
(composed and performed by Gangtai musicians) have grown into a
political genre of pop music in China since they emerged in the early
22 Y. Cheng
1980s. To a great extent, overseas Chinese musicians especially in North
America also played a role in its creation and popularization. The lyrics
of these patriotic songs have constructed an unambiguously racial discourse about Chinese identity and Chinese history by directly appealing
to ancestors, racial lineage, blood, soil, the color of eyes, skin and hair,
and the Dragon as the divine symbol of the Chinese spirit. This racialized national identity is further sentimentalized in the same songs by a
strong sense of grievance over national humiliation inflicted by foreign
powers. These Gangtai patriotic songs are numerous and have been imitated by musicians on the mainland. It is quite surprising that in terms
of volume, patriotic songs created in a time of peace far exceed those
created in times of national crisis in modern Chinese history. Through
the power of popular music, racialized Chineseness and anti-foreign
sentiment have not only penetrated Chinese society but also reached the
global Chinese diasporic communities.
The third chapter analyses how the discourse of race is articulated in
scientific language. It starts with the debate on whether Peking Man, the
H. erectus group that inhabited the area near today’s Beijing about seven
hundred thousand years ago, can still be considered the ancestor of the
Chinese people. The ancestorship of Peking Man has been challenged
by genetic science that has established a common H. sapiens ancestor for
all human groups. The debate involves two theories: China-originated
Chinese (COC) and Africa-originated Chinese (AOC). The discourse
strategies and social responses have clearly shown the nationalist implications of the debate. The chapter emphasizes that since the 1990s, in the
face of challenges from genetic science, Peking Man’s assumed ancestorship has been further valorized as a symbol in state-sanctioned patriotic
mobilization. The pseudoscientific theory that the Chinese are the most
advanced race in human evolution is even enthusiastically embraced by
some Chinese leaders. Inspired by international studies of similar discourses that have constructed various imagined ancestors, the chapter
dubs this Chinese discourse as “Homo sinensis,” but stresses its far more
prehistoric and therefore biological root.
Chapter four discusses how the Chinese perception of Africa and
black people helps in the construction of a racialized Chinese Self. It
takes on the subject of Sino-African relations, but it is not a study of
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 23
such a relationship. Rather, it critically examines how under different
historical circumstances the image and imagination of Africa and black
people—and to a broader extent darker-skinned people in general—are
used as a racial Other to distinguish the Chinese as a superior race. The
chapter stresses a historical fact that the essentialized connection between
blackness and unfree labor status appeared in China much earlier than it
did in the West. In modern and contemporary times, Africa and black
people have been used as a reference to address China’s own nationalist agenda from a racial perspective. Such a racism does not necessarily
inflict any substantial harm or threat to that particular group of people.
Rather, it works as a mirror for the cultural Self and acts as a catalyst for
a racial nationalism, especially as China rises as a global power.
While the previous chapters all focus on rather specific subjects
(popular music, scientific discussion, and the perception of Africa and
black people), chapter five undertakes a society-wide survey of other
manifestations of the discourse of race as well as its agents. It treats this
discourse not as an isolated and independent theory but one mixed
with and mutually enhanced by social Darwinism, Hanism (especially anti-Manchu Hanism), Chinese civilizational supremacism, ethnic nationalism, and other notions inherent to nationalism in general.
The chapter refers to writings, speeches, and teachings of a number of
well-known intellectuals or other public figures to demonstrate the pervasiveness and public appeal of the discourse. The chapter shows that
the notion of essentialized differences between the Self and Others not
only affects the Han Chinese, but also ethnic minority intellectuals.
The chapter argues that even pro-democratic and liberal intellectuals
are often found to be explicitly and bluntly “racial” in their discussions,
especially regarding international situations. The chapter ends with
a discussion of “baizuo ” (白左, the white left), a Chinese response to
the most recent social trends in the West involving the political fight
between liberals on the left and conservatives on the right. The chapter
argues that the Chinese discussion reveals a dilemma in contemporary
Chinese nationalism: politically it is anti-Western but racially it is dismayed by the decline of the superior Western civilization caused by its
internal divisions and weaknesses. The concept of baizuo is a Chinese
contribution to the global racial discourse and it can be regarded as the
24 Y. Cheng
most recent development of the discourse of race under new international circumstances.
The book, with the last chapter analyzing how discourses of class and
race integrate within the logic of the Chinese party-state and envisioning its future, focuses on discourses of race or racial thinking manifested
in a self-claimed Chineseness that identifies the nation with a yellow race,
and how such an essentialist mentality has been operative in many specific aspects of nationalist politics, whether manipulated or spontaneous.
Although the book foregrounds the significance of such discourses, it is not
to say that the entire realm of Chinese nationalism is racial or racialized,
nor does it suggest that the Chinese are more racist than other peoples in
the world. The book is simply saying that with an understanding that no
one in this world is entitled to be free from the influence of racial thinking, none of us should be pardoned from such a critical examination especially when faced with abundant evidence. Racism can prey on any society
in deep crisis that craves a powerful form of identity politics. Politically,
the most significant implication of such a racial discourse is the cohesive
power it engenders to the party-state’s nationalist agenda. Internationally,
such a racial nationalism has exploited the wealth, intelligence, and social
networks of overseas Chinese people for China’s recovery from the socioeconomic disaster created by Maoist policies and has helped China’s rise
since the 1980s, but by the same token it will incriminate them in any
China-centered international crisis. The international community should
stay alert regarding such prospects, especially any anti-Chinese racism.
Acknowledgements The book is a significant development and expansion from
some of my earlier publications in English. Part of the content in Chapter 2 is
based on my article entitled “Gangtai Patriotic Songs and Racialized Chinese
Nationalism,” published in R. Kowner & W. Demel (Eds.), Race and Racism
in Modern East Asia (Vol. II, pp. 342–368, Brill, 2015). Part of the content in
Chapter 3 includes my article entitled “‘Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?’—
Genetics, Anthropology and Politics of Racial Nationalism in China,” published
in The Journal of Asian Studies, 76(3), 575–602 (August 2017). Some content
in Chapter 4 is derived from my article entitled “From Campus Racism to
Cyber Racism: Discourse of Race and Chinese Nationalism,” published in
The China Quarterly, 207, 561–579 (2011). Chapter 5 reconceptualizes some
arguments in my article entitled “Constructing a Racialized Identity in Post-Mao
1
“Call a Spade a Spade” 25
China,” published in G. Wu & H. Lansdowne (Eds.), China’s Transitions from
Communism—New Perspectives (pp. 162–187, Routledge, 2015). I thank all of
these journals and publishers for allowing the use of these materials.
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Carrico, K. (2017). The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China
Today. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chen, K-H. (2010). Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Davis, C. W. (2014). Crucible of Command—Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E.
Lee. Boston: Da Capo Press.
Dikötter, F. (2012). The Racialization of the Globe: Historical Perspectives.
In M. Bergs & S. Wendt (Eds.), Racism in the Modern World, Historical
Perspectives on Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (pp. 20–40). New York:
Berghahn Books.
Dikötter, F. (2015). The Discourse of Race in Modern China (A revised and
expanded version of the book’s 1992 edition). Oxford: Oxford University
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Duara, P. (1996). Deconstructing the Chinese Nation. In J. Unger (Ed.),
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Jacques, M. (2009). When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World
and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Allen Lane.
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Keevak, M. (2011). Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Law, I. (2012). Rad Racisms Racism in Communist and Post-Communist
Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leibold, J. (2006). Competing Narratives of Racial Unity in Republican
China. Modern China: An International Quarterly of History and Social
Science, 32, 181–220.
Leibold, J. (2010, September). More Than a Category: Han Supremacism on
the Chinese Internet. The China Quarterly, 203, 539–559.
People’s Daily. (2014). 陈全国主持召开民族通婚家庭座谈会 [Chen
Quanguo Presides the Meeting on Inter-Ethnic Marriage]. http://leaders.people.com.cn/n/2014/0619/c58278-25171282.html. Accessed May 3, 2018.
26 Y. Cheng
Sautman, B. (1997). Myth and Descent, Racial Nationalism and Ethnic
Minorities in the People’s Republic of China. In F. Dikötter (Ed.), The
Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan (pp. 75–95). London:
Hurst.
Sautman, B. (2001). Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological
Nationalism in China. The Journal of Asian Studies, 60(1), 95–124.
Solomos, J., & Back, L. (1996). Racism and Society. Houndsmills and
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Yang, R. 杨瑞松. (2011.2). 病夫、黄祸与睡狮: “西方” 视野中的中国形象
与近代中国国族论述想像 [The Sick Man, The Yellow Peril and the Sleeping
Lion: The China Imagined in the West And the Discourse of an Imagined
Modern Chinese Nation]. Taipei: National Chengchi University Press: 2010.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow:
Race in Pop Music
In late 1977, an official notice jointly issued by the Ministry of Culture
and the Chinese Musicians Association was circulated among China’s
music professionals. The notice assigned them the task of creating a
new national anthem. There is no information regarding how many
submissions the authorities received although we may well assume that
the call was met with an enthusiastic response. While most submissions have disappeared into the ether, one of them has stood out and
remained popular, not as the anthem—the authorities later decided to
keep “March of Volunteers” which had been in use since 1949 as the
anthem—but as a recommended representative patriotic song. Created
by musicians in the Department of Culture of Nanjing Military Region,
the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the candidate anthem is entitled
“China, China, the Red Sun Never Sets” (中国, 中国, 鲜红的太阳永
不落) a line that might sound reminiscent of nineteenth century British
history for many in the world (Baidu.com1, 2018).
This is a rather little-known episode in the history of China’s contemporary nationalism. Mao’s death and the end of his most extreme
policies opened a new era in which the country and the people were
anxious to find their new collective and individual identities which had
© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_2
27
28 Y. Cheng
been confined or suppressed by both domestic and international Maoist
revolutionary doctrines. A sense of social liberation and cultural renaissance was the ethos of the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the
1980s. It must have been in this milieu that the authorities went a bit
too far in considering a new anthem to mark the new era, but more
importantly, this proposed change reveals an awakening of national consciousness about the collective and individual Self. Created as a candidate for a national anthem, the music of “China, China, the Red Sun
Never Sets” has a grand, masculine, and sublime marching tone. Its
music video matches it with clips of the PLA marching in Tiananmen
Square. Its lyrics portray a scenic country, a competent ruling party, and
a heroic people.
Less than two years later, in 1979, “I Love You, China” (我爱你,
中国) another patriotic song, was created and became a hit. It is the
theme song of the movie A Loyal Child of Overseas Chinese (海外赤
子). The movie tells the story of an overseas Chinese girl in Southeast
Asia (the area with the largest overseas Chinese population), a gifted
singer, who aspires to sing for her motherland but is unfairly treated by
policies discriminatory against overseas Chinese. This discrimination
derives from the Cultural Revolution ideology which labelled overseas
Chinese as bourgeois and capitalist and therefore politically untrustworthy. However, by the end of the movie, the enlightened party cadres
warmly embrace the girl and admit her into a prestigious musical institute in Beijing. The movie is historically realistic: before and during the
Cultural Revolution, numerous overseas Chinese who returned from
abroad were met with political suspicion, mistreated, and even persecuted. Up to the time of the making of the movie, the party-state had
begun to adopt a new policy preferential to overseas Chinese. The policy was designed to win their support through so-called open door policies, with their economic, technological, intellectual, and social network
resources in the countries in which they settled. Such a policy was also
adopted towards the Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
With this new policy, the class-based ideology and nationality-related
identity began to give way to a blood-based patriotism, a significant
and effective tool in the PRC’s international politics regarding overseas
Chinese since that time. The movie’s theme song “I Love You, China” is
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 29
a beautiful melody in the first person whose heart is genuinely Chinese,
despite the main character’s non-Chinese upbringings and regardless of
her previous discriminatory treatment by the Chinese state. The message of the movie is clear: as a Chinese person by blood and ancestry,
your love and loyalty to the country is unconditional, even you have
suffered from its mistreatment and even if you identify with another
nation by upbringing or citizenship status. It is not by coincidence that
the performer of the soundtrack was a female Chinese-Malaysian singer
who had returned to China, and this biographical note enhanced the
song’s appeal. The movie was also shot on location at a government
farm for returning overseas Chinese. Both the movie and the song won
national prizes (Baidu.com2, 2018).
To understand the significance of A Loyal Child of Overseas Chinese
as well as the importance of overseas Chinese to post-Mao nationalism, a comparison with another movie titled The Bitter Love (苦恋)
is helpful. Created at roughly the same time (1979–1980), The Bitter
Love tells the story of an overseas Chinese artist who returns to China
before the Cultural Revolution and subsequently suffers miserably. In
desperation, his daughter and her boyfriend decide to leave China by
illegally crossing the border, a lifesaving act taken by millions of poor
or persecuted Chinese at the time. The daughter asks the father who
is opposed to her decision because of his patriotism: “You love this
country, but does this country love you?” The movie ends with the artist dying in the snow-covered wilderness with his desperate crawling on
the white ground leaving behind a big, black question mark. The movie
was shot but never publically shown although it stirred a heated debate.
Responsible cadres of all propaganda organs (the party’s Department of
Propaganda, the state’s Ministry of Culture and associations of writers,
artists, and filmmakers, and the army’s cultural departments because the
screenwriter was in the army) along with numerous high-ranking leaders of the party-state previewed the film.
The censorship and discussion of the movie lasted almost two years.
The relatively liberal atmosphere of the immediate post-Cultural
Revolution era allowed some voices sympathetic to the movie to come
out with suggestions of cutting some scenes (for example using an ellipsis to replace the question mark at the end of the movie). Hu Yaobang,
30 Y. Cheng
the chairman of the party’s central committee, who was known for his
pro-liberal approach, refused to preview the movie to avoid becoming
entangled in the debate that would certainly have brought him into
direct confrontation with the conservatives. Deng Xiaoping eventually intervened and refused the movie’s public showing. The discussion
was an early sign of the conflict between the party’s more liberal leaders
and hardliners which culminated in 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The honor that was showered on A Loyal Child of Overseas Chinese and
the ban on The Bitter Love sent a clear message especially to overseas
Chinese: as long as you are Chinese by race, you should remain loyal to
China. Such an arbitrary onus is an explicit blood-based racial nationalism. The People’s Liberation Army Daily (April 21, 1981) condemned
the movie The Bitter Love saying it “not only negates the ‘four cardinal
principles,’ but also repudiates patriotism,”1 which implied that in the
post-Mao era official ideology, a biologically conceived patriotism was
more fundamental than socialism or communism (Baidu.com3, 2018).
Recommended as one of the most important patriotic songs, “I Love
You, China” was paired with “China, China, the Red Sun Never Sets” to
represent musical patriotism in constructing the contemporary Chinese
identity during the early years of its formation. A masculine marching
chorus created as a candidate for a new national anthem and a feminine
solo melody expressing a blood-based affection of the motherland, the
two songs thus pioneered the twin themes and the twin tones of musical
patriotism in the new era. More importantly, both foregrounded China,
the name of the country in their titles and repeated it in their lyrics.
Before this, no patriotic songs had titles or even lyrics including the word
China or Chinese. Instead, the most popular ones just used the word
motherland. For example, “Ode to the Motherland,” a grand chorus
created in 1951 shortly after the founding of the PRC and regarded as
an official National March (similar to “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in
America) and “My Motherland,” a theme song in a famous 1956 movie
1The “four cardinal principles” refers to the unchallengeable status of Marxism, socialism, the party’s leading role, and the dictatorship of the proletariat in governing China’s ideology and politics,
proposed by Deng Xiaoping, the de facto paramount leader in 1979.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 31
(The Shangganling ) about Chinese soldiers fighting Americans in the
Korean War. A female solo with a chorus in the background, the latter
is a lovely sentimental ballad relating the country scenes of the soldiers’
home. Together they are regarded as the most representative patriotic
songs between the founding of the PRC and the end of the Mao era and
are still included in the official list of the most favored patriotic songs.
They are similar in musical styles to “China, China, the Red Sun Never
Sets” and “I Love You, China,” respectively. Neither of them, however,
refer to “China” or “Chinese,” like the other two do. In other words,
there was no need to project the very names of the country and the people to arouse nationalist passions before the late 1970s.
It was therefore for the first time in the history of political music in
the PRC that the name of the country was used to induce a “China
consciousness,” a term I suggest in this book to indicate a historicized
nationalistic awareness speaking to China and the Chinese in order to
reinforce patriotic conformity among the people. It first appeared and
proliferated in music although it has also been expressed in other discourses especially since the 1990s. Such a musical Chinese consciousness would later on find itself in anything suggestive to the country and
the people, including things normally hard to pair with music such as
paintings, calligraphy, or porcelain, and even the Chinese language and
some elusive cultural contexts. In the late 1970s, directly invoking the
country and people’s names in the context of historical narrative and
nationalist contemplation was an act of objectifying the subject by itself,
signifying the awakening of the latter. In this case it constituted part of
the emerging national identity politics of post-Mao China. Over decades, driven by deliberate patriotic propaganda and intense competition in the popular culture market, this originally rather subconscious
national Self has become omnipresent in cultural production. A very
popular TV series on cuisines from all over China, for example, finds
the intimacy between the country and a person’s tastebuds in its title
China at the Tip of Your Tongue. The entire series had three seasons and
was broadcast globally between 2012 and 2018.
It is this burgeoning China consciousness in officially endorsed popular music that sharpened the sense of both the individual and collective Self in the early 1980s and prepared the way for the color of race
32 Y. Cheng
to tint the politics of national identity. The words “China” and “the
Chinese” were soon to coexist or simply be replaced by words and
phrases such as “black eyes, black hair, and yellow skin,” “descendants
of the Dragon,” “yellow people,” “yellow skin,” or simply “yellow.” Also,
a marching Chineseness originally expressed only in the context of the
national anthem or a national march now even strode in the melodies of
many patriotic pop songs that explicitly proclaimed “let the world know
we are the Chinese.”
Racializing Patriotism in Gangtai Popular Music
In the wake of the burgeoning China consciousness, the emergence of
racial nationalism in post-Mao China started in the early 1980s with
a particular music genre: the Gangtai (港台 an abbreviation of Hong
Kong and Taiwan in Chinese) patriotic pop songs whose lyrics appealed
to explicit racial markers that constructed an essentialized Chineseness.
In a self-indulgent manner, the music genre narrates the nation’s history
to highlight moments of native-engendered glory and foreign-inflicted
humiliation, and proclaims China’s revival in a dramatic characterization of “Us” vs. the world.
Created by the capitalist pop music industry in Gangtai, most of
its products were performed by pop singers who were not mainland
Chinese (some even being raised in the United States) but spoke to a
mainland-bound Chineseness. This biographical addendum not only
informed the audience of the performers’ persona—something that
always adds to pop stars’ charm in the eyes of their fans—but also
pointed to their lost but now found identity by claiming the blood
lineage in their singing. This racial sameness reduced social differences between the pop stars and their audience by satisfying the latter’s
self-esteem. The mainlanders’ socioeconomic inferiority complex before
Gangtai and overseas Chinese was now mitigated: much richer and living a free life, the Gangtai and overseas fellow Chinese nonetheless had
to come to “us” to find their sense of belonging, which had been either
lost or suppressed by the societies they had resided in and was now so
longed for in their music. Economically poor and socially less free, the
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 33
mainlanders however were morally superior in their collective virtue by
never leaving the land of their ancestors and living a life harmonious
with their cultural inheritance, while the non-mainlanders seemed to be
wanderers longing for return and acceptance.
The image of the homecoming wandering son (游子) is indeed metaphorical in classical and modern Chinese literary traditions, especially
reflected in poems and prose written by early twentieth century Chinese
intellectuals who studied and worked abroad and then returned. It
implies a forgivable guilt of leaving the homeland for one’s own benefit and escaping from misfortunes that their country folks might have
endured on the one hand, and praises a magnanimous and embracing
home community on the other. Instead of the political socialization and
citizenship status of a nation state that defines a person, in this Chinese
perception the strength of the bloodline, the bond of common ancestry, and the appeal of the land and soil, are the primeval elements that
prove eventually more decisive in determining one’s identity and sense
of belonging. This, as history has shown, already gets much closer to a
racial discourse and belief.
The political and market success of these Gangtai patriotic songs
led to many mimics among mainland Chinese pop musicians who
adopted racial language and concepts in their own products. As mainlanders themselves, their nationalism originally did not need a particularly racialized manner to express their sense of belonging. However, as
China rises, they are quickly finding that a racial patriotism is certainly
more vigorous than ordinary nationalism as a tool for mass mobilization, therefore a colorless “motherland” seems less galvanizing for at
least some mainland musicians. In this sense, Gangtai patriotic songs
awakened the racial consciousness of mainlanders, not only among
artists but also among ordinary people as well. Together, Gangtai and
mainland pop musicians formed a patriotic music movement that connects the Chinese in different parts of the world, and the movement
was centripetal to mainland China. Paradoxically, this very popular
form of contemporary Chinese patriotism endorsed by the party-state
was originally manufactured by the capitalist popular culture industry
in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the Chinese identity expressed in it
was initially performed by non-mainland Chinese pop singers on stage.
34 Y. Cheng
The propagation of technological advancement, from portable radios to
tape players, karaoke, MTV, and digital music have helped this patriotic
pop music to become a daily experience for billions of Chinese, from
the leaders at the top to the common people.
On November 8, 2017, Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the
Party and the President of the State, met Donald Trump, the visiting American President in Beijing. The meeting was unprecedentedly
arranged in the Forbidden City, the symbol of the imperial power of
China. The CCTV news channel showed coverage of the meeting in
which Xi proudly told Trump: “We inherit and continue to have black
hair and yellow skin; we call ourselves Descendants of the Dragon”
(Wang 2017). Every word Xi uttered derives from those Gangtai patriotic songs and they form Xi’s perception of the Chinese identity. Xi’s
comments exemplify the impact of the manufactured patriotism and
performed Chineseness: they have been consumed and internalized by
multiple generations since the early 1980s, from the leaders at the top
to the common people.
This music genre is actually a crafty form of political socialization,
a collaboration of a capitalist cultural industry and a party-state. From
the consumer’s perspective, it seems to be as innocent as a shopper’s
choice of merchandise. The key to understanding this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon is that the capitalist music industry, with all the
novel and fanciful features of a modern popular entertainment form,
facilitated for the socialist party-state a most cohesive element—a racial
discourse—for its ideological agenda at a time when it was facing an
ideological crisis created by the disastrous political and economic policies of Mao’s era.
This chapter analytically introduces the creation and popularization
of Gangtai patriotic songs as a political genre of pop music in China
since the early 1980s and explores its relationship with the politics of
nationalism. This discourse is analyzed in a context of Chinese nationalist politics from an identity anxiety in the 1980s in different parts
of the Greater China to a nationalist pride since the late 1990s in the
global Chinese world. The chapter reveals a collaboration between the
Gangtai capitalist music industry and the CCP propaganda apparatus
in manufacturing a racialized patriotism through issuing work orders,
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 35
spontaneous submissions, and censorship. The chapter answers the
questions of why such a discourse took the form of popular culture,
why it originated and further developed in Taiwan and Hong Kong,
and more importantly, why it had to address itself in a racial language.
Last, the chapter demonstrates that the mainland audience as consumers also participated in the propagation of this popular culture through
their interaction with Gangtai pop stars in the popular culture market.
Scholarly works relevant to this chapter’s subject could be divided
into three parts: general studies of Chinese nationalism, studies of
Chinese popular culture, and studies of racial thinking. None of these,
however, has examined or even noticed Gangtai patriotic songs.2 The
appropriation of racial concepts, along with rhetoric and specific language imported from Gangtai patriotic songs into contemporary
Chinese nationalist discourse has not been generally recognized by those
studying China. The understanding and interpretation of Gangtai patriotic songs and their impact on mainland China can therefore lead to
a more adequate understanding and interpretation of the nature and
strength of contemporary popular nationalism in China.
The official promotion of “patriotic songs” since the early 1980s
has propagated the party-state’s nationalist agenda among the populace. As part of the effort to repair its damaged legitimacy after the
Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, the
CCP attempted to identify itself with the nation by placing a greater
emphasis on the role of savior of the nation rather than the liberator
of the underclass. To this end, it recategorized many previously revolutionary songs as patriotic songs. One prominent example is “The East
Is Red,” the most famous hymn to Mao, and another is “Without the
Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” The party also
encourages the creation of new patriotic songs and will label any popular songs as “patriotic” as long as their lyrics praise the country’s natural
2The
scholarship involving pop music and contemporary Chinese nationalism is represented by
Baranovitch (2005) and Kloet (2010). Neither of them discussed racial thinking in pop music as
a major subject, nor was the role of Gangtai patriotic songs in Chinese nationalism mentioned. In
works dealing with contemporary Chinese nationalism in general, the topic of racism in popular
culture is either missing or is involved only marginally.
36 Y. Cheng
beauty and culture or simply are sentimental about the place where
one was born and raised. For example, the latter would be “I Love You,
The Snow [Fallen] Beyond the Great Wall” and “The Tibetan-Qinghai
Plateau.” Both are songs which express awe at China’s natural beauty
and magnificent landscapes. Both have also been included in the “one
hundred patriotic songs” recommended by the CCP’s Propaganda
Department and by the Ministry of Culture in 2009, the year of the
celebration of the PRC’s sixtieth anniversary. As the result, it is safe to
say that contemporary Chinese patriotic songs are more numerous than
they were during the anti-Japanese War—“the time of the greatest danger” for the Chinese nation according to the national anthems (List of
100 Patriotic Songs 2009).
Among these officially recommended patriotic songs, some were created
by Gangtai pop music producers, including “Descendants of the Dragon”
(龙的传人), “My Chinese Heart” (我的中国心), “The Chinese”
(中国人), “The Great Wall Will Never Fall” (万里长城永不倒), and
“The Pearl of the Orient” (东方之珠). These are prominent examples with the first two as harbingers and prototypes created in 1978 and
1983, respectively. However, the whole category of Gangtai patriotic songs
includes a large number with the majority of them being created between
the 1990s and the 2000s. Together, they form a political genre of pop
music.
A brief introduction to the historical background of Gangtai pop
music’s popularity in the mainland is necessary before any specific discussions. Gangtai pop music was introduced to China in the early
1980s, as the end of the Cultural Revolution loosened the grip of
extreme Maoism on social life and created cultural space for expressions
of individual pursuit as well as personal character. At the time, China
encouraged investment and tourism revenues generated by connections
with Hong Kong and Taiwan as part of its open door policy. This new
relationship was conducive to the introduction of Gangtai pop culture
in the mainland. Merchants, tourists, and other travellers brought with
them Gangtai pop music products. A much more important source of
the propagation of such non-socialist music products was the illegal
importation of tapes and tape players (tape recorders, notably the Dutch
Philipps and Japanese Sanyo brands). The business of contraband was
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 37
particularly thriving in the provinces of coastal Guangdong and Fujian,
where it has a long history and local government officers often turn a
blind eye. Gradually a pop music market—despite its unofficial status—
began to emerge and spread into other provinces.
Like pop music elsewhere, the majority of Gangtai pop songs were
tender love songs and intimate personal melodies often customized by
music companies for singers of different styles to meet and create market demand. Compared with the revolutionary songs and especially
those that were created in and dominated the years of the Cultural
Revolution, Gangtai pop songs were “soft sounding” and compassionate. Their rapid and enormous popularity in China helped depoliticize
the country’s cultural life. As a result, some famous Gangtai pop singers were idolized by young people, thus marking the emergence of pop
music fans as a social group. As a then political joke reflected, “In the
daytime we listen to the old Deng (Deng Xiaoping) but in the evening
we listen to the young Deng.” Deng Lijun or Terasa Teng, the “young
Deng,” was a Taiwanese pop singer. She was extremely popular in the
overseas Chinese world as well as in Japan, because she could sing in
Japanese and many of her famous songs were originally created by the
Japanese. Her charming tone singing in Japanese helped her popularity
in China in the 1980s when Japanese consumer goods and popular culture products (especially movies and TV series) were regarded as signs of
modernization and internationalization.
In the meantime, another type of Gangtai pop music also came to
China and developed into a trendy new music genre: Gangtai patriotic pop songs. Two types of Gangtai pop music have thus coexisted
and they have been essentially symbiotic: in order to reap profits from
China’s enormous pop music market by singing tender melodies, a
Gangtai pop singer had to chant patriotic hymns created in Gangtai as a
political gesture.3 The origin of this political genre of pop music can be
3Although
Deng Lijun or Terasa Teng was the most popular Taiwanese singer (with tapes and
records disseminated in the mainland) in the mainland from the early 1980s to the early 1990s,
she never set foot on the mainland due to her pro-Taiwan position. She was known for her
enthusiasm in singing Taiwanese patriotic songs and for performing for the Taiwanese army.
Deng died in 1995.
38 Y. Cheng
traced back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, and can be represented
by two prototypic songs. Composed in Taiwan and Hong Kong at a
time critical to their identity politics, “Descendants of the Dragon” and
“My Chinese Heart” became classics of the genre not just in their theme
and lyrics but also in the way they were produced and popularized in
mainland China.
“Descendants of the Dragon” and “My Chinese
Heart”: Two Classics
“Descendants of the Dragon” was created when the United States
decided to switch full diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in
late 1978, thus becoming the last Western country to betray Taiwan in
the eyes of the Taiwanese Nationalists. To the Taiwanese, Washington’s
change of policy did more than decisively crippling their international
status; it also essentially questioned their Chineseness. Since 1949,
when the Nationalists retreated from the mainland to Taiwan, they had
always insisted that they represented Chinese culture and tradition, in
addition to a legitimate Chinese government, while the PRC represented a non-Chinese ideology and a Russian influence that destroyed
Chinese tradition by denouncing Confucianism and native culture.
Therefore the genuine Chineseness, as the Nationalists told the world
and educated their young generations, had survived only in Taiwan.
America’s betrayal was particularly met with anger and confusion
among Taiwanese college students. In an emotional response, Hou
Dejian, a 22-year-old college student and popular singer, composer, and
lyricist, wrote the song. The late 1970s was a time of the “Campus Folk
Song” (校园歌曲) movement in Taiwan followed by college students
who found a more independent self-expression in this musical trend. It
was also under the influence of the Western-originated cultural trend
of the commercialization of music, represented by the emergence of the
record industry and the establishment of artists and repertoire (A&R)
departments. A collaboration between cultural capitalism and the artistic community, this trend quickly nurtured and dominated not only
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 39
contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong’s pop music market but also
expanded to the mainland. While most Campus Folk Songs were intentionally made to be apolitical, a rebellious posture against the officially
promoted anti-communist songs, “Descendants of the Dragon” was
exceptionally political. Part of its lyrics are as follows:
In the Ancient East there is a Dragon/her name is China/In the
Ancient East there is a people/they are all the descendants of the
Dragon/I grew up under the claw of the Dragon/after I grew up I became
a descendant of the Dragon/Black eyes, black hair, yellow skin/forever
and ever a descendant of the Dragon. (Lyrics of “Descendants of the
Dragon” from 1978)
The song finds a racialized identity for the Chinese and associates
it with a totemic mysticism in a succinct sentence: “Black eyes, black
hair, and yellow skin (abbreviated to “two blacks and one yellow”), forever and ever we are descendants of the Dragon” (abbreviated as the
“Dragon song”). First, the song denotes the innate and self-sustaining
nature of being Chinese—it is physical, biological, and primal, and
therefore defies any recognition based on sociopolitical or cultural status. Second, the dragon in the song is perceived as a totemic animal
god patronizing the Chinese people and their land, a uniquely Chinese
imagination, as Hou himself told the mainland Chinese ten years later
when he was performing the song at China’s CCTV Spring Festival
Gala: “while animal totems of all other nations are real animals, only
the Dragon is a creation of Chinese people’s imagination.” His elaboration triggered claps and cheers from the audience (CCTV 1988). Third,
it establishes an intimate bond between the Chinese people, the natural setting, and a geohistorical concept of the East. Last, it conveyed a
strong sense of a nationalistic grievance against a hostile and treacherous
outside world with amorphous, and therefore unidentified, enemies. A
stanza in the lyrics reads “one hundred years ago, gun and cannon fire
destroyed the tranquil night” and the Chinese were “surrounded on all
sides by the appeasers’ swords.” It asked the “dragon” to remain vigilant
“with eyes forever wide open.”
40 Y. Cheng
With its racialized identity and a victimhood complex contextualized in a geohistorical East, the song thus sets the tone for later Gangtai
patriotic songs. It was rapidly promoted by the Taiwanese government
to boost nationalist morale in the aftermath of America’s betrayal and
Hou was recognized as a pop star with a strong political bearing. At
that time Taiwan was still under martial law (it began in 1949 when the
Nationalist government retreated from the mainland) which authorized
the government’s news bureau to censor publications including musical products. The bureau changed one line of the lyrics to turn down
its overtly anti-Western tone. The original line was “Surrounded on all
sides by Westerners’ swords,” and the official revision was “Surrounded
on all sides by the appeasers’ swords,” implying that Western countries
had been adopting an appeasement policy towards mainland China
that sacrificed Taiwan’s status. In this revision the West was ambiguously criticized as a wrongdoer instead of being denounced as a national
enemy. This strategy of ambiguity and vagueness in identifying a
national enemy was later adopted by all Gangtai and mainland patriotic
songs in the context of the coexistence of Sino-Western economic relations and political confrontation.
Hou defected to China in 1983. This defection was largely driven by
his dream of a “great China” and his belief that it would be the mainland rather than Taiwan that would fulfil the nationalistic mission of
representing all Chinese globally (Hou 1991, pp. 40–41).4 As the creator of the song influential in Taiwan for its strong Chinese nationalist
sentiment, Hou’s defection was seen by Beijing as a victory over Taiwan
in representing China. A nationalism originally gravitated in Taiwan
was now transmitted to the PRC with its essence—a racialized national
identity—unchanged but finding a more powerful base there. The
implication of the phrase “appeasers’ swords” was ignored—after all,
4In
1981, representing Taiwanese youth, Hou visited a UN refugee camp on the Thailand border for ethnic Chinese who had been victims of the Khmer Rouge. Hou led the refugees to
sing “Descendants of the Dragon” and hoped that a great number of them could be brought to
Taiwan, but it turned out that Taiwan took fewer than ten to the island. This was the event that
forced Hou to realize Taiwan’s limit in representing China and protecting Chinese people internationally. See Hou (1991, pp. 40–41).
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 41
the line did not specify who the appeasers were and who the appeased
was. In fact, no mainlanders had ever asked publicly what that line
really meant after the song was introduced to the mainland. After Hou
arrived in Beijing in late 1983, the song was immediately accepted as a
patriotic song in the mainland. The songs “Two Blacks and One Yellow”
and “Descendants of the Dragon” have been popular ever since in both
China and the overseas Chinese world, and have even become synonyms for “Chinese” in everyday usage.
The national occasion for the “Dragon song” to come into the limelight was the 1985 Spring Festival Gala, a national celebration of the
Chinese New Year. Officially starting in 1983 and produced by China’s
Central Television (CCTV), the Gala is a major innovation of the postMao CCP propaganda form that deploys a variety of performing arts
(music, dancing, crosstalk, monologue drama, one-act plays, acrobatics, reality shows, etc.) to portray China and Chinese people. It creates
an atmosphere of a national oneness by encouraging the audience to clap
hands and cheer, reading telegraphs sent from soldiers patrolling borders
or others whose occupations keep them from spending the night with
their families, conveying blessings from overseas Chinese, and announcing greeting messages from party-state leaders. The most dramatic theatrical effect of this celebration in constructing a single Chineseness is its live,
televised broadcasting. It brings all Chinese people, especially the overseas Chinese, into an imagined single family at the moment deemed to
be essentially Chinese. A sense of concurrent celebration—a time/space
continuum that transcends temporal/spatial localities—is created and
annually reinforced. Indeed, it is a popular and effective tool for the shaping of a collective Chinese identity. The programs in each year’s event are
selected and scrutinized by the party’s censors. For performers and directors, participation in such an event brings official honor and national reputation. Many Gangtai and mainland patriotic songs were either debuted
or became popular through their performance in this event.
The choice of singer to perform the song for the first time on the
national stage was deliberately made to demonstrate a blood-based
transnational Chineseness. Instead of a mainlander signer or Hou
himself, the official selection fell upon Daniel K. Wong, a ChineseAmerican and the mayor of Cerritos, a small Asian-majority city in
42 Y. Cheng
California. Born in Hong Kong as an American citizen (Wong’s father
was a Chinese-American US citizen) and later settling in America,
Wong was a successful medical doctor and socially very active, being
especially well known for his mainland-bound Chinese nationalism. China’s People’s Political Consultative Conference contacted the
American Embassy in Beijing to get a list of politically active ChineseAmericans, and Wong was their choice to be the singer of the song at
the 1985 Spring Festival Gala. After singing the “Dragon song”, Wong
began to sing and promote more Chinese patriotic songs in America
and engaged in numerous political, cultural, and charitable activities
related to China. As a result of these he obtained two nicknames: “the
singing mayor” and “a dragon under the Star-Spangled Banner.” He
was the first person to introduce mainland China to America through
the founding of a TV station in California in 1988. More interestingly,
he was the first “foreign political figure [since he was the mayor of an
American city, albeit a small one] who paid a visit to China after the
1989 Beijing incident [a euphemism for the 1989 Tiananmen Square
Massacre in China],” when Beijing was shunned by virtually the entire
international community. He is also believed to be the only overseas
Chinese person who has kept a record of shaking hands with Chinese
leaders since the 1980s (Baidu.com4, 2018).
In the same year that Hou defected to the mainland, “The Orphan
of Asia” (亚细亚的孤儿), another song, was created by Luo Dayou,
the most important Taiwanese folk musician of the time. In the song,
racial markers were once again used to signify complex feelings of
Taiwanese identity: “The orphan of Asia is crying in wind/yellow face
stained with dirty earth of a red color/black eyeballs reflect fear of
white color.” The Orphan of Asia was the title of a novel written by Wu
Zhuoliu, a Taiwanese author who was active between the 1940s and
the 1970s. Written in the last years of World War Two, the novel, later
made into a movie, expresses the feelings of uncertainty and anxiety
among Taiwanese intellectuals as the end of the war approached, casting a shadow on the future of Taiwan. A remote ocean frontier territory of the Chinese Qing Empire (an island by itself prior to the Qing),
Taiwan was ceded to and colonized by Japan after the 1894–1895 SinoJapanese War, joined the Japanese war against China and the Allies,
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 43
and faced renationalization by China in 1945. In the aftershocks of
the US’s “abandonment of Taiwan,” “The Orphan of Asia” once again
epitomized the mood of helplessness and loneliness as the result of a
long history of not being able to stand for oneself. The song was later
introduced to the mainland as Luo became popular there with his other
musical output, including the very popular “The Pearl of the Orient,” in
which racial markers of the Chinese were further projected that demonstrate Luo’s consistence in addressing Chineseness. Although never a
match to the “Dragon song” in popularity, “The Orphan of Asia” is also
significant in its use of racialized concepts identical with those expressed
in the “Dragon song” to foreground a twisted national identity anguish
among the Taiwanese, which is exploited by mainland China.
The second song, “My Chinese Heart,” was written in Hong Kong
in 1982 while Beijing and London were negotiating over the colony’s
handover to China. To many Hong Kong residents, this was the first
time that the question “Who am I?” became acute and pressing after
more than one hundred and forty years of ambiguous national identity
(the British colonial authorities intentionally obscured national identity consciousness) (Zhu 1998, pp. 150–152). A pro-China nationalist
sentiment grew stronger as many Hong Kongers realized the inevitability of renationalization. Also in July 1982, as Japanese nationalism
reemerged following the nation’s economic rise, Japan’s educational
authority issued new guidelines for the revision of history textbooks
which significantly modified wording in regards to Japanese invasions
of China. The most audacious word change was replacing the Japanese
army’s “invasion of China” with “entering China.” The Japanese move
provoked Chinese criticism which was echoed in Hong Kong—a
Chinese territory that suffered Japanese occupation during World
War Two (Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen 1982). Around the time
of this history textbook issue, an archaeological forgery of Homo erectus sites in Japan brought the entire nation into a whirl of nationalist
pride for almost twenty years (see Chapter 3). Eventually, in 1985,
the Japanese Prime Minister began to pay official visits to the Yasukuni
Shrine as a symbolic gesture in defiance of the international consensus on Japan’s guilt during World War Two. Therefore, in a broader
vision, Japanese historical revisionism can be regarded as part of the
44 Y. Cheng
reconstruction of national identity in East Asia at a time when many
unsolved historical problems demanded a solution. Some of these
national efforts, as presented here, were interregionally connected. The
Japanese revisionist attitude towards the history of World War Two has
been an external stimuli for Chinese nationalism.
The song reflects this identity anxiety explicitly and passionately but
nothing can point to an anti-Japanese sentiment (unlike the anti-Western
sentiment expressed in the Dragon song), although decades later when
the account of the song’s making was told, the Japanese history textbook
issue was recalled and even emphasized by people involved in the song’s
creation and promotion. It is reasonable to believe that the textbook issue
was indeed part of the historical context of the moment, given its publicity
at the time. But a less known fact is that the creation of the song was an
odd combination of Hong Kong’s pro-China politics and a market-testing
effort made by a capitalist pop music company, the Wing Hang Record
Trading Co. Ltd. The company originally commissioned a musician and
a writer to compose the song in Mandarin in order to appeal to Beijing
and its admirers in Hong Kong. However, since Cantonese had been the
dominant language in Hong Kong’s popular culture market (the so-called
Cantopop 粤语流行歌曲) on which royalties drawn from sales of tapes
and records were the main revenue for companies and singers, no established lyricist would write, and no popular singer would sing, in Mandarin.
Huang Bingheng, the owner of the company, had been inspired
by the market success of Taiwan’s Campus Folk Songs movement
(lyrics written and chanted in Mandarin) and had issued its records
including the “Dragon song” in Hong Kong. He thought that
under the political situation of the time, such a song was worthy
of trying. Singing in Mandarin would ride the arriving tide of the
Chinese renationalization of Hong Kong, as he believed. Cantonese
had been regarded as being associated with the colonial culture
that picked a regional dialect to defy a national language. At a dinner with Huang Zhan, the most famous pop song lyricist in Hong
Kong, Huang Bingheng asked him to write lyrics for an explicitly
national song in Mandarin Chinese (in Hong Kong at the time the
term national was used more frequently than patriotic for pro-China
politics). Huang Zhan was indeed nationalistic but hesitant to write
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 45
a song in Mandarin. He was known for numerous love melodies but
also theme songs of movies and teledramas in Cantonese in which
Chinese martial arts beat Western boxing. He was concerned that
such a song would not sell well on the market and as a result his
reputation would be affected. However, Huang Bingheng’s vision
of Hong Kong’s political future convinced Huang Zhan. He agreed
to do the job if he was offered compensation equal to the payment
made for lyrics written in Cantonese. The boss agreed. Huang Zhan
instantly came up with the idea that the “lyrics should include the
name of China, heart, and the Chinese nation.”
Huang Bingheng then selected Zhang Mingmin to perform the
song. An amateur but enthusiastic singer, Zhang’s daytime job was as
an assembly line worker in electrical manufacturing and he was associated with a leftist trade union. Huang had earlier discovered Zhang
and placed him in the “Mandarin nationalist singer” category of his
inventory. At his arrangement, Zhang had already performed—singing
in Mandarin—“Descendants of the Dragon” in Hong Kong but sales
of the record were not an impressive success in a market dominated by
Cantopop products. Nonetheless, Huang decided to give it a shot with
a piece made in Hong Kong under the new political situation. Part of
the lyrics are as follows:
Western outfits dress me/But my heart will always be Chinese/My ancestors branded my heart with a Chinese mark/Blood that flows through my
veins/Rolling and roaring—“China”—that’s the name/Although I was
born in a foreign land/It can never change the Chinese heart of mine.
(Baidu.com5, 2018)
While the “Dragon song” used colors of the race and a divine animal totem to speak to Chineseness, “My Chinese Heart” appeals to
similar biological, but more innate and primal elements in defining
Chineseness—“heart,” “blood,” and “ancestor.” It goes further to essentialize such an identity, believing that such a “Chinese heart” defies any
political socialization and citizenship status. The song and the singer
were discovered by the CCP’s propaganda agents in 1983 and immediately became another symbol of Chinese patriotism in the form of
46 Y. Cheng
pop music originating from outside the mainland. Zhang Mingmin was
later invited to sing this song at the 1984 CCTV Spring Festival Gala.5
“Descendants of the Dragon” and “My Chinese Heart” came to
China unexpectedly but met the party-state’s political agenda in a timely
manner. As the old-fashioned Maoist ideology retreated, the party-state
needed a new propaganda that was more rooted in nationalism and took
a more attractive popular form. The “Dragon song” and “My Chinese
Heart” entered China’s burgeoning pop music market which had begun
with apolitical “soft songs” such as Teresa Deng’s, but now the new
form of mass entertainment could also fit the party’s patriotic education
agenda in a more spontaneous and engaging manner. Political education started to take a market-driven, supply-and-demand-determined
popular culture form. To the CCP, the two songs were salient examples
of the support expressed by the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong for
the “One-China” policy and national unification. In a more implicit
way such a mainland-bound patriotism also helped to repair the damage done to the party-state’s legitimacy by Maoist political campaigns
and economic mismanagement: if Chinese people in Hong Kong and
Taiwan, who did not suffer from the Cultural Revolution and had
enjoyed a much higher standard of living, were now so attached to a
mainland-oriented nationalism, then why shouldn’t the Chinese people
in the mainland be more proud of their Chineseness?
These two songs also helped the CCP party-state to solve a dilemma
between domestic patriotic education and international policies. As
China normalized its relationship with Western countries and Japan
to fully take advantage of their Cold War anti-Soviet and pro-China
5Because China at the time had not joined the International Copyright Protection organization,
Huang Bingheng, the mastermind of the song’s creation and the owner of Wing Hang Record
Trading Co. Ltd, which held the song’s copyright, could not make any profit from the Chinese
market despite the song’s significant success in the mainland. Not only that, Huang quickly realized that the song’s pro-mainland content could negatively affect his market share in Taiwan. He
never contracted Zhang Mingmin for any such performances. Huang Zhan, the lyricist, simply
forgot about the song until two years later when he ran into Zhang Mingmin, who told him of
the song’s popularity in the mainland. Huang complained to Zhang that he had not received
a penny from China and jokingly asked Zhang to get some royalties for him from China. It is
believed that years later, after China joined the International Copyright Protection organization,
Huang received some compensation.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 47
strategies for China’s reform and openness policies, an overtly revengeful
anti-imperialist propaganda was out of the question. The “Dragon song”
and “My Chinese Heart” resulted in expressing grievance against foreigners in a muffled but more emotional way, with enemies not named but
vaguely signified through the use of metaphors and allusions. By contrast, songs created during the anti-Japanese war and the Korean War
named the Japanese and Americans as enemies. This discourse strategy
nurtured a nationalist anti-foreign sentiment that was suppressed at the
time by international circumstances but was fermenting deep in the
minds of the Chinese, anxiously awaiting for the time to erupt. It was a
deliberate propaganda scheme that carefully drew a line between domestic ideological education and international policy statement. It is a propaganda game that the CCP regime has played ever since the 1980s.
Without identifying a specific national enemy, lyrics of subsequent
Gangtai and, later, mainland patriotic songs as well, vent resentment in
such words as “gun and cannon fires,” “tears,” “wounds,” and “pains.”
Eventually, in the late 1990s, the audience began to hear such assertions
as “it’s time to let the world know who we are,” and even “the yellow
race walk on the Earth,” as China’s continued rise brought about an
increase in nationalist confidence. However, because no particular
foreign countries could be officially and openly identified and condemned as China’s enemy (although on social media Western countries, Japan, South Korea, and many of China’s South and Southeast
Asian neighbors have been so named and cursed) in a time of close
international economic relationship, an ambiguously referred outside world is frequently used as an alternative that thwarts a marching China. This avoidance led to a vague perception of “China vs. the
world” being embedded in the minds of numerous Chinese nationalists. The official doctrine of China’s diplomacy during the 1990s had
been “hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time,” as Deng Xiaoping
succinctly put it in a popular Chinese idiom (韬光养晦). In policy
and academic communities, however, such a restrictive strategy began
to encounter criticism from radical nationalists in the 2000s as China
continued to flex its muscles. A similar revisionist mentality was already
chanted in stanzas of popular patriotic songs as early as the 1990s. In
this way, it might not be an overexaggeration to say that by exerting a
48 Y. Cheng
racialized discourse in making nationalist claims, pop-music patriotism
pioneered a populist and aggressive mentality that defied official policy
norms, but enjoyed official acquiescence.
The More Racialized, the More Patriotic—The
Imitations
Since the early 1980s, China’s pop music market has expanded to have
the largest and most diverse population of fans in the world. Inspired by
the political and market success of the “Dragon song” and “My Chinese
Heart,” appearing as if out of a wellspring, numerous patriotic songs
have been created by Gangtai cultural producers. Some more gifted
singers penned lyrics or composed music themselves for their signature pieces to impress audience in China. Rapidly appearing one after
the other, with a flag-waving nationalistic approach, the most famous
ones include “The Chinese” (中国人), “The Chinese Nation” (中华民
族), “I Am Chinese” (我是中国人), “Brave Chinese” (勇敢的中国人),
“We Possess the Name ‘Chinese’” (我们拥有一个名字叫中国), “The
Youth, the Chinese Heart” (青年人 中国心), “The Chinese Language”
(中国话), “Roots and Arteries” (根脉相连), “My Root Is in China”
(我的根在中国), “The Yellow Race” (黄种人), “The Yellow” (黄), and
“The Yellow Skin” (黄皮肤). Many more are less well known, such as
“The Sons and Grandsons of the Dragon” (龙的子孙), “The Dragon
Rides the Wind” (龙乘风而来), “The Giant Dragon Takes Off”
(腾飞的龙), and “The Dragon Scripts” (龙文). There are yet many
more whose titles do not denote China or any ethnic, cultural, and
racial symbols but their lyrics do.
A new development in this pop music patriotism is the incorporation of elements of contemporary Western pop music especially rap and
hip hop into their performance. This invention was made particularly
because some of the singers were raised and educated in America and
they either adopted rap or hip hop in their compositions or improvised
it in their performances. Rap and hip hop allow the singer to chant
rhythmic lines in a rapid but often stifled tone between musical lyrics,
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 49
acting as an effective outlet for suppressed or side-lined ethnic or class
feelings that are difficult to pair with music due to their coarse and even
vulgar wording. Originally created by African-American musicians as
a distinctive artistic style to assert their ethnic identity with an implication of cultural resistance, the adoption of rap and hip hop allowed
Gangtai patriotic singers to include a lot more grief-stricken and
revengeful emotions against the enemy to cater to their Chinese audience, therefore significantly furthering the influence of Gangtai patriotic
songs in China with a more militant spirit.
These songs have expanded the racialized discourse articulated in the
“Dragon song” and “My Chinese Heart” by finding new racial markers to denote Chineseness. Examples include “Never Forget My Yellow
Face” (“Pearl of the Orient”), “What an intelligent people and what a
beautiful language/the words we utter/the whole world listens” (“The
Chinese Language”), “Black eyes and black hair/ [you are] truly benevolent … With Yan and Huang the common ancestry/we as descendants
share the same blood (Dragon Scripts).” While sorrow and self-pity
characterized a mood common to most of these songs, more heavyhanded tones and harrowing narratives were adopted to stress the emotions of grievance and anger. The lyrics of some of these songs are thick
with explicitly racist language expressing a sense of victimhood in the
face of unidentified foreign enemies. “The Chinese,” created in 1997, is
a case in point. Consider the following lyrics written for a Hong Kong
pop singer and his Chinese audience. After proclaiming an experience
of “5000 years of winds and rains,” the stanza narrates, “yellow faces,
black eyes, our smiles remain the same … The same tears, the same
pain/Past sufferings are remembered in our hearts/The same blood,
the same racial seeds/There are still dreams in the future/Let us pursue
them/Arm in arm, let’s march forward together with heads raised high/
Let the world know we are Chinese” (Baidu.com6, 2017).
“The Yellow Race,” created in 2003 for a Taiwanese singer by a
Hong Kong lyricist, can likewise be read as a statement of blatant racism in vulgar language: “Yellow race, walk on earth /Stick out a new
chest/the world knows that we have changed /More chaos, more courage/The more the world changes, the more adventurous I become …
50 Y. Cheng
/After 5000 years it’s finally my turn to step onto the stage.”6 Following
this stanza is a rap improvised by the singer during the song’s debut:
“There is no wound that cannot be healed/Ancient might lasts forever/
The yellowness in the soil carries the Orient [to fly] with doggedness /
Everywhere in the world you will see a yellow face/Red blood flows in
the veins of 1.3 billion people/You say it’s my fury/I say it’s my attitude/
Fearless, marching forward are only us, the Chinese/The more chaos
there is, the more courageous I become/I shed my yellowness/With the
yellow heaven above/You will see how I become a true man” (Baidu.
com7, 2016).
In 2007, Alan Kuo, a young Taiwanese pop singer, wrote some lyrics for his signature patriotic song entitled “Yellow Skin.” The lyrics
sound like a battle cry calling on people with “yellow skin” to “stand
up and unite.” “Defeating the enemy is our urgent task,” because “you
got to think for your kids/do you want them to continue suffering from
our grievance?” The lyric continues, “when we go wild/we will rule the
entire world/you will kneel down [in front of me] and call me papa/ I
then will let you know who is the number one in the entire universe/ …
that girl with black hair and black eyes/behold, she is absolutely the
most beautiful type” (Baidu.com8, 2017).
In these lines, “you” sometimes refers to the Chinese and sometimes
to the world. Forcing a person to kneel down to call another “papa” is a
submissive insult in Chinese folklore culture although it is by no means
unique to China. These lyrics were used in the original version of the
song, but after the song became popular and the singer established himself in China’s pop music market, the lyricist/singer revised them and
removed the most blatant and aggressively racist lines—“when we go
wild/we will rule the entire world/you will kneel down [in front of me]
and call me papa/I then will let you know who is the number one in
the entire universe.” Compared with other Gangtai patriotic songs, the
6The market success of this song inspired the lyric writer and composer to create yet another song
with the more concise title of “The Yellow.” The lyric basically repeats the phrase “The Yellow
Race”.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 51
lyrics of “Yellow Skin” are coarse and vulgar, yet the album containing
the song won Alan Kuo a big prize in China.
In 2018, a Chinese student enrolled at Penn State University and
wrote a patriotic song for the Chinese New Year celebrations held
on the campus. Such celebrations held on foreign university campuses by Chinese student associations have been popular for many
years with many programs appearing to mimic those on CCTV. The
song was titled “The Chinese Papa” (中国爸爸) and the lyrics stated
“our new year celebrations are so big and powerful/one day we will
let Americans call us papa.” His performance provoked critical emails
from two Chinese-American professors who received complaints from
their American students about the song, but this criticism was derided
by numerous supporters of the song on the Chinese internet (World
Journal 2018). The two Chinese-American professors were cursed as
“sons of Americans.”
The Complicity of the Party-State
and Gangtai Popular Culture Producers
A tacit collaboration between the CCP regime and Gangtai cultural
producers lay behind the creation and popularization of these Gangtai
patriotic songs. This collaboration can also be seen as a type of political economy in China’s party-state capitalism. This agenda first became
apparent in the early 1980s in the official promotion of the “Dragon
song” and “My Chinese Heart.” Hou Dejian’s defection was actually
secretly arranged by the Xinhua News Agency’s Hong Kong office that
sent him on a detour to China via Great Britain. After Hou arrived
in Beijing, the CCP propaganda apparatus launched a press campaign to establish him as a nationalist hero and promote his “Dragon
song”, showering him with honors such as meetings with top leaders in
Zhongnanhai, where CCP leaders meet domestic and foreign dignitaries. Hou often appeared or was introduced at public events or in state
media together with the China national women’s volleyball team, who
had won a number of medals in international competitions in the early
52 Y. Cheng
and mid-1980s and had subsequently become the symbol of China’s
revival. The so-called “spirit of the women’s volleyball team” was officially endorsed as the new national spirit. Hou himself became a close
friend of the team and was often seen around its training camp (Hou
1991, p. 6).
All of these provided Hou access to the nascent pop music market
in China. Hou was in fact the first pop singer in post-Mao China to
make a legendary fortune as early as the mid-1980s. He was able to
buy a Mercedes and luxurious apartments in Beijing and Guangzhou,
a mark of unusual wealth of the time. However, as an independent and
rebellious pop musician, Hou soon ran into conflict with bureaucratic
and doctrinarian propaganda officers who attempted to intervene in
his musical creations and performance style. He soon converted himself from a “great China” dreamer to a critic. He was especially scornful
about Chinese people’s stoical attitude towards the authoritarian regime,
an attitude—or a national character as it had been termed by critical
Chinese intellectuals since the early twentieth century—he found common on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. Unlike Zhang Mingmin, who
earned the reputation of being a professional patriotic singer, Hou’s
musical output did not include any more patriotic songs after he established himself in the mainland, only love songs or similar, although
he always kept the “Dragon song” in his repertoire. For Hou, being
Chinese was no longer something to be proud of. His friends included
some of the most influential liberal and pro-democratic intellectuals and
artists in the China of the 1980s. Hou’s ideological conversion eventually led to his involvement in the 1989 prodemocracy movement that
rocked the CCP regime and was brutally crushed. He participated in a
televised mass rally in Hong Kong in late May of 1989 in support of the
student movement and hunger strike in Beijing, and after that he went
on to join the hunger strike in Tiananmen Square with Liu Xiaobo, the
2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner and famous writer of the time. Hou’s
participation in the movement led to his expulsion from China in 1990
and the “Dragon song” was subsequently banned in China.
However, the value of Hou’s “Dragon song” to nationalist i­deology
still remained unparalleled, despite his rebellious behavior. It can be
more clearly seen in the official disregard of Hou’s request to change the
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 53
song’s lyrics and then later in the official pardon granted in respect of
his high-profile participation in the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
Shortly after arriving in China in 1983, Hou visited the western part of
the country and was surprised to find that there were non-Han Chinese
who did not know of “two blacks and one yellow.” Hou said that he
was “ashamed” by his ignorance, and blamed the narrow-mindedness
of patriotic education in Nationalist Taiwan for it. In subsequent years
he asked for “two blacks and one yellow” to be removed from the lyrics, because these physical features were not shared by many non-Han
Chinese. He made this request most publicly in the mass rally in Hong
Kong, May 1989, along with his apology to all non-Han Chinese (Hou
1991, p. 21). He particularly mentioned Wu’erkaixi as one example
who did not fit “two blacks and one yellow.” A Uyghur student from
Xinjiang enrolled in Beijing Normal University, Wu’erkaixi was a popular hunger strike leader. His faint in Tiananmen Square during the
strick caused a great deal of sensation after it was televised. Hou also
announced a change to part of the lyrics from “surrounded on all sides
by the appeasers’ swords” to “surrounded on all sides by the lackeys’
swords,” indicating his harsh criticism of Chinese people’s servile or
even slavish resignation to a tyrannical regime. Hou’s requests to drop
the “two blacks and one yellow” line from the lyrics fell on deaf ears,
however. It is certainly possible to argue that from an official propaganda point of view the removal of these lines will significantly compromise the song’s popular appeal, especially among Han people.
After being banished from China in 1990, Hou spent fifteen years
first in New Zealand and then in Taiwan, but neither could give him
a true sense of home. Some Taiwanese still regarded his secret defection
to the mainland in 1983 as an act of betrayal. Others simply became
indifferent to any mainland-bound nationalist feeling as an independent Taiwanese identity had developed since the 1990s, resulting from
the independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party’s success in
challenging the unification-oriented Nationalist Party. Alienated in
Taiwan, Hou returned to the mainland in 2006. It is quite possible that
his return, which led to his permanent settling down, was a result of an
agreement with the mainland authority, given his rather public participation in the pro-democracy movement in 1989 and his subsequent expel.
54 Y. Cheng
In 2011, Hou made a high-profile appearance singing the “Dragon
song” again. The performance was a duet with Li Jianfu (a Taiwanese
singer known for being the first performer of the song in 1980) that
took place in the Bird’s Nest Stadium, a monumental architectural
achievement built for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Before
they sang the song and in front of the audience, Hou and Li stated
that due to “being politically incorrect,” the history of the lyrics and
their revision had been complex, implying that this time they would
do it in a politically correct manner. The politically correct part of
the lyrics was soon revealed: “surrounded on all sides by appeasers’
swords” was now replaced by “surrounded on all sides by Westerners’
swords.” When this line was chanted, Hou and Li pointed to each
other with index fingers while punctuating the word Westerners
to impress the audience.7 It is true that Westerners was indeed in
the original, but in 2011 the word certainly catered to anti-Western
nationalist sentiment in the rising China instead of a memory of
Western countries’ betrayal of Nationalist Taiwan, which was the original context of the song but which was unknown in the mainland.
“Surrounded on all sides by lackeys’ swords,” which was so emphasized in May 1989 by Hou himself in Hong Kong, was simply not
mentioned at all. Most importantly, “two blacks and one yellow,” the
line Hou had hated so much and once publicly denounced, was now
chanted loudly and proudly, echoed by almost ninety thousand members of the audience in the Stadium. Eventually, Hou chose to resign
himself to a regime as authoritarian as the one in the 1980s but more
powerful, and delivered his patriotic tribute in a most impressive way.
This performance eventually settled all previous disputes between him
and the party-state and silenced his criticism of the Chinese people
who, two decades ago, were despised by him as the regime’s servile
subjects.
Zhang Mingmin’s success has more to do with the official endorsement of Gangtai patriotic songs than anything else. Zhang was discovered by Huang Yihe, the executive director of CCTV’s 1984 New Year
7《龙的传人》-
侯德健 李建复, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEUCqDDZRQs.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 55
Gala. Huang was also the executive director of the previous year’s Gala
(the first such celebration) and due to its success he was under tremendous pressure to make the second one equally as popular. Huang came
up with the innovative idea of inviting a singer from Hong Kong or
Taiwan. He saw two reasons for such an invitation. One was political:
finding someone—from Hong Kong in particular—who supported
such notions as “One China” and “Reunification,” against a backdrop
of Sino-British negotiations on the colony’s handover. The other is apolitical: “nowadays the young people like things from Hong Kong, and
if we can find either a host or a singer from Hong Kong, we can interpret government policy on the one hand and cater to the taste of the
young generation on the other.” The director of CCTV supported his
idea and so did many of his colleagues: “the same ancestor, the same lineage; descendants of Yan and Huang Emperors under heaven, together,
we celebrate the Spring Festival” (Zhao 2015).
Having no idea how to find such a person, Huang went to Shenzhen,
a small town back in the early 1980s on the border with Hong Kong,
where people had listened to Gangtai pop music, often using smuggled products. Miraculously, while riding a tourist minibus he heard
the song in Mandarin from a tape recorder played by the local driver.
Overjoyed, Huang got the singer’s name and the song’s title from the
driver and ran to the border in the hope of being able to buy the tape.
In his rush he accidently crossed the border and was stopped by the
Chinese guards. After hearing his explanation, one of the guards went
to the Hong Kong side and found a copy of the tape on a stall.
Huang brought the tape back to Beijing. The authorities conducted
a background check on Zhang Mingmin, scrutinized the lyrics and
revised them after identifying a political problem, just as Nationalist
propaganda authorities in Taiwan had revised the “Dragon song.”
The political problem was identified in the first stanza of the lyrics.
“Mountains and rivers are always in my dream, but for too many years
the motherland has not been in peace,” was the original. “Not been in
peace” seemed to imply political turmoil brought about by Maoist policies, though it is unclear if this line was written deliberately to mean
that. Given the fact that the song was created at a time when such turmoil had only recently come to an end and memories of the Cultural
56 Y. Cheng
Revolution were still fresh, particularly images of large numbers of refugees—perhaps more than one million—pouring into Hong Kong while
at least another million either drowned or were shot or captured by the
Chinese guards between the 1960s and the late 1970s, it was quite possible that a sophisticated writer such as Huang Zhan would be nationalistic but not necessarily pro-communist. The official revision was
“Mountains and rivers are always in my dream, but for too many years
I have not been able to get close to the motherland.” Coincidently, the
line “not been in peace” (未清净) and the line “not been able to get
close to” (未亲近) both take three Chinese characters and they sound
miraculously identical (wei qin jin ).
After a long delay and almost at the very last minute, the CCTV was
allowed to officially contact Zhang through the Xinhua News Agency’s
Hong Kong office. Zhang was the first Hong Kong actor invited to
participate in the CCTV’s New Year Gala and such an invitation has
since become part of the regular program. Zhang was an obscure amateur singer in Hong Kong, but the experience of being under the Gala’s
national limelight inspired him to promote himself as a patriotic singer
in the mainland. Since then he has come up with numerous patriotic
songs customized by Hong Kong’s music industry whose lyrics are
tainted with racial terms and whose concepts were initially expressed in
“My Chinese Heart.”
The official endorsement of Zhang’s patriotism was legendary. For
example, the song was no less than Deng Xiaoping’s favorite when
he spent time at home with his children. After watching the 1984
CCTV Spring Gala, Hu Yaobang, the then CCP general secretary,
asked for a tape of Zhang’s performance, and learned how to sing the
song overnight (Ifeng 2011). As Zhang recalls, at that time, participants in the CCTV Spring Gala were not compensated monetarily,
“but I was given first class round-trip tickets, stayed in a luxurious
hotel, and was privileged to order meals customized just for me.” After
the performance, Zhang, then an ambitious singer but little known
in Hong Kong, walked down the streets in Beijing and bought a
string of firecrackers as he had a feeling that “‘My Chinese Heart’ is
a hit and it will make me popular in China.” During the following
year, Hu Yaobang promptly approved Zhang’s personal request for a
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 57
national concert tour of patriotic songs to celebrate China’s hosting of
the Asian Olympic Games. When Zhang received Hu’s letter he was
so excited that he “jumped from the bed and could almost touch the
ceiling with my hands,” as he recalled. As a result, Zhang performed
more than two hundred concerts between 1986 and 1987 in China
(Baidu.com13, 2008).
A “professional patriotic singer,” as he came to be known to the public, Zhang sometimes ran short of supplies of new products.8 At one
time he replaced just one Chinese character from “The Republic of
China” (中华民国) to read “The Chinese Nation” (中华民族) in the
title and the lyrics of a song originally created in Taiwan as a hymn to
the Nationalist regime. As he performed the song, its graceful music
and lyrics intoxicated the Chinese audience. They took it for granted
that it was Zhang’s creation, since in the mainland the song was barely
heard of. Zhang’s patriotic plagiarism was later exposed but in the long
run his opportunism only ensured his political credit in the eyes of the
party-state. When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, Zhang
was invited to sing the song at the national celebration. When China
launched its first lunar satellite in 2008, the music of “My Chinese
Heart” was selected as one of thirty national songs to be sent back from
outer space. Zhang’s life is so attached to the song that he printed characters of “Chinese heart” on his name card. When he became a member of Hong Kong’s race club, he named the horse he picked “Chinese
heart.”
To be fair, the composition of the “Dragon song” and “My Chinese
Heart” reflected a spontaneous urge of patriotism and identity anxiety, the former in particular. However, their reception by the mainland
propaganda authorities provided incentives for mimics, and many of
the Gangtai patriotic songs that followed were the result of conscious
efforts to cater to such a patriotic market demand. The patriotism and
8Other
than “My Chinese Heart,” the patriotic songs either created by Zhang himself or which
became popular in China due to his performances include “I Am Chinese,” “Roots and Arteries,”
“We Possess a Name ‘Chinese’,” “Give You One Handful of Earth,” “Palm and Back of Your
Hand,” “the Youth, the Chinese Heart,” “The Chinese Nation,” “The Same Kind of Chinese,”
and “The Beautiful Chinese”.
58 Y. Cheng
nationalism of those songs were contrived. Also, the initial coincidence
that two Gangtai songs served the party-state’s political agenda developed into a pattern of tacit collaboration between the mainland authorities and the Gangtai capitalist cultural producers. The subsequent
production of such songs was essentially an exchange of patriotism for
market entry, a patriotic tribute, as it were, and thus far from a sincere
expression of genuine political commitment. In paying such a patriotic
tribute, the producers often fall into a pattern of one-upmanship which
often forces them to find more racial and therefore more appealing language in the lyrics.
The creation of Gangtai patriotic songs follows the mode of capitalist cultural production with the necessary extra step of political censorship, either from China or a kind of self-censorship internalized by the
producers through years of experience in collaborating with Chinese
censors. The Chinese cultural authorities, through such agents as organizing committees of public or international events held in China and
requiring theme songs, permitted the entry of such products into the
market and promoted them through official recommendations, press
coverage, and marketing advantages. There are two ways to initiate such
a collaboration: either the issue of work orders by the mainland authorities, often in the form of an invitation from those organizing commissions or committees to Gangtai pop culture producers; or, and this is
more common, the spontaneous submission of products to the mainland authorities by Gangtai producers. In both cases the producers customize their products to suit the individual singers’ character and style,
a common practice in the pop music industry.
A traditional center-periphery relationship may be useful in our
understanding of the relationship between Beijing and the Gangtai
music industry. The periphery (Hong Kong and Taiwan) purports
to speak in the center’s (Beijing) voice in order to facilitate the latter’s
agenda by constructing a new identity applicable to all Chinese and
thus transcend national and political boundaries to establish a patriotic
global alignment. It is mainly the center’s ideological project, but the
periphery does this in an ostensibly unprompted and ingenuous manner. This pattern of the periphery speaking in the center’s voice actually
has a long history in the PRC’s propaganda strategy. Since the 1950s,
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 59
numerous “ethnic/frontier minority folk songs and dances” have been
created in a similar manner to support the agenda of socioeconomic
transformation carried out by the PRC state, including such things as
land reform, road and railway construction, and political campaigns
such as the Cultural Revolution.9
An example of such a collaboration between the CCP regime and
Gangtai cultural producers is the song “The Chinese” (lyrics above), created in 1997 when Hong Kong was in the process of being returned
to China. Amusic, a record company based in Hong Kong, had aspirations to exploit this historical event and commissioned a lyricist and
a musician to compose a song. Both the writer and the musician were
Taiwanese with the musician actually being a sales manager for the
mainland branch of a Taiwanese music company. The song was customized for Liu Dehua, a top Hong Kong pop singer signed to Amusic. Liu
was well established in China but still wanted to secure and expand his
market there given the increasing emergence of younger pop singers.
As the title of the song clearly demonstrates, it attempted to beat
other Gangtai patriotic songs by going so far as to define the term
Chinese, an undertaking far beyond a pop music product’s ideological
capacity. It was such an audacious position that occupied the patriotic
high ground and secured Liu’s market share in China. As baidu.com
approvingly states, by accommodating the strong nationalist sentiment
of the time, the song “laid down the foundation for Liu’s increased market share in China after Hong Kong’s return to China.” Ironically, the
song was manufactured by two Taiwanese people at a time when deSinicization characterized Taiwan’s mainstream political culture as the
result of the Democratic Progressive Party’s rise to power. It would therefore be hard to imagine such a song being popular in Taiwan. However,
it was introduced to China as a patriotic pop song composed by a
Taiwanese and performed by a Hong Kong singer. Liu was accordingly
9Some
examples of such songs created between the 1950s and the 1970 include “The Liberated
Tibetan Peasant-Slaves Sing Songs” (翻身农奴把歌唱), “Miao Villages Now Have Railroads”
(火车修进苗家寨), “On Beijing’s Golden Mountains” (在北京的金山上 a Tibetan folk song),
and “A Never-Setting Red Sun on the Prairie” (草原上升起不落的太阳, a Mongol folk song).
The latter two both liken Mao to the red sun.
60 Y. Cheng
rewarded by the Chinese state. In 1999, two years after he sang “The
Chinese,” he was invited to sing a song titled “I Will Love You for Ten
Thousand Years” in Tibet to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of its “liberation,” marking the People’s Liberation Army’s march into Tibet in
1959 and the ensuing “democratic reform.”
Another example is even more illustrative in light of the collaboration. This one concerns Yiu Fai Chow’s—the lyricist of “The Yellow
People” and “The Yellow”—and his engagement in writing the lyrics of Gangtai pop songs for the mainland market. Like many Gangtai
pop lyricists, Chow mainly writes love songs, but was sometimes also
asked to write patriotic or national songs as the genre is known in
Hong Kong. Raised in Hong Kong and holding a Ph.D. in cultural
studies from Leiden University, Chow is a very sophisticated intellectual and does not like patriotic rhetoric at all. However, the temptation
of market success in the mainland meant his lyrics were often a struggle between an independent intellectual engagement and a political
assignment.
“I was (and still am) intrigued, and troubled, by the role such nationalistic songs might play in the construction of Chineseness,” Chow
remarked, “especially in connection with the so-called ‘renationalization
process’ of Hong Kong” (Chow 2009, pp. 546–547). More importantly,
however, his concern here was with how Chinese texts (song lyrics) might
be developed to frame Chinese history and identity in narrow nationalist terms, thereby reducing the possibility of defining Chineseness in
other terms, such as gender, class, or regional space. Chow explained
how he had attempted to resist the nationalistic discourse whenever he could, often by employing wordplay or avoiding using words
and phrases associated with such a discourse. One strategy he often
employed was to use the first person singular (I, me) instead of the plural (we, us), whenever the concept of Chinese is involved, to make the
identity a more individualistically based notion. In 2002, for example,
his record company received an order from China’s event organization
committee to write a theme song for China’s football team as it took
part in the World Cup, an unprecedented sporting accomplishment for
China. The designated singer was Leon Lai, a Hong Kong pop singer
from the mainland. Chow succeeded in twisting the lyrics enough to
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 61
turn down nationalistic rhetoric by avoiding words associated with a
“more militant spirit of fighting and winning” and injecting words suggesting “personal, romantic, rather than national, love.” In a word, he
tried to twist a song of national pride into a ballad of a mundane love
affair. He hoped it “would be a good antidote to straightforward nationalist longing” (Chow 2009, pp. 546–547).
In 2003, Chow faced his most serious challenge: to define
Chineseness in his writing for Xie Tingfeng, the most popular Gangtai
pop singer in China in the first decade of the new century. Xie was
going to undertake a nationwide concert tour during the following year in China, which is a most profitable opportunity for any pop
singer. His manager found Chow and asked him to write a song about
Chineseness. He told Chow that every time Xie kicked off his concerts
in China, he would sing “The Chinese,” and the Chinese audience
would “just love it.” This strategy worked out quite well, but Xie was
unhappy because the song was not customized for him. It was for Liu
Dehua, and now Xie wanted his own patriotic song. In order to compete with Liu’s signature song, the manager made it clear that the song
had to be about Chineseness.
Chow decided to play the wording game again. He attempted a threefold strategy. Firstly, he problematized the category of “Chinese” by not
using the word but “yellow race” (huangzhongren 黄种人) in order to
refer to the Chinese.10 The idea, as he explained, is that the term “yellow race” is more “fluid and open to interpretation and contestation.” In
other words, “yellow” is more likely to pass the censor than “Chinese,”
if anything seems inappropriate in the lyrics. Second, he played down
the sentiment of national victimhood by attributing grievances to atrocities inflicted by Chinese tyrants rather than by foreigners. As he put it
in the draft: “yellow people, who buried you with the dead?” and “yellow ­people, who caused your pain?” Chow explained that the amorphous “who” was meant to remind the Chinese of the stories about
10The
Chinese characters in the song’s title and lyrics denoting the Chinese people are huang,
zhong, and ren (yellow, race, and people, respectively). In his article, Chow chose to translate
them as “yellow people,” omitting the second character. In the context of the entire lyrics, I think
“yellow race” is a more accurate translation.
62 Y. Cheng
Qinshihuangdi’s tyrannical behaviors, such as the burying of thousands
of his tomb builders to keep the secrets of construction after it was
done, as well as the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.11 However, these
lines were rejected by the commissioning authorities in China. They
remarked: “Overall, inappropriate wording. The main thing should be
to embody the pride of Chinese people as well as their unyielding spirit”
(Chow 2009, p. 558). Chow decided to give and take by keeping “yellow
race,” thus avoiding “Chinese,” but removing the aforementioned lines
alluding to the sufferings inflicted by China’s own tyrants.
One question remains unanswered in reading Chow’s explanation: if
“Chinese” was not used for its undertone of a collective identity, then
“yellow race” is even more problematic for its obviously racialized connotation. As a sophisticated intellectual, how is it possible that the
strong aversion to nationalist expression coexists with insensitivity to
an overtly racial term? One explanation may be found in Hou Dejian’s
case. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hou announced that he would
drop the line “two blacks and one yellow” in the “Dragon song” for its
exclusion of those non-Han minorities in the category of the “Chinese,”
but he never realized that the more serious problem of the “two blacks
and one yellow” was that it was a racial concept.
As analyzed in the introduction, an insensitivity or even blindness
to intra-Chinese racialism seems somehow common among Chinese
intellectuals, and they tend to fall short of admitting the problem even
when they sense something wrong in this type of rhetoric. The lack of
basic concepts or caution regarding race-related issues is epidemic even
among some of the most pro-democracy and liberal intellectuals. In
fact, the production (in Hong Kong and Taiwan) and promotion (in
the mainland) of the whole category of Gangtai patriotic songs already
demonstrates a stark absence of a basic sense of political correctness or
civility in Chinese culture. It is a problem existing in the “pan-Chinese
world”—China, Gangtai and overseas diasporic Chinese societies.
11Qinshihuangdi was the founder of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the first centralized
empire in Chinese history. A notorious tyrant, he mobilized the population to build his tomb
when he was alive and allegedly buried all the laborers upon its completion to keep the construction secret.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 63
In any case, while lines with the implication of domestic tyranny were
rejected, Chow’s revision with its explicit racial rhetoric was approved
by China’s censors. When the song’s DVD album was released, the
advertisement line on its cover promoted it as reflecting “the essence of
Chinese culture” and “the spirit of the new generation.”
A Chinese-American Version of the “Descendants
of the Dragon”
“Descendants of the Dragon” is the first and prototypical Gangtai patriotic song. Its impact on this music genre has been profound, including
a revision of the lyrics made by another musician during the time in
which the original song was banned (1990–2000) in the mainland due
to Hou Dejian’s involvement in the 1989 pro-democracy movement.
The revision of the lyrics reinforced the racialized Chinese identity
constructed in the original song from a Chinese-American perspective.
With the revised lyrics chanted by a Chinese-American singer, the song
was not only allowed to reenter China’s pop music market but also to
enjoy a significant success there.
The song’s revisionist and singer is Wang Lihong, a Taiwanese born
in America. After graduating from Williams College in 1998 with a
degree in music, Wang decided to go to the Chinese musical world for
his career. As the nephew of Li Jianfu, the first singer of the “Dragon
song” in Taiwan, Wang was not at all unfamiliar with the song. The
revision happened at the time when he was reinventing himself from an
American-born and educated young musician to a Chinese pop singer
and seeking an entry to the mainland market. Wang not only revised
the lyrics, he also added a rap/hip hop part—a Western pop music element—to the song.
The revision kept “two blacks and one yellow” and “the descendants of the Dragon,” but replaced the original lyrics from “One hundred years ago/in a tranquil night” to the very end. The lyrics now read:
“Many years ago on a tranquil night/Our whole family arrived in New
York/Nothing can destroy what is in our hearts/Every night, every day,
64 Y. Cheng
longing for home/I was raised in someone else’s land/After I grew up/I
become a descendant of the Dragon” (Baidu.com9, 2018).
The lyrics further stress the eternal and unchangeable nature of
Chineseness, the original theme of the song, especially when New York
City is placed in the background as a powerful symbol of American culture. A “melting pot,” as it was perceived, America is rejected and even
resented by a Chinese immigrant in the song. The lyrics could even give
the impression that “our” family’s migration to America was involuntary.12 The message the song sent to the Chinese audience was that even
though “I” grew up as an American, “I” am still longing to become a
Chinese and nothing can change my Chineseness. Patriotism in this
way is demonstrated by the ethnic and racial resistance to Americanism
that assimilates heterogenic ethnic and racial groups. The concept of
“descendants of the Dragon” as well as that of a “Chinese heart” were in
this case extended beyond Taiwan and Hong Kong to include Chinese
Americans, which had been represented by the Chinese-American “singing mayor” Daniel K. Wong, in China’s Spring Festival Gala as early as
in 1985.
Wang performed the song first in Taiwan and then in China in 1999
and it was taken as a patriotic song just like the original one some
sixteen years earlier. Many post-1989 generation Chinese youth liked it
and took it for granted that it was Wang’s creation, since the song was
vaguely attributed to Wang’s revision, without mentioning Hou Dejian’s
name. It wasn’t until years later, when Hou Dejian’s name was allowed
to reappear in public, that they came to know that the song had been
popular before 1989 in another version and was associated with another
name. However, online discussions show that instead of questioning
why the song had disappeared after 1989 many young Chinese praised
the song for its representation of the unyielding Chinese spirit expressed
12One personal anecdote may illustrate this impression. When I was printing out the English
translation of the song’s lyrics in my department’s copying room, one of my African-American
colleagues passed by. Upon glimpsing the lyrics, he murmured “a story of Chinese indentured
labor?” I was confused by his response, but as I read the lyrics again, I quickly realized why he
had this impression.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 65
in the mix of Sino-Western musical elements—for many pop music
fans, the rap/hip hop element incorporated in the song was a fresh experience. As one commentator put it, “Through his ideas about music,
we come to see his Chinese heart as an ABC [American-born Chinese].
A musical dragon was about to fly, in the hope of reviving Chinese
music! A wonderful album that makes the name of a remarkable
descendent of the Dragon known to the world (bbs cri.cn).”
However, the appeal of identity politics was manipulated in Wang’s
case and the pop music fans’ sympathy for the purported “I” and “we”
in the song bearing the grief of Chinese immigrants in America was misplaced. As a Chinese-American himself, Wang used the first person in
his revision of the song to portray Chinese immigrants in America as
homesick, low class, ostracized, and alienated in the world of the Other.
The revision therefore leads easily to an impression, especially in China,
that the new lyrics had something to do with the immigration experiences of Wang and his family. However, the fact is that Wang’s family
members and many relatives were among the most elitist Nationalist
Chinese-Americans who either had migrated to America to escape the
CCP’s takeover of mainland China or later left Taiwan to seek a brighter
future in America.13 Their children were well educated in America.
Wang himself is a case in point: he graduated from the most elite private
institution—Williams College has been ranked constantly as the number
one private college in the country. Wang hardly suffered any hardship
in his American experience as the source of the grievance he vented in
the revised lyrics as well as the invented rap/hip hop element. From a
truly elitist family history and a successful immigrant story on the one
hand, and a fictionalized depressed experience and a painful struggle of
alinated immigrants on the other, Wang chose the latter to address his
Chineseness in America, apparently because it is patriotically attractive in
mainland China. In 2012, Wang and Li Jianfu, his uncle, performed the
“Dragon song” together in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium. Before singing,
13Wang’s
uncle, Cho-yun Hsu, is an influential Chinese historian with numerous honors and
titles and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.
66 Y. Cheng
Wang jokingly told the audience that he “stole” his uncle’s song fifteen
years ago, which might have indicated his awareness that his revision lent
the song something his uncle would not expect (YouTube 2).
Wang’s inventive patriotism has been well rewarded. In the late
1990s he was little known in China, but his 2000 album including his revision of the “Dragon song” marked his rapid ascendency
in China’s pop music market. CCTV’s MTV program selected the
revised “Dragon song” as “the year’s best song” written in Taiwan in
2001. His most remarkable recognition in both official and popular
terms came in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics and an outburst
of Chinese nationalism. He was “the only Taiwanese and overseas
male pop singer who participated in singing four officially designated
Olympics theme songs,” including the best known song and his solo
“Beijing Welcomes You.” In monetary measures, as a title of an entertaining news report marveled in 2005—“Wang Lihong raked in 6.25
million Chinese yuan in six hours by running to different performances!” (Ent.sina 2005).
As a patriotic idol, Wang sometimes confuses his fans. His style
of synthesizing Western pop music elements (especially rap/hip hop)
in performing Chinese songs is valued as representing a “chinkedout” music genre, which promotes and popularizes Chinese music
to the world. The phrase “chinked-out” used to be a racially derogative term, but in the context of Wang’s innovative style of exploiting rock and roll elements to express Chinese patriotism, he actually
used the phrase in a sarcastic manner to disregard anti-Chinese
racism in America. There was a confusion among Wang’s fans in
China after they came to know the phrase’s original racial meaning,
and some of them even turned against Wang. His patriotic intent
in twisting this phrase was soon understood and appreciated, however. Some of his fans were also confused by his Christian faith—the
dragon is perceived as a symbol of Satan in a biblical context, so
does that mean he admitted that we Chinese were descendants of
Satan? Then Wang’s other fans came out to clear his name—it was
all right as long as the Dragon in the song represented a “positive
and aspiring spirit.”
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 67
Awards and Punishments in the Chinese
Market
The role of popular culture—especially music and songs—in shaping
public consciousness and perceptions in an industrialized and mass
media society has been extensively discussed. Theodor Adorno’s classical
argument suggesting that cultural industry manufactures and indoctrinates a false consciousness into a passively receptive audience through
standardized expressive forms can be applied to Gangtai patriotic songs
(Adorno 1941). An analysis of late capitalist cultural phenomena is particularly relevant to the understanding of cultural manipulation under
a socialist party-state. A great number, if not all, of those Gangtai patriotic songs were customized and manufactured with a clearly-defined
ideological agenda and their lyrics are standardized by using the same
or slightly modified set of racial idioms and metaphors. Essentially serving as an ideological commodity for the party-state’s mass consumption,
this political genre of pop music appears to be individualized—many
songs were created to suit the characters of different individual singers
to make them seem more genuinely patriotic. However, as Adorno and
the Frankfurt School point out, a close look at the communications of
the pop music market will show that the Chinese audience is not a mere
passive recipient of the message sent to them in the music, but an active
participant in the development of the genre, given that the internet has
changed a previously one-way mode of communication and allowed the
audience’s voice to be heard.
As with popular culture in many countries, the main audience of
Gangtai pop songs in China comprises young people such as students
and young professionals. Like fans of pop culture idols elsewhere, these
people adore Gangtai pop stars, particularly because their styles and
characters represent a cultural border between mainland China and the
outside world and as a result their images often seem simultaneously
Chinese and foreign. Young, handsome, and charming, these Gangtai
pop singers can easily gain millions of fanatic followers overnight and
leave their impact on the fashion industry and hairstyles. Since these
songs address political subjects, their influence has reached far beyond
68 Y. Cheng
the specific age cohort to include various groups of people concerned
with or affected by pop music’s social role. Many Chinese understand
that Gangtai pop singers perform patriotic songs in order to gain market
share in China. They are, however, not aware of the fact that these songs
were deliberately manufactured and customized for mainland China’s
consumption through a collaboration between nationalistic politics and
capitalist cultural production. They may not be as naive as to believe that
all Gangtai singers are genuinely patriotic—in fact, many Chinese even
consider them cynical. Such a scepticism concerning the motives of some
Gangtai pop stars never extends to questioning the creation of such a
music genre as a political scheme, and its products have flooded the pop
music market and have been embraced by the Chinese audience.
The dialogue between the two ends of patriotic communication
takes many forms. Whether and how much these Gangtai pop stars are
patriotic—not so much with regard to their sincerity, but with regard
to their performance and behavior—often constitute much of the
online discussions among Chinese netizens. They reward those enthusiastic patriotic singers with enormous profits from not only box office
proceeds, sales of tapes, CDs, and DVDs, but also from other entrepreneurial activities such as being representatives of certain consumer
goods or specially invited VIPs at important cultural events. However,
they also punish those less patriotic or even politically misaligned with
harsh criticism and even boycotts. Some of the more extreme fans even
established a patriotic index in which Gangtai singers were rated based
on their patriotic performance.
Although words such as “descendants,” “ancestor,” “heart,” and
“blood” are indeed magical spells that act like an “open sesame” for the
mainland market, many Gangtai pop stars soon found that a claim for
their Chineseness in a dramatic and racial stance alone cannot guarantee their market share. As more Gangtai pop singers come to China
and rake in the money, the Chinese audience have been used to such a
patriotic stance and will not tolerate any acts showing a betrayal of it or
any offense towards it as judged from their perspective. Since Gangtai
pop music is a pan-East and even Southeast Asian pop culture phenomenon, based on an ethnic Chinese population and a shared historical
and musical tradition that binds the Chinese world with the Japanese
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 69
and Korean worlds, Gangtai singers also perform beyond the mainland-Taiwan-Hong Kong triangle. In this internet age, even when these
pop singers are not in mainland China, they are constantly on the radar
screen of patriotic Chinese netizens. Any words they utter relating to
their identity or their attitude towards mainland China can be found
and spread with a click of a mouse and turn dangerously sensitive and
provocative. Participation in politically misaligned public events or even
a simple slip of the tongue may cost them dearly. Participation in public
events or speaking with foreign journalists have been a political minefield, especially for Taiwanese singers. A case in point is the controversy
around Zhang Huimei, a Taiwanese singer very popular in the mainland
for her spirited performing style.
In May 2000, Zhang attended Chen Shuibian’s presidential inauguration and sang Taiwan’s national anthem at the ceremony. Chen was
the leader of Taiwan’s Democratic Progress Party (DPP), which advocates for Taiwan’s independence, and is scornfully called Taidu in China.
As a result, Zhang was boycotted in the mainland by pop music fans
who, through the internet called for a campaign to “force her out”
(封杀). Rumors even suggested that the mainland authorities had a
blacklist for those “green Taiwanese singers” (“green” is the color of the
DPP, while blue represents the Nationalist Party which still holds to the
position of one China uniting the mainland and Taiwan). In response
to the pressure from the audience, some provincial and municipal TV
and radio stations suspended broadcasting Zhang’s songs. Many mainlanders were further irritated by Zhang’s contemptuous replies to the
criticism as she allegedly said “You are Chinese, I am Taiwanese, so I
just do not care whatever you say about me.”
Zhang’s political misbehavior was unforgivable to many Chinese.
Four years later, when she came to Qingdao and Hangzhou in the
mainland for concerts and also to appear in public as an advertising
spokesperson for a Taiwanese brand of tea, she faced organized protests.
“Let them know that support of Taidu must come with a cost!” was
the online call (Yu 2008). Zhang cancelled her activities in Hangzhou
where a group of college students protested her appearance. By contrast, however, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television
of China (SARFT, the Chinese authority that issues permits to Gangtai
70 Y. Cheng
pop stars to perform in China) proceeded more cautiously in response
to controversies involving relations between the mainland and Taiwan,
perhaps because its main obligation is to maintain and further develop
cultural ties between Taiwan and the mainland and not to heighten
tensions or even scare off those cultural celebrities. The administration
not only denied the existence of any “black list of ‘green singers’ from
Taiwan,” but also invited Zhang to participate in a musical performance
at the World University Games held in China. Taking a lesson from this
experience, Zhang has never since involved herself in any politically
sensitive events.
Pressures from watchful music fans and the general public forced
Gangtai pop stars to be ingenious in finding new racial markers to highlight their Chineseness as an image repair strategy if they were implicated
in political problems. The case of SHE, a team of three Taiwanese girl
singers (SHE represents the first letters of their last names), is illustrative
in this regard. In 2005, SHE was under attack for what they allegedly
said when interviewed by a Japanese TV program. Before the incident,
SHE had a revenue of one hundred and twenty million Chinese yuan
for appearing as advertising spokespersons for some companies and
another eight-digit income in yuan from two concert tours. According
to some unconfirmed sources, the Japanese interviewer asked them: “Are
you Chinese?” and they answered “No, we are Taiwanese.” This alleged
interview was inflammatory particularly because it happened in Japan,
a country that colonized Taiwan and as many Chinese people believe
cultivated a pro-Japan and anti-China cultural heritage in the island and
even allegedly left behind more than a million Taiwanese with Japanese
blood. These Japanese-Taiwanese people are certainly seen as alien to the
Chinese race. An internet search for “Taiwanese with Japanese blood”
and the alleged population’s impact on the relationship between the
mainland and Taiwan will find many discussions on the subject.
The truthfulness of this interview was never verified but the allegation spread rapidly over the internet. “As long as you are a Chinese, you
should join us to boycott them!” was the online call for the campaign.
Online opinions show that many people believe that because of the
interview and the campaign, SHE was dropped from CCTV’s list for
the 2006 Spring Festival Gala.
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 71
Next year, SHE returned to the mainland pop music market with a
new hit entitled “Chinese Language.” It praises the global impact of the
government-promoted educational and cultural programs of Chinese
language and culture as well as the Confucius Institutes:
People of all skin and hair colors are now reading and talking in Chinese/
For so many years, we have labored to practice grammar and pronunciation of English/Now it’s the time for them to learn how to practice
retroflex in speaking Chinese/What Confucius said has become internationalized/What an intelligent people and what a beautiful language/The
words we utter, the entire world listens. (Baidu.com10, 2018)
In order to pacify the mainland Chinese, this song turns up Gangtai
pop music patriotism by praising the language, a rather adventurous
artistic undertaking. One may well suspect that because all other real or
imagined symbols and substantial subjects associated with Chineseness,
from the colors of eyes, hair, and skin, through blood, heart, and arteries, to ancestors and soil, let alone names of national landmarks such
as big rivers and great mountains or plains had been taken, a dramatic
patriotic pose therefore required something extraordinary but which still
made sense. By portraying overseas Chinese education as a global cultural triumph that challenges the dominance of the English language,
the lyrics succeed in reinforcing nationalist pride by finding connections
between language learning and the advancement of China’s international status in a context that foregrounds racial sentiments. Following
the tradition established by earlier Gangtai patriotic songs, the lyrics
refer to an ambiguous “they” as foreigners who in the past forced “us” to
learn “their” language but now are taking pains to learn “our” language.
A hymn to the national tongue, the song certainly helped the group
to restore and promote its popularity in China, but the controversy
stimulated by their alleged statement “we are Taiwanese” did not go
away. People who believed that the interview did happen regarded the
song as the group’s repentance. As some middle-school students pointed
out, “obviously the song was created to whitewash people’s memory
about their pro-Taidu talks and the lyrics are yet far from ‘patriotic’”
(Baidu.com11, 2018). Since their guilt was never proved with hard
72 Y. Cheng
evidence, their sympathizers believed that the song showed the three
Taiwanese girls’ mainland-bound patriotism, and thus saw it as evidence
of their innocence. These people even suspected that their idols had
fallen victim to a smear campaign masterminded by the “black hands”
of their competitors in China’s pop music market.
Rumors accusing some of the most popular and trendy Gangtai pop
stars of being associated with unpatriotic or anti-China acts, in particular those offending Chinese racial identity or pride, have indeed proved
to be an effective device in defaming them and reducing their box office
revenue. This type of rumor often happened when the individuals concerned were outside mainland China and were therefore supposedly
more prone to fall victims to slips of the tongue that betrayed their pretence to Chinese patriotism. The anonymity of the source of much of
online information and discussions made this conspiracy theory sound
plausible, given the fact of stiff competition among Gangtai pop singers
in China. What happened to Zhou Jielun in 2007 is a case in point.
A Taiwanese pop singer, Zhou was popular in the mainland and had
average daily earnings that could reach several thousand US dollars in
2005. In October 2007, just before he was about to initiate a marketing
campaign for his new album and a concert tour in Japan, “all of a sudden
rumors exploded on the internet, involving sensitive political subjects,
saying that Zhou Jielung told Japanese media that he was not a Chinese.
Now the CCTV has banned advertisements in which he appears.” Zhou’s
agent quickly fought back and they had even filed a case with China’s
“internet police”—as they told the media—in order to identify the source
of the rumor. According to the agent, there had been malicious rumors
of a political nature incriminating Zhou, and this time they had gone too
far by trying to confuse the CCTV. “We will hunt down those rumor
mills and expose them.” To reaffirm Zhou’s innocence, Zhou’s agent told
the media that Zhou had not visited Japan for a year, so “how could he
tell Japanese media that he is not Chinese?” (Sohu 2007).
As a Taiwanese singer enormously popular in the mainland, Zhou
continued to be on the radar of China’s online patriotism regarding his
Chineseness. In 2008, China suffered a powerful earthquake. Public
fundraising campaigns became stressful for many Gangtai pop singers,
and the amount of their donation in Chinese yuan tested the patriotism
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 73
that they had demonstrated on stage. The Chinese netizens publicized
and compared their donations on the internet. In this media frenzy, rumors spread that Zhou not only donated the sum of 50,000 Chinese yuan,
but also said “I am not Chinese, so even 50,000 yuan is good enough.”
This rumor irritated Zhou’s fans and many of them came out to defend
his innocence. Later Zhou’s patriotism was reaffirmed: after the initial
donation of half a million yuan, he added two million yuan to the relief
charity making him the most generous donor among Taiwanese pop
singers. In addition, he participated in charity and fundraising concerts.
His fans even uploaded a photo of a letter of gratitude sent to Zhou for
his participation in a charity concert by a student who lost her legs during the earthquake. Even today, a search on “Zhou Jielun and patriotism”
will still produce numerous discussions and there is even a video clip
compilation of discussions on Zhou’s patriotism on YouTube.
Pop stars from Hong Kong are also on the radar screen of Chinese
patriotism and they have learned how to escape the identity politics
traps set for them, maliciously or not, at public events. Liu Dehua, for
example, a top singer who is known for his singing of “The Chinese” and
who has enjoyed decades of popularity in China, succeeded in escaping
such a trap during one of his concert tours of Japan. During the tour,
according to accounts of Chinese netizens, Liu declined to deliver greeting messages and sing songs in Japanese, a common protocol for many
Gangtai pop stars on their tours of Japan. He even allegedly announced
to his Japanese hosts at the televised performance: “Don’t introduce me
as a ‘Hong Kong singer’ next time. I am first of all Chinese.” Then he
proudly sang the song “The Chinese.” Liu’s swift response to the Japanese
host won him high praise in China (BBS 2012).
The Idiomatic Impact of Gangtai
Patriotic Songs on Chinese Nationalism
However, the most important part of the communication or interaction between Gangtai patriotic songs and their Chinese audience is
idiomatic: the lyrics of these songs have entered the public usage of
74 Y. Cheng
nationalist language. “Two blacks and one yellow,” “descendants of
the Dragon” and “descendants of the Yan and Huang Emperors” have
been chanted as a more sentimental expression of being Chinese both
inside and outside China. In 2008, the year in which China hosted
the Olympics, the world witnessed a significant outburst of Chinese
nationalism. This was demonstrated in rallies supporting Beijing as the
host of the Olympics in many global cities and protesting the Western
media’s concerted smear campaign—as it was seen by many Chinese
patriots—against China. In this global Chinese campaign these phrases
were essentially identity catchphrases for patriotic overseas Chinese. In
London, a young Hong Konger-Briton—a perfect example that even
multiple non-Chinese upbringings or backgrounds still could not prevent a Chinese person from being Chinese in his heart and blood—
was chosen to participate in the torch relay. His first name happened
to contain the Chinese character meaning “revering dragon (敬龙).”
A widespread interview with him by a major Chinese TV station was
titled “Zhang Jinglong: the descendent of the Dragon among the torchbearers in London” (Zhang 2008). During the same year in China,
competitions were held for songs, poems, and essays promoting patriotism. Many submissions identified the Chinese with “descendants of the
Dragon” and “two blacks and one yellow,” clearly showing the influence
of the lyrics of those Gangtai patriotic songs.14
The idiomatic influence of Gangtai patriotic songs in China can also
be found in numerous “made-in-the-mainland” patriotic songs. For
example, Chen Liming, a young singer whose appearance and style are
considered the closest to Liu Dehua of the numerous singers imitating Liu, the idol whose charm seems everlasting, has his own patriotic
song. Entitled “We are all Chinese” (我们都是中国人), it apparently mimics Liu’s patriotic song “The Chinese” and the lyrics include
lines such as “we are all descendants of Yan and Huang Emperors,”
and “we will let the world salute us/because we are descendants of the
14For example, one middle-aged woman submitted a poem for a song titled “Glorious
Torchbearer” in which she wrote: “I am a glorious torchbearer, one of those descendants of the
Dragon … black eyes and black hair, my forever pride” Mei (2008).
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 75
Dragon.” “Dear China, I Love You,” (亲爱的中国我爱你) a song
first performed at the 2001 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, helped Ye Fan,
a singer unknown to public at the time to forge a national reputation. The song was created to promote the campaign of “Great West
Development” (西部大开发) a multi-billion yuan strategic project
designed to economically and culturally integrate the massive non-Han
part of western China through investment and migration. It proclaims
that “the yellow-skinned face is China’s flag,” simply ignoring many
Caucasian-looking Chinese as well as Tibetan Chinese whose skin color
seems either lighter or darker than most Han Chinese. The song craftily combines elements of ethnic minority folk music in Xinjiang, Tibet,
and Sichuan, with a Western rock and roll performance style. Speaking
in the center’s voice and enhanced by elements of foreign music, the
periphery song soon became popular. Contemporary critical cultural
studies should take this type of combination as typical cultural borrowing that disrespects and ignores the cultural sovereignty of disadvantaged ethnic groups.
A more typical example of the idiomatic influence of Gangtai patriotic songs on mainland patriotism is demonstrated in a famous poem
entitled “I Am Proud I Am a Chinese” (我骄傲, 我是中国人). It
proclaims:
Among countless blue and brown eyes, I have a pair of black, diamond-like eyes/I am proud, I am a Chinese/among countless white skins
and black skins, I have yellow, earth-like skin/I am proud, I am a Chinese
… My ancestors were the first to walk out of the jungle/My ancestors
were the first to start farming. (Wang 2008)
Wang Huairang, the poet, won many official honors, one of which
was “people’s poet” bestowed by the official China Writers’ Association.
The poem was included in some Chinese language and literature textbooks as a model for students to imitate in their Chinese composition
class. It was recommended for various patriotic education events and
programs, such as recitation for school shows and celebrations of public holidays or important anniversaries held by governments at multiple levels and administrative authorities of educational and business
76 Y. Cheng
enterprises. Yin Zhiguang, the most popular poem-reading actor who
claimed that he conceived the title of the poem and presented it to
Wang Huairang and Wang wrote up the whole piece in just two days,
performed a recital of the poem more than three thousand times during
his many nationwide tours (Dahebao 2010). The poem was also set to
music to make it a song. An online search shows that it appears on the
Chinese army’s webpage for ideological and political education.
In 2012, Xi Jingping became the General Secretary of the CCP
and soon after he proposed “The China Dream” as the catchphrase
of his policy goal. An established lyrist expeditiously responded with
stanzas for a new patriotic song entitled “The China Dream” (中国
梦)—“Walking among people/You and I look the same/Yellow skin,
black eyes/We are all seeds of the Dragon/Speaking the same language/
Dreaming the same dream/Your dream, my dream, come together/A
China dream/Walking on the earth/you and I look the same/Yellow
Skin, black eyes/We are all seeds of Yan and Huang Emperors” (Wang
2013). The racial features of the Chinese reflected in these lyrics were
later proudly confirmed by Xi himself as he told the visiting American
president in the Forbidden City.
A common practice in mainland patriotic education that shows the
impact of Gangtai patriotic songs involves various competitions dedicated to the creation of new patriotic songs, especially in schools.
One such song, “The Faith of the Dragon,” appeals to “yellow face,”
“Chinese soul,” “descendants of the Yan and Huang Emperors,” “greatness of 5000 years of civilization,” glory of “heavenly dynasty,” national
humiliation and the resolve to revive, and that “the earth knows our
might,” and “the sky is waiting for us to fly.” An essay written in a similar competition for a high school politics class was recommended by
the teacher as a sample essay. Titled “The National Spirit Handed Down
to Us Through the Torch,” the student proclaims: “A beautiful little
girl asks her mom in her child’s voice: ‘Why do we have yellow skin
and black hair?’ Her mother answers with a firm tone: ‘Because we are
Chinese!’” The essay goes on to quote many lines of lyrics from the song
“The Yellow Race,” and then undertakes a historical review of some
major challenges in historical and contemporary China which leads
the student to believe that China will thrive and become powerful and
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 77
glorious forever. “Torch” in the essay symbolizes the national spirit that
never extinguishes and the student traces the seed of the fire back to
Peking Man, the ancestor of the Chinse people (Zhaojiaoan.com 2013).
One Chinese netizen’s spontaneous revision of the lyrics of “The
Yellow Race” reveals more about the revengeful sprit hidden in contemporary Chinese nationalism, a spirit which considers the whole world as
the hateful Other. The netizen, writing under the online alias “the shield
of Huaxia (华夏盾牌)” proclaims that “After 500 years, it’s finally my
turn to step onto the stage” (in “The Yellow Race,” it is “5,000 years,”
and the revision implies that China has only lagged behind in modern
times), and that “the yellow as a whole” will “conquer the world with
courage.” And finally, where the “Yellow Race” proclaims “With the
yellow heaven above/you will see how I become a true man,” the revisionist version declares “With the yellow heaven above/you will see how
I kill in four corners of the world” (BBS 2010). Such a militant spirit
was not entirely the revisionist’s invention: in the song’s music video,
Xie Tingfeng is depicted wearing ancient Chinese imperial armor with
numerous armored extras lined up behind him wielding flags and halberds in an impressive display of ancient China’s might.
“Chinoiserie ”: A More Subtle Form
of Racial Patriotism
Since the early 1980s, the number of Gangtai patriotic songs has kept
growing and their producers have almost exhausted the words and
phrases that directly appeal to the biological, physical, and natural characteristics of the assumed Chineseness. Duplication and modification
can no longer meet the market demand. Also, a dramatic, aggressive,
highly tuned, and even combative tone and an overtly “China vs. the
world” mentality sometimes raise political concerns. As a result, a new
trend or subgenre has developed within Gangtai patriotic music. The
emergence of the so-called “Chinoiserie ” (中国风, or “China spirit”)
represents this new trend and it is personified by Zhou Jielung and Fang
Wenshan, a lyric writer who often wrote for Zhou. Both of them are
young Taiwanese.
78 Y. Cheng
Zhou has been popular since the early 2000s in China, but in 2005
he was involved in a political debate. In that year, Shanghai’s educational authorities recommended one hundred patriotic songs to middle school students in the metropolis. The list included some Gangtai
pieces as usual, but the one performed by Zhou, titled “Snail” provoked debates involving educators, party-state officials, journalists, students, and Chinese netizens and pop music fans in general. Although
it was created as a theme song for the International Day of Persons
with Disabilities, an officially sponsored event to promote positive values among youngsters, the song’s lyrics are not related to patriotism in
any literary way. At best, there is only one line that shows the Snail’s
unyielding spirit to overcome its physical restrictions and therefore it
could perhaps be interpreted as inspirational to youngsters—“Trying
hard to see the blue sky, I will climb up step by step.”
Critics of this patriotic snail were shocked by such an ideological elevation of pop music and believed that it had abused the name of patriotism and would only reduce its educational value. Supporters argued
that the inclusion of Gangtai pop music on this official list would make
patriotic education more attractive to students, and they also contended
that patriotism should be broadly perceived and articulated under the
new and more open-minded social milieu. So why not interpret a teenager’s personal resolution as patriotic since individual pursuit that was
in line with positive values would eventually contribute to the country’s
progress? As a responsible person in Shanghai’s Municipal Educational
Committee explained, the song’s “lyrics and ideological content are positive and endeavoring, and students just like it.” Another high-ranking
party cadre also defended the selection saying that “national-spirit education cannot be achieved by preaching but by methods acceptable to
kids and teenagers” (Wang 2005).
Defendable or not, the selection apparently had a lot to do with
Zhou’s enormous popularity among teenagers, particularly in Shanghai
perhaps, which convinced the educational administration to include
the idol in order to make the list more appealing to his fans. While
doing so, they found that Zhou had not customized a famous patriotic
song of his own. Zhou did, however, create a song titled “Dragon Fist”
(龙拳) in 2002. The lyrics included racial markers such as Dragon,
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 79
blood, skin color and eye color, and claimed “there is only one facial
expression left for the entire world/awaiting the hero/I am that Dragon
[hero]/Incarnated as the Dragon/I adjust time and arrange space/
to dominate, to control.” However, it was just not popular for some
unknown reason and even Zhou himself rarely mentioned it. Instead,
he sang patriotic songs originally created for other Gangtai singers in
his performances. As a result, the authority chose a song that he was
the original performer of and its lyrics could be interpreted as being as
close as possible to patriotic education. This unstated intent behind the
selection did not escape the watchful eyes of Zhou’s defenders. Titles of
newspaper articles such as “Who Said Zhou Jielun Does Not Have a
Patriotic Song? All Kids Love the ‘Snail’” were quite revealing.
Zhou soon displayed his patriotism in a string—not just one or two
signature pieces—of songs in his style. He throws away the clichés and
stereotypes in the lyrics of previous Gangtai patriotic songs. In general
he does not pay tribute to color, blood, ancestors, or soil. Instead, in
collaboration with the lyricist Fang Wenshan, and with Zhou himself
a gifted composer, he chooses subjects of material culture, literary classics, and the fine arts (such as ancient masterpieces and calligraphic
works) that are commonly held as essentially Chinese, and more subtly,
some settings, circumstances, and contexts which a Chinese person is
prone to feel at home with and can immerse themselves in sentimentally. Titles of his hits include The Compendium of Materia Medica
(本草纲目, a Chinese herbology volume written by Li Shizhen during the Ming dynasty), “The Blue and White Porcelain” (青花瓷
a type of porcelain known for its delicacy and beauty produced in
China and desired by merchants in the early modern world), Preface to
the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion (兰亭序 a piece of poetic
work composed by the famous fourth century writer and written in
his calligraphy—the original calligraphic piece survives—at the occasion of a Spring Purification Ceremony), and love songs set in Chinese
textual and musical contexts, such as “The Chrysanthemum Altar”
(菊花台), “Snow-like Hair” (发如雪), “East Wind Broken” (东风破),
and “Thousand li Away” (千里之外). He also has songs aesthetically
objectifying Chinese martial arts such as “Nunchaku” (a martial arts
weapon originating in Japan but sinonized in the lyrics).
80 Y. Cheng
By creating at least a dozen such songs and making them popular,
Zhou breaks or transcends the old style of Gangtai patriotic music and
establishes a new one. The creation of these songs had a self-acknowledged personal political agenda: to prove his Chineseness. When a
rumor surfaced accusing him of denying his Chinese identity, Zhou
refuted it and said: “my purpose of composing so many Chinoiserie
songs is to write Chinese culture into music and let the foreigners
know how great and graceful Chinese culture is. My songs prove [my
Chineseness]” (Sohu 2007). Commonly called Chinoiserie (China
spirit), the term originally refers to a trend in contemporary art that
“establishes itself in Chinese and oriental culture and uses China elements” to project a globalized image of China popular in such cultural
industries as advertising, movies, music, fashion, and architecture,
and which has been apparent since the beginning of the new century
(Baidu.com12, 2011). Against the trend of an increasingly mixed and
fluid contemporary culture, Chinoiserie uses the term “China Elements”
(中国元素) to point to efforts made in rediscovering a pure and consistent Chinese essence. Zhou’s Chinoiserie musical products generally
admire, romanticize, and sentimentalize cultural subjects deemed to
be distinctively and profoundly China or Chinese. He turns a more
assertive, outward-looking articulation of a colored and blood-based
nationalist pride into a more reflective, inward-looking, and culturally oriented nationalist essence believed to be codified in the tenderness, delicacy, and subtleness of an ancient and native setting. Such an
aesthetic and psychological complex is portrayed as only open to the
Chinese mind and soul. It is a nationalistic narcissism and a historical
nostalgia that helps to mystify the Chinese essence and thus support the
more general argument of Chinese characteristics.
It is important to notice that this Chinoiserie does not appeal to
the language of racial markers to foreground the Chinese essence, but
the way it essentializes this Chinese uniqueness is not only as exclusive as in other Gangtai patriotic songs, but also even more radical in
its approach. Neither does it invoke a national humiliation complex
to whip up the audience: the ghost of a faceless national enemy disappears in the lyrics. However, it goes deep into a Chinese psyche. If other
Gangtai—as well as mainland—patriotic songs sound more masculine,
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 81
hyperbolic, and even expansionist, Chinoiserie patriotic songs are more
feminine, introspective, nostalgic, and self-indulgent. Just like yin and
yang, they are two sides of the same racial uniqueness and are supplementary to each other in the nationalist discourse.
The Sporadic Resistance of Mainland
Intellectuals
To say all Chinese intellectuals are blind to this racial thinking and
racialized discourse addressed in pop music is inaccurate, but their
resistance is ominously sporadic and appears only in social media
rather than mainstream media, and is often met by repudiation. A
case in point is Tao Dongfeng, a history professor in Beijing Normal
University, who posted a short essay on his blog that invoked intense
discussion in 2005. Entitled “Stay Alert to Racism in Pop Songs,” Tao
was specifically concerned with the selection of the song “The Chinese”
for inclusion in the one hundred patriotic songs for middle school students by the municipal government of Shanghai. Tao also included
other Gangtai pop songs in the category, such as “Descendants of the
Dragon,” “Pearl of the Orient,” and “Dear China, I Love You.” Tao
argued that “rather than an identity based on modern nationality or
citizenship of the ‘Chinese,’ these songs project biological characteristics as markers of a racial ‘Chinese’ identity. Modern nation states are
a multi-racial political community organized on the basis of modern
political principles … This principle is modern because it differs from
a pre-modern identity established on the basis of racial characteristics
such as [colors] of skin, hair, and eye, as well as the names of specified
mountains and rivers (such as the Yangzi and Yellow rivers).” According
to Tao, these songs define the Chinese racially and exclude ethnic
minorities, and thus cannot be regarded as patriotic at all (Tao 2006).
Tao’s criticism was contested by many critical posts insisting that
such a racism was not racist at all but was a legitimate and genuine
expression of Chinese national pride and patriotism. Among Tao’s critics, one came from an unexpected background: a scholar of literature
82 Y. Cheng
and critical theory at Beijing Youth Politics College who was educated
in the West. Entitled “Why Should We Hymn the Yellow Skin?” the
article came out in the political and cultural commentary section of the
Guangming Daily, a major Chinese newspaper. Employing the concept
of resistance in postcolonial discourse, such as the idea that blackness is
as beautiful as whiteness, the scholar argued that the racialized concepts
Tao criticized were not only essentially anti-racist but also exactly what
the Chinese needed to enhance their confidence in the face of Western
racial superiority that denigrated the yellow skin, in the same way that
black people felt proud of their black skin (Yu 2006). The author muddled two sets of different concepts. Just because in the past “yellow skin”
was racially denigrated does not justify its racial elevation today. Just
because one rejects Western racism using yellow skin to mark an inferior national identity does not vindicate using the same marker as a key
component in constructing a self-confident national identity. By twisting postcolonial critical theory, the essay evaded the key question Tao
raised in his essay: was it politically correct to identify the Chinese by
projecting their racial features? Nonetheless, this essay was widely read
and also posted on some official media’s cultural websites.
In 2007, after the song “Yellow Skin” became popular in China,
Mao Chongjie, a researcher at the Institute of Literature at the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), wrote an easy and posted it on his
blog. Under the conspicuous title “Embrace Universalism, Reject Racial
Supremacism,” he began with a review of the controversy provoked by
Tao’s essay two years earlier. He agreed with Tao that “all of these songs
have racial characteristics that arouse [nationalist] pride, such as ‘yellow skin,’ ‘black eyes,’ and ‘black hair.’” However, he said “Tao’s essay
was repudiated by numerous music fans using swear words. This trend
[of racial nationalism] has gone more wild and recently there is even
a song simply titled ‘Yellow Skin.’” Mao asked: “Was Tao’s criticism
wrong?” He suggested the reader replace the “yellow skin” of the song’s
lyrics with “white skin,” and he did so in his essay before going on to
ask “What do we feel if we hear a white person sings such a song? If we
feel a bit uncomfortable then we should think of what Confucius said:
‘What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’ Racial
characteristics are created by nature, not society; there is nothing racially
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 83
superior neither inferior, thus there is no reason to be proud of or feel
shame [because of one’s racial identity]” (Mao 2008).
There have been other critics of the racial discourse expressed in
Gangtai patriotic songs and echoed or further developed by patriotic
songs from the mainland. However, they were sporadic, cautious, and
basically didn’t feature in mainstream media. In addition, the social status of their authors was unlike that of Tao and Mao, who are recognized
intellectuals, and therefore often received much less attention and were
hard to find.
Patriotic Music in the Time of Peace:
Some Comparisons
The role of music—classic, folk, and popular, or a mixture of them,
especially of the latter two—in creating and enhancing nationalism
through constructing and propagating collective and individual identities as well as nurturing patriotic sentiments has been a subject of
musicology in academic world. In this regard, some international comparisons may help in finding an appropriate place for the Chinese case
in the long history of such a political appropriation of music. Such
comparisons are particularly relevant if drawn from studies of the type
of nationalism that tended to subject individuals to a collective identity, rejecting or avoiding the idea that in modern society the sense of
national belonging and political loyalty should first base itself in fullrights citizenship, rather than appealing to primitive and therefore
arbitrarily enforced concepts such as blood, soil, ancestors, etc., or a
romanticized nostalgia of a constructed national past that invokes feelings of uncritical nationalist pride. This, of course, is nothing new in
world history.
All nations promote national and patriotic music, but the difference is its prevalence in both spatial and temporal terms in the musical
cosmos. Every country has its national anthem and a number of historically established patriotic songs in its national musical repertoire
for ritualistic occasions that distinguish themselves from most musical entertainment events. A line between patriotic music and everyday
84 Y. Cheng
musical enjoyment or even civic musical education is often observed.
Significant endorsement of patriotic music is commonplace among
countries in national crisis only and is limited to a particular genre.
The problem in China, however, is that since the early 1980s—a
time officially recognized as the most favorable for the nation’s socioeconomic development since the Opium War in 1840—patriotic songs
have mushroomed to take up a significant space and have continued to
be prominent in the musical world with official promotion and popular
enthusiasm. From government ceremonies to school events, pop music
concerts, and private KTV self-entertainment, patriotic songs or their
lyrics are omnipresent. This problem gets even more unsettling if no
one has ever felt a strange feeling about this extraordinary phenomenon
that often appears elsewhere only in times of all-out war.
China did have a war with Vietnam in the time period this research
concerns, but its full-scale campaign was brief (February–March of 1979,
although tension and skirmishes along the Chinese-Vietnamese border
continued for many years), limited to two border provinces, and most
importantly it was the Chinese army’s invasion of a small neighbor—
regardless who is to blame for the origin of the conflict—rather than an
invasion of China by an imperialist power. Compared with wars involving foreign powers in modern Chinese history as well as the Soviet threat
in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the border war with Vietnam certainly was not a national crisis at all. The party-state propaganda apparatus, especially the music departments of the army’s political divisions,
created a number of patriotic songs and attributed them to the patriotic
fervor inspired by the war with Vietnam, ironically China’s most admired
ally in its anti-American propaganda in the previous decade.
Of these songs, three achieved immediate success and have remained
on the list of official patriotic songs. The first is “Good Bye, Mother!”
(再见吧, 妈妈), a farewell melody in which a departing soldier comforts
his mother by telling her that if he dies, she will see beautiful camellia.
The message is that the fallen soldier’s soul will enter an incarnation of
a flower that symbolizes natural beauty and the purity of the nation.
“Bloodstained Glory” (血染的风采), the second song, is also a departing melody but by a husband to comfort his wife that if he dies, “the flag
of the republic will fly with this bloodstained glory of mine.” The third
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 85
is “The Full Moon” (十五的月亮). A duet, the song is an affectionate
dialogue between the husband who is patrolling the border and the wife
who is rocking the cradle of their baby far away from her husband. The
full moon in the night sky—the moment heavy with an overwhelming
feeling of homesickness in the Chinese literary tradition—transcendentally facilitates their reunion as both of them look upon it.
All of these songs fall into the category of popular music, not of a
marching band. A historical comparison may be found in Japanese wartime patriotic pop songs. During the 1930s and the entire Pacific War,
a number of patriotic songs were created or were created previously
but then promoted with government sanction. They were broadcast on
radios all the time and their records sold in large numbers. There were
two types of Japanese patriotic songs: the first and mainstream type
was termed Gunka (songs of a military nature), represented by Aikoku
Kōshinkyoku (“March for love of the fatherland”) created in 1937, the
year Japan escalated its war in China and occupied the Chinese capital. The song was a result of a government-sponsored nationwide competition, which received thousands of submissions and was regarded as
semi-national anthem. “China, China, the Red Sun Never Sets” can be
regarded as an equivalent of this Japanese song in the way it was created
through the mobilization of lyricists and musicians and its designated
theme. The second type was called gunkoku kayo, or popular songs, and
were officially encouraged and promoted. As Christine Yano describes,
“they tend to dwell on themes such as family, and especially motherhood, that, when taken together, form a sentimental education. One
example, ‘Kudan no Haha,’ [Mother of Kudan, the area of Tokyo around
the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan’s war dead are commemorated], created in 1939, tells a poignant story of an elderly mother who travels
from the countryside to the Yasukuni Shrine where her son is commemorated as a war hero” (Yano 2002). The aforementioned three Chinese
songs are very similar to this one in terms of the sentiment and content.
One more intriguing similarity between Japanese wartime and
Chinese peacetime popular patriotic songs is that their lyrics rarely
mentioned any particular enemy or appealed to apparently racial concepts or rhetoric. Instead, in the Japanese case as John Dower analyzes,
they were replete with sentimental self-reflection about the country,
86 Y. Cheng
the culture, and the people, with snowflakes likened to the purity of
national spirit and cherry blossoms to the sacrifice of soldiers. One such
song entitled “Flowers of Patriotism” found a nationalist essence in the
seasonal blossoms of cherry, red plum, crimson camellias, and chrysanthemums. “Most … reveal an almost painfully self-conscious aspiration
for transcendence, and are suffused with an aura of whiteness, brightness, and redness,” the pure colors associated with the purity of the race
(Dower 2013). While a similar aura and sentiment in general can be
discerned in many Chinese pop songs such as “Good Bye, Mother,” in
which Camellia also essentially symbolizes national beauty, the genre of
Chinoiserie may be seen as a much more appropriate match.
A peacetime China indulged itself in patriotic music as much as wartime
Japan did, perhaps even more obsessively so given the fact that the amount
of patriotic songs created since the early 1980s is enormous (including
Gangtai and mainland pieces together) and the fact that their music as well
as lyrics permeate society. This is phenomenal. In both cases, aside from a
militant marching style, passionate and melancholy descriptions of various
aspects of the national Self infuse the lyrics, and both endeavor to rediscover
and adhere to that pure self-image while the identity of a national enemy
could be a secondary concern or even remain amorphous.15
Another example of music extraordinarily facilitating a rising nationalist agenda, especially in peacetime, can be found in Germany during the 1930s. The sponsorship as well as guidance of German music
from the state was all-encompassing, in particular in terms of folk
music which was the equivalent of pop music in Japan and China in
terms of everyday influence. It included the Nazi Party and the state’s
administration of the Propaganda Ministry, the Reich Chamber of
Culture, and the SS-Ahnenerbe, which directed and supervised musical
culture through organizing music in civil, ceremonial, and paramilitary activities. It drew on the music’s strength by granting it official
status, and sponsored the collection, research, and education of folk
15In
Japan, however, such a sentimentalized wartime culture eventually concerned the authorities. As
Dower put it, “the molders of public sentiment deemed it necessary to toughen up patriotic spirit by
encouraging more specifically anti-Anglo-American songs. Thus in April 1943 a nationwide competition was announced for a ‘lively, sturdy tune’ with the tempo of a march. The prescribed title was
‘Down with British and American’” (Dower, p. 214).
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Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 87
music. The idea behind such a state engagement of folk music was to
discover and promote an untainted “urdeutsche music” (literarily old
German music, for example the music of prehistoric Germanic tribes
and the alleged strains of German characteristics in medieval liturgical
chants) (Applegate and Potter, pp. 25–26). This musical engagement
of the Nazi party-state helped to construct a pure Germanness within
Germany and beyond its borders as a cohesive element in the panGerman world of a number of Central and Eastern European countries
with ethnic Germans. On the surface it was not expressed in racial language, but the way it claimed a German soul in ethnic music constituted part of the periphery of an authentic national culture with a racial
core, just like many pop music products in Japan and China.
Analysis and Conclusions
Gangtai patriotic songs and their mainland mimics do not simply represent Chinese national identity, they are agents participating in its creation
and implementation. Their music and lyrics narrate the national history, define Chineseness, and invoke, sharpen, and propagate a feeling of
national grievance with an increasingly explicit assertion that the “Yellow
race walks on the earth.” The way their repertories have been used for
all kinds of social activities as well as private entertainment events—
both domestically and internationally—demonstrates its role not only
in civic patriotic education but also, or even more, in state nationalist
mobilization. It is an all-encompassing rhetoric that permeates the musical entertainment of the people. The extent of politicizing pop music in
peacetime, an extraordinary phenomenon elsewhere, has become so normal in China that one rarely feels uneasy about it. An overly patriotic
music genre with an explicitly racial appeal has become an inseparable
part of the upbringing of many generations since the 1980s.
In analysing such a development of a pop music genre employing
racialized concepts to serve a nationalist agenda, the most important
political factor is a new political economy that developed in the collaboration between the propaganda apparatus and censorship authorities of the party-state and capitalist cultural producers in Hong Kong
88 Y. Cheng
and Taiwan. This new political economy constitutes part of the survival
strategy of the CCP regime, in which the party-state can gain through
the marketization of cultural and ideological goals, as long as the
authorities can set and regulate the agenda. This hand of manipulation
is less visible in the creation of those Gangtai songs, but is more apparent in promoting and rewarding them.
There are some other major questions standing out. One is why the
lyrics of Gangtai patriotic songs have to be racialized, or why the producers didn’t choose “colorless” nationalistic or patriotic language? The
answer is that the conventional appeal of racism to nationalism notwithstanding, it is because the patriotic Chinese identity of these Gangtai
singers is ambiguous, questionable, or even unqualified: they were not
born and politically socialized in mainland China and none of them is
a citizen of the PRC. They are residents of Hong Kong or Taiwan, and
some of them actually hold foreign passports. In order to sidestep this
inherent handicap to their claimed Chineseness, their lyrics must therefore play up the physical and biological characteristics of perceived
Chineseness. The lyrics of Gangtai patriotic songs assert that Chineseness
is essentially innate and immutable, and thus as long as one has “two
black and one yellow,” he/she shares the same ancestors, blood and, more
allusively, a “Chinese heart,” with the mainland Chinese, regardless of
all social, political, and cultural factors that might identify a person otherwise. These concepts are so well received among many Chinese that
whenever a scientist, or a cultural or political celebrity of Chinese ancestry emerges outside China, questions and discussions about “how much is
he or she Chinese?” or “what do his or her achievements mean to China?”
will certainly be seen in the Chinese media and internet.16
16For example, when Roger Yonchien Tsien, a Chinese-American scientist, won the Nobel prize
for physics in 2008, he was asked several times by Chinese journalists in news conferences about
the implications of his success to China and Chinese scientists, even after he expressed confusion
caused by such questions and insisted that he was an American. Gary Locke, the US ambassador
to China between 2011 and 2013, is a second-generation Chinese-American. With the Chinese
name of Luo Jiahui, he looks perfectly like a Han Chinese in the eyes of many Chinese people.
Since his nomination, speculation on “how much is he still a Chinese” have bothered numerous Chinese netizens. After living in Beijing, Locke seemed to get used to such a perception and
began to use it for public relations purposes. His long interview with a major Chinese popular
history journal was titled “Luo Jiaohui: My Chinese Heart” (Locke 2012).
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 89
A racialized discourse is often a more potent element in radical
nationalism, but because it is racist its application is often avoided or
restricted by officially stated nationalism in a post-racist world. In the
case of Gangtai patriotic songs and their mainland mimics, precisely
because of this non-official origin and the form of presentation—it originated from outside the mainland and was spelt out in pop music language—racial thinking can address itself more freely, pervasively, and
blatantly on non-official occasions and is thus more accessible to ordinary people on a day-to-day basis. It can even invite spontaneous participation in the creation, revision, and enhancement of such a musical
patriotism on the popular culture market with little public resistance or
international attention. That is part of the reason why such a palpable
racism has rarely been treated or even noticed by academic communities
and observers of China.
Another question is how inventive the genre of Gangtai patriotic
songs is in regard to its role in the construction of a racialized nationalist discourse. Most specific concepts and vocabulary, such as “two
blacks and one yellow,” the “Chinese heart and Chinese blood,” and
“descendants of the Dragon,” etc., were created by Gangtai patriotic songs and their mainland clones since the early 1980s. A review
of patriotic song lyrics produced during the war against Japan’s invasion in the 1930s–1940s finds very little in racial terms (Miao 2007).
It was possibly because the racial lines were blurred by the fact that a
fellow “yellow race” (the Japanese) invaded China while many “white
races” (the Americans, British, and Russians) who had been enemies of
Chinese nationalism were now allies. Language referring to the “Yellow
Emperor” or “Emperors of Yan and Huang” and their “descendants”
was used to enhance the awareness of being Chinese and provided a
sense of Chinese identity in some of the poems.17 In addition, often by
17An example in this case is Wen Yiduo (闻一多 1899–1946), a very popular poet between the
1920s and 1940s, who wrote a poem titled “I Am a Chinese.” An influential piece often quoted
in patriotic education as an example of patriotic literature before 1949, it was written during
the time that Wen was an overseas Chinese student. It heralded Gangtai patriotic songs in two
ways. One is that the poem contains some lines with racial connotations echoed in Gangtai patriotic songs, although it is difficult to determine whether the latter’s lyricists were aware of them.
90 Y. Cheng
adopting a first-person love song and employing a biographical narrative (the non-mainland upbringing of the singers versus their Chinese
blood), the political message in the song becomes more personal and
therefore more appealing. Also, by using vulgar and coarse language
the patriotism appears less orthodox and resonates not only among
the young, less-sophisticated groups, but also among relatively welleducated people who seek a more direct way of venting their nationalist
emotion.
Another question is that although there is evidence indicating a
collaboration between the party-state and Gangtai capitalist cultural
industry, as a government of a multi-ethnic nation, what exactly do we
know about the CCP’s official stand on such a Han-centric construct
of Chineseness? Based on the available data, it is possible to argue that
the discourse poses a dilemma to the CCP regime. On the one hand it
was a very effective tool in patriotic education and nationalist mobilization, but on the other hand it also carried negative connotations regarding Han and non-Han relations. In practical terms, the regime avoids
the discourse in official policy statements, but grants acquiescence to it
in propaganda, education, media, and particularly popular culture. In
a way, this practicality resembles the way the party-state has restricted
overtly resentful nationalist feelings against certain clearly identified foreign countries in its official propaganda but has allowed or even encouraged an outlet in pop music for this sentiment.
This analysis can be supported by an observation of the official attitude—and its disregard by the society as a whole—towards “descendants of the Yan and Huang Emperors.” The “Yan and Huang Emperors”
in question were two legendary tribal leaders who purportedly lived
somewhere in the Yellow River Valley, probably in the vicinity of today’s
Shanxi Province, in around 4000–5000 BC. The two emperors have
been venerated as ancestors of the Chinese nation in many Han historical narratives. This Han-centered monogenesis of the Chinese race
The poem includes lines such as “I am Chinese, I am Chinese, I am the divine blood of the
yellow Emperor … my race is like the Yellow River.” The poem is now available online on many
education websites (the translation is taken from Dikötter 1992, p. 362). The other is that the
patriotic sentiments in the poem are expressed against a biographical background: a Chinese student in a foreign country longing for his motherland.
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 91
and civilization has been disputed since the 1920s and in the eyes of
many contemporary archaeologists, anthropologists, and genealogists is
nothing more than a myth, but has remained the most popular alternative term to Chinese with the public (Leibold 2006, pp. 181–220). The
phrase—or, an ancestor-based ethnonym for Han Chinese—became
especially popular during the war against Japan’s invasion (1931–1945)
as a catchphrase to arouse nationalist sentiment and disregard for political differences between various political forces, the communists and
nationalists in particular. It was such a valuable and effective concept in
patriotic propaganda that even its 1920s critics were led to forsake, or at
least stop insisting on, their previous position (Leibold 2006, p. 209).
The argument was of little importance during Mao’s time, due to the
overwhelming influence of Marxist classism and ongoing political and
military confrontation between the mainland and Taiwan. In 1979, as
political circumstances changed significantly, the central government
issued an “Open Letter to Fellow Chinese in Taiwan,” a policy statement that called for a peaceful reunification and used “descendants of
Emperor Huang” to identify the Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan
Straits and thus reintroduced it into the nationalist discourse (Standing
Committee of the National People’s Congress 1979). Since then the
phrase has been popular in nationalist discourse as well as in Gangtai
patriotic songs as a pan-Han Chinese ethnonym transcending political
and even citizenship-based differences.
In 1984, Mi Zhancheng, a Hui Muslim member of Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC), wrote a letter to the CCP’s
central committee stating that using “descendants of Yan and Huang
Emperors” to denote all Chinese people was inaccurate and inappropriate. Mi made it clear that the “Yan and Huang Emperors” were merely
the legendary ancestors of the Han Chinese, and as a Hui Muslim
Chinese, he was concerned about the language’s negative connotations in terms of national unity. During the following year (1985) the
General Office of the CCP’s central committee issued an internally
circulated instruction requiring the use of “Chinese people” or “all
nationalities of China” in policy statements and official occasions, but
admitting that “descendants of Yan and Huang Emperors” appeals to
Chinese people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese world
92 Y. Cheng
in general, and could therefore continue to be used in the media for
propaganda purposes. This permission clearly shows the authorities’
understanding of the practical value of this racial rhetoric to the entire
Chinese world as far as its national unification agenda is concerned
(Ye 2010).
During a 1991 meeting regarding frontier security and ethnic relations, Jiang Zemin, the then general secretary of the CCP, demanded
that for “domestic occasions” only “Chinese people” or “all sons and
daughters of China” should be used for “domestic purposes.” Jiang was
specifically responding to “some ethnic minority people’s dissent of
the phrase” and excluded it from “domestic use,” which meant that its
use was still permitted overseas which was inconsistent with the aforementioned instruction. In 1993, Li Ruihuan, the then chairman of the
CPPCC, proposed the use of “all sons and daughters of the Chinese
all over the world” (海内外中华儿女) as an official as well as popular
term to refer to the Chinese wherever they reside. It is a pan-Chinese
ethnonym that avoids an explicit Hanist connotation but still promotes
a familial tie that appeals to the concept of ancestors and lineage and
is therefore by implication still close to racial identity. However, in the
mid-1990s, the continued persistent and pervasive use of the phrase
“Yan and Huang Emperors” provoked criticism once more. The representatives of ethnically diverse Guizhou Province in the national
People’s Congress proposed that the term be officially abandoned, a
request that was supported by the central government in the form of an
official instruction issued by the Propaganda Department of the CCP’s
central committee in 1995. In 2002, the State Administration of Radio,
Film, and TV (SARFT) issued an official direction, requiring that the
phrase should not be used in the media, entertainment, and popular
culture (Ye 2010).
Despite all of these dissenting voices from ethnic minority people and requests from central authorities, the phrase “descendants of
Yan and Huang Emperors” has remained as the most popular publicly
used synonym of “Chinese people”, more than “the descendants of the
Dragon,” both domestically and internationally. A web search for the
term will certainly find that the minorities’ opposition and the official
ban on the term have been simply ignored by various groups in Chinese
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 93
society, many of which are essentially official or semi-official. For example, for Chinese diplomats around the world, “descendants of Yan and
Huang Emperors” has become the most common and inclusive ethnonym when they address the Chinese in their respective areas. Overseas
Chinese associations often include the ethnonym in their organizations’
titles.
The explanation for this unusual ineffectiveness in the CCP’s political control system, and for the unusual popular disregard of a repeated
official position (a ban on the positive use of “multi-party democracy”
or “freedom of the press”, for example, will be forcefully implemented)
has a lot to do with the ambivalence of the authorities. The CCP regime
is currently facing a quandary concerning the contradiction between an
effective patriotic propaganda tool and concerns about Han and nonHan relations. On the one hand, the authorities know the ethnonym
is politically incorrect and even potentially harmful to ethnic relations.
On the other hand, it is a time-honored, powerful, and popular signifier
of a majority-based patriotism. The history of the discussions regarding
the use of “descendants of Yan and Huang Emperors” within the party-state shows a somewhat perfunctory dealing with the issue: it is not
allowed in principle, but it is used everywhere in practice.
In this regard, the authorities’ dismissal of Hou Dejian’s publicly
made request to drop the “two black and one yellow” from the “Dragon
song” is also illustrative: if asked seriously, the authorities would say
that such a description of Chinese people is wrong, by the same token
as their opposition to the phrase “descendants of Yan and Huang
Emperors.” However, they never bothered to enforce such a standing—
it is, after all, a mighty catchphrase for a patriotism that appeals to a
majority ethnicity. Therefore, the pervasive use of “descendants of Yan
and Huang Emperors” and “two black and one yellow” is by no means a
petty neglect that either slipped the notice of official censors or failed to
raise government attention. It is rather the result of a deliberate political
pragmatism in the resolution of an ideological dilemma, leading to a
hands-off policy.
In September 2009, and shortly before the sixtieth anniversary of
the founding of the PRC, Hong Kong’s Wenhui Daily, Beijing’s mouthpiece in the former colony, published an article titled “Patriotic Songs
94 Y. Cheng
of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Mainland and the Formation of the
National Identity.” The author, Yang Zhiqiang, was the president of
the Business and Professionals Federation of Hong Kong, a pro-Beijing
organization. Yang felt it unfair that the one hundred patriotic songs
recommended by Beijing honored only five Gangtai patriotic songs
(Yang 2009). However, Yang’s complaint was baseless. Among the hundred songs, about half were actually dedicated to the party, honoring its
glorious history and Mao. Of the remaining half, more than forty cannot be identified with any ethnicity or geographical region. Among the
last ten selections, five could be associated with cultural or geographical features of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan. With a
total of five selected, Gangtai patriotic songs stood out collectively as the
most conspicuous category. The party-state’s reward to the pop music
genre was extremely generous.
Lastly, it would be natural and logical to ask a question: if Gangtai
patriotic songs had never existed, would a racial discourse about
Chinese identity have emerged anyway? The answer to this hypothetical
question can be found in the examination of the racial content in other
parts of the Chinese nationalist discourse, which will make this particular rhetoric seem less historically contingent. After all, the Chinese
world beyond the party-state would sooner or later interact with the
China under the party-state as the latter’s “reform and open-door”
strategy continued, and mainland-bound nationalism would inevitably
play some role. More importantly, what we are now certain of is that
the party-state did not sit passively at the receiver’s end of this cultural
production. Rather, it has appreciated, encouraged, and often directed
the racial elements in the music genre. Whether invisible or on display,
the hand of the party-state is always there. The music genre was a result
of the interaction between capitalist manufacturing and a party-state,
therefore its creation is somehow historically unavoidable.
Through timely accommodation of the ideological agenda of the party-state both domestically and internationally, Gangtai patriotic songs
have played a significant role in contemporary Chinese nationalism.
The music genre contributed a number of racialized concepts about
Chinese identity and Chinese history to contemporary China’s nationalist politics, as well as a set of highly effective idioms that address these
2
Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music 95
concepts, a form of popular appeal and mass mobilization in a seemingly spontaneous and innocent manner, and finally, a mechanism
through which the party-state deftly tames and exploits the power of
capitalist cultural production and the marketplace for ideological education. An introduction to and an analysis of this pop music genre
provides a particular prism through which the dynamics and intensity
of contemporary Chinese nationalism can be better understood as an
interaction between the politics of reconstructing the national identity
and the origination and popularization of a racial discourse.
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3
Is Peking Man Still Our
Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage
From the “Sacred Flame” to “Thank You,
Our Ancestor!”
In a culture known for its emphasis on the veneration of ancestry and
family lineage, it is natural for a powerful nationalism to find a descent
as ancient as its textual and material cultures can trace, often measured in several thousands of years. However, in China such an ancestral root is found in lithic age fossils and the remains of prehistorical
human activities, and is aged at somewhere between two million years
at most and seven hundred thousand years at least. The latter has been
officially established and represented by Peking Man, a Homo erectus
(H. erectus ) group who lived in mountain caves of the Zhoukoudian
region, about fifty kilometers southwest of today’s metropolitan
Beijing. First discovered in 1929 when a skull was unearthed, Peking
Man, whose archeological sites were found in China, was considered
to represent all Paleolithic hominid groups as the direct ancestor of the
Chinese people. At the time of the discovery, Peking Man pushed back
the timeline for studies of human evolution about half a million years
from Neanderthals and put China at the forefront of the field. The most
© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_3
99
100 Y. Cheng
recent estimate of the age of Peking Man is seven hundred and seventy
thousand years (Shen et al. 2009).
Peking Man’s eminence as the national ancestor in contemporary
China was first marked by the inclusion of Zhoukoudian on the list
of the “One Hundred National Bases for Patriotic Education” by the
Department of Propaganda of the CCP Central Committee (DPCCP)
in 1997 (Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen 1997), the year of a significant boom in nationalist rhetoric as Hong Kong returned to China
after one and a half centuries of British rule. Before, Zhoukoudian
was a National Site for Historical Preservation, established by China’s
State Council in 1962. Since the mid-1990s, however, Peking Man has
walked out of the museum and history textbooks to assume a role in
patriotic mobilization.
Today, Peking Man’s physical presence in Chinese nationalism can
be seen in the China Centennial Monument (中华世纪坛) on West
Chang’an Avenue in the center of Beijing. The monument has stood
since January 2000 to mark the start of “the Chinese century” and to
witness “the great revival of Zhonghua minzu.” The monument complex includes a sunken plaza with an eternal fire burning at its center
called the Altar of the Sacred Flame. The flame was obtained through
wood drilling in the caves of Zhoukoudian on the last day of the century, by actors dressed in cavemen costumes and was passed on to Li
Ning, a gymnast with numerous medals for China, and then carried to
the monument site through a fifty-kilometer relay. Hours later, at the
eve of the new century, Jiang Zemin, the then leader of the party-state,
introduced the flame to the altar to consummate the state ritual that
has established of Peking Man’s symbolism as a perennial sign (CCTV
2000.1).
As a matter of fact, fire obtained from the Zhoukoudian caves
through wood drilling has resulted in the use of sacred flames to initiate public events since the 1990s, and has indicated the significance
of the work of senior China-originated Chinese (COC) anthropologists to Chinese nationalism. The torch of the Seventh National
Olympics (1993) was lit there by Jia Lanpo, a legendary anthropologist
who discovered three Peking Man skulls in 1936. Named The Flame
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 101
of Civilization, the torch was relayed to Tiananmen Square, where a
massive rally was awaiting. In July 2005, to celebrate the commencement of a cultural plaza in Beijing designed for the 2008 Olympics,
Liu Dongsheng (1917–2008), also a senior anthropologist, lit the torch
by the same method and passed it on to actors who were half-naked,
covering their lower bodies with tree leaves and animal furs, to start a
relay with the torch being carried by cultural and athletic celebrities.
Photos of the ceremonial fire making in the cave is still displayed online
(People’s Daily, March 27, 2008). Upon its arrival at the plaza, the director of the State Bureau of Cultural Relics, along with Beijing’s deputy
mayor, took over the torch to ignite “the Altar of the Sacred Flame and
restart the fire of human civilization.” When China hosted the 2008
summer Olympics, the route of the Olympic torch in the Beijing area
began in Zhoukoudian, where a mass rally over the whole day was
organized with various patriotically themed activities. Online photos
show that the ceremonial relay started at the site of Peking Man’s bronze
head statue which projects facial features of the national ancestor. Feng
Gong, the torch bearer and a very popular actor, was proudly holding
the torch high and was escorted by a bodyguard. The same bodyguards
also appeared on the torch’s global multi-city relay in the same year to
fend off various groups of people protesting Beijing’s hosting of the
Olympics (People’s Daily, August 8, 2008).
Since the discovery of the fossils, Chinese anthropologists have interpreted ash-like remains at the site as evidence of Peking Man’s capability
with fire, which was believed to be the earliest among the world’s primitive hominids. This hypothesis transformed itself into a national pride
and the popular perception that ascribes the use of fire to the creation of
not only Chinese but also global civilizations. The general reader often
takes it for granted that fire was created by wood drilling, unaware of the
fact that fire lit by accidental lightening had long preceded fire obtained
by artificial methods. As early as the 1930s, under a Nationalist government, a popular narrative of the national ancestry myth titled “From
Prehistoric Human to the Chinese” had already claimed that “We pioneered in human evolution and made human civilization bloom. Our
ancestor lit up the fire so we could be illuminated. How can the Chinese
today not be awakened and inspired!” (Yen 2015, p. 614). Half a century
102 Y. Cheng
later, the CCP’s official narrative regarding Peking Man’s use of fire went
from strong nationalist pride to a claim of international acknowledgement of China’s leading role in world civilizations: “Making and using
fire was the glorious first attempt in the history of mankind to control
nature.… The Chinese nation has never given up its unyielding struggle
for survival and pursuit for proliferation [and] the fire for hope has never
extinguished. … This spirit will inspire China in the new century and
the new millennium to ensure the great revival of the Chinese nation”
(CCTV 2000.2). Historical tourism proclaims, “[w]e can say without
any exaggeration that the fire in Zhoukoudian illuminated the world”
(Wenweipo Daily 2011). International archaeologists’ disagreement with
the Chinese interpretation of the ash-based evidence is often perceived
as a challenge to China from the West, as media report suggests (Yang
2015). The fire lit by Peking Man is also treated on the first pages of
history textbooks and highlighted in exercises and exams (Ye 2012; Qu
2013), often along with a map of the distribution of primitive hominids
all over China. A history teacher shared with his colleagues his didactic
instruction methods that stretch the patrilineal imaginations of students
into an unmeasurable past: “You ask them: ‘How old are you?’ ‘How old
is your father?’ ‘How old is your grandfather?’ And so on. As students
answer these questions, you help them calculate ‘100 years, 1000 years,
10,000 years, 400,000 or 500,000 years and one million years’, and so
on to establish basic concepts of the long history of our fatherland” (Wei
1984, p. 46).
In history education and nationalist discourse, such a veneration of
a lithic-age national ancestor is induced with words describing the positive traits of today’s Chinese people such as diligence, brightness, and
bravery. Popular culture digs deeper underneath the sundry facts of
chronology and relics to attribute the assumed longevity of the Chinese
people and civilization to virtues of their ancestors, reflected in a drama
titled Primitive Love of Peking Man. As a music, dance, and epic drama,
a genre usually reserved for programs of political significance, it pays
tribute to Gen (根 “root”), the protagonist whose single-character name
indicates his ancestral status. A patriarch of a Peking Man group, Gen ’s
valor and shrewdness are key to the survival of the small family group,
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 103
but his privileged status in the competition for females causes grievance
from the young cavemen. As he grows older, he realizes that he can no
longer produce healthy offspring to carry on the lineage, so he allows
his young rivals to share his female companions. In the finale he throws
himself into a bone fire to let others consume his barbequed flesh in
a desperate food shortage created by a harsh winter. “Thank you, our
ancestor!”—the drama’s poster highlights the fact that the virtue of
altruism for the survival of the collective has been part of Chineseness
since the very beginning of the race (CRJ Online 2010).
The drama incorporated popular culture and the COC theory. A collaboration between the Zhoukoudian Museum and a group of avantgarde artists (Beijing 1998 International Youth Art Troupe), the drama
was created to promote the Museum to tourists. To maximize box office
proceeds, the drama’s poster warned the audience about the content
inappropriate for young adults and children, by alluding to violent and
sexually explicit scenes legitimate in the context of primitive and promiscuous cavemen life. However, by the end of the drama, in the flame
of sacrifice, all sensual scenarios and expectations are sublimated to a
tribute to an ancestral hero’s altruism. The fire lit by Peking Man thus
not only reflects an overarching theme of Chinese nationalism—an anxiety for the survival of the nation and a call for sacrificial patriotism—
but also dramatizes the argument made by anthropologists in their
debate with geneticists: fire making technology likely enabled Peking
Man’s descendants to survive the Ice Age while their counterparts elsewhere went extinct, as we will discuss later.
Paradoxically, since the 1960s there have been substantial findings of H. erectus fossils significantly predating Peking Man, for example Yuanmou Man (in Chuxiong Yi ethnic autonomous prefecture,
Yunnan Province, which is about 1.7 million years old) and Lantian
Man (in Shaanxi Province, at about 1.15 million years old). Found in
recent years, Jianshi Man (in Enshi Tu and Miao ethnic autonomous
prefectures, Hubei Province) is believed to be more than two million
years old. However, Peking Man and Zhoukoudian still stand to represent the earliest Chinese people and the earliest Chinese civilization.
Historically and institutionally more established in Chinese archaeological and anthropological experience, Peking Man’s name also implies
104 Y. Cheng
unique values that could foil any challenges from geographically remote
and culturally marginal candidates. Scientific facts yield to ideological
preferences for an iconic unifying role in nationalist memorial.1
An Ongoing Debate on Peking Man and Chinese Racial
Nationalism
The relationship between Peking Man and Chinese nationalism is a relatively marginal subject in the international China studies community
and has only entered scholarly discussions since the turn of the century.
There has been only one book on Peking Man in PRC’s political socialization which includes discussions on nationalism, and there have been
several articles focusing on nationalist, ethnic, or even racial aspects
of Chinese discussions on H. erectus and they are more relevant to the
subject of this book. In this chapter, this literature is outlined and analyzed around the key issue of to what extent the Chinese discussion has
enhanced racial discourse in Chinese nationalism.
In 2001, The Journal of Asian Studies published an article titled
“Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism
in China” by Barry Sautman. It attempted to divert scholarly attentions on Chinese nationalism in post-Mao China from the focus on
“‘high politics’ or the foreign policy of party-state elites” to more cultural and social trends by examining a state-sponsored discourse that
adapted a body of complex scholarship of both the archeology and the
anthropology of the Stone Age to identify the Chineseness personified by Peking Man. Sautman’s research played a pioneering role in the
1Unlike the names of other famous sites of primitive human habitats, such as Neanderthal and
Cro-Magnon, or those found in China, which derive from the names of the immediate localities of the discovery, Davidson Black, a Canadian anatomist and physical anthropologist who
supervised and authenticated the discovery in 1929, named the fossils Sina anthropuspekinensis,
popularly known as Peking Man, despite the fact that the site is about fifty kilometres from metropolitan Peking. The name was literarily translated into Chinese as “Beijing People.” Had it been
named “Zhoukoudian Man,” or even “Longguo Hill Man” (Longguo Hill, meaning “hill of dragon
bones,” and which was the name of the immediate site where Peking Man fossils were discovered), it perhaps would have sounded less magical to Chinese nationalism.
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 105
discussion by establishing some key arguments and analytical concepts.
He agreed with some scholars’ preliminary observation that in a time
of racial nationalism’s retreat in most major states, Chinese nationalism had shown more “official efflorescence” expressed in the concept of
blood ties. As he stated: “Official PRC paleoanthropology undergirds
a Chinese patriotism that resonates with a folk taxonomy that understands ‘race’ as an evident, natural, fundamental, pervasive, omni-historical, and biologically significant division of the world’s p
­eople.”
The so-called “politics of paleoanthropological nationalism” was its
manifestation. Sautman defined this politics of paleoanthropological
nationalism in the Chinese rejection of the internationally accepted
Out-of-Africa theory regarding the monogenetic origin of modern
humans by insisting on a polygenetic origin to support an independent progenitor of H. sapiens in China. Behind this nationalist assertion
of a native origin was a bolder “Sinocentric evolutionary theory” held
by some Chinese scholars. Sautman’s data were mainly drawn from
scholarly discussions, media reports, and talks by high-ranking leaders’.
Sautman convincingly revealed a strong consciousness among Chinese
scholars of the political sensitivity attached to the discussion on fossils,
and he dialectically portrayed the nationalist Peking Man narrative as “a
kind of reverse teleology, in which the present-day nation is projected as
the inevitable consequence of evolution” (Sautman 2001, p. 104). For
Sautman, this Chinese discourse was a pronounced case of racial nationalism, which “holds that each of us can trace our identities to a discreet
community of biology and culture whose ‘essence’ has been maintained
through time” (Sautman 2001, p. 95).
The key point in understanding this seemingly esoteric discussion
involves a debate between the world’s mainstream paleoanthropologists
and their Chinese peers. While the former adopt the theory first proposed by Allen Wilson and Rebecca Cann in their famous 1987 collaboration “Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution” and believe that
both H. erectus and H. sapiens originated in Africa, that modern humans
are the descendants of the H. sapiens who migrated out of Africa as early
as one hundred and twenty-five thousand years and as late as sixty thousand years ago and replaced the previous H. erectus groups worldwide,
the latter claims that the H. erectus group that had arrived in the land
106 Y. Cheng
of what is today’s China had independently evolved into H. sapiens.
Ordinary readers may construe the meaning of the debate simply as
a question regarding whether the Chinese share a common modern
human origin with the rest of the world, and if not, then exactly how
old are they—one million or two million years?
Sigrid Schmalzer’s 2008 book, People’s Peking Man: Popular Science
and Human Identity in Twentieth Century China, is a comprehensive
study of the role of Peking Man in the PRC’s ideological indoctrination
and political socialization against a backdrop of how modern states have
used scientific education to shape citizenship. Such a political agenda
in the PRC established a human identity free from the influence of the
Christian creation myth and folk religious superstitions regarding the
origin and evolution of mankind, and helped to promote socialist ethics
that exalted physical work by using Peking Man—believed to have been
able to use tools—as an example of what Frederick Engels argued in
his The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Human. This
official effort in popular science to some extent led Schmalzer to arrive
at the conclusion that it was in the early years of the PRC that Peking
Man’s status as the national ancestor was officially established, despite
the fact that prior to 1949 some propagandists of the Nationalist regime
had ventured to do so out of nationalist political agenda. However,
she agreed with Sautman that “a nationalist state agenda has worked
to privilege scientific theories that root Chinese ethnic identity in the
remote past,” which emphasized “the longevity of the Chinese as a biological race and the connection of this race to the Chinese land.” She
also agreed that such a trend had accelerated from the 1980s.
However, Schmalzer disagreed with Sautman on the extent that
such an ethnic identity politics had played in the Chinese emphasis
on Peking Man. First, as she argued, the Chinese discussion was also
a scientific (and not merely political) debate, since “the jury is still out
on many questions about human evolution,” and the Chinese scientific community—archeologists and paleoanthropologists—is in general open minded towards the debate regarding the foreign or native
origin of their ancestor. Second, even in the political motive, a claim
for China’s central role in the origin of humans—“a question more of
prestige in international science”—was more prominent than ethnic
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 107
identity. Third, the construction of “a concept of a biological race” is
“simultaneously destabilized by other meanings produced by scientists,
laypeople, and the state itself.” Finally, many individual Chinese regard
human fossils such as Peking Man “not simply as early representatives of
their nation or race,” but also as “family, community, regional, professional, and human identities” (Schmalzer 2008, pp. 248–250).
Thus both Sautman and Schmalzer agreed upon a nationalist agenda
behind the Chinese discussion on Peking Man, but differed in their
assessments of how political the discussion was and whether a racial
nationalism characterized such a discourse. In tracing the construct of
the discourse of a historical China in lineage and space to define and
defend China as a legitimate nation state against the odds of a historical complex of changing and often ambiguous territorial and ethnic
lines, James Leibold engages Peking Man in his articles “Competing
Narratives of Racial Unity in Republican China: From the Yellow
Emperor to Peking Man” (2006, “Competing Narrative” hereafter) and
“Filling in the Nation: The Spatial Trajectory of Prehistoric Archaeology
in Twentieth-Century China” (2012, “Filling in the Nation” hereafter). They involve the late Qing dynasty and the PRC, but focus on
the Nationalist era, a time critical to the transition from a multi-ethnic empire to a modern nation state. This transition was notably disrupted by Japan’s encroachment and invasions in the 1930s, which
made Peking Man a timely and meaningful discovery for Chinese
­nationalism. Leibold’s interpretation gets more to a reading of a racial
national identity that Peking Man was appropriated to establish.
In “Competing Narratives,” Leibold reveals the tension between a
shared consciousness of a homogenous “Chinese nation”—a “racial
unity”—and different narrative approaches to this consent among
leading Chinese intellectuals whose lifetime crossed the Nationalist
and Communist regimes. Facing a rather messy history of heterogeneous ethnic and racial components as well as the power relations among
them that could lead them to see each other as the Other, Chinese
scholars in the early twentieth century worked strenuously to seek “scientific proof of this unitary national imaginary.” While one narrative
identifies the source of such unity in the common origin for all members of the Chinese nation, the other describes the nation as a result of a
108 Y. Cheng
gradual and evolutionary “melting” of the whole. While both imagined
the Chinese nation of the time as a community of common consanguinity, the common origin discourse took the ancestors of the Han
people as the springboard of such a community, explicitly identifying
the Yellow Emperor (along with some other sage kings praised in Han
folklore) first and Peking Man later as the ancestor of the entire Chinese
nation.
The discovery of Peking Man came in the nick of time when Gu
Jiegang, a famous historian, exposed and critically analyzed the lack of
sufficient and verifiable evidence in Chinese historical records to demystify national origin narratives constructed since the late Qing era that
were based on a single progenitor and a homogenous racial family. Gu
and his followers were thus called “doubters of antiquity.” “The government does not have to lie, telling us that we have descended from the
same ancestor,” such was Gu’s political denunciation of the officially
endorsed national origin myth in the late 1920s. Gu argued for a theory that recognized the multiple ethnic and racial origins of the Chinese
nation, and he believed that such a theory not only reflected historical truth but also would not hurt the shared consciousness of a unified
Chinese nation. On the contrary it honored contributions to the formation of the nation made by non-Han peoples, and would therefore help
national unity.
After the discovery of Peking Man, while some scholars were cautious
to accept his ancestor status for various reasons (some were waiting for
further scientific verification, and others found Peking Man’s facial features looked like those of black slaves rather than sagacious ancestors),
more enthusiastic nationalist intellectuals, some associated with the
Nationalist Government, believed that the discovery “provided scientific
evidence of the autochthonous provenance of the Chinese people.” Gu’s
“doubting of antiquity” and his theory of a Chinese nation with polytheistic components now seemed to be losing ground. The most adamant and confident advocate for Peking Man’s ancestorship was Xiong
Shili, a very influential cultural conservative and neo-Confucian philosopher, who held a series of lectures on Chinese history at the Central
Military Academy in 1939. Xiong told his audience that “[a]mong the
descendants of Peking Man, one branch remained in the Divine Land
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 109
[神州, meaning China] and became today’s Han lineage,” while the
others spread in all directions and became the ancestors of the principle
non-Han minorities (Leibold 2006, pp. 203–205).
In “Filling in the Nation,” Leibold applies the concept of “geo-body,”
a biological nationhood imagined through mapping out the sites of
prehistorical human remains and activities (a typical example involves
the maps of such sites and illustrations that appear in the beginning of
history textbooks in China), to foreground the spatial rather than the
temporal significance of Peking Man to Chinese nationalism. Since the
process of nation-state making demands the inclusion and binding of
all ethnic and racial groups within the national borders, an antiquarianism of such border formation values Peking Man and other primitive
humans found in China today as the most undeniable evidence of the
existence of a historical China that has continued through a bloodline
originated from those lithic-era sites. In the 1930s and 1940s, many
Chinese nationalist scholars had suggested that Peking Man was the
common progenitor of all the peoples in China. By the time of the early
PRC, as Leibold believes, the need for defining borders and uniting different ethnic groups became more urgent as well as realistic under a centralized nation state, and “Peking Man was now clearly positioned as the
direct, linear ancestor of H. sapiens, the yellow race, and the zhonghua
minzu (中华民族 Chinese nation)” (Leibold 2012, p. 346). Therefore,
from different perspectives, both Schmalzer and Leibold reached the
same conclusion regarding the time at which Peking Man was officially
enshrined as the national ancestor.
The relationship between Peking Man and Chinese nationalism has
also been examined from the perspective of a paradigm shift in the
exploration of human origin from Asiancentrism to Sinocentrism after
Peking Man’s discovery. In her article “Evolutionary Asiancentrism,
Peking Man, and the Origins of Sinocentric Ethno-Nationalism” that
covers the period between the 1920s and the 1940s, Hsiao-Pei Yen
extended the discussion to emphasize the “invention” of Peking Man’s
national ancestor status as the result of “negotiations between scientific
universalism (or internationalism) and nationalist commitments” (Yen
2015, p. 591). The discovery and authentication of Peking Man fossils,
according to Yen, was due to many foreign anthropologists’ hopes and
110 Y. Cheng
efforts in finding a human ancestor of lithic age in Asia, especially in
what is today’s north and west China. The driving force of this paradigm shift was the discovery of more early hominid evidence in Asia
and had nothing to do with Chinese nationalism, but its result was read
and exploited by the latter which helped to construct a national identity
with racial implications. As a matter of fact, since that time, the negotiations between scientific cosmopolitanism and its nationalist appropriation have continued to characterize academic and popular discussions
regarding Peking Man.
The above discussions have introduced Peking Man’s significance—
an otherwise purely scientific subject—into our consciousness about
Chinese nationalism by establishing an analytical framework that identifies its political and ideological implications against historical contexts.
It also extracts and expresses in common language some key concepts
from voluminous highly specialized hypotheses, theories, and knowledge, to make sense of the debate for ordinary readers. All authors agree
that the Chinese discussions about Peking Man—and more broadly,
paleoanthropology and prehistorical archaeology—serve a nationalist
agenda with its racial implications. However, there is not only a divergence regarding the significance of such a racial aspect in the nationalism, but also and more importantly a lack of a theoretical explanation
as to why the discourse is racial, although simply by creating and applying those concepts a reader informed by fundamental knowledge about
racial thinking can clearly see the association between them. This theoretical elaboration is necessary not only because it will effectively
engage the Chinese defence that has rejected even nationalist—let alone
racial—implications of the discourse, but also because it will contribute
to our understanding of the varieties of scientific racism that appear to
have nothing to do with a harmful or even dangerous racist agenda.
This chapter therefore furthers the discussion in the hope of addressing these issues and remedying these deficiencies, based on important
developments either not examined in the previous literature or which
have arisen since. First, it emphasizes that since the 1990s, Peking Man’s
assumed ancestorship of the Chinese people has been further valorized as a symbol in state-sanctioned patriotic mobilization, instead of
a mainly paleoanthropological interpretation in nationalist discourse.
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 111
Evidence points to a deep-seated consciousness existing even among
the top leaders of the Chinese being the most evolutionarily advanced
human species among the world’s populations. Second, it focuses on
Chinese discussions on genetic challenges to this ancestorship and sets
the challenge in the historical context of China’s participation in the
international Human Genome Project (HGP) in the late 1990s and
early 2000s to give an understanding of the provocation of the debate
as well as the actions taken by the Chinese state and scientific community. Third, while acknowledging the archeological ground for the
China-origin Chinese (COC) theory, the chapter nonetheless reveals
in detail the academic debate between the two theories regarding the
origin of people. While geneticists in general hold a belief in Africaoriginated Chinese (AOC), anthropologists continue to defend the
COC theory. The debate has carried and enhanced political sensitivity as a result of the discourse strategies employed. In other words, the
issue is scientific (there is indeed archeological evidence in favor of the
COC theory), but the way it is addressed in many situations reads in a
political way. Fourth, the chapter shows how lay supporters of both the
AOC and COC theories fully understand the nationalist implications
immersed in such a professional debate and have engaged each other
in a public discussion through various media channels. This new phenomenon reflects the sociopolitical impact of scientific debates in a time
of mass media and social media, and is analyzed in light of a broader
national ideological divide between ultranationalists and liberal-oriented
groups. Chinese society’s more diverse attitude towards Peking Man, as
Schmalzer emphasized, now includes a potent internationalist antidote
to the nationalist stimulant.
This chapter thus argues that, galvanized by the challenge from genetics to the persistent veneration of Peking Man as the national ancestor,
the Chinese discussions—both academic and popular—on the subject have revealed the more political and especially racial meanings of
the issue. The fact that society scientifically accepts the AOC theory
cannot obscure the fact that the COC theory still serves the nationalist
agenda. On the contrary, the coexistence of the two facts only enhances
the tension within Chinese nationalist politics, and forces COC advocates to seek a more effective discourse strategy that often appeals
112 Y. Cheng
to concepts and terminologies that are more racialized or simply racist when judged by international standards. Inspired by international
studies of similar discourses dubbed such as H. europaeus, H. alpinus,
and H. israelensis, which constructed various imagined ancestors who
bequeathed essentialized communal traits to their posterity, this Chinese
discourse can be called “H. sinensis,” with a much more prehistoric and
therefore biological root to it. Mystifying its association with the land,
this H. sinensis collaborates with the rising racial nationalism expressed
in pop music introduced and analyzed in the previous chapter, which
epitomizes Chineseness with explicit racial taxonomies. Further, it
advances this nationalism by elevating Chinese civilization among the
world’s civilizations with a claim for an incontestably greatest antiquity,
and creating a most cohesive force for nationalist mobilization by establishing a common bloodline.
AOC or COC?—A Debate Between Geneticists
and Anthropologists
Peking Man’s recent prominence reiterates what Chinese nationalism
had assigned to it before. It has risen in defiance of a cutting-edge scientific challenge in the context of China’s participation in the Human
Genome Project (HGP) that enhanced the debate between geneticists
and anthropologists with public repercussions. The HGP was launched
in 1990 by the United States and comprised four developed nations. By
decoding and mapping all the genes in the human genome, this postCold War global collaboration had an immense impact on the determination and preservation of human genetic distinction and diversity,
therefore its results can also be read as “a history book—a narrative of
the journey of our species through time” (National Human Genome
Research Institute 2012). This “history book” opens with a single
African-origin H. sapiens as the ancestor of all modern humans and goes
on to provide genetic interpretations (including migration and interbreeding, among other factors) for the racial and ethnic differences of
all peoples in the world.
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 113
Despite the obvious scientific benefits that the HGP created, sharing national genetic data within the program raised concerns in the
participating countries.2 Weighing the benefits against the risk, the
Chinese state decided to join the HGP in 1993 and officially made its
entry in 1998 after five years of preparation, becoming the only developing nation in the project. The National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NNSFC), under China’s State Council, funded “Research
on the Human Genome in China,” and established a southern center
in the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering in the Institute of
Genetics, School of Life Sciences, at Fudan University in Shanghai. A
northern center was also established in the Human Genome Center at
the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. This national scientific
endeavor started with a project titled “Research on Some Structures of
Gene Loci in the Genome of Chinese People,” which resulted in a contribution to the global genomic map (Jin and Chu 2006, p. 2). This
participation has been reviewed as a strategic development in promoting China’s national interest—“The Battle for Genetic Resources is as
Important as a Battle for Territory,” as the title of an interview with the
director of HGP’s Beijing project clearly indicated (Ji 2007).
2Major
political concerns include how to treat DNA data as a new form of national property
and security. Paul Rabinow illustrates a dramatic case in this regard with the French government prohibiting French scientists from offering “French DNA” to Millennium, a HGP-related
US biochemical company in 1994 (Rabinow 1999). In China, concerns and debates emerged
over possible gene outflow to the West and even alleged gene weapons particularly devised to
sap the Chinese nation. Titles of reports in national media included “To Protect Our National
Security, Safeguard Our Genetic Code” (China Chanjin xinwen bao 2002) and “Is the Chinese
Nation’s Gene Safe? Are Our DNA Samples Outflowing?” (People’s Daily 2005). Chinese geneticists explained that what they shared with foreigners were not samples of saliva or blood but just
certain categories of selected data drawn from these samples. However, this concern still persists
and is dramatized in popular culture. A recent movie titled War Wolf (战狼1) includes scenrio
of international genetic weapons developers using stolen “Chinese DNA” to make biochemical
weapons to attack China. The movie can be seen as a political interpretation of discussions on
a Harvard-based Chinese-American biologist’s collection of gene samples in China in the late
1990s and early 2000s for his research on chronic diseases also funded by the National Institute
of Health, USA, and also associated with Millennium. Chinese scientists and media later became
alerted by the scientist’s research conduct for ethical and legal reasons, which prompted a government investigation in the United States (Harvard School of Public Health 2003).
114 Y. Cheng
What led this Chinese participation to call Peking Man’s ancestorship into question were the research activities conducted by a group of
Chinese scholars affiliated in various ways with American institutions.
Key to this affiliation was Tan Jiazhen, a founding figure of Chinese
genetics who studied at Caltech in the 1930s with Thomas Hunt
Morgan, the father of modern genetics. In the 1950s, after returning
to China, Tan resisted Soviet criticism of genetics—especially Morgan’s
theory—as Western bourgeois science and strove for the survival of the
science in China.3 He urged the Chinese state to join the HGP in the
1990s by using his contacts among Chinese leaders,4 and succeeded in
getting Fudan—his home institution—to become the southern center
for China’s genomic research. He also helped to connect China’s young
geneticists to the international scientific community. Among those
scholars, the most important figures include Jin Li, a geneticist trained
in the United States and a research scientist at the Human Genetics
Center, University of Texas-Houston (HGUT) in the late 1990s; Chu
Jiayou, from the Institute of Medical Biology, Chinese Academy of
Medical Science, who was also a visiting scholar in the United States
in the 1990s; and Su Bin, a postdoctoral fellow at HGUT in the late
1990s. Their international connections made them more aware of the
relationship between the Out-of-Africa theory and the HGP, and they
also knew that the data supporting that theory did not cover China.5
Intrigued by the contradiction between this international mainstream
science and their nationalist belief, they saw Chinese participation as an
opportunity to test both.
3The Soviet criticism of genetics was based on Lysenkoism, an officially endorsed pseudoscientific
theory under Stalin that only recognized acquired characteristics but rejected inherited ones in
relation to biological evolution.
4As an internationally known scientist, Tan was selected in the 1990s by the CCP leadership to
be Honorary Chairman of the China Democratic League, the largest among eight democratic
parties that function as the CCP’s consultative partners, especially among intellectuals. Tan used
his influence to secure China’s partnership with the Human Genome Project (HGP) by directly
addressing its strategic importance to Jiang Zemin (Zhang 2013).
5In 1995, Japanese geneticists provided mitochondrial DNA evidence collected from Japanese
people to support the Out-of-Africa theory (Horai et al. 1995).
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 115
The data these Chinese geneticists collected in China completely
supported the Out-of-Africa theory. Starting in 1998, they began to
publish in international scientific periodicals such as Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), The American Journal of Human
Genetics, Human Genetics, and Science. The first report, “Genetic
Relationships of a Population in China,” analyzed the microsatellite
data of twenty-eight mostly non-Han minority population groups in
China (a microsatellite is a type of molecular marker used to determine
kinship or genetic relations). It concluded that the “genetic evidence
does not support an independent origin of Homo sapiens in China”
(Chu et al. 1998, p. 11763). A more important report was published in
Science in May 2001. Titled “African Origin of Modern Humans in East
Asia: A Tale of 12,000 Y Chromosomes,” the project used chromosomes
as a more accurate data indicator and expanded a sample poll to include
Han Chinese (4592 and 5127 samples from northern and southern
Han Chinese, respectively) and other ethnic groups in East Asia. By
identifying a genome mutation carried only by males “which originated
in Africa about 35,000 to 89,000 years ago” but found in all individual
samples, the report rejected even a minimal likelihood of a native origin
of modern humans from East Asia (Ke et al. 2001, p. 1151).
The first report was originally submitted to Science, but the editor decided to wait due to concerns over the significance of the subject. Tan Jiazhen then suggested the authors try PNAS (Huang 2008).
It was quickly published by that journal and Nature immediately followed up with a lengthy commentary. That was the first time that the
international scientific community confirmed the Out-of-Africa theory with data collected in the world’s most populous country. When
“African Origin of Modern Humans in East Asia: A Tale of 12,000 Y
Chromosomes” was submitted to Science three years later, it was quickly
accepted. Although the research was conducted mainly by Chinese scientists organized in or benefiting from NNSFC projects, the results
were first announced in international journals and then disseminated
back to China through the media. Such a phenomenon is often called
“import via export” in China meaning that international recognition
helps domestic status. After the 1998 PNAS report made Chinese scientists aware of its challenge to Peking Man’s ancestorship, the 2001
116 Y. Cheng
Science report received more publicity in China. The NNSFC official bulletin commented that although fossil and anatomical evidence
found in China still suggested the possibility of the COC theory, “we
very likely have to accept such a point of view: our ancestors came from
Africa” (NNSFCB, February 6, 2002).
A speedy translation and publication of The Journey of Man: A Genetic
Odyssey in 2004, only two years after its English edition appeared, joined
the challenge in a more popular form. Written by Spencer Wells, the book
and a documentary with the same title have been recognized as one of
the most influential popular interpretations of the Out-of-Africa hypothesis. The book has very little on China—since discussions on China had
only recently emerged—but quotes Jin’s work as “bad news” for those
who believe in multiregional continuous evolution. The Chinese publisher’s inclusion of numerous photos and maps indicates the strong expectation for a broader audience, and its preface alerted that “for Chinese
readers, there must be a lot to ponder,” because contrary to the theory
that “Chinese people evolved from an uninterrupted development of local
‘Peking Man’ and other H. erectus groups, the author finds that there is no
evidence for such a hypothesis” (Wells 2004, p. 29).
With further data collection and analysis consistent with these publications in China—a very recent one was announced in 2014 by the
Institute of Zoology of Kunming in Yunnan Province (IZKYP) which
included six thousand individual samples (IZKYP, August 25, 2014)—
the AOC theory has enjoyed wide appeal in Chinese society, especially in the natural science community. Branches of the social sciences
and humanities have also felt the impact with nationalist and ethnic
nationalist implications. One such field is that of linguistics. Quentin
Atkinson’s hypothesis that the phoneme roots of many native languages can be traced back to Africa—an evolutionary linguistic school
inspired by the Out-of-Africa theory—is echoed among Chinese linguists in their search for the origin of the Chinese language (Yao 2010).
Ethnography has become more prominent in ethnic studies as molecular anthropology has become more popular, diverting attention from
textual and material culture analysis to lab results of population genetic
surveys, leading to the reinterpretation of the origin and migration of
many ethnic minority peoples and their relations with the Han and the
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 117
Han-dominated state (Jin and Chu 2006, pp. 227–240). One intriguing result is the discussion on the demic-diffusion model of Han expansion in southern China—as opposed to the traditional cultural diffusion
model, i.e., Han expansion resulted from non-Han peoples’ adoption of
more civilized Han culture—which shows a predominant pattern of a
DNA mix of Han-males and non-Han females in southern China’s Han
population. This result was also first published by Nature (Wen et al.,
September 16, 2004). By interpretation, this could suggest a tantalizing
concept of a longue durée internal gender-based colonization.
Molecular anthropology has also added new fuel to the fire of the
conflict between mainland and Taiwanese nationalisms within a particular context: the outbreak of SARS in 2002–2003. The attempts by
Taiwanese hematologists to analyze the impact of the virus among different population groups in East and Southeast Asia made them aware
that both mtDNA and the Y chromosome of aboriginal Taiwanese are
much closer to those of Austronesians rather than those of the mainland Chinese. “We have different blood,” a claim made by a leading
Taiwanese hematologist in the title of her book thus argues for a much
more diverse origin for the Taiwanese and refutes China’s “same blood,
same ancestor” discourse in its nationalist claim over Taiwan (Lim 2010).
The geneticists’ challenge to the COC theory, however, met with
swift resistance from anthropologists clustered in the Institute of
Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, the institutional spokesperson for the COC
theory. The IVPP was formerly the Research Department of the
Cainozoic Era (RDCE) at the Institute of Geological Survey of China
in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, established in
1929, the year of the discovery of the Peking Man fossils. The institute’s history was essentially a result of Sino-Euro-American scientific
collaboration,6 which not only trained the first generation of Chinese
6The
institute was affiliated with Peking Union Medical College (established by The American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions), especially its anatomical department, which at
the time was the institutional home for physical anthropology. Between 1929 and the outbreak of
the Pacific War, European-American scientists assumed responsibilities for the institute’s administration, and the Rockefeller Foundation financed the work on the archaeological site.
118 Y. Cheng
anthropologists and archaeologists, but also laid the foundations for
the COC theory. Franz Weidenreich (1873–1948), an anthropologist
at the University of Chicago known for his multiregional hypothesis
of human evolution, was honorary director of the RDCF in the mid1930s and that experience played a role in the formation of his theory.
Most COC advocates such as Pei Wenzhong (the discoverer of the first
Peking Man skull in 1929), Jia Lanpo, and Yang Zhongjian (coordinator of Zhoukoudian’s excavation in the 1930s), were trained on site
by Western anthropologists and then became elders in the IVPP. They
were even all buried in Zhoukoudian at their request. Official historical narrative elevates their professional careers as patriotic commitment,
as elsewhere anthropologists and archaeologists who helped in constructing national history become nationalist heroes. Today, among the
IVPP’s researchers, Wu Xinzhi, Huang Wanbo, and Gao Xin are ardent
defenders of the COC theory.
Contrary to genetic data supporting the AOC theory, Chinese
anthropologists have shown rich evidence for a seeming evolutionary continuity in the form of similarities between the morphological,
anatomical, and cultural remains of H. erectus and H. sapiens found in
China. Morphological and anatomical evidence include such physical
features as a flat-fronted face with projecting cheekbones, shovel-shaped
incisors, a low nasal bone, and rectangular-shaped eye sockets. Evidence
from cultural remains shows that quartz and sandstone tools fashioned
by a chopping action seem dominant from 1.7 million years ago to
about thirty thousand years ago, but in Africa and the Middle East (a
corridor for the journeys of H. erectus and H. sapiens “Out-of-Africa”),
tool-making technology seems more advanced and obsidian hand axes
are commonly found. So the COC argument is that if the AOC theory
is true, then why didn’t those African-originated H. sapiens bring that
technology to China (Wu 2006; Gao 2010; Hua Ti 2009.2)? More generally, for COC supporters, a nationwide distribution of thousands of
archeological sites of both H. erectus and H. sapiens makes any scenario
of a complete replacement by a single foreign species hard to believe.
Anthropologists responded to the AOC theory in the first media
reports of the geneticists’ work in summer 2000, in which they were
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 119
interviewed, notably Wu Xinzhi. Wu, the chief opponent of the AOC
theory, who used fossil data from East Asia to propose a multiregional
evolution model for modern humans with the American Milford H.
Wolpoff and the Australian Alan G. Thorne (1939–2012) (Wolpoff
et al. 1984). Wu has since maintained that “four main races in the
world all linked to a more archaic human species in their respective
locations, all native born” (Wu 2003). Wu told the newspaper that fossils were the most direct evidence while DNA was indirect and fragmentary.7 As he stated, “Over the last 50 years, Chinese archaeologists
have found many sites of paleoanthropological fossils and more than
a thousand locations of Paleolithic culture remains. [They show] that
there were no discontinuities between H. erectus, represented by Peking
Man, and the modern Chinese, and [the evolution was] an ‘expansion
like a river network with small amount of interbreeding’” (Huashengbao,
June 15, 2000). Three months later in an article titled “Is Peking Man
Still Our Ancestor?” Wu reiterated the possibility of an incidental interbreeding between African-originated and China-evolved H. sapiens
(Wu 2000). This referred to some anatomical features of H. sapiens
found in China, such as round-shaped eye sockets and a projecting
occipital bone, which appeared more common in Europe (Wu 2003).
This revisionist reconciliation with genetics is yet to be supported by
critical evidence, although geneticists have recently begun to suggest
a similar scenario in regard to Neanderthal Man (Green et al., May 7,
2010; Pääbo 2014). As he was opposed to a phylogenetic tree concept
of both H. erectus and H. sapiens with Africa as the common root, Wu
accepted the former but insisted on his “river network [meaning a multiple source of origin] with a small amount of interbreeding” hypothesis for the latter’s global evolution. With a multiregional evolution with
incidental mixing, rather than a single African-origin mutation and
replacement, Wu’s model for H. sapiens has been the COC’s theoretical
paradigm.
7According
to Schmalzer who interviewed Wu Xinzhi in 2005, Wu invited Jin Li to the IVPP
(time not specified) to exchange opinions but remained unconvinced afterwards (Schmalzer
2008, p. 271).
120 Y. Cheng
Responding to anthropologists’ defensive arguments, the geneticists
have mainly stood the ground of their own discipline with undisputable
evidence for the AOC theory. They also call attention to the difficulty
in determining the relatedness between two human groups simply by
matching facial and skull resemblances, which could be subject to the
existing perception of the observers. More importantly, they point to a
breakage of archaeological evidence in the assumed evolutionary continuity found in China. This breakage is an absence of evidence of fossils and cultural remains for the time between one hundred thousand
years ago and forty thousand years ago, a key stage in which H. sapiens
(early modern humans) evolved into H. sapiens sapiens (the complete
modern human). As Jin Li and others have explained, this breakage is
not an accident but was created by the quaternary glacier which caused
the extinction of many species globally, and following which a new H.
sapiens migrated from Africa and spread all over the world (Jin and Chu
2006, pp. 234–235). To this, anthropologists have argued that the climate in some parts of East Asia during the Ice Age was relatively milder
and because primitive humans there had been able to make fire, they
might well have been able to survive the cold. Therefore the fire made
in the Zhoukoudian caves once again set the ancestors of the Chinese
apart from their peers elsewhere, a technical plausibility moralized in
the drama Primitive Love of Peking Man. Since the debate started, the
main task of anthropologists has been to find the missing link evidence
that will testify to the survival of Peking Man’s descendants throughout
the Ice Age.
As the debate was made public, Chinese media’s attitude reflected this
scientific divide but often sensationalized its nationalist implications.
Reports were either titled “Peking Man Is Not Our Ancestor Anymore!”
or “Chinese Archeologists Are Once Again Challenging the Universal
‘African Origin’ of Modern Humans!” However, a more neutral, ambivalent position, often sympathetic to the COC theory but with “a careful agnosticism” (Schmalzer 2008, p. 270), was also common. CCTV’s
involvement showed such a position with palpable nationalistic sentiment. Responding to international popular media presentations on
the AOC theory, CCTV came up with a Chinese version of the story,
a five-episode series in 2011 titled Where Did the Chinese Come From?
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 121
The program admitted that the AOC theory was currently the mainstream science but presented the COC theory as a legitimate hypothesis. The episode narrating the debate was titled The Remote Eden. It
claims, half jokily, that since international geneticists used mitochondrial DNA (the matrilineal line) to trace human evolution elsewhere,
thus known as the “Eve theory,” but Chinese geneticists used the Y
chromosome (the patrilineal line), China should still be proud of being
“the remote Eden” where an “Adam” has been identified to consummate
the evolutionary union.
An Academic Debate with Political Discretion
This Chinese debate constitutes part of the international discussion
on the impact that DNA studies have had on unsettled issues in many
fields, especially those related to history and identity (Wailoo et al.
2012). The cleavage between the COC and AOC theories mirrors an
international debate between a minority and a majority of anthropologists since the joint work of Wilson and Cann in 1987. The former claims a multiregional origin for H. sapiens, as pioneered by
Weidenreich and now represented by Milford Wolpoff and Rachel
Caspari. These anthropologists are fully aware of the political implications of the discussion, since Wilson and Cann’s finding is seen as a scientifically decisive blow to white racism, and call the subject “a public
discipline,” referring to non-professional interest in the discussion. They
feel their academic standing is often mistaken for polygenism by the
public, an outdated anthropological theory of the parallel evolution of
human races from the genesis that had lent credence to racism in the
past. From their perspective, while they are seen to be denying the idea
of “all brothers under the skin,” their rivals appear to be on the moral
high ground of a politically correct ideology of a universal humanity and
are therefore rewarded with enormous popularity by an uncritical public, and especially media. A scientific hypothesis cashes in on a popular
social agenda (Wolpoff and Caspari 1997, p. 54).
This international anthropological school has been essentially Chinabound, with Weidenreich’s theoretical foundation work some eighty
122 Y. Cheng
years ago and a collaboration developed between Western anthropologists and their Chinese colleagues. After a long break under Mao, the
relationship quickly resumed with Wolpoff and Thorne’s trips to the
IVPP in the early 1980s and their meeting with Wu Xinzhi there. They
took the findings of remarkably substantial evidence for both H. erectus and H. sapiens in China in the previous decades as critical evidence
for their evolving concept of a multiregional theory. In 1983, Wolpoff
invited Wu to the United States on a National Science Foundation
fellowship based in the University of Michigan, Wolpoff’s home institution. These exchanges led to their coauthored 1984 article which
reinvigorated the multiregional argument. Since Wilson and Cann’s
findings in 1987, however, their collaboration has been an alliance
against the challenge from genetics. The most recent activity of the collaboration is Wolpoff and Caspari’s article published in the IVPP’s journal in both English and Chinese languages (Wolpoff and Caspari 2013).
Instead of race in the international discussion, ancestor is the key
word in the Chinese debate. The political implication in China is about
how much “we” are different from the rest of the world, creating a tension between genetic facts and nationalist sentiment. However, the
word ancestor is functionally a Chinese equivalent of race, this chapter argues. Chinese geneticists and anthropologists are aware of the
political implications of their research for Chinese nationalism, but
they refrain from an explicit appeal to such an interpretation. Neither
a genetically universal modern human origin nor an anthropological Chinese pedigree is openly used to occupy a moral high ground or
claim political correctness. The discussion is not politicized, but a close
reading of the discourse on both sides reveals a delicate discretion in a
tension concealed under piles of scientific jargon and research statistics.
In general, the geneticists tend to circumvent political sensitivity,
leaving the interpretation of their findings open to their audience. Jin
Li, the author of most articles or research reports written by Chinese
geneticists and published in international journals around 2000 and
now a leading scientist at Fudan University, has become a spokesperson
for the AOC theory through popular science writings, media interviews,
and public lectures and has been recognized as such by his foreign colleagues. Alice Roberts, a British anthropologist who wrote and hosted
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 123
the BBC’s four-episode documentary series The Incredible Human
Journey, another popular science project in 2009 after The Journey of
Man promoting the Out-of-Africa thesis in which China is well represented, interviewed Jin in his lab. With an Out-of-Africa view, Roberts
disagreed with Wu Xinzhi in another interview in Beijing for the documentary. Roberts appreciated Wu’s kindness in receiving her in the
IVPP and showing her skull fossils of Peking Man. To Wu’s interpretation of similar morphological features between the skull and modern human, however, Roberts not only remained unconvinced but told
Wu that such similarities seemed “subtle” to her. Roberts finds an ally
in Jin’s lab in Shanghai. Jin’s remarks show that he is conscious of the
implications of his research for Chinese nationalism, and he seemed
delighted about the common origin of Chinese and other modern
humans,
Before the project [i.e., the project leading to the 2001 Science report]
started, I was hoping that I could identify or would be able to find evidence to support an independent origin of the Chinese in China, because
I am Chinese, I came from China, and through the educational process I
always believed there was something special about Chinese.” [To Roberts’
question “How did you feel as a Chinese person?” Jin answered] “After
I saw the evidence generated in my laboratory, I think we should all be
happy with that, because, after all, modern humans from different parts
of the world are not too different from each other and we are all very
close relatives. (Roberts, BBC 2009)
However, when facing domestic media, Jin sounds more neutral.
When interviewed by CCTV’s program Where did the Chinese come
from?, Jin only emphasizes his initial doubt about the validity of the Outof-Africa theory for the origin of the Chinese and his hope for a kind of
“different result” from the data to be collected in China (CCTV 2011).8
In his other public talks, he rarely makes any reference to a Chinese identity to which Peking Man is attributed, despite his staunch position on
8Chu Jiayou also admitted his hope of finding a “non-African, independent Chinese gene” before
he started his research that resulted in the 1998 PNAS report (Huang 2008).
124 Y. Cheng
the validity of his team’s findings in answer to the question “from where
did we come?” (Jin 2005). He never asks the public and the state to
reconsider the popular veneration of Peking Man and has avoided using
words such as nationalism, patriotism, and even history education.
A history teacher’s reservation about the COC theory may give us
a sense of the self-censorship that occurs. In a 2012 interview titled
“History Education Should Serve Patriotism but Should Do So in
Line with Facts,” an unusually bold title by the editor, Li Xiaofeng, a
model history teacher in Beijing, begins with the case of Peking Man.
Li says he encourages students to think independently rather than
blindly believing their textbook. “If you ask them ‘Is Peking Man our
ancestor?’ they will be confused [since the textbook says yes]—how is
it possible that someone tells them Peking Man is not our ancestor?” Li
then introduces the controversy between the AOC and COC theories.
However, he avoids any elaboration on history education and patriotism
(Li 2012).
Evidence continues to suggest that even after almost twenty years,
supporters of the AOC theory, especially from the natural sciences
community, still regard the popularization of the theory as a serious
undertaking in the process of enlightening the public. It is not only
for scientific purposes but also social purposes. To debunk Peking
Man’s ancestorship matters more than an act of simply telling the scientific truth. For example, Rao Yi, Dean of the School of Life Science
of Beijing University who obtained his Ph.D. in the United States and
returned to China after he had established himself as a prominent scientist in the international life science field, told students in his public
speech titled “What Type of People Do You Want Yourself To Be?” that
“the so-called Peking Man is not the ancestor of any of us who are sitting here today.” He went on to delineate the route of human evolution
and the migration of H. sapiens into China (Rao 2016). Rao is known
for his criticism of China’s institutional deficiencies in education and
research and his skepticism of the guidelines set by the state, especially
given the massive government investment in these fields. In the same
speech he said he rejected any interpretation of his return to China
as a patriotic act. Yuan Shuo, a guide specialized in lithic-era exhibits
at the National Museum of China and very popular in the museum’s
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 125
interaction with public, had a televised public lecture in 2017. Titled H.
Sapiens’ March, he said “every time I start the tour, I like to ask museum
visitors: how does Peking Man relate to modern people? Everybody
says he is our ancestor; we are the result of an evolution from him.”
Unfortunately, Yuan told his audience, there is a reproductive isolation
between Peking Man and “us,” created by different biological mechanisms of the two species (Yuan 2017).
With regards to anthropologists, only a purely academic purpose
has been claimed in response to queries, in particular those from foreign academics and journalists. As Wu Xinzhi put it, “this has nothing
to do with nationalism” but is all about evidence, “everything points
to continuous evolution in China from H. erectus to modern humans,”
although “they want everything to come from China” is a kind of
response from some foreign researchers (Qiu 2016). Sautman argues
that the work of Chinese anthropologists “implies that hominids living
in what is now China were ‘Chinese’ and urges that science should reinforce nationalism by showing an ancient Chinese pedigree” (Sautman
2001, p. 103). Acknowledging a nationalist agenda behind the Chinese
anthropologists’ argument, Schmalzer nonetheless maintains that such
an argument is to “defend their discipline’s primary data set [i.e., fossils]” and she also believes that “Western ignorance about Chinese fossils” contributes to the nationalist taint of the argument (Schmalzer
2008, p. 270). While both are true, the discourse of anthropologists
in recent years does read to be more suggestive of a lithic-age Chinese
identity, which is more assertive than defensive. Without directly referring to nationalism or patriotism, it tends to manifest and transmit
itself through a narrative of a set of distinctive attributes claimed to have
been found in the entire geological epoch telescoping the eras of both
H. erectus and H. sapiens. According to anthropologist Gao Xing in a
2010 IVPP annual research review,
[A]ncient humans in China as well as East Asia had maintained continuity and stability in behaviour and technology throughout the entire
Paleolithic and early Neolithic ages, developed a pattern of unique and
gradual evolution with a characteristic of inheritance over innovation, and
there had not been replacement and interruption. About 800,000 years
126 Y. Cheng
ago, in southern and central China there appeared hand axes and other
items similar to the contemporary Western ‘Acheulian-technology’ type,
and about 30,000 years ago in northern China there appeared ‘stone
blade technology’ with characteristics of later European Paleolithic culture, but they existed very isolated and transiently, like short-lived blossoms, and failed to leave any significant influence on native mainstream
culture. Based on such evidence, scholars have suggested that the main
group of ancient humans during the Pleistocene era in China and even
in East Asia had continued to thrive, never experiencing any disruption,
that its culture had powerful vigour for life and presented a successive
evolutionary relationship; there were a small number of incidental foreign
groups who had brought with them ‘non-native’ culture, but would soon
disappear without any trace in the mainstream culture’s dominance.
Gao named this Chinese or East Asian evolutionary pattern a “comprehensive behavior model” which “was adaptive to local conditions and
harmonious and friendly with the native environment, kept the use of
environmental resources to a low level by constant migration and relocation, while reforming and assimilating foreign cultures that had occasionally penetrated [local culture]” (Gao 2010).
If Wu’s river-like network hypothesis for H. sapiens’ global evolution
answers the question as to how an independent origin of the Chinese is
possible, then Gao’s comprehensive behavior model asserts that such an
origin is historically inevitable. Superior traits had sustained an archaic
hominid group from H. erectus to H. sapiens over two million years
of geological time, showing extraordinary talents and skills in making
itself sovereign of the environment while indigenizing foreign influence. But exactly from where did this “powerful vigor” and those fine
traits originate? Were they acquired through adaptation to the natural
settings, a process in which contingent responses eventually led to structural reconfiguration and intuitive formation, or was it something more
inborn? In the context of a strong nationalist tradition that tends to historicize national characteristics, such an evolutionary adaptability and
success narrated in a triumphal tone naturally leads to a perception of
an immutable and transhistorical Chineseness that arouses awe among
its descendants.
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 127
This argument for indigeneity and continuity of the lithic-age experience underlines an already clearly drawn trajectory of the development
of prehistoric archaeology and ushers it into the discourse of Chinese
civilization (Leibold 2012, pp. 343–348). It facilitates an authoritative Chinese archeological claim in the new millennium for an essentially endogenous, self-perpetuating civilization, a phenomenon among
the world’s civilizations. In that claim, China is taken for granted as a
prehistorical given, and there seems to be no need for restrictive clauses
such as “in what is today’s China,” as the spatial relationship between
the past and the present is often so clarified by international scholars
when necessary. Such a faithful confidence articulated in academic language had existed even in the early 1940s, as Li Guangming, one of the
earliest ethnologists, incorporated paleoanthropological and archaeological findings with ancient historical text to delineate the continuity from
Peking Man to the Zhou Dynasty (from the 11th century to the third
century BCE): “our race had been native long ago in prehistoric time,
and it goes without saying that the later culture was also created by our
native ancestors” (Yen 2015, pp. 615–616).
Such a direct and million-year-long link between H. erectus and the
first dynasties in China has been thematic in some mainstream narratives of the origin and evolution of Chinese civilization. In 2005, The
Formation of Chinese Civilization—An Archaeological Perspective, a
state-sponsored work by prominent Chinese and Chinese-American
archaeologists, was published in both Chinese and English languages. A
landmark effort in synthesizing updated research to reinterpret the origin and formative stages of China in a comprehensive and systematic
manner,9 the authors proclaim their mission is to explore “the particular
characteristics of the Chinese Paleolithic.” Years after genetics rocked the
COC theory, however, the book makes no mention of the debate at all
9For
an official assessment of the book by the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences, see 朱乃诚, “21世纪初中国文明起源的主要成果、特点和展望” (Zhu
Naicheng, Major achievements, characters, and prospects of research of the origin of Chinese
civilization in the beginning of the twenty-first century). The book is accessible at http://www.
kaogu.cn/cn/xueshuyanjiu/yanjiuxinlun/wenmingtanyuanyanji/2013/1025/36045.html.
128 Y. Cheng
in its first chapter entitled “Early Humans in China.” Xu Pingfang, the
author of the Introduction II of the book and former director of the
Institute of Archeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, extends
the lineage of Chinese history deep into the mid-Pleistocene era—“This
‘pre-Qin’ period [the Chinese historical period prior to the late third
century B.C. Qin Dynasty], lasting a million or more years, includes
the Chinese Paleolithic and Neolithic periods and the Three Dynasties:
the Xia, Shang, and Zhou” (Xu 2005, p. 7).
Yuanmou Man and Nationalist Politics
In this regard, discussions of Yuanmou Man sheds more light on the
relationship between the COC vs. AOC debate and Chinese nationalism, and the relationship can be traced back to parallel the development of the Sino-US engagement, the most important part of China’s
international relationships. Yuanmou Man (Homo erectus yuanmouensis ) refers to two incisors accidently discovered in Yuanmou County,
Yunnan Province, during a geological survey for industrial purposes in
1965. In the following decades, archaeologists also discovered pieces of
stone artefacts and animal bone showing signs of human work and perhaps the use of fire. The dating of Yuanmou Man has remained controversial but mainstream Chinese anthropologists believe it is 1.7 million
years old, therefore standing out as the earliest evidence of China being
the home of human evolution at least at the time of its discovery.
Due to the Cultural Revolution’s (1966–1976) interruptive impact
on cultural and scientific activities, especially in the second half of the
1960s, this discovery was not announced until February 23, 1972. The
official account explained the timing as follows: “On the day of Richard
Nixon’s (the then American President) visit to China, a time of special significance, the Xin Hua News Agency announced the discovery
to the world.” The correlation between the American President’s visit to
China (the first time in Sino-US relations) and the announcement of
the discovery has been reiterated as “by no means a coincidence” with
the exhibit of the Yuanmou Man Museum and popular narratives of
the discovery. The timing was determined by the DPCCP, which was
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 129
looking for some big news that would foreground China’s international
status as the US president arrived in Beijing (Liu 2006). As a matter
of fact, decades later, when the Yuanmou Man Museum established its
webpage, it opened with a full-screen photo of Chairman Mao shaking
hands with Nixon. Later the photo was removed but the lines of explanation remain in the exhibit.
Yuanmou Man continued to support the COC theory. Four years
later, in 1976, Chinese scientists held a conference celebrating the
one hundred year anniversary of Frederick Engels’s The Part Played by
Labor in the Transition from Ape to Human. The Xin Hua News Agency
announced that “the discovery of ‘Yuanmou Man’ has pushed the timeline of Chinese human history back more than one million years, identifying Yunnan—a province even beyond the Yangzi River region—as
the critical and key area for human origin and evolution, and therefore
forcefully challenges the African-origin theory of human evolution and
supports the multiregional theory of human origin and its development with convincing evidence. ‘Yuanmou Man’ has been written into
the opening page of the Chinese history textbook as the beginning of
human history in China” (Yunnan Provincial Government 2011).
More specific evidence shows that the significance of Yuanmou Man
for nationalist education and international propaganda—once again
involving the United States—was understood even by Chinese leaders. In October 1988, Song Jian, the then State Counsellor, Chairman
of the National Science and Technology Commission, and the party’s
Politburo member, visited Yunnan Provincial History Museum where
some fossils (including a skull believed by some anthropologists belonging to H. erectus at the time) found in Yuanmou were displayed. In a
letter written to the governor of Yunnan Province and the director of
the museum upon his return to Beijing, Song said he was “still in the
mood of exhilaration aroused by that Ramapithecus skull.” He told
them he had just received a copy of National Geographic from America,
which was a special issue on the origin of modern humans. Song said
he looked for Yuanmou on the map titled “The Peopling of the Earth”
in the issue but it wasn’t there, although Liujiang Man (sixty-seven
thousand years old and from the Paleolithic era) and Peking Man were
included. “The author says our ancestors are all immigrants from Africa!
130 Y. Cheng
But if we show them Yuanmou Ramapithecus of more than three million
years old, this illustration will be completely cast off!” Song urged for
more propaganda efforts to make Yuanmou Man known in the world to
“give those undereducated but arrogant Americans a good education.”
At the end of the letter Song asked to circulate the map in National
Geographic (Song 1988).
Song’s comments on “undereducated but arrogant” Americans and
his hope to “give them a good education” seem a bit too harsh given
the fact that the National Geographic article and the map were a global
survey of the scientific issue in which China had been already well represented. One may well suspect a nationalist sentiment, instead of a
pursuit for scientific accuracy, was behind those critiques.
For scholars of early Chinese history, Song’s profound interest in
Chinese antiquity and his role in promoting relevant research are an
example of state patronage of discussions on national origin. Song is
known for his role in the state-sponsored efforts to establish a credible
chronology for Xia, Shang, and Zhou, the three earliest Chinese dynasties. Traditional Chinese historical chronology only recognized the year
841 BCE as the beginning of the documented history of China, established in Sima Qian’s (the first and most influential figure in Chinese
historiography, who lived from the second to the first century, BCE)
Shi Ji (The Grand History ). This year falls in the middle of the Zhou
dynasty. Despite the fact that the existence of Xia and Shang as
Chinese states predating Zhou had been generally accepted by historians, the specific dates of Xia, Shang, and the starting date of Zhou had
remained undetermined with a very vague estimate of the twenty-third
century BCE for Xia. During a state visit to Egypt, where the chronology of ancient civilization is documented with specific dates, Song
was impressed and felt an urgency to do the same for Chinese history,
a civilization believed to be comparable to Egypt in its antiquity. Song
campaigned for an interdisciplinary effort to determine the earliest dates
of those dynasties and secured millions of Chinese yuan in funding.
Named the Xia, Shang, and Zhou Dynasty Chronology Project, it was
completed and preliminary results were produced around 2000, which
pushed back the credible time table for Chinese history to some eight
hundred years earlier than that determined by Sima Qian (Song 2009).
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 131
Yuanmou Man’s ancestorship has also become a battleground
between COC and AOC scholars since 2000. In 2005, an international conference held in Yuanmou hosted by the provincial government and under the guidance of COC academics (it was presented by
Wu Xinzhi) to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the discovery of the
two teeth. While all the participants including the deputy governor of
the province made it clear that Yuanmou Man is undoubtedly the earliest human species and the ancestor of Chinese people, Su Bin presented his paper titled “The Genetic Study of the Origin of Modern
East Asian Humans and Their Migration,” using DNA data to inform
conference participants of the AOC theory. His discordant voice was
submerged by “categorical” repudiations from “all experts at the conference” (Yang 2016).
The promotion of Yuanmou Man has been neither purely scientific,
nor simply nationalistic, but has also been exploited for economic
reasons, similar to Peking Man Museum’s collaboration with artists
in the creation of the drama Primitive Love of Peking Man and the
site of Zhoukoudian as a tourist attraction for the local government.
Yuanmou is one of the poorest counties in Yunnan province and the
provincial and county governments have proposed several projects to
attract not only tourists, but also investors. The very high-profile government project was announced in 2007 with the aim of establishing
a “China Yuanmou East Humans Sacrificial Shrine.” The project “calls
for the global Chinese to participate in the building of a cultural
‘human temple’ to honor humans of the East.” The Chinese Ministry
of Commerce, which received the project application, stressed the
three main points of the plan as allocating 9750 mu (roughly 1606
acres) of land to build a “massive shrine to honour the ancestor,” the
shooting of a film about the life of Yuanmou Man, and the composition of a theme song for “all peoples in the world.” The ambition
was to make the site a “world-class cultural memorial” (The Chinese
Ministry of Commerce 2010). However, due to the uncertainty about
any returns from investment in such a remote location lacking in
even modest infrastructure and accommodation, the project has so far
remained on paper.
132 Y. Cheng
“The Chinese Must Have Been the Human
Racial Group That Started Evolution Earlier
Than the Others”
Nonetheless, compared with Li Changchun’s faith in the prominence of
the Chinese in human evolution in the context of the COC vs. AOC
debate, Song Jian’s enthusiasm for fossils and the chronology project
can only be said to be very modest. Li, a member of the CCP Politburo
Standing Committee and the Chairman of the Central Spiritual
Civilization Steering Committee (both 2002–2012), published an article
under his pen name of Yong Chun in the Guangming Daily in 2012. Li’s
article was a result of his inspection tour to Nihewan (Yangyuan County,
Hebei Province), a site of some of the earliest Paleolithic remains found in
China. Before Li’s visit, Liu Yunshan, the minister of the DPCCP and a
member of Politburo, had visited the site and emphasized its importance
for nationalist education, believing that the site shows how ancient human
evolved in the “East.”   (Wang, X. 2014. P. 214) With the title “Some
Philosophical Thoughts Regarding Human Evolution,” Li started with a
short explanation of the multiregional and Out-of-Africa theories regarding the origin of humans, and acknowledged the latter as the current
mainstream theory. Li claims that he “knows nothing about archaeology
nor anthropology,” but following Marxist dialectical materialism, Darwin’s
natural selection, and especially Lamarckian use and disuse theories, he
stated his belief in the multiregional theory and strenuously argued for an
evolutionarily most advanced status for the Chinese based on his analytical
comparisons of the physical characteristics of the world’s races. He started
with an answer to the question of why the Chinese are less hairy. Early
anthropoids had thick and dense hair to keep their naked bodies warm,
but as they became more civilized, they came to be aware of the shame of
their nudity so they began to use animal furs and tree bark and eventually
textiles to cover their bodies. As a result, the function of the body being
kept warm by hairs was replaced and led to its gradual loss,
Therefore we can come to the conclusion that the race of the least hairy
is the race of the evolutionarily most advanced. Among modern humans,
white people are the most hairy, blacks next, followed by brown people,
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 133
yellow people the least, and the Chinese with the least of the least. So, the
Chinese must have been the racial group [种群] that started human evolution earlier than the others. Of course, there are some groups in China
who are more hairy [than others], that is perhaps the result of racial
mixing.
Li then discussed why the Chinese have relatively flatter buttocks.
He said that from crawling to upright standing and walking, the
bone structure of the human body underwent a directional change
of ninety degrees, which altered the direction of force of the central
bones to enable the buttock and hip bones to evolve more inwardly
rather than bulging outwards. This change enabled the human body to
stand upright on two legs, unlike animals that walk on four limbs. Li
continued,
So we can come to the conclusion that [among human races] the less protruding the buttock, the earlier upright walking started. Compared with
other races, the Chinese buttock is flatter. Therefore, the Chinese must
have belonged to the race that started upright walking earlier [than other
races].
The third piece of evidence for a more advanced Chinese race is that
the length of their forelimbs is shorter than that of other races. Li said
that Australopithecus lived in forests and had to hold on to branches and
perform jumps so their forelimbs developed to be stronger and longer
than their hind legs. As anthropoids came down to the ground and used
tools to work, their forelimbs were released from making heavy physical movements resulting in degenerated and shorter forelimbs. His
conclusion is that the human race groups whose forelimbs are shorter
started evolution earlier than those whose forelimbs are longer. Modern
human’s forelimbs are in general shorter than their hind legs, but different races exhibit different proportions. Then he ranked racial groups
based on a comparison of the lengths of their forelimbs and hind legs,
“The lengths of forelimbs and hind legs of black and brown races are
the closest, the white race is next, and the yellow race is the least close.
Therefore, the Chinese must have been the racial group that abandoned
living in trees before the others did.”
134 Y. Cheng
The fourth piece of evidence involved the evolution of the olfactory
gland. Li said the olfactory gland is an information system that animals
use to help them identify groups, look for mates, and define territories
by the sense of smell. As evolution developed, humans gradually learned
to use language to exchange information, and the primitive function of
glands gradually degenerated with the olfactory grand being a typical
example,
Therefore, we can come to the conclusion that, as far as the olfactory
gland [among different race groups] is concerned, the less remaining, the
earlier the evolution. According to some data, among the Han Chinese,
only about 4% of them have armpit sniffing, while the percentage is
much higher among Westerners and Africans. So, the degeneration of the
olfactory gland among the Chinese started much earlier and progressed
further than it did among the other races.
The last piece of evidence is found in the evolution of the stomach
and mouth. Li said that using fire weakened the function of the stomach because cooked food is easier to digest. Therefore the stronger the
stomach function is, the later the using of fire came and the later the
primitive way of eating was abandoned. Li referred to the Chinese
phrase of “eating meat with hairs and blood” (茹毛饮血). Li believed
that is why the Chinese cannot eat more raw, cold, and hard food,
because their stomach function has degenerated as the result of their
more civilized way of eating. He continued to discuss the evolutionary
changes that happened to the mouth. Because cooked food was more
processed, the number of teeth were reduced and the shape of the
mouth became flatter. “Compared with other races, the mouth of the
Chinese is flatter. So, the Chinese must have been the race that used fire
earlier than the others” (Yong 2012).
Li blamed invasion by foreign imperialist powers and fighting
between warlords for the fact that only a few of the earliest human fossils were found in China before 1949, and praised the PRC’s significant
support in the field. He proclaimed that with more government funding and better coordination, he was fully confident there would be discoveries of fossils of the earliest humans to confirm China’s status as an
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 135
“important place in the origin of mankind.” The correlation between
a strong state and the prominence of human evolution seems so
self-evident.
These arguments would read like a satirical essay purportedly written by a public figure unpopular for his utter ignorance and stubborn
racism if published elsewhere. However, Li was serious and the newspaper is a very prominent, nationally circulated one targeting intellectuals
and cultural elites in the party-state’s media empire. Also known for his
penchant for poetry, lyric writing, and photography, Li is regarded as a
literatus among his Politburo peers. Clearly, Li privileged the Chinese
with a more advanced status with implications of biological, psychological, intellectual, and even moral superiority by his “comparative physical anthropology” and established a global rank accordingly. It does not
take much for one—if s/he subscribes these comparisons—to accept the
conclusion that the superiority of the Chinese civilization derives from
its people’s evolutionary advancement.
In fact, precisely the same arguments regarding the relationship
between the Chinese and their presumably advanced state in the evolution of hair and olfactory glands had been articulated many decades
ago by Chinese intellectuals, as Frank Dikötter observantly noticed,
to show the bodily differences between civilization and savagery. Lin
Yutang, arguably one of the most popular Chinese writers, and who
introduced Chinese culture to the world in the first half of the twentieth century, savored: “A study of the hair and skin of the [Chinese]
people also seems to indicate what must be considered results of millennia of civilized indoor living,” which answered the question of why
Chinese men were much less hairy and Chinese women had absolutely
no moustache (Dikötter 2015, p. 90). In an introduction to human
races for the general reader, Gu Shoubai, a writer of popular science and
especially anthropology, wrote that each race exuded its peculiar odor
and that “Africans have a smell of rotten meat one can detect from far
away. Browns from America also have a specific odor; they also accuse
the whites of having a bad smell” (Dikötter 2015, pp. 93–94).
Chinese AOC scientists also interpret racial differences between
East Asians and human groups elsewhere by biological traits formed
136 Y. Cheng
through evolution. In a very recent interview, Li Hui, one of Jin Li’s
colleagues and director of the Key Laboratory of Modern Anthropology
at Fudan University, said that in 2013 Jin Li and his team collaborated
with scientists from Harvard University and discovered a gene mutation that at a critical time influenced the evolution of human races.
Li said, “the ancestors of our East Asian peoples entered the land of
Zhonghua [today’s China] from Yunnan [China’s southernmost province] and they were the descendants of prehistorical human groups in
West Asia. Perhaps in order to adapt to the then hot and humid climate
there, a radical mutation happened in their body’s EDARI [a type of
gene unit]. It is an important gene that controls ectoderm.” Li explained
that this mutation in EDARI not only led to changes in the shape and
color of hair, which later characterize East Asians, but also differentiated
East Asians from Europeans in terms of perspiration. The skin tissue
(determined by EDARI) of East Asians enables them to radiate body
heat more through sweating, therefore East Asians often sweat more
than West Asians and Europeans do. Li went further, suggesting that
the result of this gene mutation can be used to explain why Westerners
like to drink cold or even ice water even in winter, partly because cold
water can directly lower their body temperature while East Asians like
to drink hot water, regardless of the season, because it helps them to
sweat. He said that when East Asians have a fever, as long as it is not
very high, they can lie down and cover their body with a heavy quilt
to force themselves to sweat—sweating helps lower body temperature—
but this practice doesn’t work for Westerners. Li believed that this is the
reason for today’s “precision treatment,” a treatment considering human
genetic differences and rejecting a standard or indiscriminate treatment
for all types of peoples (Wu 2016).
While Li’s explanations cannot answer the question of why many or
even most East Asians who grew up in America also drink cold or even
ice water in all seasons, and therefore drinking hot or cold drinks might
be just a habit formed in different cultures, his interpretations regarding the consequences of gene mutation in hair and skin color as well as
skin tissue do not convey any implications of a more advanced evolutionary stage. Rather, they merely describe different evolutionary results
determined by natural circumstances, rather than being shaped by the
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 137
species’ conscious and goal-oriented efforts. Also, his interpretation does
not suggest a relationship between the evolutionary characteristics of the
species and its social and cultural traits. More importantly, in the same
interview, Li stated, “the Chinese civilization did not begin to appear
until 12,000 years ago when the last Ice Age ended, the climate began
to turn warm, and agriculture started to develop.” Therefore the evolutionary results of explaining racial differences are not read from an
apparently cultural and social perspective for the purpose of constructing a unique national character and attesting to its advanced status in
the human evolutionary process.
One may blame Li Changchun’s utter simplification of the
Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics and
his ignorance of the development of life science since Lamarck for
his astoundingly racial thinking. One may also assume Li was unaware that similar comparisons had been drawn by Western racists but
debunked even before his birth, and his comparisons read like a reincarnation of those dead theories. And lastly, let’s assume he might not
have intended to use these comparisons to claim for China a superior
standing in international affairs. However, one still has to face some
critical questions. Why is there such a remarkable resemblance between
racial discourses almost a century apart embraced by intellectual and
political elites regarding the evidence of and belief in the evolutionary
advancement of the Chinese, yet their political ideologies are so distinctively different? Why did Li adhere so single mindedly and naturally to
Lamarckian theory, as he understood and interpreted it, while showing
no knowledge at all of other theories, and why did he come so close to
those racial theories—without knowing them—in arguing for an evolutionary superiority of a particular present-day race? In this book, I argue
that it is precisely this seemingly ignorant, innocent, and naïve racial
thinking that characterizes racism with the Chinese characteristics of
more independent and native roots.
It is worth pointing out that Li and Song, as well as Jiang Zeming,
belonged to the generation of technocrats from the time of the postMao CCP leadership. They all had a background of education and
career experience in technological and industrial fields, having nothing to do with the humanities, social sciences, and sciences related to
138 Y. Cheng
human origins. However, they all showed significant interest in and
even commitment to promoting China’s status in the studies of the
origins of mankind and civilization, and they expressed a firm faith in
China being the earliest in these fields. A very intriguing contradiction
demands an answer: they are scientific laymen, so why were they so
confident about the final result of this ongoing scientific exploration?
This is the kind of attitude Mao held towards debates on the divisibility of elementary particles among international scientists in the mid1960s. Mao, in pursuit of his ideological agenda to justify constant
political purges under his regime and within his party, argued that even
in socialist society there would be capitalists and class enemies constantly engendered from within and which needed to be periodically
identified and eliminated. He could find nothing in Marxist theories to
support this argument, therefore he turned to physics where although
more elementary particles were being identified, scientists were not
sure if such a divisibility would go on indefinitely. Mao jumped into
the discussion and claimed his faith in indefinite divisibility and made
it clear that it was the scientific foundation for his theory of continued
revolution under socialism. His political theory complied with cosmological principles that claimed contradictions and oppositions were
universal and permanent in the physical world. It was because of Mao’s
interest and faith in this indefinite divisibility that the Chinese state lavishly sponsored elementary particle research in the 1960s in the hope of
establishing a “Chinese school” of elementary particle physics (Cheng
2006).
Today, the Chinese state’s attitude towards the debate between the
AOC and COC theories and its supporters bears a resemblance to
Mao’s treatment of elementary particle physics and the then government’s support of the science. Song and Li’s confidence in the COC
theory and an uncontested antiquity of Chinese civilization reads like
Mao proclaiming his faith in the indefinite divisibility of matter to
scientists and party leaders: “Do you believe it? Whether or not you
believe it, I do anyway” (Cheng 2006, p. 113). What buttresses their
confidence in a science to which they are laymen are political and ideological agendas: in the past, it was Mao’s political purges under the party-state, and today it is nationalism that legitimates the party-state. Mao
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 139
appealed to a hypothetical scientific theory, and his successors a racial
science. Their political power grants to them a discourse hegemony in
the sciences.
Peking Man’s ancestorship in the post-Mao era was established during the administration of Song, Li, and Jiang, especially given the
fact that Li as a CCP Politburo Standing Committee member was in
charge of the party-state’s entire propaganda apparatus between 2002
and 2012. After Li, Liu Yunshan, the minister of DPCCP who made
inspection tour to Nihewan before Li did, succeeded Li’s position in the
Politburo Standing Committee. Evidence clearly shows that they were
not only informed about the debate between the COC and AOC theories and its nationalist implications, but also used their influence to support the former. As Wang Xitong, the archeologist who was in charge
of the Nihewan project, stated that Liu and Li not only made inspection tours to the archeological site in the same year, specifically stressed
its value in “seeking roots regarding human evolution in the East” as
part of a “state project”, but also promised substantial government
budget for the site (Wang X. 2014. p. 214). An academic conference
was quickly convened following their inspection tours. The link
between the debate on human origins and nationalist politics at the
highest level is undeniable. Finally, the superiority of the Chinese race
has been so explicitly articulated by Li’s meticulous attention paid to the
would-be evolutionary advancement bestowed on the Chinese, that it is
reminiscent of those scientific racial theories of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
“To Expel Homo sapiens, and to Revive
Zhonghua!”
The responses of ordinary people show that in China the subject is not
just a popular science lesson but something unequivocally about who
“we” are, or a “public discipline” as Wolpoff and Caspari described it.
Unlike geneticists and anthropologists, both COC and AOC lay supporters openly politicize the subject. Some find the AOC theory to
be a new form of the discredited idea of a Western origin of Chinese
140 Y. Cheng
civilization proposed by European scholars in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, or a Western ideological conspiracy that uses unpatriotic and fame-hungry Chinese scientists as agents to deconstruct the
foundation of Chinese nationalism. For these people, the AOC theory
is a Western theory while the COC is a Chinese theory, almost as if the
latter was an indigenous Chinese product. Their opponents dismiss such
allegations as patriotic paranoia fostered by a hypernationalism that
rests on a presumed confrontation between China and the West.
Similar to multiregionalists outside China, defenders of the COC
theory feel offended by the AOC’s media publicity. However, their
responses are more agitated by nationalism, evident from their distrust
of the AOC’s Western origin. Lu Guoyao, a senior philologist, deplores
that the “molecular biology-based Out-of-Africa theory has prevailed in
both ‘academic’ and ‘popular’ publications, and even Chinese linguists
are now mimicking geneticists.” Lu rejects linguists’ discussions as an
attempt to relegate the dialectal diversity and complexity of China to
a singular non-native source and to deny the aboriginality of Chinese
civilization. He warns his linguistic colleagues that Western scholarship
has been frequently discredited for its tendency of pursuing novelty and
creating sensation by making groundless assumptions and far-fetched
connections (Lu 2012). In a more sweeping, book-length global historical narrative, The Genesis—An Evidential Study of the Chinese Origin
of Human Civilization, an amateur but erudite author engages a wide
range of academic disciplines to refute the AOC theory as a Western
denigration of China accepted by the Chinese due to their lack of cultural confidence. He claims that even H. erectus originated in China.
China is the cradle of all major world civilizations (Liu 2008).
The response by COC supporters on social media is even more political. Responding to a major report in which both Jin Li and Wu Xinzhi
were interviewed, one commentator called Jin a charlatan and asserted
that his “research was either funded by Americans or the money was
inveigled from the Chinese government. Such an ‘achievement’ was
surely to be published in a famous [foreign] journal to guarantee him
fame and money.” Two comments followed, “[They] simply just cannot
wait to dissolve our nation’s cohesive forces,” and “Nowadays many discourses are attempting to marginalize our history; they are bidding to
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 141
divide us from all sides, weaken our blood stock, confuse us, insidiously
make rumors with a purpose to destroy our cultural and racial durability, and undermine our national unifying forces and confidence. It
is a pity that our nation has never been short of such scum” (Hua Ti
2009.1). National History, an avant-garde popular history journal with
a liberal tendency, was labeled as a “banana” (meaning it had a yellow
skin but was white on the inside, a racialized aphorism used to denote
the unpatriotic Chinese people) for a lengthy feature on the subject.
The comment asserted that the journal had an agenda of promoting
“national nihilism and Western universalist values” (Hua Ti 2009.2).
The most radical defense of the COC theory can be found in a cartoon posted on a BBS (a major online discussion platform) site with the
comment “It’s time to post it.” The cartoon juxtaposes two images on
its right side. One shows two naked Peking Man statues (exhibited in a
museum) making fire and using a stone as a tool with a Chinese phrase
meaning “orthodox” (正统) below the image. The other shows a man
capped and dressed in a typical Chinese aristocratic dress style against
a background of various scenes of civilized society. Below this image a
Chinese phrase “barbarians” (蛮夷) appears. On the left of the cartoon
are lines of Chinese characters in a large font: “The great H. erectus two
million years [ago]; Son of Heaven defends the entrance of his cave; The
king would die in the jungles [rather than surrender to a more civilized
life?]; No territorial concessions (割地) and no war reparations (赔款);
No marriage for peace making (和亲) and no tribute paying (纳贡).”
A probable encounter between H. erectus (Chinese) and H. sapiens (foreigners) is portrayed as a Stone-Age skirmish between foreign invaders
and national defenders. Last, the bottom line (eight large Chinese characters in red) is translated into “Expel H. sapiens and revive zhonghua
(China)” (驱除智人 恢复中华), a modified version of a famous Han
nationalist anti-Manchu catchphrase (驱除鞑虏 恢复中华 Expel the
northern barbarians and revive Zhonghua ) in the late Qing (Manchu)
dynasty (for Hanist anti-Manchu racial nationalism, see Chapter 4). As
bizarre as it may seem, the cartoon interprets with an intense feeling the
debate between the AOC and COC theories as a transhistorical defense
of the Chinese against the foreign at all costs, even a more civilized
way of life, a reminder of Chinese anthropologists’ argument that had
142 Y. Cheng
Chinese H. sapiens been foreign in origin, then archaeologists would
have been able to find more developed tools (Hupu 2009). The anonymity of the authorship reveals the existence of highly informed but
strongly opinionated racial nationalists in action through social media.
On the other side of the debate, AOC supporters are comfortable
with the fact that the Chinese have no prior China-based ancestry, nor
an indissoluble relationship with the land. National History reports,
“Ever since 1929, we have believed that we have been here for hundreds
of thousands years; we have been born here, grown up here and buried here generation after generation. But scientists have recently told
us: we actually came from afar” (Huang 2008). Yang Jintao, an editor
and popular history author for the History Channel (one of the top web
portals), wrote an article about changes in perceptions of “our ancestor” since the late nineteenth century. He told the reader that for quite
a while many late Qing and early Republican conservative intellectuals, including Liu Shipei and Zhang Taiyan (two influential anti-Qing
scholars who aspired to a great Han nation), embraced a hypothesis
of a Western origin for the Chinese created by Terrien de Lacouperie,
a nineteenth century French orientalist. According to Lacouperie, the
ancestors of the Chinese are the Babylonians. These intellectuals were
fascinated by this Western-created theory of a Western origin for the
Chinese, a seeming contradiction given their staunch cultural conservatism because it boosted their ethnic and racial confidence: we were
descendants of the white race while the ruling Manchu were barbarians. Now, the Chinese believe that their ancestor is independent and
native. Leaving the answer to the question of the AOC vs. the COC
to further scientific research, Yang nonetheless suggested that changes
in the perception of ancestorship reflect a change of national mentality
that resulted from different circumstances of Chinese nationalism: “in
the late Qing, people built up their [national] confidence through seeking evidence for their Western origin, but today they hope to prove an
independent origin of the Chinese” (Yang 2016).
The ideological implication of a fake ancestor and a forged link to
the land is obvious for many AOC supporters: in a very devious way,
it helps to justify Chinese characteristics in defiance of universal values,
as debated by Chinese liberals and conservatives in the 2000s because it
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 143
shows that “we” have been here and unique ever since. However, some
of them have gone even further. One internet comment titled “From
where did the modern Chinese come?—it is a political question” mentions a Chinese archaeologist’s claim made in his speech at the School of
Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) in London, that the sole purpose of
his work in Xinjiang is to prove that the region has been part of China
since antiquity. The author continued: “Paradoxically, those patriotic
scholars are just the same as those Western racists who they hate. Racists
believe the noble whites evolved separately from other races; scholars of
this land of miracles [神奇的土地, a sarcastic take on China’s presumed
greatness] insist that modern Chinese people evolved along a single line
of ancestry linking Yuanmou Man to Lantian Man and Peking Man to
justify their pride in being Chinese” (Din 2010).
Comments from AOC supporters on those who believe the COC
theory are hence contemptuous—“hoodwinked” and “mentally
retarded.” In 2014, Wang Sixiang, a popular essayist, responded to the
anger of COC supporters on a microblog provoked by a project of The
Institute of Zoology of Kunming in Yunnan Province (IZKYP) in 2014
supporting the AOC theory. Wang said that “Our history textbooks not
only lie in modern history, but in ancient history as well.” Our “ancestors” had been “wiped out by Africans!”—what a terrible fact that has
made those “nationalists” so “wretched”! The essay ends sarcastically—
the CCTV now might as well “sing a patriotic song—‘Oh, Africa, My
Dear Motherland!’” (Wang 2014).
The AOC theory also found supporters in Hong Kong after the former British colony was returned to China in 1997. Pro-democratic
political commentator Zhong Zhukang published an essay in 2007 entitled “Genetic Research Rocks the Foundation of Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics” in Open Monthly, the most influential political periodical, which survived until 2014. In that article, Zhong said that there
were two reasons why mainland scholars ignored the globally accepted
AOC theory and adhered instead to the COC theory: one was that the
political stake of the research involving ancestors was already high, and
the other was that “many mainland scholars are either blind fanatic Han
chauvinists or ‘great China’ nationalists.” For the CCP regime, “nationalism was the last straw to clutch at,” and they would never admit the
144 Y. Cheng
fact that their “ancestor” came from a continent whose inhabitants had
been racially despised in China. Most interestingly, Zhong involved
Taiwan in his discussion: he told the reader that genetic research had
proven that the ancestors of Taiwan’s aboriginal people were Polynesians,
therefore China’s nationalist myth that included the Taiwanese in its
“same ancestor, same blood” nationhood was groundless (Zhong 2007).
A “Homo sinensis ”?
In sum, since China participated in the Human Genome Project
(HGP), implications of the debate surrounding Peking Man’s ancestorship for nationalism wrapped in scientific jargon have been well understood by various segments of society with ultranationalists and liberal
public opinion as the two extremes contesting each other. This divergence also cuts through the Chinese party-state—while its scientific
authorities acknowledge the AOC theory as mainstream science and
the state benefits from AOC-related scientific achievements, its propaganda and education agencies continue to propagate the COC theory
for patriotic education and nationalist mobilization, directed by the top
leadership. To promote Peking Man’s archaeological site as a base for
national patriotic education and commemorate those Chinese anthropologists as patriotic heroes purposefully ignores the internationalist
spirit of those foreign scientists who committed themselves to Chinese
archaeology and anthropology, as well as China’s international prominence in these fields. Davidson Black, the leading anthropologist and
chief administrator of the Zhoukoudian site in the early 1930s from
whom Peking Man took its name, was so devoted to the job that he
ignored the heart condition he was born with and died on site while
working on the fossils (Jia 1990, p. 1). Despite the profound gratitude
Chinese anthropologists hold for these foreigners, the official narrative
of Peking Man, whenever unavoidable, refers to these foreigners’ contributions as scientific but rarely internationalist. The word is dodged for
its mitigating effect on patriotic sentiment aroused by Peking Man.
The general reader attempting to make sense of the debate may
understand it first as a disciplinary one, perhaps reflecting a dichotomy
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 145
between diachronic and synchronic approaches followed by anthropologists and geneticists, respectively. Second, the evidence confirming the
survival of the descendants of H. erectus throughout the Ice Age has yet
to be found. There is also no substantial evidence yet to prove a mixing between African-origin H. sapiens and local H. erectus or H. sapiens
in East Asia. It could exist. Third, and this is most important, even if
the two types of data—or any type of fossil evidence critically challenging the DNA-based AOC—should be found,10 these ancients cannot
be called Chinese (or the ancestor of any particular ethnic or national
group). Their habitat was not China (or the fatherland/motherland of
any nation state). The vestige of their activity was not Chinese civilization. There exists a fundamental difference between a scientific hypothesis of multiregionalism and its nationalist or racialized interpretation,
as Sautman noticed in the works of Wolpoff and Caspari, the leading
exponents of the hypothesis that denied that “anything like the ‘races’
of today existed before the first modern H. sapiens.” However, multiregionalist scholars in China had not issued similar disclaimers (Sautman
2001, p. 101). Wolpoff and Caspari have since maintained this position, as they stated in their article recently published in China—“All
human populations today are equally modern. … It was not our origins
that made us what we are, and it is not our genealogy that makes us
unique” (Wolpoff and Caspari 2013, p. 394).
The question of whether and how scientific facts about the human
body—living or fossilized, in the form of physical appearance or coded
in our DNA—can be used in constructing human social identity as
well as narrating the historical transformation of such an identity is not
unique to China. Also, a specific science may be used to either challenge or defend an existing perception about such an identity. As Keith
Wailoo and others argue, “science does not exist apart from its contexts
and uses” and it could be both liberating and confining in its effect on
the popular imagination (Wailoo et al. 2012, p. 4). Genetics in China
10The
most recent fossil evidence (forty-seven teeth) suggesting that H. sapiens existed in what is
today’s China (Daoxian, Hunan Province) between one hundred and twenty thousand years and
eighty thousand year ago was announced in October 2015, although the relationship between the
fossils and Peking Man-age H. erectus remains undetermined (Wu et al. 2015).
146 Y. Cheng
challenged Stalinist interpretation of biological evolution in the form
of Lysenkoism in the past, and now it undermines racial nationalism.
Elsewhere, however, it has a recorded history of being exploited by
state-sponsored racism in the twentieth century, and as Wailoo and others have shown, the science is still being manipulated to suit the political agendas of nation states and ethnic groups.
Nadia Abu El-Haj’s critical studies of the Israeli discourse of
Jewishness is illuminating in this regard. It has been a fundamental
assumption of some Israeli historical narratives that contemporary Jews
are the direct and pure descendants of an original Hebrew people from
ancient Palestine. Genetics in the twentieth century and genome studies in recent decades have been used by this discourse as scientific evidence attesting to that history. Nevertheless, technical difficulties and
uncertainties unsolved by the discourse aside, especially regarding how
to identify Jews (who is and who is not) under different historical circumstances, Abu El-Haj argues that DNA analysis cannot be directly
converted into an identity construct. The barrier between historically
formed human consciousness and human bodily facts is epistemological. Abu El-Haj effectively shows how the Israeli discourse has played
with genetic data, leaving behind unanswered questions reflecting ambiguity, elusiveness, and an ever-shifting emphasis caused by ignoring
such a barrier. Her analysis on the problematic use of genetics in Israeli
nationalism therefore provides a comparative perspective as well as a
methodological tool in the critique of the use of paleoanthropological
science by Chinese nationalism (Abu El-Haj 2012).
The discourse on a pure ancestry, an ancestral home, a natural bond
between this ancestor and the environment, and most of all, a narrative that attributes a remarkable lineal continuity to physical, mental,
intellectual, and even moral traits unique to this ancestor and its posterity, support fanatical racial nationalisms. The efforts to construct
racial uniqueness through finding an H. erectus ancestry has led to paleoanthropological hoaxes that catered to nationalism with strong racial
implications. The “discovery” of the big-brained, ape-jawed Piltdown
Man (named after a hamlet near the site) in England a century ago was
celebrated as the long-sought missing link between apes and humans
in the chain of evolution, but was debunked in the early 1950s as a
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Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 147
scientific scandal perpetrated by Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian and solicitor. The link was even named Eoanthropus dawsoni—“Dawson’s Dawn Man”—which turned ironically appropriate since the most
important human fossils of the Piltdown Man were fake pieces processed
or polished by his hands. The fake human fossils heartened the British
imperialist pride that had been hurt by the type specimen of Homo heidelbergensis—perceived as the earliest human in Europe and discovered
several years earlier (1907) in Germany, the chief rival to British imperialism at the time. The “British Man”—as it was so perceived—rivalled
the “German Man” both in age (it was half a million years old) and skull
solidity (its bones were thicker), and was widely accepted among elite
intellectual and cultural circles. “The Piltdown find would raise not only
the reputation of Dawson and Smith Woodward [an anthropologist who
joined Dowson’s plot], but also of Britain as a key nation in the story of
human evolution” (Isabelle et al. 2016).
By comparison, however, Piltdown Man as a scientific hoax that
accommodated a nationalist agenda is significantly dwarfed by Japanese
Man in many ways. In the early 1980s, Fujimura Shinichi, an amateur
archaeologist, excavated many Paleolithic stone artifacts in Miyagi prefecture and subsequently many other places as well. As the dating of
the findings kept rolling back from fifty thousand years to five hundred
thousand years ago, the biological sketch of an H. erectus Japanese Man
became clearer with each excavation. This Japanese Man not only distanced Japan from Korea (like in Japan before Shinichi’s “findings,” the
earliest traces of human activity found in Korea were from no earlier than
thirty thousand years ago) but also enabled the nation to compete with
China, the regional big brother in the field of human evolution. Japanese
Man therefore claimed for the nation a prominent place in the history
of human evolution. Much more than that, this Japanese Man was portrayed by authoritative scholars and media as “uncommonly intelligent,”
“capable of building tombs, using colors to differentiate between tools,
even performing math,” and appeared to have had some sense of spirituality (French 2000). Japanese Man stood to challenge conventional
thinking about the intellectual and mental faculty of H. erectus for almost
two decades in which the nation was plunged into an archeological fever
centered on Fujimura, until it was debunked in around 2000 as all of
148 Y. Cheng
these findings were found to be forgeries secretly buried in advance by
Fujimura himself. He was called “God’s Hand” because of his miraculous
series of successes in identifying sites of artifacts. After his “discovery” was
debunked, the age of Japanese Man in human evolution was set back to
the previously acknowledged date of no more than thirty thousand years
ago (Romey 2000).
Compared with Piltdown Man, Japanese Man was much more dubious even at first glance to bear scientific scrutiny. No human fossils were
found, only tools and some material culture remains were found, and all
the discoveries were made by Fujimura and his team. There was a distinct lack of cross-examination of artefacts by rigorous peer reviews, and
contemporary scientific dating and authentication methods. Why was
such a charlatan able to fool Japanese academia and society so quickly,
so easily, and for so long (fortunately the international anthropological community never took Japanese Man seriously)? Immediately after
the debunking, international media pointed out the source of the decades-long national fever of archaeology, “For a nation that has always
revelled in its cultural uniqueness, the discoveries were more than heartening; they were almost too good to be true. They meant that Japan was
settled more than half a million years ago, which put it on a par in the
antiquity scales with its perennial rival, China” (French 2000).
Wai-Ming Ng, a Japan specialist in Hong Kong, provides a more
critical analysis on the relationship between the saga of Japanese Man
and Japanese nationalism. It is noteworthy that the scientific scandal
came at the time when Japanese nationalism, especially its right wing,
was on the rise as national confidence was regained after two decades
of post-war economic miracles that amazed the world.11 Wu argued
that the Fujimura fraud “was indeed a conspiracy involving government
agencies, regional governments, the media, and academia… Through
textbooks, museums, and designated cultural assets, the officials of the
11The
Fujimura fraud happened roughly at the same time the Japanese government began to
rephrase the history of the Japanese invasion of China, which provoked Chinese protests and
became an external stimuli for the creation of patriotic songs in China. See Chapter 1. Yasuhiro
Nakasone, the Japanese Prime Minister with an attitude of rightist nationalism, visited the
Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni in 1985, which was the first such official visit since the end of World
War Two. The Chinese government criticized the visit.
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 149
central government used Fujimura’s findings to enhance national pride
and cultural nationalism. Regional governments strove to promote local
identity and tourism” (Ng 2010, p. 104). The last point, that local government exploited the tourist value of Japanese Man, was similar to
the one behind the promotion of Peking Man and Yuanmou Man in
China, but such a mundane motive only testifies to a new, consumerist
form of discourses of race.
By comparison, Piltdown Man is still an anthropological species but
Japanese Man is a national ancestor that directly led to the rewriting of
the history of the origin of Japanese people and civilization. The difference lies in the fact that the former is just human fossils while all the
evidence for the latter showed the creature’s intelligence and craft adaptable to the environment and its aesthetic preference and spiritual desire.
All of these traits were connected to the characteristics of Japanese civilization. In fact Japanese school history textbooks—especially ones used
in the region where Japanese Man was “found”—had included the “discovery” and its interpretation. The absence of human fossils in this case
makes the illusive Japanese Man even more intriguing, just as a Japanese
puppet show—the man hidden behind the puppet only revealing himself through the pulling of the strings that manipulate the actions of the
puppet to gain the audience’s admiration. When a direct link between
the half a million-year-old ancestor and today’s Japanese is established,
a scientifically endorsed sense of superiority in human evolution reinforces the myth-based belief in the uniqueness and purity of the people.
It is this link that lends racial implications to the nationalist agenda of
Japanese Man.
Some Chinese COC scholars were very interested in the discovery
of Japanese Man, as it might have supported their theory in their eyes.
Huang Weiwen, a paleoanthropologist at the IVPP and an ardent supporter of Yuanmou Man’s status as the ancestor of the Chinese people,
visited the archaeological sites in Miyagi prefecture before the scandal
was debunked. His remarks not only agreed with Fujimura’s discoveries
but also showed a sign of the possible collaboration between Chinese
COC scholars and those Japanese anthropologists in search of an independent East Asian origin of modern humans. As he put it, “the progresses of the Chinese research and the Japanese research are like two
150 Y. Cheng
wheels of a vehicle. We can expect that the chronology [of human evolution] based on the African-origin theory will certainly be changed in near
future” (Ng 2010, p. 91). Huang is a very active researcher and popular
science writer. Following a suggestion by Japanese scholars, his book on
Peking Man (published in 2005, after Japanese Man was debunked) is
titled Peking Original Man (北京原人) instead of the common Peking
Man (北京猿人). The pronunciations of 北京原人 and 北京猿人 are
precisely the same in the Chinese language, but the former renders the
meaning of the “original man of Beijing,” thus indicating the status of
ancestor and lineage while the latter literarily means “the ape man of
Beijing.” Interestingly, Japanese Man also literarily meant “Japanese
Original Man” in the Japanese language as well (translated into Chinese
as 日本原人) when it was believed to be true (Huang 2002).
Although “regarded as illegitimate in our time,” as Benjamin Isaac
cautions, racism “occurs under different names and in different guises”
(Isaac2009, p. 4). However, the political appropriation of the COC theory shows that some classical and prototypical racial thinking persists
with little alteration. Among recent discussants of racial nationalism
and the myth of a unique ancestor, Maurice Olender reveals “a nostalgia for old Aryanistic themes” in Nouvelle École (New School), a French
school of classics, in recent decades, which can also provide a comparative perspective. Despite the notoriety of Nazi propaganda regarding
the Aryan race, the Nouvelle École attributes to the origin of Western
European civilization a “perfect Aryan genius” of the “Indo-Europeans”
since the Neolithic era, manifested in such traits as “abstraction and
metaphysics,” “reflection,” and particularly “a constant tendency to subordinate the natural by integrating it into the political” (Olender 2009,
pp. 47, 68). A moral portrait of such a creature is also implied. These
echo the Chinese discourse of ancestral genius, implied in the comprehensive behavior model, and praise of ancestral valor and virtue in
anthropological and artistic languages. On the national ideological
spectrum, many Nouvelle École scholars were leaning towards “various
currents of the ‘New Right’.” In China the most outspoken COC lay
supporters are ultra-nationalists for whom defending a purely indigenous origin is a political cause.
3
Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?—Race and National Lineage 151
For Olender, the Nouvelle École discourse represented efforts to rehabilitate Homo europaeus (Olender 2009, p. 55), a discredited racial concept that portrayed a presumed superior human stock with a unique
social character derived from biological traits. Similar efforts to essentialize and mystify particular human groups can also be found in the
discourse about Homo alpinus, a Swiss alpine peasant myth of “a strong,
healthy, hardworking, patient, perseverant, good natured but autonomous human type” (Sommer 2012, p. 120). Abu El-Haj also dubs the
Israeli construct of a pure-blood and single-ancestor Jewishness Homo
israelensis (Abu EI-Haj 2012, pp. 99–108). While these discourses
involve a relatively recent time in which human civilizations had begun,
the Chinese discourse dates back at least half a million years, sunken
deep into pre-human natural history. “Homo sinensis,” a term invented
by this author to refer to the parallel is therefore more of a legitimate
name for the assumed prehistorical and transhistorical human stock
with a more biological than cultural connotation.
The nationalist interpretation of the COC theory cannot be dismissed as a wild ramification of an already zealous and insular nationalism embraced only by a handful of hardcore, out of touch conservatives
with its influence being inflated by social media. It is a neoracial rhetoric rooted in modern China’s nationalist tradition and has collaborated
with the racial discourse expressed in the popular music analyzed in the
previous chapter. To conclude, Peking Man’s ancestorship facilitates the
national identity politics in China’s rise and a racialized Chineseness as
a most cohesive force. Anthony Smith’s concise analysis on archaeology’s role in legitimating the ethnic nation is a ready tool for a brief final
analysis. All concepts in favor of “the nationalist ideal of the distinctive, territorial nation” backed up by archaeology’s presentation of the
material culture of the past such as uniqueness, essentialism, rootedness,
authenticity, indigeneity, or more tangibly, soil, lead to a construction
of the “historical homeland” (Smith 2001). The political appropriation
of the COC theory has extended the application of these concepts from
the ethnic/cultural (measured in thousands of years) to the evolutionary/biological (measured in hundreds of thousands of years). Cultural
continuity has been transformed into racial genealogy. A Chinese identity finds its ultimate origin not only in an H. erectus ancestry but also
152 Y. Cheng
in an asserted harmony between this hominid and the natural setting.
The two fuse into a habitat alien to foreigners from which “motherland/fatherland” (the land is ancestrally “ours”) and “Chinese territory
since antiquity” acquire absolute legitimacy. In the final analysis, a racial
myth of a million-year-old exuberant bioenergy, called the “vigorous
vitality and incomparable creativity,” as the current Chinese President
reiterated, has become a catchphrase that distinguishes the superior
Chinese from Others (Xi 2014).
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585–625.
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sohu.com/a/128043855_627609. Accessed May 30, 2018.
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Yunnan Provincial Government 云南省人民政府. People’s Government of
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4
Discovering China in Africa:
Race and the Chinese Perception
of Africa and Black Peoples
In October 1971, the United Nation’s General Assembly passed
Resolution 2758 which recognized the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) as the representative of the Chinese nation to replace the
Republic of China (Taiwan) in the UN. The admission also granted
the PRC the power and privilege of a permanent member of the
Security Council. This diplomatic victory came in the nick of time for
the Chinese regime which had fallen into an unprecedented political
­crisis created by the disastrous socioeconomic impact of the Cultural
Revolution since 1966 and, just a month earlier, the defection of
Marshall Lin Biao (Mao’s hand-picked successor) to the Soviet Union
and his death in a plane crash in Mongolia.
In many academic, media, and popular narratives of that timely but
unexpected victory, a purported speech by Mao at a meeting with a
small number of key officials right after he got the news has not only
been widely reported but also relished. Responding to concerns over
whether China should immediately send a delegation to New York City
before getting more prepared for such an important diplomatic occasion, Mao allegedly said: “We should organize a delegation and go there
straightaway. African black brothers lifted us up and carried us into the
© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_4
161
162 Y. Cheng
United Nations. If we don’t go we will alienate the masses.” The expression used the Chinese verb phrase “tai jing ” (抬进) which means someone is lifted up and carried into a place in a sedan chair by bearers.
Although “sedan chair” is not included in the phrase, it is denoted in
the lexemic context of the use of everyday Chinese.
The most official version of this story was told in a book collectively
written by a group of senior Chinese foreign relation officials, diplomats, and scholars as part of the propaganda campaign to celebrate
the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC (Zhou 1999, pp.
1715–1716). However, immediately after its publication in 1999, an
article published in a major party-history journal rejected the truthfulness of the story. Xiong Xianghui, the author, was a senior intelligence and foreign affairs officer, an advisor of Zhou Enlai (then China’s
premier), and an attendee of that meeting with Mao. Xiong said that
he did not hear those words and challenged the authors to document
them with the meeting’s original minutes. Not only that, Xiong went
further to refute the perception that it was “African black brothers”
who played the key role in PRC’s entry into the UN, as the fake story
had greatly impressed people. Xiong said that among forty-two African
UN member states, twenty-six voted in favor of China, of which six
were North African Arabic countries and therefore not “black” (Xiong
2000). Globally, seventy-six countries voted to support China and
therefore twenty black African nations certainly do not constitute the
majority.
But curiously, since Xiong published his article to set the record
straight, no one who participated in writing the book has come out to
answer his challenge, but this fake history has survived and been retold
in many accounts—academic, political, and in the media—of SinoAfrican relations, including in CCTV programs and on the Chinese
army’s webpages. The original version of Mao’s quotation did not make
it clear in what carrier China was “lifted up” by “black African brothers”
although in that context a sedan chair is implied. A CCTV program
titled Decoding History in 2016, however, added details to complete
the picture and recruited the entire Third World as bearers for China:
“Mao: ‘the Third World is inviting us to sit in a sedan chair headed for
the UN, why shouldn’t we go?’” (CCTV 2016).
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 163
The fabrication, dissemination, and enrichment of Mao’s speech is a
case of rather unusual political tolerance of important historical events,
especially when Mao is involved as the regime would hardly allow any
blatant lie to survive and disseminate. While the motive of this bold
fabrication has remained veiled and is therefore intriguing, the psychology behind the lie and its widespread diffusion and vigorous persistence
in a much savored tone, as it has been so repeated over decades, provide
a twisted prism for an analysis of racial thinking in Chinese nationalism
regarding Africa and black peoples. In a joyful and condescending air, it
apparently reveals a sense of superiority that places China above Africa.
A more hidden and twisted racial psyche can be read in a comparison
of different attitudes towards the white Europeans and black Africans in
the same history. There were twenty-two European nations casting their
votes in favor of China in that UN resolution. All of them are white
and collectively their number is greater than the twenty in the black
African group. No single European UN member state voted against
China, while in Africa there were sixteen. So why didn’t we hear “our
white European brothers lifted us up and carried us into the UN”? And
why did so many believers of the fabrication in China ignore this simple
mathematical comparison and fail to ask the question? One conceivable
excuse might be found in geopolitics: most of those European countries
were not China’s allies and some of them were even enemies, especially
the Soviet-Eastern European group. However, so were sixteen African
nations (the majority of them black) and yet they voted against China.
Such a selective gratitude finds no basis under scrutiny.
The most reasonable speculation for the motive among the political
and intellectual elite who created and enjoyed the fake history and its
uncritical acceptance by many in society, given the emphasis on color
and race in the fabrication itself, is that the fantasy of the Chinese
sitting and being lifted in a sedan chair is only associated with black
African bearers—albeit benignly called “our brothers”—or even other
Third World peoples, but certainly not white Europeans.
Although dissenting voices indeed existed and used Xiong’s article to
correct others, an online search still finds that their influence is mixed
with that they were meant to correct. And none of them points to the
fabrication’s racial implication that denigrates Africa and black people,
164 Y. Cheng
let alone compares the votes of European nations with those of African
nations to debunk the lie and investigate its roots. People never ask such
questions as “What motivated such a blatant lie that even implicated
Mao?”, “Why has such a lie been so widely accepted by so many and
lasted for so long?”, and “Why ‘our black African brothers,’ while ‘our
white European brothers’ would actually be more accurate in this case?’.”1
It is very likely that many Chinese would regard the above discussion and questions as far-fetched, hair-splitting, and even preposterous.
Or, reading too much between the lines at best. In the same way they
have responded to numerous outside criticisms of incidents with racial
implications or discrimination that either happened in China or related
to China. The falsehood and propagation of this speech by Mao and
especially the indifferent attitude towards an expression suggestive of
racial superiority or inferiority in relevant discussions reveal the Chinese
racial psyche. A mix of Western social Darwinism, racism, and a traditional Sinocentric world view created in the late nineteenth century, it is
a global racial hierarchy constructed in modern Chinese history to identify China in the global system and define Sino-foreign relations. This
racial discourse places white supremacy at the top, the yellow (Chinese)
second (although sometimes the yellow race is at the top), then the
brown, the red, and the black in that order. As losers in the struggle for
survival and burdens to the world’s civilizations, Africa and black people
constitute a global blackness as the Otherness of the global Chineseness.
Over a period of more than a century, China’s mainstream ideology
has undergone various changes, but this racially hierarchical discourse has
never been fully exposed and negated. What happened to racism, especially since the founding of the PRC, was political denunciation, as part
of an anti-Western ideological campaign rather than academic, cultural,
historical, and psychological examination and self-reflection. Even an
1In
comparison to so many mainland Chinese authors or commentators who never thought of
racial thinking as they challenged the truthfulness of “Mao’s speech,” Liu Xiaopeng, a Taiwanese
researcher, raised the question briefly: “Why do so many Chinese accept an error in diplomatic
history—‘black brothers lift up China into the UN’ … black people ‘lift up’ China implies a superior-inferior relationship, then why did the Chinese fabricate this scenario of China being lifted up
and carried into the UN by African blacks?” (Liu 2013a, p. 60).
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 165
admission that “we Chinese also could be racially biased or racist against
Africa and black people” would seem inconceivable or intolerable to
many. In fact, the sense of racial hierarchy with global blackness at the
bottom has been hidden as part of a collective unconsciousness within
Chinese nationalism and the Chinese world outlook. In recent decades,
as China’s rise increasingly engages Africa, this engrained attitude has
increased and become very noticeable and even conspicuous in Chinese
society, especially in popular culture and online discussions.
As part of research on Chinese racial thinking, this chapter will
examine the negative aspects of the Chinese perception of Africa and
black people, as the same problem exists in racial discourses elsewhere.
However, the chapter will analyze the perception in the context of the
traditional Sinocentric worldview in ancient times, and Chinese nationalism and social change in modern and contemporary times to emphasize that such a Chinese perception has never been constructed in any
intellectual or cultural discourse detached from specific social realities,
as a result of pure ethnic imagination, pseudoscientific thinking, or
even aesthetic preference. Rather, it has always emerged as a response
to a nationalist development or an international situation that relegates Africa and black people to a reference for China’s own place in
the world. Historically, this racial thinking has its seeds in the elite and
popular culture of ancient Chinese empires, but fully manifested itself
through stages of nation building in the context of Western colonialism
and imperialism of the late Qing dynasty and early republic era, China
as the center of a Maoist world revolution, the post-Mao democracy
and modernization movement in the 1980s, and a much more complex
context of China’s rise since the 1990s.
The Black, the White and the Korean:
Color and Slavery in Tang China
The culturally and socially discriminatory view of Africa and black
people in China is an undisputable fact. The problem though is
whether to treat it merely as something culturally common in daily
166 Y. Cheng
occurrences—just as the same phenomenon has existed in some other
societies—or relate it to a deeply rooted racial psychology in the context of the history of China’s engagement of foreigners and its hierarchical perceptions of the peoples of the world. Many Chinese and
foreign observers tend to ascribe the phenomenon to the lack of direct
contacts between Chinese and blacks in Chinese history—because we
didn’t know them so we often thought of them negatively—and blame
the influence of Western racism in modern times for introducing such a
negative view into China. Further, they argue that anti-black racism was
historically a by-product of slave labor and the slave trade, an economic
institution that finds no equivalence in Chinese history. An innocent
ignorance and an external influence, rather than a cultivated attitude,
are the source of some unpleasant incidents with racial implications
in China or in the Chinese perception of Africa. They do not reflect
Chinese impartiality regarding black people.
A refutation of such arguments can be very simple. First, the lack of
knowledge and contact can lead to either a positive, negative, or neutral attitude, therefore bias and stereotypes can only be explained as
the result of an informed process. Human cognition of many specific
subjects does not require significant direct contact or firsthand experience. Second, the lack of historical contact between Chinese and black
people cannot be taken for granted as a historical fact as the Chinese
not only had contact with Africans and black people in ancient history
but also did so through slavery and the slave trade. Such an engagement
even established a perceptive connection between the darker skin and
the status of slave, a concept that appeared much later in the Atlantic
world but existed in the Arabic Islamic world contemporary to the
Tang and other Chinese dynasties. Third, an even more meaningful but
lesser-known fact is that Africans are just part of the category of a perceived black human race. In Chinese history, such a darker-skinned race
included many South and Southeast Asians (even some non-Han ethnic
groups). They were lumped together with African blacks into a category
of the darker-skinned and unfree human race that was mainly ascribed
to Africans and members of their diasporic communities worldwide in
modern history. The historical connection between the past and the
present is a concept of an indiscriminate blackness.
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 167
This history mainly started in Tang dynasty (between the seventh and
tenth centuries), a major empire in world history and the most glorious time for Chinese civilization. The Tang dynasty’s significant foreign interactions with regions west and southwest of China through the
Silk Road transformed major Chinese cities into hubs of international
commercial and cultural exchanges. In today’s “One Belt, One Road”
(China’s plan to economically engage Eurasian and African nations)
propaganda, the Silk Road is celebrated as the historical precedence of
a benign power seeking coprosperity and global harmony, an idealized
and romanticized premodern and non-Western model for international
relations. A fictional description of how ancient Persians held massive
ritualistic welcoming ceremonies to enthusiastically receive emissaries
from China’s Han empire has been added to elementary school Chinese
language textbooks’ reading materials (ruiwen.com).
However, like most other empires but not as well known, Tang China
was also an empire with large numbers of enslaved foreign laborers. Wars
and conquests, tributary gifts and, more often, the slave trade brought
them to China. The Silk Road itself was a massive slave transaction network that connected the Arabic slave trade to the west and Southeast
Asian slave-holding societies to the east. The relationship between the
Silk Road and slavery has been explored by previous literature, with
the most recent claiming “slaves, like silk, were Silk Road goods, to be
bought, used, and sold for profit, and many were transported long distances by land and sea to be traded in foreign markets. … Its importance
to the Silk Road economy probably rivaled that of the silk, horses, or
other goods. … Yet slaves rarely have a central if any role in the Silk
Road histories that are told today” (Whitefield 2018, p. 250).
A historical fact even less known than the relationship between the
Silk Road and slavery as revealed by literature today, however, is that
in Tang—and later dynasties—China a connection between physical (racial) and cultural features of the enslaved ones and their unfree
social status had been established. Such an almost essentialized perception regarding individual identity not only reflects the consciousness
of a racialized social classification but also a perception of the relationship between China and the non-Chinese world. This section analyzes
three types of foreign slaves distinctively typified and exploited by their
168 Y. Cheng
racial and sexual features that has implications not only for the origin
of Chinese racial thinking but also for the global studies of race and
racism.
The first group constituted blacks, collectively called kunlun nu
(昆仑奴). Kunlun today often refers to a mountain range in western
China, but in Tang China (and afterwards) it broadly referred to anywhere west and south of the Chinese empire where darker-skinned peoples clustered. Nu means slave. When kunlun and nu are put together,
the phrase means “black slaves from afar.” There were two types of kunlun nu: one from Africa brought to China mainly by Arabic traders
and the other from South and Southeast Asia brought by Tang expansions and the slave trade. Sources generally do not specify their origins, perhaps because such information got lost during the long course
of transactions or, more likely, because their skin tone became the most
conspicuous and indicative marker of their identity in Chinese society.
Only the word sengzhi (僧祗) has survived, vaguely referring to Zanzibar
and its surroundings in coastal East Africa, where the Silk Roads reached.
Current literature distinguishes the two types from sources that sketch
some blacks as taller and more masculine, while others were smaller and
good at waterborne activities (deemed to be Southeast Pacific islanders’ traits), and therefore identify them roughly as Negro and Negrito,
respectively, ignoring the latter’s more complex meaning in today’s ethnography of the entire Indian and Southwest Pacific region. These black
slaves were kept in royal courts, homes of aristocrats, bureaucrats, merchants or well-to-do urban dwellers in general, as day laborers, house
servants, and personal retainers. The royal court of the Tang dynasty
kept records regarding black slaves as tributary gifts that served in the
court. Rich and noble families in Changan, the capital of the dynasty,
purchased black slaves for domestic uses. Merchants in Guangzhou,
a major port city in southern China, not only held black slaves in their
households but also sold them elsewhere in China through their domestic networks. Other regional destinations for these black slaves were
some cities along the Yangzi River, especially Chengdou in Sichuan and
Yangzhou in Jiangsu, where intra-provincial commerce was very active
and even linked with international trade. The domestic services these
black slaves carried out included doorkeeping, nightwatching, water
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 169
and food delivery, and being pages. It was also said to be customary
to entrust some of them with the keys of household because they had
no local connections. The image of black slaves—many look closer
to African blacks—was portrayed in many Tang dynasty murals and
figurines that project their exotic physical features.
The second group was Caucasian women from various groups of
Turks and Iranians, including groups of Uyghurs and Tocharian whose
descendants nowadays have become part of the Chinese nation in
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, historically at the far eastern end
of the Indo-European migration. They were collectively called hu ji (胡
姬). Hu means white and ji entertaining slave girls (hu also means northern and western barbarians in general throughout Chinese history). They
came to China as the result of Tang’s westward expansion (many enslaved
as prisoners of war), tributary gifts, but in long run mainly through the
slave trade largely operated by both Arabs and Iranians. Often trained
in special schools or programs—commonly held as family business and
operated in household compounds—upon arrival to learn the Chinese
language and customs (for this reason many arrived in China as children
and started working at their teens), they were sold to Chinese masters as
singers, dancers, and waitresses to various service businesses. Tang China’s
bustling trade and lively urban culture generated significant demand for
such businesses, especially the hospitality industry. A typical job for hu
ji was in wineries and inns to urge guests to drink more and stay longer
with their charm, a scene often portrayed by Tang poets. As practiced
elsewhere, there was no line between service and prostitution in such
businesses. Their ethnic and racial traits (glamorous performing styles,
fashionable dress, fair skin, and shapely bodies) and feminine tenderness
at an extremely young age captivated in particular the gentry and literati
class who turned prostitution into an experience of exoticism, and celebrated it in their poems, novels, and paintings. Since hu ji ’s social status
was so racially and sexually typified, unlike their Chinese counterparts,
only the most beautiful, elegant, and spirited could become legal concubines or consorts to enter Chinese families. Some were traded as priceless
gifts among rich and powerful Chinese men as peacock feathers to flaunt
their status, and some were even used as bribery from frontier officers or
merchants to high-ranking administrators.
170 Y. Cheng
The third group of slaves was comprised of Korean maidservants
obtained through Tang’s conquest of Korea (mid-seventh century; Sui,
a short-lived dynasty prior to Tang, also had a war with Korea and
obtained slaves) and later through slave raids and smuggling operated
by Korean and Chinese slave traders. The Korean maids were called
“gaoli bi” (高丽婢) or “xinluo bi” (新罗婢) (both gaoli and xinluo refer
to Korea; bi means young female maids). Unlike Hu ji who were perceived as seductive and more foreign, Korean women were perceived
as girlish, obedient and clever, and nurtured in a culture under China’s
influence could therefore be included in a harmonious image of the
Chinese household and even trusted with domestic managerial duties.
“For northern Chinese, if they obtain maids, they have to have
Korean girls; if they have servants, they have to have black boys. If they
don’t have both at any time, they are not households of literati officials” (Ye Ziqi, Caomuzi ). This historical account provided by Ye Ziqi,
a famous fourteenth-century scholar and philosopher who also wrote
about everyday life in urban China both contemporary and historical, shows that the possession of both black and Korean slaves became
the standard among China’s upper class. Ye’s portrait might be more
likely a reflection of the northern urban China of his time instead
of that during the Tang dynasty. However, if that is the case it only
demonstrates the persistence of the slave trade and slavery after Tang.
Of the three types of unfree foreigners, kunlun nu and gaoli bi were
for domestic use, while hu ji was largely for men to seek pleasure outside their households. Elite and popular culture attached social and
cultural values as well as sensual sentiment to foreign slaves’ tamed and
desired characters. Blacks were masculine, dutiful, loyal, all combined
to conjure up a superstitious imaginary of magical but harmless power
in Chinese folklore. Whites were romantic and sexy, a popular subject
in Tang poetry, somewhat similar to images of the Circassian beauties
desired by various masters in the medieval Black Sea region manifested
in literary and artistic works. Koreans were reticent, prudent, and submissive, although much less visible in art and literature.
The Tang legal system defined slavery and made it inheritable and regulated, particularly in the kunlun nu and hu ji trade with a requirement
for sales records to rule out slave stealing and kidnapping. There were also
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 171
laws regulating manumission, an evidence suggesting the existence of a
prevalent and complicated system of slavery. There were many slave markets in western China where kunlun nu and hu ji were sold. However,
later in the dynasty, rampant smuggling and illegal trading caused troubles in population, taxation, and frontier controls that forced the state to
outlaw the Korean slave trade and clamp down on others later. Since the
1990s, Chinese scholars have presented abundant and specific evidence
for such a legal system and practices (Yang 2010; Li 2001; Wu 1994).
Foreign slavery still persisted but to a lesser degree until the Qing dynasty,
as the result of the implementations of imperial policies of stricter control
over its frontiers and foreign trade as well as regulations on domestic residency. In addition to kunlun nu, hu ji, and gaoli bi, there were also slaves
of non-Han frontier people, as the result of Tang territorial expansion
and collaborations between Han and non-Han slave traders. These slaves
mainly came from regions in today’s South and Southwest China where
slavery was more common than in Han-concentrated regions.
The legacy of this history of multi-ethnic and non-Chinese slavery
in the Tang and some later dynasties manifests itself in modern China’s
perception of the world, especially the concept combining blackness
with servitude originally denoted by kunlun nu. It survives in other
terms such as hei gui (黑鬼 nigger) and hei nu (黑奴 black slave), and
both explicitly refer to Africans and the African diaspora. The exotic
image of Hu ji has been idealized and romanticized as a symbol of international cultural exchange that femininely enriched Chinese culture
with inspirations for literary and performing arts, and demonstrated
Chinese civilization’s assimilative power. This expands discussions on
the historical roots of internal Occidentalism—the Caucasian Chinese
are often presented as exotic performers on the national stage just like
their ethnic ancestors at various entertainment and service businesses
but are now nationalized as part of “us” in China’s multi-ethnic self-­
image. In retrospect, one may ask: how much did these color-specific
categorizations of human groups reinforce the Sinocentric world view
with a sharpened consciousness of a colorless but pure “Us” vs. colorful
“Others”? What is the implication of this consciousness to the discourse
of the yellow race developed much later in modern China that distinguishes the Han Chinese especially from the “Others”?
172 Y. Cheng
From Kunlun nu to Hei nu:
The Blacks and Slavery
It is in this multi-ethnic and society-wide slavery that we understand the construct of an almost racial concept regarding Africans.
The darker-skinned kunlun nu already epitomized a perceived complex of three relationships—the Chinese and barbarians, the lightskinned and the dark-skinned, and the master and slave. A seminal
work in this field, Frank Dikötter’s The Discourse of Race in Modern
China, assembles evidence for a premodern racial thinking in China.
Dikötter particularly argues that “the equation of ‘black’ with ‘slave’,
an important factor in the development of racial discrimination, was
thus realized at a relatively early stage in China. It existed well before
Westerners established themselves at the frontiers of the Empire”
(Dikötter 1992, pp. 16–17).
Some Chinese scholars have recently also admitted that as early as
the Tang dynasty blackness was a color for servitude or simple slavery,
although they would not bring the historical comparison—the colored
identity was established in China earlier than it was in the West—into
discussion, neither would they formally apply the terms “race” or “racial
thinking” in the Chinese case (Liu 2000; Liang 2004; Peng 2007;
Cheng 2002; Xiao 2007.1, 2). Any discussion on that history from a
global slavery and racism perspective would be either avoided or such
an awareness simply did not exist. Some of them emphasize that despite
an unfree status the treatment Kunlun nu received in China cannot
be compared with what black slaves suffered under Western colonial
slavery.2 For them, slavery in China and in the West belongs to different
historical universes.
2In the Islamic slave trade, a large number of black slaves were castrated; while in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the hellish experience of the Middle Passage and the brutal treatment in plantations
have been perpetuated in the memories of entire human races. While works detailing the brutality
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 173
A comparison with the Arabic/Islamic slave trade which not only
coexisted with but was also connected to the slave trade in Tang China
will further illustrate the significance of the construct of the perception for a darker-skinned slavery—kunlun nu—in ancient China. The
trans-Saharan and Red Sea slave trades started as early as the seventh
century and continued into the early modern times that brought millions of black slaves to the Mediterranean region and Islamic world
(both the Arabic world and Ottoman Turkey). The distribution of black
slaves was similar to that of black slaves in China—slaves were mainly
used as day laborers, servants, and personal retainers in the royal courthouse and families of slave masters, with certain numbers working on
some experimental sugar plantations in Mesopotamia and elsewhere in
the Mediterranean region. Such a large-scale black slavery gave an old
term of abd a new meaning combining the color black with slavery just
as the Chinese equivalent kunlun nu did. There was also another term
“Zenj” that refered to black slaves from Swahili Africa by Islamic empires.
This Arabic-Chinese connection of slavery in terminology thus almost
essentialized the link between physical and biological features and unfree
labor status that equated color to status at a global level (the then known
world). This connection extends the “interactive paradigm,” as Dikötter
argues, from perceptions that existed in individual nations (China) to a
global network. An unfree labor system of colored people did not exist in
this case as a mode of production—as it did in the Western-dominated
colonial world later—but subsisted as a society-wide domestic and service
slavery.
The black slavery in China may add a relevance to this global blackness: kunlun nu refers to all darker-skinned people to whom Africans
were just a part. This indiscriminately color-based identity ignores ethnic differences, therefore it gets much closer to an essentialized racial
concept. By contrast, the concept of “black slaves” in the European
world came much later. Throughout ancient European history, slaves
existed in the entire Mediterranean world, but they could appear in all
of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas are too many to name, for the Islamic
or trans-Saharan slave trades, see John Wright, The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade (New York: Routledge,
2007).
174 Y. Cheng
kinds of skin colors. According to George M. Fredrickson’s synthesis
of some literature in this field, before late medieval times, the color of
black and the status of slavery were not associated. The first time that
the Europeans began to equate slavery with a particular skin color was
very likely during the late fourteenth century in the Iberian Peninsula,
where Christians coexisted with Arabic Muslims for a certain length
of time and the latter possessed black Africans as slaves through the
trans-Saharan slave trade. During the next century when Portuguese
merchants started slave raids and began trading along the coast of West
Africa by exploiting the local slave market, the concept of slavery associated with people of a certain color further developed (Fredrickson 2002,
pp. 27–28).
Sources reflecting social life in the Tang dynasty have convinced
Chinese scholars to believe that the market demands for black slaves in
upper-class prosperous urban centers were enormous. As one scholar
analyzed, most Southeast Asian countries contemporary to the Tang
dynasty were slave-holding societies and had a relationship with China
as tributary states and trading partners. Compared with the feasibility
of carrying slaves to China from Africa, it was much more likely that
a large number of the black slaves that originated from these regions
were part of tributary gifts, or sold as “barbarian devils.” Some of them
were brought to China as servants by their masters and then for various
reasons stayed in China and fell into the category of slaves. “Only [with
such multiple sources] could kunlun nu satisfy the elite families’ significant demand for slaves” (Liang 2004, p. 60).
These black people’s ethnic and racial traits—mainly their shiny black
skin combined with unusual physical strength and rare skills—sometimes also caused them to be viewed as exotic creatures: strange-looking,
primitive, unthinkably energetic, generally harmless but occasionally
dangerous with a sudden outburst of an animal-like roar and destructive
force. Their masters used them to flaunt their status, an assignment similar to hu ji’s. A much-quoted case in relevant literature is that from the
Tang dynasty of a rich merchant who owned a darker-skinned slave who
could dive and stay under water for quite a long time. When the merchant entertained his guests, he threw precious items in the river and the
slave would dive deep to find them. According to the legend the slave
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 175
eventually drowned in his last performance. The popularity of their
mysterious image led to sales of kunlun nu masks in market places for
entertainment and festival events. As the opposite to the civilized and
therefore normative self-image of the Chinese, such a category constituted a subordinate part in the China-centered “All under the Heaven”
ecumenical order and paved the way for the perception of a universal
blackness in a much later imagination of the modern world.
Popular culture stresses and retains such an image, attached to the
fictional black slave hero in a romance and legend story, simply titled
Kunlun nu, written by Pei Xin, a Tang dynasty author from the ninth
century. In the story, Cui Sheng, a son of a court minister and a young
scholar, falls in love with Hong Xiao, a singing girl who is an unfree
entertainer in the house of the prime minister, but the class difference
prevents them from living together. Mu le, Cui Sheng’s black slave,
decides to help them. He kills the ferocious watchdogs of the prime
minister’s house in the middle of the night, carries Chui Sheng on his
back and climbs over ten high walls surrounding the prime minister’s
house in order to let the two lovers meet in private. After the dating,
Mu le carries both of them on his back and sneaks them out of the
house. The two lovers are then free and stay together forever. When
the prime minister discovers that the plot was made possible with the
help of a black slave, he is taken by a fearful awe of the mysterious
power the slave possesses and orders no-one to pursue the escaped
slave girl.
This story was so popular that it is even regarded by many as the
earliest chivalry and martial arts novel, an important genre in Chinese
popular literature that is thought to reflect the desire for justice and
freedom in ancient Chinese society. It was adopted into other forms of
literary works and performing arts, especially Peking Opera (renamed
Stealing Hong Xiao) that was performed through the twentieth century.
Chinese historians often point to such a popularity to claim a Chinese
attitude towards black slaves that was different from that of Westerners.
However, if so interpreted, while the story does portray the black
slave as a hero in a gratuitous way, it also emphasizes a servant’s loyalty and dedication and his role in helping the union between his master, a talented young literati, and a beautiful girl. Such a union is called
176 Y. Cheng
cai zi jia ren (才子佳人), meaning that the talented young literati is entitled to be accompanied by graceful beauties, an ideal match in ancient
Chinese romances that actually reflects the appropriate gender-power
relationship. In this case, the gender-power relationship is implicitly
endorsed by a race-power relationship. The opera therefore assigns the
positive values of the slave to his social status and popular expectation.
In this regard, the views on a decent, honest but servile Uncle Tom in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by contemporary critical theory and race studies may
provide a comparative perspective in decoding values coveted by masters
in such an ostensibly benign image of a slave such as Mu Le.
In addition, the mysterious power Mu le possesses conjures up the
superstitious perceptions Chinese society subscribed to black people—their racial and ethnic attributes made them an inscrutable and
devilish creature of either subhuman or superhuman nature, but never
a creature humanly equal to “us.” The dark, rough, and animal-like
physical features of the slave are displayed in contrast to the light, delicate, and refined young Chinese lovers, which reveals not only aesthetic but racial perceptions, as well as a popular imagination of a
civilized China surrounded by a barbarian world inhabited with wild
and somewhat mysterious mortals whose diabolical power could be
at the service of the Chinese when appropriately tamed, enlightened,
and guided.
The tragic life of a Korean maid, which is true and happened at the
same time as the creation of the fictional hero of Mu Le, sheds further
light on our understanding of the Chinese perception. Taiping Guangji
(太平广记), a Song dynasty compilation of miscellaneous literary
works, includes an account of a Korean maid captured by the Tang
expeditionary army and held as a slave maid by a ministerial court
official. The maid, favored by the master for her superb beauty as well
as her prudence, made a failed attempt to poison him and then fled,
hidden with her lover until she was found after a carpet search of
the capital by the police. Yu Shu, the name of the Korean maid, was
interrogated, tortured, and publically executed (Li et al. 2018 Taiping
Guangji, Vol. 171). Unlike the fictional Mu Le, the historically true
Yu Shu was only sketched with vague details and never achieved any
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 177
publicity but is buried in the volume of miscellaneous historical records.
The Korean maid was also courageous—like Mu Le—but desired her
freedom and happiness and was therefore disloyal to her master. She was
portrayed as a cunning and vicious criminal whose beauty and talent
only made her even more dangerous. As unfree and non-Chinese servants, the images of Mu Le and Yu Shu were shaped by the Chinese master’s values. Given the deficiency of historical documentations regarding
lives of these slaves and maids in ancient China, this type of depiction
and perception is a typical “history of a people without a history,” albeit
in a much distorted manner.
This argument finds support in the recent popular history writing
that involves black slaves in ancient China. Public history writing in this
case mainly involves popular writers who write on interesting but lesser-known histories for public media, which help in popularizing scholarly research results that concern the general public. Major web portals,
newspapers, cultural journals, and TV and radio talk shows, as well as
popular history books, are their outlets. Since the early 2000s, popular history writers have written on the subject of kunlun nu and most
of them simply cut and paste details from the aforementioned academic
works but add eye-catching titles and sensationalized tones. They were all
surprised—and expecting their readers to be equally surprised—by the
fact that “black slaves also existed in ancient China!” “In the great Tang
dynasty black slaves served aristocrats!” Or, “our city (Guangzhou) had
many black slaves in the Tang dynasty!” After reassembling details taken
from those academic pieces (the large numbers of Korean maids is often
mentioned as well, apart from in Yu Shu’s story), they emphasized that,
unlike the West, China treated black slaves with little discrimination or
brutality, and there was even respect for them, reflected in the legendary
romance of Kunlun Nu, the literary work. In addition to a discernable
sign of nationalist sentiment (“our ancestors possessed black slaves as well
when we were rich, strong, and powerful”), a lighthearted tone rather
than a sense of soul searching often associated with the history of slavery
characterizes these narratives. For example, they amaze in that during the
Tang dynasty, black slaves were so popular that they were “standard” in
a “middle-class family” and “rich families rushed to get both black slaves
178 Y. Cheng
and Korean maids.”3 Some of them even portray kunlun nu as pets, as
they use the phrase “yang kunlun nu” (养昆仑奴) to describe slave owning (“yang ” literarily means “to feed.” In everyday Chinese language,
“having a cat or dog” is expressed as “yang ” a cat or a dog).
In regards to black slaves in premodern China, I have basically
relied on sources and literature provided by Chinese authors, ancient
and modern, and focused on the issue of the construction and legacy
of a Chinese perception—both of the elite and commoners—of black
people. It is not meant to be a piece of research on how such a slave
trade was conducted and such a slavery as an institution was established and maintained. Don Wyatt’s The Blacks of Premodern China
is a recent work in this regard. Wyatt has come to a conclusion of the
existence of large numbers of black slaves—a certain number of them
from Africa—in ancient China. Wyatt’s conclusion has provoked some
discussions. The conclusion has been legitimately challenged by some
scholars who point out the weakness of Wyatt’s evidence in ascertaining
that the blacks were Africans—as Wyatt admitted in the book himself.
It is indeed an historical problem that has perplexed Chinese historians as well. As far as I have read, the Chinese historians are quite certain that there were slaves from Africa in ancient China as early as the
Tang dynasty although the majority were very likely from South and
especially Southeast Asia. That is a conclusion similar to Wyatt’s. One
criticism of Wyatt’s work suggests that the book’s “ultimate aim” was
“implicating China as an entity that, like the United States and other
3Because most online popular history essays on Africans or darker-skinned people in ancient
China have no credible authorship and are often the work of cut-and-paste with added sensational titles, it is difficult to include them as references, I choose to document them in this footnote. “唐代崑崙奴是非洲黑人?最早的黑奴貿易來源於此?” (Were Kunlun nu in the Tang
Dynasty African blacks? Was it the earliest slave trade?) https://kknews.cc/history/kz48yeb.html;
你所不知的盛唐奇闻:唐朝已有黑奴为贵族服务,比西方早一千年! (What you don’t know
about the powerful Tang Dynasty: black slaves were already serving Tang elites, one thousand
years earlier than the West!) https://kknews.cc/history/8bxokon.html; 昆仑奴身份解密:世界
最早被交易的奴隶,唐朝中产阶级标配 (Decoding Kunlun nu identity: the earliest traded
slaves and the standard for the Tang Dynasty’s middle class) https://kknews.cc/culture/lvvjoz.
html; 昆仑奴是从哪儿来的? 唐朝流行养昆仑奴 (From where did Kunlun nu come? It was
a fashion for people in the Tang Dynasty to have Kunlun nu ) http://www.todayonhistory.com/
lishi/201703/58688.html (all accessed May 25, 2018).
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 179
Western countries, once took part in one of the most horrendous events
in human history: the buying and selling of Africans as slaves” (Bodomo
2013). China can absolutely not be compared with the West in that
regard, but as far as the existence of some slaves (regardless of their
numbers) from Africa in ancient China is concerned, it is not scholars
and popular history writers in the West but instead in China who first
discovered and still believe it. Among these scholars, however, there has
been a tendency to interpret such a slavery with Chinese characteristics
which mitigates the inhuman nature of slavery.
As kunlun nu gradually disappeared in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the concept of darker-skinned slavery evolved from a category
indiscriminate of African blacks and South/Southeast Asian blacks to a
category of a global black slavery of mainly Africans, collectively called
heinu (hei means black, and nu slave).4 In the mid-sixteenth century,
Portuguese merchants obtained Macau (located about one hundred and
ten kilometers from Guangzhou) as a trading post from the Chinese
authorities, and they brought with them black slaves in substantial
numbers as servants and soldiers. Unlike black slaves brought to China
during the earlier centuries with obscure origins and in unknown numbers, this time most of these black slaves were identified as Southeast
Africans, from Mozambique in particular, with a clearer demographic
estimate. According to a study by Chinese scholars that synthesizes
relevant literatures, black people in Macau between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries were mainly Southeast Africans but could include
certain numbers of darker-skinned people from India, Hormuz,
Bangladesh, Malacca, and East Timor. To what extent these black people were natives or mixed-blood descendants of Africans with natives
in these location remains unclear. The black population was estimated
at around five thousand during the Ming dynasty but declined to one
thousand and seven hundred in the early nineteenth century during the
Qing dynasty (Tang and Peng 2005).
4While
heinu remained the most common, there were other terms that also combined color and
status. They include guinu (鬼奴 devil slave; “devil” here means “foreign black devil”), heigui
(黑鬼 black devil, a term today still used as a racial slur), wugui (乌鬼 darker black devil), heifan
(黑番 black barbarian), heisi (黑厮 black servant), etc. Unlike Kunlun nu but similar to hei nu,
these terms literarily denote the color black.
180 Y. Cheng
The African slaves’ misery at the hands of their Portuguese masters was
reported in detail by local Chinese sources, showing sentiments of sympathy mixed with distain. There were also records of disruptive behaviors when these slaves were released for a period of time and went to
the streets, and Chinese officials would hold their Portuguese masters
responsible for the consequences. Unlike their predecessors, however,
these black slaves could not be legally purchased by the Chinese, but
there were cases of their escapes being encouraged and even arranged by
some Chinese interested in their services. Over time there was certainly a
number of African slaves who succeeded in fleeing their masters and who
then disappeared in China (Peng 2007; Liu 2000).
From Physical and Cultural to Scientific
and Biological: Essentializing a Universal
Blackness
As discussed above, a concept combining dark skin and unfree social
status had been established in premodern China. This preliminary
perception was further developed into a modern racial category after
the mid-nineteenth century as China suffered from Western colonial
and imperialist politics and was exposed to Western racist ideologies
that defended such politics. This historical process proceeded with the
transformation of China from a self-centered empire to a nation state in
which China’s new identity—both as a nation and as a people—was constructed in the context of an imposed global order. In this order black
people—much portrayed as heinu—were perceived along with a global
white and other racially perceived human groups, rather than in a bipolar
structure of a civilized Chinese world vs. a barbarian periphery inhabited
by various kunlun nu. Africans in Africa and Macao were now indiscriminately lumped together with the worldwide African diaspora, a racial category ignoring ethnic differences that has continued to the present day.
The cultural superiority of the Chinese to black people was interpreted
with anthropological and pseudoscientific theories, and even eugenics that explained the superiority as clearly racial rather than cultural.
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 181
Politically, the perceived inferiority of black people worldwide facilitated
the social Darwinist discourse of national survival: they are regarded
as hopeless losers to despise and a deplorable misfortune to avoid. Any
discriminatory treatment the Chinese received from Westerners would
invoke an unwanted comparison between themselves and black people.
In analyzing the racial aspect of the late Qing era and early republican Chinese intellectual and political elites’ anti-Manchu, anti-imperialist, and nation-building discourses, Dikötter sketches the perception
of black people portrayed in such a discourse. The elites included
Chinese enlightenment thinkers (those who introduced Western theories into China), reformists and revolutionaries (identified by their attitudes towards the Qing dynasty, respectively). A racial topology was first
made clear by the British-educated Yan Fu (1853–1921), a pioneer in
translation and interpretation of Western social and scientific thought
in modern China. As a theoretician, Yan replaced the traditional Sinobarbarian world view with a four-race hierarchy of the world: the
white, the yellow, the brown, and the black. With distinctively different physical characteristics, the blacks were the “lowest” and were
all called “black slaves” (Dikötter 2015, pp. 40–41). Tang Caichang
(1867–1900), a prominent reformist who was executed by the Qing
court after a failed uprising, phrased racial superiority and inferiority
of each group (in Yan Fu’s category) as “antithetical couplets,” a traditionally rhetorical method stressing rhythmic tone—“Yellow and white
are wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white are rulers, red and
blacks are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and blacks are scattered” (Dikötter 2015, p. 50). Liang Qichao (1873–1929), one of the
most erudite and influential enlightenment and reformist thinkers of
the era, added American Indians (red) as a separate racial category to
Yan’s four-group racial order with blacks still assigned to the bottom
rank. He thought that dark races were driven only by instinctive desires
for food and sex (Dikötter 2015, p. 50).
Racial categorization was essentialized by applying Western scientific
concepts. Liang Qichao, for example, believed that “all the black, red,
and brown races, by the microbes in their blood vessels and their cerebral angle, are inferior to the whites. Only the yellows are not very dissimilar to the whites” (Dikötter 2015, p. 50). Because of this biological
182 Y. Cheng
inferiority, a theory or hypothesis of racial extinction was seen either as
a natural and inevitable result of social Darwinist evolution or a desirable outcome of a social engineering project of amalgamation. The most
radical—yet benign in their eyes—proposal was perceived by Kang
Youwei (1858–1927), the best-known reformist philosopher and politician who masterminded the failed One Hundred Days’ Reform in
1898, in his visionary work for the future of the entirety of humanity,
entitled One World. Kang envisioned the elimination of the black race
as a prerequisite for global harmony and proposed to reach this goal by
whitening the race through dietary change (particularly eating cooked
Chinese food, a substantial marker of Chinese civilization), intermarriage (those yellow and white individuals who sacrifice themselves in
such experiments should be awarded medals), migration (forcing them
to leave the natural environment they were accustomed to), and sterilization (the last resort). In other words, what Kang was perceiving was a
combination of “exterminationist logics” and “assimilationist logics” as
Ian Law argues in the case of contemporary Chinese racism.
All the above discussions apparently reflected the influence of
Western racist theories, but they also derived from the overseas experiences of the discussants, for example both Liang Qichao and Kang
Youwei visited America and were shocked by the socioeconomic conditions of African-Americans and the racial discrimination they suffered.
These Chinese often continued to use the term “black slaves,” although
by the time of their visits and their discussions slavery had been abolished for decades. Such a firsthand observation not only reinforced
their racial presumptions regarding blacks, but sharpened their nationalist sentiment whenever they felt discriminated against by Westerners.
As Dikötter quotes, “‘we Chinese are less than black slaves’ was a
common expression” and “even the ‘black slaves’ in the United States
were educated: was this not a source of shame for the civilized Han?”
(Dikötter 2015, p. 72). This quote indicates the extent of the complex
of racial thinking: Chinese were looked down on by whites; Chinese
were denigrated to the level of inferior blacks, and it was the racially
inferior non-Han Manchu dynasty that had dragged the Han people into such a mire of racial humiliation. Black slaves were used as a
terrifying alarm to spur the sense of patriotic solidarity and nationalist
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 183
responsibility, a powerful instrument in the formation and education of
modern Chinese nationalism.
If in ancient and early modern times, the firsthand observation of
black people was made through black slaves brought to China and was
subject to the laws and customs of Chinese society, then in modern
times it was made in a much more complicated context. While the cultural and political elites came up with their depiction of black people
outside China based on their reading and comprehension of Western
racial concepts and their own observations while traveling overseas,
some ordinary Chinese came to form their perception of black people
through working with them under the circumstance of foreign laws
and customs which they themselves were subject to as unfree labor. In
this sense “we Chinese are less than black slaves” was neither merely a
pathetic racial lament nor a sentiment politicized for nationalist education, but simply a painful daily suffering. The Chinese indentured labor
brought to Spanish Cuba by international migration provides the case
for the examination of the racial relationship between low-class Chinese
and black slaves. It was the case of direct and intimate daily engagement
between the “yellow” and the “black.”
The Chinese indentured laborers—or coolies—in Spanish Cuba,
the world’s largest sugar producer based on black slavery, were brought
there between the 1840s and the 1870s as an alternative labor force to
alleviate the labor shortage problem on the island created by the global
abolitionist movement. Yellow trade, the popular name for this migration, is already suggestive of the racial nature of such a labor force transaction. As indentured workers, the actual treatment of Chinese laborers
at the hands of Spanish planters proved no different from that of black
slaves, or was even worse: a significant death rate (close to 12%) during the middle passage—crossing the Pacific instead of the Atlantic—on
average matched the latter; the Chinese were sold in slave markets to
Spanish masters at a price cheaper than that of black slaves; the terms
stipulated in contracts were often violated (food, working hours and
conditions, health care, salary, and the eight-year term); and severe
corporal punishment and murders of defiant individuals. The most
astonishing fact was the suicide rate: given the total number of one hundred and fifty thousand Chinese shipped to Cuba, between 1850 and
184 Y. Cheng
1860 there were five thousand cases of suicide among the Chinese, but
only three hundred and fifty and fifty-seven among blacks and whites,
respectively (Yun 2008, p. 84).
“Racial anxiety,” as Lisa Yun puts it, was one of major psychological sources for such a hellish experience. It was mainly a psychological
animosity and physical confrontation between the Chinese and black
slaves intentionally cultivated and manipulated by the Spanish planters’ racial politics. The arrival of the Chinese complicated the racialized labor system in Cuba, because the workers of the inferior race were
legally unfree, but not slaves either; they were assigned to work along
with black slaves but got paid, and they were much more adaptable to
the new technologies just installed in Cuba’s sugar mills but could also
work in cane fields and the planters’ households as cooks and servants.5
Spanish planters inverted racial politics to meet the challenge. For one
thing, they often appointed members of each group to be overseers of
the other, with black overseers outnumbering Chinese ones. In order
to survive or even win favor from their masters, these overseers often
administered their duties with excessive violence, leading to the deaths
of many Chinese workers. There were cases of revengeful Chinese workers murdering their black overseers, which further heightened racial
tensions. There were also cases of Chinese people murdering overseers
of their fellow Chinese, who were seen as traitors of the same-blood
community—the same violent act that had a racial implication if performed in a foreign land. When China sent a delegation—the famous
Cuba Commission—in 1876 to investigate the labor situation in Cuba,
the grievance the Chinese laborers vented carried a “particular resentment against blackness”—“‘Why’ should blacks be better than Chinese
and ‘Why’ should ‘we’ be less than ‘they’?” and “‘it doesn’t make any
sense’ or ‘have you ever heard of such a thing?’” (Yun 2008, p. 167).
Clearly these were indications of a response to their assumed superiority
superseded by a forcefully imposed position of inferiority. The reversed
5An observation and comparison between Chinese laborers and black slaves made by expatriates
of the southern US slavers who went to Cuba seeking alternative laborers during the Civil War
foregrounds the complex of racial hierarchy, labor division, and social control in Cuba (Guterl
2003).
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 185
or misplaced racial rank that angered the elite members of the Chinese
nation as Dikötter noticed turned into something physically hurtful and
even fatal to their fellow but low-class Chinese in Cuba.
In examining the case, mainly testimonies provided by Chinese laborers interviewed by their government delegation, Yun came to the
same conclusion as Dikötter: “A consideration of racialized mindsets
raised the possibility of cultural preconceptions of blackness and slavery
embedded in Chinese cultural views before [italic original] their arrival
in Cuba.” She pointed out that research on Africans, slaves, and blackness in ancient China was insufficient in scope and depth but clearly
indicative of the existence of such an attitude. She went on to quote
some literature that documented or analyzed the attitude, for example kunlun nu as a general term that combined color and servitude.
She believes that the public denunciation of labor trafficking in China,
which led to the Chinese government sending the commission to Cuba
to investigate and shortly after that deciding to end labor exportation,
was associated with this attitude. The problem though, as she recognized, was the lack of direct evidence of these laborers’ preconceptions
regarding blackness, but “yet the nature of ‘attitudes’ is that they are
naturalized into acts, texts, and expressions.”
From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the
direct contact between Africans and their diaspora and Chinese people
was very limited and mainly made culturally through African-Americans.
Some famous African-American intellectuals with strong black nationalist standing, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, visited
China in the 1930s. They mainly stayed in Shanghai’s foreign concession quarters and were appalled by the racist treatment of the Chinese
inflicted by Westerners. That firsthand observation perhaps helps explain
why many black intellectuals chose Japan—imperialist to its Asian
neighbors but defiant to the West—rather than China—downtrodden by but submissive to the West—to be the hope for a non-Western
power standing for colored peoples’ interests. Such a pro-Japan attitude
had begun to develop since “Asian” Japan defeated “European” Russia
in 1905 and advocated racial equality at the Paris Peace Conference
in 1919 (Gallicchio 2000, Chapter One). Du Bois and Hughes met
some Chinese intellectuals but certainly could not impress on Chinese
186 Y. Cheng
intellectuals to make any significant change to the Chinese perception of
blacks. By comparison, Rabindranath Tagore, a poet from colonial India,
visited China during 1924 causing significant public enthusiasm in
multiple cities and his visit has been seen as a major event in the history
of cultural interactions between the two old civilizations.
During the 1930s, some African-American musicians—with Buck
Clayton and Earl Whaley the most known ones—were highly successful in Shanghai’s foreign concession quarters until Japanese invasion of
the city. They popularized jazz music in urban China by their performance and played Chinese musical selections in jazz style. With their
influence, some Chinese musicians, represented by Li Jinhui, created
modern Chinese popular music with jazz characteristics. But this new
musical trend was rejected by both cultural conservatives and political
radicals as primitive and pornographic, mainly because it originated
from African culture (Jones 2001, pp. 1–4). Half century later, the same
racial bias would serve the Han Clothing movement for its rejection of
the “shaking and rolling music” of “Africans” in China (see Chapter 5).
One incident, however, stands out in a politically more meaningful
way to show the influence of racial thinking regarding black people that
was formed earlier and had continued to influence high politics. During
World War Two, about nine thousand African-American soldiers, engineers, and truck drivers—out of about fifteen thousand American GIs
in total—worked on the construction of the famous Burma Road (or
Ledo-Kunming Road) that delivered the Lend-Lease Act war supplies to
China from India. Starting in 1942, the construction of the road is considered as a “war-time engineering miracle,” given the extremely difficult
and unsurveyed topography, the subtropical jungle and weather as well as
the diseases of the region. The construction claimed about one thousand
and two hundred lives of American soldiers which certainly in proportion
involved large numbers of black soldiers (BlackPast.org; US Department
of Defense). The black soldiers and servicemen worked with the Chinese
expeditionary army in Burma, but when the construction was nearing
completion and getting close to the Chinese border in early January 1945,
the Nationalist government of China secretly asked the American headquarters in the Pacific and China to prevent black soldiers from entering
the country. The sudden disappearance of black drivers (the majority of
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 187
truck drivers) from truck convoys heading for China alerted embedded
black journalists and caused concerns and suspicions back in America.
Responding to inquiries and rejecting rumors of racism, the army
promptly added black drivers into the convoy that would enter China
first. Shortly afterwards, the army’s regional headquarters issued a directive
to remove all “alleged bans” on “the use of negro troops in China.”
Marc Gallicchio’s research proves that the request that led to the elusive
bans was raised by Chiang Kai-shek (the leader of nationalist China) himself and some ministers in the government, and it became a sensitive issue
in secret negotiations between the Chinese government and the US army.
The Chinese leaders made it clear that they would not like to see black
soldiers in China—“the Chinese people are not accustomed to mixing
with Negros, and they might excite undue sensation.” The Chinese leaders reconsidered after American generals emphasized the indispensability
of black soldiers to the operation and warned Chiang that his reputation
in the United States had been damaged by rumors of alleged racism, since
the disappearance of black drivers from the first convoy had been widely
covered and discussed in America by pro-communist media as well as
African-American media. Chiang eventually compromised—“if necessity
dictated, they could be used east of Kunming [the provincial city close
to the border],” which the American generals accepted and they also
promised to limit the numbers of black soldiers. However, publically the
spokesperson of the Chinese government rejected such rumors—“we are
colored people too … We certainly could not condone any racial bar in
our country against other darker-skinned races. That would be an international scandal” (Gallicchio 2000, p. 195). Eventually an all AfricanAmerican engineering aviation battalion entered China as a whole unit
and was stationed in an airport outside the city of Kunming. During the
negotiations, both sides agreed that the discussion should be kept off the
record. When the first American truck convoy arrived in Kunming’s suburbs, an American army photographer took a picture showing a black soldier and a Chinese soldier harmoniously working together to place their
national flags on a jeep. It was actually an arrangement for the purpose of
propaganda (Gallicchio 2000, p. 1970).
A historical fact little known to most Chinese is that black soldiers
participated in two wars in China before this Burma Road incident.
188 Y. Cheng
The first was the Dutch-Portuguese battle over Macao (1622), in which
African slave soldiers fought for the Portuguese colonial authorities
and played a decisive role in foiling the Dutch attempt to take over
the trading-post city in order to control trade between Southeast Asia,
China (including Taiwan), and Japan. The battle was the only conflict
between European powers in East Asia for colonial competition, but
since Portuguese jurisdiction over Macao was granted by the Chinese
government, the Dutch were seen as invaders by China. The Chinese
provincial governor and local residents attributed the victory to the
bravery and loyalty of black soldiers. The second was that during the
subsequent Sino-Dutch battle over Taiwan (1622–1624, after their
defeat in Macao, the Dutch attempted to take Taiwan as their colonial post), the Chinese military recruited some black soldiers through
their connections with the Portuguese in Macao, and these black soldiers also impressed the Chinese with their fighting capacity. Both battles are important events in the early history of Chinese defense against
European colonialism, but unfortunately the role of African soldiers has
remained little known to most Chinese nationalists.
The Yunnan-Burma Road has been one of the most celebrated and
well-remembered Chinese contributions to the victory in World War
Two in books, documentaries, and popular history writings. Hundreds
and thousands of Chinese workers, peasants, and soldiers participated
in the construction of the road’s section inside China and many of
them died in the process. However, the history of African-American soldiers being the major labor force for the road’s section between India
and the Burma-China border and their sacrifice has remained almost
unknown, let alone the story of the aborted ban prohibiting them from
entering China. Even scholars of the history of Sino-American relations
were unaware of it.6 By comparison, the story of the Flying Tigers, an
American volunteer pilot group (all whites) who fought the Japanese Air
6I wrote an essay entitled “二战时美军黑人士兵为何差点进不了中国” (Why nearly couldn’t
African-American soldiers enter China during WWII?) and published it on a popular history
website http://www.ifengweekly.com/detil.php?id=4476. I also presented the history at a conference held in Fudan University (Shanghai) in summer, 2017. The feedback I received from both
the general audience and scholars was “I never knew that history.”
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 189
Force over China’s skies in 1941 and 1942, is almost a household story
in China.
In summary, before the founding of the PRC, the racially discriminatory view of black people manifested itself in Chinese nationalism and
the Chinese view of the world in a number of sporadic incidents. By
comparison, positive views of black people existed not only occasionally but also were provoked by China’s nationalist agenda of the time.
In 1936, when China was facing increasingly aggressive Japanese expansionist policies, the government joined the League of Nation’s sanctions
against Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia—an act regarded as similar to
Japan’s incursions in China—and some newspapers highly praised the
Ethiopians’ resistance as an exemplary act for the world’s oppressed and
colored people.
Campus Racism: From the Early 1960s
to the Early 1990s
The aforementioned Chinese praise of Ethiopia in the 1930s became the
precursor of the official propaganda policy after the funding of the PRC,
as the African continent underwent the common cause of decolonization
during the 1950s and 1960s, which led a number of nations to become
China’s allies in its anti-Western and anti-Soviet international politics.
However, this alliance was also perceived to have a “color strategy”—as
Liu Xiaopeng, a Sino-African relations researcher in Taiwan put it—that
appealed to a shared status of racially discriminated peoples of the world.
This strategy was clearly stated by Mao himself as early as 1958 when he
talked to a delegation of African youths when China began to engage
political agents in Africa’s independence movement, “[Westerners] say
we Chinese are useless, we colored people are useless, we are dirty, and
we are not elegant. Our race seems to be the same with you Africans,”
and therefore, “in front of African friends, I feel very equal” (Liu 2013a,
p. 135). Years later, after China had established diplomatic relations with
a number of African nations, Peng Zhen, the Mayor of Beijing and a
member of the politburo of the party, echoed Mao’s tone as he met a
group of African ambassadors—“Today all of us [in the meeting] are
190 Y. Cheng
colored people, all ‘war hawkers’ [jokingly referring to the shared militant anti-imperialist spirit]; but since there are no outsiders here we can
speak freely. We colored people should be united against them, the white
people, to form a united front, do you think it is a good idea?” (Liu
2013a, p. 70).
These closed-door discussions of “color strategy” reveal the consciousness of racial distinctions and racial politics among the top CCP leaders but also the opposite politics of the Nationalist leaders represented
in the case of the black soldiers involved in the Burma Road. Similar
to the Nationalist government, official policy statements would not
use language with explicit an racial connotation (for example the term
white to refer to imperialists) but visual propaganda images often highlight color differences between the white and the yellow, brown, and
black (often placed in the last or on the margin in a row of “brothers of
colored-people”).
In the late 1950s and through the entire 1960s, Mao’s Chinacentered anti-imperialist world revolution agenda intersected the
black civil rights movement in the United States. Mao issued a famous
“Statement Supporting the American Negroes in Their Just Struggle
Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism” (August 1963) and
the Chinese government organized several massive rallies and parades in
response to Mao’s call. A number of African-American civil rights activists or socialists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois,
William Worthy, Vicki Garvin, and the more militant freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams visited China and some of them met
Mao. Earlier on, African-American singer Paul Robeson sang a famous
Chinese patriotic song during World War Two in his support of the
Chinese war against Japanese invasion. After 1949, the song became
the national anthem (March of the Volunteers ) and Robeson also became
known in China with his affective voice spread throughout China by
radio. The official Chinese support, especially as portrayed in media and
travel narratives by those individuals, was taken as an important symbol
of the international alliance by black civil rights fighters (Frazier 2015).
In the Chinese media, the similar image of a Sino-Negro anti-American
coalition was also popular, but due to the almost purely political nature
of this mutual support, the popularity of this imagined international
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 191
alliance and the positive character of black Americans in China were
quickly diluted and even fell into oblivion as the Sino-American
Détente was established after Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. It
failed to leave any enduring imprint on the Chinese perception of black
people. The Chinese students’ anti-black movement during the 1980s
testified to the transient nature of this political alignment.
As a matter of fact, the “color strategy” and a Sino-Afro/black political coalition suffered setbacks in China’s initial engagement with newly
independent African nations at the individual level. The experience of
the first group of African students in Beijing is a case in point. It shows
the significant discrepancy between a grand political strategy designed
to promote Sino-African relations at the state level and the results in
reality at the individual level based on life experience. At the beginning of the 1960s, China sponsored scholarships for about two hundred students from a number of newly independent African nations to
study in Beijing in degree programs that could be as long as seven years.
Compared with their Chinese classmates, these African students were
treated with many privileges in Beijing: two of them shared a fully-furnished apartment while six to eight Chinese students packed a single
room; they received eighty Chinese yuan (later increased to one hundred) as a monthly stipend while their Chinese peers received twelve;
they could go to special stores for foreigners while the ordinary Chinese
lived off meager rations. It was quite an irony that black people as a
group came to China either as enslaved or privileged. This historical
irony became even more pronounced as they enjoyed such privileges at
the time of the great famine in China when millions of Chinese were
starving to death. The Chinese authorities rationalized such an investment, “if a half of every one hundred students return to their countries
and commit themselves to making revolutions there, it will be a significant impact on Africa and Latin America” (Jiang 2016, p. 53). The plan
by the Chinese foreign ministry to bring African students to China was
proposed as a program for training “revolutionary cadres” for Africa.
However, in under two years these African students all but a couple dropped their studies and returned to Africa, after a number of conflicts with the Chinese authorities. Among those conflicts, the incident
that happened in March 1961 in which a student from Zanzibar and
192 Y. Cheng
his African friends were beaten in a hotel by the Chinese staff (possibly
sparked by a quarrel over the student’s request to purchase cigarettes)
provoked protests and hunger strikes by African students that eventually
led to their departure.
Three accounts stand in narrating and analyzing the causes of the
failure of the first serious state-sponsored effort in engaging Africans
in Chinese politics. The first and also the most firsthand and comprehensive description was provided by Emmanuel John Hevi, a Ghanaian
student who actively participated in the African students’ organization and movement. Hevi’s vivid and detail-infused book, entitled An
African Student in China and first published in Britain and America in
1962 (very shortly after he left China), summarized the reasons why
African students decided to leave China. They include “the calculated
attempts to indoctrinate them [African students] with communism, the
devices employed to make the African students’ body an instrument of
Chinese policy, the shifts and stratagems used to maintain the façade
of a ‘democratic, peace-loving’ China friendly to Africa, and the racial
prejudice and discriminatory practices of the Chinese authorities against
Africans” (Hevi 1963, jacket page). The racial aspect of the Chinese
practices included the segregation of Africans and Chinese, the intellectual underestimation of African students, and discriminatory policies in
favor of the white foreign students over the black foreign students.
However, Hevi’s main concern was not so much about racism against
Africans but was a cry for Africa to guard itself against the temptation
of following the Chinese model as many newly independent African
nations were looking for a developmental approach alternative to the
Western one. In historical hindsight, one has to admit that Hevi’s book
is full of insights about Chinese society under Maoism, from the lack
of basic freedoms and human rights to the shortage of daily necessities. Hevi was particularly concerned with his own country—Ghana—
taking a socialist approach similar to Mao’s under Kwame Nkrumah
and he was even involved in dissident political activities for which
he had to leave the country until Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966.
Hevi’s denouncement of China provoked criticism at a time (before the
Cultural Revolution) when Mao’s Red China was taken by too many
in Western academia as a great experiment for social equity where
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 193
racism had no history. Major academic journals in the China/Africa and
international education fields such as The Journal of Asian Studies, The
Journal of Modern African Studies, Pacific Affairs, and the Comparative
Education Review, carried reviews that cast doubts on the credibility of
Hevi’s account, describing it as “emotional” and “over simplified.” The
review published in The China Quarterly characterized such a negative
view—Hevi’s book was described as a “petty annoyance” (Adie 1965).
The second account was a revisiting of Hevi’s book fifty years later,
in particular responding to those negative comments, by Liu (2013b).
Based on newly released government archives and with a historical
hindsight now that much of the truth about Mao’s China had been
made known, Liu not only rejected the “petty annoyance” critique
but emphasized the racial aspect of the conflicts between African students and the Chinese authorities. Liu engaged newly developed literature examining Chinese racial thinking in modern history as “the
roots of Chinese anti-black racism,” and analyzed the racial consciousness and “color strategy” among Chinese leaders when they encountered Africans. He also considered cases Hevi discussed in his book with
Chinese archival sources to reveal the racial implications, especially cases
of interracial relationships that led to some tragic consequences between
Chinese and African lovers.
The third account was provided by Jiang Huajie, a researcher at
China’s Eastern China Normal University. Titled “An Analysis of DropOut African Students in China during the 1960s,” Jiang relied more
on original sources from official archives, but attempted to examine
the phenomenon from a more political and policy-based perspective
to which race thinking or discrimination is not so influential. Jiang
revealed the complex of administration and treatment of African students from a Chinese perspective, and pointed to the fact that due to
the lack of selection based on scholarly aptitude, a number of African
students came to China without the necessary preparation (unlike
other foreign students such as those from Eastern Europe), and some of
them indeed had disciplinary problems. The main analytical approach
of Jiang’s reexamination is identity politics: the Chinese educational
authorities attempted to put African students rather arbitrarily through
a Maoist political socialization process while the African students
194 Y. Cheng
resisted it. This identity-politics conflict certainly involved a racial
aspect from the African students’ perspective, but on the Chinese side
the conflict was mainly political and disciplinary, and not racial. Added
to this political dimension of the Chinese attitude towards the incident
was a British communist’s open support of the African students. The
British communist lived in Beijing but was taking a pro-Moscow position in the developing Sino-Soviet ideological debate, and was therefore
suspected by the Chinese authorities as a Kremlin agent who was pulling strings behind the student movement (Jiang 2016).
It would be difficult to evaluate exactly how important the factor of
race played a role in the decisions by African students to leave China.
There is no reason to believe that the African students were invited and
sponsored by the Chinese state to live a racially discriminatory life in
Beijing, but the ideological agenda for China’s international strategy
and political concerns over social control made African students not
only “ungrateful” for their fellowships, stipends, and privileges but also
believe that they were being politically used and race was a psychologically behind-the-scene issue. Hevi’s book conveys an ethos charged
with a spirit of freedom and rights cultivated by African decolonization
among most politically active African students in China, which certainly made a Maoist totalitarian regime unbearable to them. They were
sensitive to any treatment based on their group characteristics but the
Chinese were often insensitive to it. Indeed, all three aforementioned
perspectives to different degrees discussed at least a gut-level racial attitude towards black students among ordinary people, including a publically displayed inquisitiveness directed at the physical features of black
students. For the Chinese, it was merely an innocent “cultural curiosity”
but for Africans it was more than a racial gaze.
An international perspective may help us understand this political
complex of ideology, social control, race, and culture. During roughly
the same time as the incident, African students ran into similar troubles
with governments in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia as
the entire socialist camp was eagerly recruiting African students for its
Cold War international agenda. In these countries, similar policies and
practices led to protests by African students and some dropouts. Hevi
was made aware of the incidents in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia when
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 195
he was writing the book. The most sensational incident, however, happened in the Soviet Union in December 1963, when several hundred
African students took to the street and occupied Red Square for a day
to protest the sudden death of an African student who was courting a
Russian girl (Matusevich 2012). The African students believed that
he was murdered by racist Russians whose anti-black behavior was an
everyday reality for many African students. It was almost the only public protest that happened in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, and
was so publically known that it made the headlines of Western media
with amazement (New York Times 1963), just as the African students’
hunger strike and protest were almost the only such public political
action in Mao’s China. In all these incidents, the governments denied
any “racial” discrimination but the African students thought otherwise.
Comparing cases of protests by African students in China and the
Soviet Union, it may be legitimate to believe that the most important
reason for their political activism was not race but their disillusionment
with and disbelief of the regimes’ self-claimed social and moral superiority over Western capitalist societies. Hevi’s observation and analysis
of early 1960s China has proven insightful. In fact he was much more
shrewd—given his pre-university education level—in detecting various
deficiencies and deceptions the regime entailed than most China experts
of his time, who appreciated communist China’s social experiment. His
warning to African nations regarding the Chinese approach to development remains a valid historical reference even today. In the case of
the Soviet Union, African students were acting even more politically
by demanding a Bill of Rights in their 1963 protest. Later, according
to Maxim Matusevich, they became “the de facto conduits of dissent”
by exploiting their relative freedom of information and travel as foreign students to disseminate materials detrimental to the regime and
engage Soviet students in political debates in private. In the mid-1960s,
the Soviet authorities judged the activities of some African students as
subversive and instigated by American diplomats, and expelled them.
What made many African students feel alienated and even hateful of the
Soviet regime was not merely politics but the “overall drabness of life”—
regimented, segregated, and rationed. In general, neither China nor the
Soviet Union succeeded in licking African students into their desired
196 Y. Cheng
shape of foreign agents and African students who stayed in these countries simply to study for diplomas (Matusevich 2012). Having said that,
it is also true that while the overall political, social, and cultural circumstances of the Stalinist and Maoist regimes alienated African students,
the grassroots and gut-level racism or racial attitudes—as perceived or
interpreted by African students but denied by both governments—
sentimentally sharpened their views of these societies and enhanced
their political consciousness.
These campus-based confrontations between African students and
the Chinese erupted again two decades later in the 1980s. It was a time
when China came out of the Cultural Revolution period that had suspended the policy of such international education programs and was
now reengaging Africa by accepting even larger numbers of African
students. It is worth noting that during the Cultural Revolution, the
Sino-African friendship kept developing in the form of Chinese economic and technological aid to Africa represented in projects such as
the famous Tanzam Railroad, textile factories, and medical teams.
However, paradoxically, the negative views regarding anti-African racism were strengthened by a backlash against Maoist internationalism.
Africans were regarded as passive recipients of the fruits of other civilizations. The word “Africa” was often inseparable from the word “aid”
to ordinary Chinese (yuan fei, yuan means aid, fei Africa), and the term
“aid” was misunderstood by many as “gift” rather than a long-term or
interest-free loan. The arrival of African students was seen by many as
an extension of China’s aid to Africa within their own country.
It is worth emphasizing that as far as the Sino-African relationship is concerned, African indebtedness to China is taken for granted
and the Chinese public is completely unaware of negative influence
of Chinese policies in Africa. One such influence was the Cultural
Revolution’s appeals to African radicals and China’s efforts to export
Maoist ideology (even encouraging the personal cult of Mao in Africa)
in its aid projects in the 1960s, which ended up with diplomatic ties
being severed or reduced by some African nations such as Ghana and
Zambia. When China turned to ally with the West against the Soviet
Union in the 1970s, it sought support mainly from rightist and
anti-revolutionary dictators as notorious as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko.
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 197
Ironically, Mobutu was China’s prime enemy during the 1960s when
world revolution was China’s international agenda and he was once
portrayed as Africa’s Chang Kai-shek in China’s domestic propaganda.
However, when he visited China in 1972, Mao treated him like an old
friend. Also, China was involved in proxy wars in Zaire and Angola
contesting Moscow’s influence and which left bloody legacies in those
countries.
Compared with their predecessors of two decades earlier, these
African students of the late 1970s and 1980s received a similar package
of a scholarship and a stipend and lived in much more spacious and better equipped dormitories. However, they were admitted into a number
of Chinese universities scattered in different cities (Beijing, Shanghai,
Nanjing, and Tianjin initially) instead of being isolated in the capital,
their curriculum was more academically based (they were no longer
expected to be Maoist revolutionaries but pro-China technocrats upon
return to their own countries), and they enjoyed much more freedom
in socializing with the Chinese as Chinese society was undergoing a liberal transition of reform and openness. It was the first time in the history of encounters between Africans and Chinese that large numbers of
Africans engaged with Chinese society on daily basis. It was against this
background that their campus-based protests displayed more of a racial
rather than political nature, and their main antagonists were Chinese
students rather than the Chinese authorities.
Throughout the end of the 1970s and the entire 1980s, conflicts between Chinese and African students at the level of collective
actions (demonstrations, rallies, petitions, distributions of statement,
etc.) on both sides happened sporadically with notable occurrences
in Shanghai (1979) and Tianjin (1986) that resulted in not only university and municipal government administrative action, but even
central government intervention. The incident in Shanghai Eastern
Textile University (June 1979) in which Chinese students attacked the
dorm buildings of African students due to complaints of the latter’s
playing of loud music caused the central government to send Fang Yi,
a politburo member and vice premier, to Shanghai to handle the situation, and many African countries’ embassies in Beijing also dispatched representatives to the city. However, the most violent and
198 Y. Cheng
publically known incident happened in Nanjing and Beijing during the
New Year holiday of 1989. Triggered by a dispute between a Chinese
gatekeeper and two African students at Hehai University, Nanjing (the
capital city of Jiangsu Province), who were bringing Chinese girls into
their dorms on Christmas Eve, 1988, the incident quickly developed
into a mêlée between African and Chinese students. The violent conflict then involved several thousand Chinese students in the university
organizing massive demonstrations. The municipal government suspended public transportation in several districts, blocked the campus
of Hehai University, evacuated African students to Yizheng (a city sixty
kilometers from Nanjing), declared the Chinese students’ demonstration illegal, and brought in riot police reinforced from nearby provinces
to bring the situation under control. Some districts of the city were
brought to a standstill for a couple of days, an event unprecedented
since the turbulent early days of the Cultural Revolution. The intense
racial hatred was reflected in slogans such as “Down with the niggers!”,
“Niggers go the hell home” and “Niggers! Kill the niggers!” The outburst of racial confrontation drew significant attention from the international media until it was eclipsed by the democracy movement in the
following spring.
It is noteworthy to point out that unlike conflict between African
students and the Chinese authorities two decades earlier, the 1980s
anti-black campus racism was intrinsically connected to a broader consciousness of China’s place in world politics and domestic social movements. The generation of that particular age cohort was not far from
the years of the world revolution, in which propaganda and education promoted a sense of solidarity of the oppressed peoples of color
that prevailed for more than a decade (from the late 1950s to the early
1970s). The Chinese students’ strong sentiment showed no positive
influence from that recent past. The once overwhelming and pervasive
sense of an anti-imperialist solidarity between China and colored people
expressed in images, slogans, mass rallies, parades, and classrooms, simply evaporated. Maoist legacy in that regard seemed so artificial and left
no imprint on the new generation. The traditional view of a racialized
world in which China defined its own place and defended its own interest reemerged with enduring vitality and strength.
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 199
The expression of this traditional view of a racial order of the world
was driven by a new dynamic, just as it was articulated in the language
of republican revolution one hundred years ago. The Chinese students’
animosity towards African students reveals more nationalistic sentiment combined with their demand for democratic reforms, which was
characteristic of the ethos of the ideological and political atmosphere of
the entire 1980s. A letter sent to all African embassies in Beijing by the
“alleged Chinese Student Association” in spring 1986 (during an earlier
student demonstration targeting African students) not only revealed the
connection between the students’ anti-African slogans and the racial hierarchy ideas constructed in the late nineteenth century but also expressed
their discontent at government policies of lavishing economic aid on
Africans and concerns over the African corruption of Chinese culture
and society. The letter declared that the Chinese people would not “feed
uncultured Africa with the results of our efforts” or “allow any Negro
to hang about our universities to annoy Chinese girls and to introduce
on our academic grounds manner[s] acquired by life in tropical forests”
(Sullivan 1994, p. 445). In contrast, “whites were seen as contributors to
China’s development, while Africans were viewed as uncultured suppliants” (Sautman 1994, p. 424).
In historical hindsight, the Chinese student movement during the
1980s—politically the most active period in the history of the PRC that
allowed spontaneous organization and campaigns to come out until
the Tiananmen Square incident in June 1989—was organized around
twin themes: a nationalistic demand for modernization and a political
call for democratic reforms. The animosity towards African students in
China was exploited to address these twin themes. The students and
many intellectuals believed that Mao and his successors had wasted
China’s resources, allied with backward nations, and sacrificed their own
people’s—especially intellectuals’—material benefits. In the 1980s the
meager stipends of college students and low salaries of their professors
were the main source of social discontent that turned the campus into
a hotbed of political activism. Ironically, campus racism legitimated a
political opposition calling for a more democratic policymaking process.
The Chinese students’ anti-African protests were almost the only organized mass display of social discontent parallel to the pro-democracy
200 Y. Cheng
movements in the 1980s. Similar people joined both the anti-African
demonstrations and the pro-democracy movement. This connection
persisted in the post-1989 Chinese overseas pro-democracy movement.
Chinese human rights activists in the United States made no efforts to
seek support from the influential black civil rights movement, in part
because “the Chinese know that Africans and African-American people
had bad social habits and vices and they would corrupt Chinese society
as they had corrupted American society” (Johnson 2007, pp. 104–105).
Therefore, rooted in the perceived global hierarchy and associated
with Chinese nationalism and even the pro-democracy movement,
the 1980s campus racism was “an intrinsic part of racialized trends of
thought which have been diversely deployed in China since the end of
the 19th century” (Lufrano 1994, p. 84). The long history of denigration
of blackness had stigmatized African students as sexual predators and
a relationship between a black man and a Chinese woman was socially
unacceptable. This racial prejudice remains the most sensitive part of
the anti-African racial sentiment. The Nanjing incident was triggered by
anger at such relationships and then linked to nationalist and pro-democratic rhetoric. Despite the official Sino-African friendship propaganda
and significant freedom (compared with the 1960s) of socializing with
Chinese people, Africans often still found a de facto apartheid in China
in daily life, compared with what they could experience elsewhere.
M. Dujon Johnson called this racial barrier “Afrophobia,” ostracizing
African students (Johnson 2007, pp. 76–77, 144).
Media Racism of the 2000s
Two decades after the Nanjing incident, as China deepened its economic involvement in Africa, large numbers of African and Chinese
merchants and workers have migrated to each other’s lands. This
mutual migration has fundamentally and once and for all changed
the political and socioeconomic circumstances and individual status
under which black people had appeared in China. In the past they
were collectively brought to China mostly either as the enslaved or
privileged. Now they came to China by themselves as individual
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 201
migrants seeking economic opportunity with many settling in the
country. Through this development, China becomes an important part in the global African diaspora, which is world historically
significant. It is this fundamental change—a historically progressive
change worthy of high praise in a country with a history and perception unfavorable towards black people—that forced many Chinese to
face an unfamiliar reality. As a result anti-black discourse has resurged
to join the nationalism of a rising China that responds to domestic
and international challenges with racial rhetoric.
On the one hand, Chinese society now accepts these foreigners who
used to be seen as completely non-Chinese Other as being as human
as the Chinese themselves. On the other hand, this historical change
galvanizes the legacy of racial perception of black people at a time of
mass communication and especially social media that allow such a discourse to be disseminated widely and rapidly rather than be spread
through discussions in elite and campus cultures. In the meantime,
large numbers of Chinese immigrants in Africa face a complicated and
often unfriendly reality, which some of them interpret—and especially
did so during the early stage (1990s–2000s) of Chinese immigration in
Africa—as an inferior race’s racism against the Chinese, something similar to the feelings that Chinese indentured laborers had in Cuba one
and a half centuries ago. In addition to discussions provoked by mutual
migrations, the advancement of Sino-African engagement promotes an
awareness of the African presence in China that leads to representations
of black people in popular culture. Some incidents with implicit or blatant and nasty racist content reveal a simple fact: whenever black people
are perceived in public discourse or imagination associated with the
peoples of the world, even without any ill intent (many Chinese would
say “we didn’t mean that” when such incidents caused an uproar outside
China), their representations easily fall into the category of racial stereotypes or flagrant racism. In some cases, the image of black people is
simply missing in the representation of the world if the purpose of
the representation is associated with the concept of wealth, power, or
beauty. Unprompted and untaught, this type of racial attitude seems
indeed rooted in Chinese culture and society, especially among cultural
and intellectual elites.
202 Y. Cheng
The significance of these phenomena does not lie in themselves,
because after all, similar incidents may happen in other countries
although they may very likely not be so blatant, so frequent, and so
publicized in a so-called post-racist world. The phenomena have to be
examined in the context of the rise of China’s new nationalism and
interpreted from the perspective of China’s self-image and self-expectation of its role in world politics. And all of these continue the discourse of a racial hierarchy constructed in the country’s modern history
of nation building and national identity formation, which has survived
numerous political and ideological changes and now has reemerged
with new dynamics and incentives.
The issue exploded in the summer of 2009, one year after China
succeeded in hosting the Olympics in Beijing and suppressed political
unrest in Tibet in defiance of international pressure, marking a significant moment in contemporary Chinese nationalism after Hong Kong’s
return to China about ten years earlier. On July 15, two Nigerians
ran to escape from police checking passports in Guangzhou. One
was seriously injured after jumping from a building. Believing he was
dead, hundreds of Africans gathered at a local police station to protest
about being victims of racial profiling by frequent police ID checks.
The incident immediately caught the attention of the media and was
followed up by feature reports. It was the first time that the issue of
African immigrants in China attracted national attention. However, for
­people in Guangzhou, concern over Africans in the city emerged long
before the incident. A report by a local newspaper in January 2008
estimated that there were twenty thousand blacks living and working
in the city legally, but including illegal immigrants the black population could be as high as two hundred thousand and growing (Southern
Weekly 2008). There were also many Africans in Wenzhou and Yiwu in
Zhejiang province. Both Guangdong and Zhejiang are major producers
of “Made in China” household consumer goods. Many reports focusing on Guangzhou sympathized with the Africans struggling to survive in China, but the language often remained demeaning regarding
Africans as much less civilized people. Chinese media then used words
such as tribes and habitats when referring to the African community.
An African father’s blessing to his baby daughter born in China—
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 203
“I hope she has a Chinese brain”—was used as a section title in a
lengthy report (Southern Weekly 2008). The report painted a picture of
a rapidly expanding illegal population competing with local people for
residential and employment resources and causing problems and crime.
Although there had not been a racial confrontation, fragmentary and
isolated tensions had occurred.
On the surface, African migrants in Guangzhou—both legal and
illegal—make China look like a country facing a foreign immigration
problem similar to those in Western Europe and North America, and
this was a source of worry and anxiety for many Chinese nationalists.
However, one important difference is rarely mentioned by them: unlike
the large numbers of immigrants in the West who came as political,
religious, or even environmental refugees, African migrants in China
came solely for economic reasons and they made a special contribution to Chinese economy at least during the time of the discussion—
with most of them working for African merchants or by themselves in
wholesale purchasing and shipping end-of-line fashion and low-end
merchandise to Africa. These were excessively overproduced household
consumer goods that could not find an international and domestic market. The manufacturers of such products were highly concentrated in
Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces and many such enterprises were
heavily in debt due to overproduction. However, this contribution was
rarely mentioned and appreciated in the Chinese media.
Many Chinese netizens outside Guangzhou were struck by the
facts presented in these reports. Extreme racist language included: “It
is a racial invasion!”; “Public safety is gone!”; “Are they becoming the
fifty-seventh ethnic group?” (officially the government identifies fifty-six ethnic groups in China); “China is not a camp for refugees; our
resources are already scant”; “Not obeying law and order is their nature,
not to mention their body odor!”; and “Go home you African dogs! You
are here only to share our businesses and our women!” (BBS, shehui1,
2009). Comments concerning interracial marriages (extremely rare but
publically eye-catching) between black people and Chinese and the call
to “defend Chinese racial stock” clearly revealed the continuation of
the racial discourse constructed after the late nineteenth century. One
comment elaborated on the racial degeneration or improvement among
204 Y. Cheng
mixed-blood offspring as follows: “Children of Chinese and African
blacks should be regarded as a mixed but inferior race. If we take no
action, this kind of race will blacken China. This has nothing to do with
racial discrimination, but is simply a matter of eugenics. We should admit
that the white is a superior race, the same as us. The children of whites
and Chinese are accordingly relatively superior” (BBS, shehui2, 2010).
The race issue also arose in Shanghai in a discussion of the saga of
Lou Jing, a black-Chinese girl. The girl’s mother had an out-of-wedlock
affair with an African-American in the late 1980s. She divorced and
raised the child by herself after the father disappeared. The girl became
a student at the Shanghai Academy of Theatre, which certainly showed
the very positive progress of Chinese society regarding concepts of race
and family background in the educational system. The girl’s teachers
cherished her as a talented student, racial slurs spread on the internet
in the summer of 2009 when she participated in a local television talent show, and the stereotype of blacks as irresponsible pursuers of sex
was conjured up. Many Chinese netizens claimed that they despised
Lou’s mother not because she slept with a black man but because of her
“immoral conduct.” Given the extent of sexual freedom in the urban
China of the twenty-first century, it is hard to accept that they objected
solely to an affair out of wedlock. Some Chinese men felt humiliated
because they believed that Chinese women were influenced by a racial
stereotype that exaggerates black men’s masculinity as superior to that
of Chinese men. In the cyber discussion on the Guangzhou incident,
some netizens attacked Chinese women involved with black people in
obscene language from a nationalist perspective, saying they brought
shame to “our country” and “our ancestors” by sleeping with “ugly and
smelly” blacks (Chineseinafrica.com 2009).
The Chinese experience in Africa is another new source of racism
provoked by the Sino-African engagement in summer 2009. Two essays
by the same author drew public attention from the audience concerned
with the engagement. The first article discussed the question of why the
Chinese were discriminated against in Africa. The author provided a
title in English which read “Is Africa Worth China’s Aid?” (Liu 2009.1).
It appeared online as part of the author’s blog on May 18, 2009. The
second article, also under a title in English “The Chinese in the Eyes
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 205
of African People,” appeared on the author’s blog five days later (Liu
2009.2). It was translated and published four weeks later by the Global
Times English edition. Guangmin guancha (Guangming Observer), the
web page of the Guangming Daily, published its Chinese version later.
Both essays have been pasted on many web pages and blogs and discussed
by numerous netizens. The author, Liu Zhirong, is a French-educated
businessman with ten years of African experience, including as director
of the Woreta-Woldiya road upgrade project launched by the World Bank
in Ethiopia. Liu has interacted with a wide range of Africans, from government ministers and provincial governors to local elites, tribal chiefs,
and ordinary people, and has shared his experiences and opinions with
the Chinese in his many publications and online pieces.
In the first essay, “Why Are the Chinese Discriminated against in
Africa?” Liu poured out his frustration and anger resulting from his
African experience. From airport and custom facilities to highways and
government offices, the Chinese were victims of racial profiling by abusive
policemen and arrogant administrators. Behind the double-checking of
Chinese passports, the demanding of more ID or the searching of baggage
often lay explicit requests for bribes. These were often in places where
landmarks of Chinese aid—stadiums, factories, highways, government
buildings, and hospitals—were in plain sight. Liu attached photos showing such buildings in Cameroon. He found that Africans took Chinese
aid for granted even after he told them that such facilities would be a
luxury to most Chinese. He quoted a long chat with the Cameroonian
Minister for Industry, Mines, and Technological Development, who
unabashedly asked for more Chinese aid. Liu then said: “We have given
Africans so much, but they still give us such a hard time. Is our help like a
meat bun eaten by an unthankful dog?” (Liu 2009.1).
Liu’s racially charged discussion raised a sensitive nationalist issue
regarding relations between mainland China and Taiwan. Taiwan had
competed with mainland China to win African countries’ diplomatic
support since the 1960s as decolonization was under way in Africa.
Taiwan’s particular goal was to maintain its seat at the UN by securing
enough support from African nations. During the 1960s, according to
Liu Xiaopeng, America was playing racial politics involving the black
and the yellow peoples in its Cold War strategy by secretly encouraging
206 Y. Cheng
and financing Taiwan’s engagement with Africa, because the Taiwanese
themselves were “colored people” who had nothing to do with Western
colonialism in Africa. Washington proposed a project called Operation
Vanguard (originally named Operation Safari, a name that unwittingly
revealed a colonial and even racial perception of the African continent)
that used Taiwanese technological workers (especially in rice cultivation-related agrarian projects) in mainly western and southern African
nations. The racial aspect of this project also included a consideration
that the compensation for Taiwanese workers in Africa could be much
cheaper than for Americans. America would like the anti-communist
Taiwanese to present themselves as “the model colored people” in Africa
(Liu 2013a, Chapter Four). The Taiwanese presence in Africa paid off—
during the entire 1960s, the majority of African UN member nations
voted against motions by pro-China nations (led by Albania and
Algeria). Even in the critical 1971 UN resolution regarding who should
represent China, there were still sixteen African nations that voted to
keep Taiwan’s seat. After 1971, the fight between mainland China and
Taiwan switched to diplomatic recognition and continued for more
than two decades.
Liu Zhirong acknowledged that China’s aid to Africa is to eliminate Taiwan as a diplomatic rival, which showed the essential correlation between Chinese nationalism and racial thinking. “Some African
countries have no principles,” he deplored, “whoever feeds them milk
is their mother and whoever gives them more money gets the recognition.” Their greed is a “bottomless pit” for both China and Taiwan.
“The Taiwan issue must be solved with a sense of urgency,” otherwise
“no one knows how much more money these black men will be able
to extort from the Chinese nation. Mainland money is Chinese money,
and so is Taiwan’s. After all, we are all descendants of the Emperors Yan
and Huang.”
Liu’s answer to “Why are the Chinese discriminated against in
Africa?” is “because we did not colonize them.” Echoing social
Darwinism and “might is right” rhetoric, he maintained that “all
nations in the world seem to be the same. They admire the strong and
despise the weak. It is just like taming a horse: only when you remain
tough will it be submissive to you … Otherwise not only will it not
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 207
allow you to ride on it and touch it, but it will kick you.” “The whites
colonized Africans, and that is why today Africans still treat whites like
a servant treats his master. The face of a white man is his passport,”
Liu asserted. The Africans spoke “birds’ language”, and the white men
“worked very hard with their tongues” to teach them European languages which they have kept. The naked African bodies “visually bothered whites” so they forced them to put on clothing in a Western style.
They had only primitive religions until whites gave them the Bible. To
provide a piece of solid evidence of African subservience, a reminder
of the Aristotelian theory of natural slavery, Liu quoted a paragraph of
a letter, purportedly from two Cameroonian tribal chiefs (Akwa and
Bell) to the British Queen in 1879, begging her to colonize their tribes.
African independence, according to Liu, was just a “trick” played by
native politicians for their own sake.
“The Chinese in the Eyes of African People,” a politically correct essay by the same author, quickly appeared on his blog only a
week later. It listed nine reasons why Africans had negative views of
the Chinese. None is racial or political this time. Some are cultural or
social, such as the Chinese work so hard that they don’t even rest on
Saturday and Sunday, but they are neither religious nor spend their
money for fun, so that Africans cannot understand the purpose of
such diligence. However, most of the reasons reflect the problems the
Chinese bring to Africa. Chinese products are cheap both in price and
quality. The Chinese force out European competitors with extremely
low prices, but later “lower construction standards, violate contracts,
cut corners, or use substandard materials.” They also “disrupt the market” by making large-quantity purchases. They are not used to following
legal procedures and often become entangled in employment disputes
by unlawfully hiring or firing local workers. The Chinese often act
without a sense of civility, such as spitting and smoking on airplanes
and dressing too casually. They are involved in gang activities against
other Chinese competitors. Lastly, the Chinese eat everything. They
have made many local animals extinct without heeding African cultural and religious sensitivities. The last sentence was not translated into
the essay’s English version: “If we are looked down on even by blacks,
who could be bought and sold in the past, then what on earth can we
208 Y. Cheng
Chinese, who have a civilization of five thousand years, find to be proud
of?” (Liu 2009.2). In contrast to the first essay, this clearly shows the
author’s much balanced and self-critical view on the sources of problems
for Chinese businessmen and immigrants in Africa and was publicized
through official channels and even has an English version.
Liu’s questions of “Is Africa worth China’s aid?” and “Is our help like
a meat bun eaten by an unthankful dog?” are shared by many Chinese.
For them, Chinese aid to Africa and Africa’s indebtedness to China
are plain facts. An article widely circulated in China in 2008 asserted
“China is Liberating Africa for the Second Time!” (Gu 2008). Written
for Deutsche Welle’s Chinese Service by a Chinese professor of international politics at Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, the article was pasted on
numerous Chinese web pages and was aid to be a “German opinion” of
Sino-African relations.
At the time, Liu’s first essay provoked more cyber-based discussions.
In general, most comments appreciated Liu speaking the “truth” and
some echoed nasty racist language and social Darwinist interpretations. In the influential China.com and its subdivision military.club.
china.com, one hundred and twenty-seven votes agreed with the
author and only two disagreed. One reply stated: “I said this before:
in history we Chinese did not colonize and exploit others, and that
is why we are looked down on today … Don’t treat these niggers like
humans, otherwise they won’t see you as human.” The popular Sina.
com has numerous comments on Liu’s essay, with one saying: “I also
have worked in Africa and I am sure all Chinese in Africa have the
same feeling. Only colonization can force these gorillas to respect
you.” Another claims: “What the author [Liu] told us is like the story
of the farmer and the snake [that is, that Africans are like the snake in
Aesop’s fable that bites the hand of its saviour].” After the Guangzhou
incident some Chinese netizens in Africa joined the discussion quoting their African experience. On Sina.com, one commented: “I have
worked on construction engineering in Africa. These niggers are born
subhuman. They tremble before whites, but when they see Chinese,
they either play on your sympathies or extort you, both for money”
(Blog.sina.com1 2009).
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 209
Many comments agreed with Liu’s view on the correlation between
China’s aid to Africa and the China-Taiwan competition, and his support of national unity. Some attributed China’s benign policies towards
Africa to Chinese culture which was described as being peaceful and
friendly to others in a hope of reciprocity. Instead of dispensing gifts,
many at China.com believe it is now time for the Chinese to show
muscle. “We cannot just give them the carrot; we must show them the
stick, too” and “Without the protection of the bayonets and guns of
the army, there is no way merchants and travelers can stay safe in alien
lands.” One essay with the title “China: Don’t Spoil Africa!” by Zou
Kaiyi blamed China’s “unconditional” aid for the African thanklessness. He said China had been a “model” nation with its peaceful foreign
policy of wang dao (王道 roughly translated as winning the hearts and
minds of people by benign and paternalistic imperial policies), instead
of ba dao (霸道 military hegemony), but whenever China was forced
to fight, the world was impressed and treated it with more respect (Zou
2009). Another popular piece was entitled “The Difference between the
Chinese Passport and US Passport in Africa.” ZT (apparently a pseudonym), the author, detailed his difficult experience of traveling in Africa
with a Chinese passport in contrast to his fellow traveler with a US
passport. In a reflective tone, he ended his essay with an appeal to the
Chinese leadership to take a lesson from Zheng He, the Ming dynasty’s admiral, who “showed off China’s power and wealth in Africa” but
“failed to leave us any piece of land there” (ZT1 2009).
Harsh online criticism of Liu’s and similar racist discourse does exist
in China but is much less visible. However, many Chinese netizens in
North America are appalled by Liu’s essay and its approval by so many
netizens in China. The popular China News Digest, a Chinese webpage based in Canada, had a blog to discuss the essay. One contributor
stated that “This is the typical logic of a racist and an upstart.” Others
pointed out that “the Chinese have brought with them the corruption
and bribery they are used to in China to Africa, and [the Africans] have
become used to it.” Because the Chinese established “under-the-table
rules” (潜规则) in Africa, “your yellow faces invite the police to come
for ‘extra income’.” Some comments blamed China’s “dollar diplomacy”
210 Y. Cheng
against Taiwan for Africa’s lack of appreciation for and even extraction
of Chinese aid.
Cyber racism against Africans actually started much earlier. One
example is ZT’s online essays. His “The Divine Dragon and the Black
Africa in My Eyes” appeared in November 2006. ZT claimed to have
worked in Africa for six years and had written another online essay
earlier under the title “African Blacks Deserve No Pity” for which he
said he had come under attack from some Chinese advocating “universal compassion.” Such a nationalist vs universalist debate would further
develop into a debate regarding political correctness in the West as well
as in China (fully discussed in Chapter 5, especially regarding the concept of the “white left”). In “The Divine Dragon,” he reiterated what
he had said in that earlier essay: he used to be as naïve as the universalists but six years in Africa as a French-Chinese translator had completely
changed his view. The Africans were greedy, cruel, and racist against the
Chinese. The police often targeted the Chinese because they understood
that as long as a case involved a Chinese person, they could squeeze
some money out of it. He conceded that Chinese behavior in Africa
did contribute to the African attitude towards the Chinese, but for
him Africans were malicious by nature while the Chinese just behaved
inappropriately. He also deplored the fact that it was mainland-Taiwan
competition that had enhanced the African appetite for Chinese aid.
He believed his aversion to Africans was shared by all Chinese who
had worked in Africa. Responding to the discussion about a love affair
between a Chinese girl working in Africa and an African, ZT said that it
was “unthinkable” that a “little sister” fell in love with a black man, but
it was even more “inconceivable” that when people tried to dissuade the
girl, “she got so upset” (ZT2 2006).
Another essay, using the number 01240303 as authorship, was entitled “The Chinese Blood and Tears in Africa in the Eyes of a ChineseFrench Interpreter—to Those Younger Brothers and Sisters Who
Are About to or Plan to Go to Africa” (Tiexue.net1). This originally
appeared on a website serving the Chinese in Africa, but was later
pasted on a popular web page named Iron and Blood, which was aimed
at Chinese patriots and got more attention. It paid tribute to “The
divine dragon and the black Africa in my eyes” for being “objective”
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 211
and “speaking the truth.” Six years working in Cameroon, the author
said, had taught him “a history of the blood and tears of the Chinese
who were discriminated against, oppressed, and humiliated in Africa.”
The essay started with the author’s first experience in Africa: going
through Cameroonian customs. While blacks and whites easily passed
through, the Chinese were double-checked until cash was handed over.
The author detailed “African greed, slyness, selfishness, and laziness”
and quoted another “gentleman who had spent an even longer time
in Africa: … whoever eradicates this continent will contribute significantly to mankind!” Declaring “there is nothing racist in my mind and
I am definitely not a racist,” he told of how, when he finally left Africa
and arrived at the airport in Paris, he ignored the first taxi (with a black
driver) and walked to the second one. When the black driver protested,
he said “I replied politely, ‘sir, I just came back from Africa and I don’t
want to see the black color again!’” The essay emphasized that it was
diplomatic needs that forced China to act compliantly in Africa and
fail to protect its citizens. As the author phrased it in a perfect rhythm
in Chinese, “China trembles when those small African countries yell;
China takes a deep breath when those small African countries fart”
(Tiexue.net2).
There is no reason to doubt the truthfulness of episodes about the
maltreatment of the Chinese in Africa. During the time in which the
discussions above happened, in Tanzania, a country known for the
TanZam railroad, the official discriminatory policies targeting Chinese
migrants had made the situation harsher for them. In Dar es Salaam
on November 20, 2008, the Chinese became the only target of the
government’s large-scale anti-illegal immigration action. The detainees
were held in a basement for most of the day without water or food in
the hottest season of the country and most of them were released after
bail money was handed in. The source of the Chinese predicament in
Africa is complicated. Corruption, abuse of power, and bureaucraticism
in Africa are apparently part of it, but as an intruding power, China had
also contributed to it. The Chinese government had supported dictatorial or even genocidal regimes in exchange for oil and raw materials;
the Chinese businesses provided unfair labor contracts and low salaries
for locally recruited workers; there was a lack of labor protection and a
212 Y. Cheng
discouragement of unionization; Chinese firms hired Chinese instead of
local African workers; the Chinese were insensitive to local culture and
religion; and there was an apprehension that China dumped low-quality products instead of helping Africa develop its own manufacturing
industry. All these helped to create a hostile atmosphere (Michel and
Beuret 2009). Dubious practices in Chinese private businesses might
also contribute to African local resistance to individual Chinese. Gregor
Dobler’s investigation of Chinese migrant shop owners in Namibia
described how Chinese merchants allied with the local elite to play
illegal or deceptive tricks in their business. These practices have led to
“public uneasiness about the growing number of Chinese” and have had
“repercussions on [Namibian] immigration policy” (Dobler 2009). Last
but not least is the dark side of Chinese commercial culture and business
ethics. A ministry of commerce spokesperson admitted that while 60%
of the goods China imported from Africa were oil and raw materials,
“a significant amount of Chinese merchandise sold in Africa is fake and
inferior” (Twenty First Business Herald 2009).
The media discussion on Africans in China and the Chinese in Africa
of the 2000s was the first time such a topic entered the public domain,
attracted national attention, and displayed society’s concern about the
issue in the history of not only the PRC but also of whole of modern
China. The internet enabled various sections of society across the country
and even overseas Chinese to converge and interact without the restrictions of traditional media agencies and official doctrines. The discussions
clearly continued the campus racism of the 1980s and were infused with
the racial discourse of modern Chinese history. Neither campus racism
nor media racism was purely racist (racism for racism’s sake) but was
addressed in the context of nationalism and even pro-democracy ideology. They developed along the line of the assumed global racial hierarchy originated in the late nineteenth century, ranked China in the world
order and defined its relations with different parts of the world, explaining the problems China faced. The rhetoric and vocabulary used in both
racisms were strikingly similar. Contemporary Chinese intellectuals
are sensitive to the Western orientalist attitude towards China, but the
Chinese perception of Africa or black people expressed in the discussions
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 213
was also essentialized and racialized to perpetuate the negative image of
them as the primitive and inferior Other.
This discourse colored discussions on social and cultural issues, such
as the political demands of the intellectual and cultural elites, educational resources and the environment in Chinese universities, social
wellbeing in some Chinese urban centers, and sexual relationships
between Chinese and foreigners. However, it also informed discussions
of China’s policy towards Africa. The campus racism questioned this
policy for allying with underdeveloped countries and wasting resources
that could have been used for China’s modernization. The media racism
demanded action on Taiwan so as to eliminate it as a rival in Africa, and
appealed for a tougher foreign policy to improve China’s global power
status and protect Chinese people working overseas. It echoed “diplomacy backed by force; trade with swords in hands” (外交恃强 持剑
经商), a slogan in Unhappy China, a 2008 chauvinist bestseller. Such a
demand sometimes even created tensions between the overseas Chinese
business community and China’s diplomatic installations. Seeing themselves as independent pioneers of China’s new economic frontiers,
many Chinese businessmen and workers claiming to be victimized
in Africa complained about the indifference of Chinese diplomacy to
its countrymen’s miseries (they used 不作为—taking no action—
to describe Chinese diplomats’ irresponsiveness to their requests for
help). They attributed the diplomats’ unwillingness to help ordinary
Chinese people for fear of provoking diplomatic disputes. The diplomats, however, blamed them for wasting China’s diplomatic sources by
implicating themselves in legally ambiguous situations and demanding
unreasonable help.
Racial discourse in the case of Sino-African relations during the
first decade of the 2000s revealed its political implications as it had
done so in modern world history. It distorted the nature of sociopolitical problems, diverted attentions from domestic issues to foreign factors, and fanned racial hatred. The Chinese netizens knew about the
moral, social, and cultural problems of Chinese people in Africa, as Liu
Zerong’s second essay and the comments of many others clearly showed.
However, the discrimination against the Chinese by an inferior race,
214 Y. Cheng
rather than a sociopolitical and cultural analysis, was taken by many
as the root of the problem. Paradoxically, these Chinese were racially
supersensitive and superinsensitive at the same time. The paradox continued a history with China as a victim of foreign racism while denying
its own racism. This racial perspective was also reflected in numerous
protests about foreign prejudices against China during the time of the
Chinese discussion on Africa. As China rises, many fengqing (愤青),
the indignant patriotic youth who have been highly visible in contemporary China’s nationalist scene, believe that an old-style colonial and
racist mentality has reappeared to stigmatize China, but disguised in
new rhetoric such as human rights and democracy. Like the Chinese in
Africa, these protestors are not necessarily blind to the roots of China’s
problematic image. Abhorring foreign criticism, however, they ascribe
racial biases to such criticism. In the meantime, the language in their
discussions on foreigners is itself racist.
Since 2008–2009, all the aforementioned issues have continued to
concern Chinese nationalism as the Sino-African engagement has developed further, especially in regard to the impact of African immigrants on
Chinese society. At both grassroots and national political level, discussions
have continued and sharpened racial rhetoric. These discussions proclaim a more eminent black threat to the Chinese race contextualized in
the presumed global racial expansion of blacks and Arabic Muslims. One
essay, posted at a WeChat official account in sohu.com (a major internet portal in China) in April 2017 and widely circulated, was titled “Ten
Thousand Blacks are Acting Barbarically in the Streets of Guangzhou:
Chinese Girls, Please Guard Your Self-esteem.” It claims that at least 60%
of women in Guangzhou had been harassed by blacks. “Blacks belong to
parasite races and they are negative current assets of any country.” The
author says that West European countries have ignored the problem and
now it’s too late to regret: they are rapidly being occupied by blacks and
Arabs. The essay warns that by 2030, the black population in China will
reach 15 million, and by 2050 it will be 100 million (black and mixed
blood together), “China will no longer be a yellow race nation but a black
and yellow mixed-blood nation … Perhaps some people will say I am a
racist, but I just want to remind you: throughout history, many civilizations were exterminated by population or race flows.” The essay takes
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 215
Chinese women in particular as a target group to warn against being
attracted to the assumed sexuality as well as flirtation skills of blacks and
therefore acting in a socially irresponsible manner with regard to the
Chinese race (Yangguangyishen 2017).
It is possible that this provocative online essay was inspired by a
politically more high profile discussion at China’s annual meeting of
the National Political Consultative Conference one month earlier. Pan
Qinglin, a representative from Tianjin, submitted a proposal titled “An
Appeal to the State for an Urgent, Rigid, and All-Out Effort in Solving
the Problem of African Habitats in Guangdong Province.” The proposal characterized Africans in Guangzhou as “three illegals” (illegal
entry, illegal stay, and illegal work) and cited serious social problems
that they were claimed to have created. These problems included public
safety, public health (Aids and Ebola), and racial impact on the Chinese
nation. What concerns Pan in the long run and what he sees as most
consequential is the third problem: racial hybridization and demographic degeneration. As he calculated, illegal African immigrants in
China had reached seven hundred thousand. This number would climb
to 15 million, and “by 2050, 50 million at least.” “When that time
comes, population with black-blood stock (including the mixed-blood
population) will exceed 100 million; one-tenth of the Chinese population and about one-quarter of the population under 25 will become
blacks or black-yellows. China will no longer be a nation state and a
genetically yellow race state but an immigration state and a black-­yellow
mixed blood state.” Pan then elaborated this “nation destroyed and race
exterminated” prophesy from a perspective of the rise and decline of
world civilizations,
In human history, population flow and foreign cultural importation are
important factors that led to the demise of national culture and historical civilization. The demises of ancient Egypt, ancient India, and ancient
Babylon civilizations are warnings. (Pan 2017)
Pan therefore proposed a number of legal, financial, and social policies to solve the problem once and for all. As the first discussion openly
raising the issue of African immigrants in China at the highest national
216 Y. Cheng
political forum, Pan’s proposal was widely reported in detail by the
media and drew significant attention from the public with many praising him for being brave in speaking the truth. However, unlike other
proposals made publically known by media coverage, Pan’s was met
with official silence from the relevant government agencies. While the
spokesperson of the Guangzhou police has denied the level of the seriousness of public safety problems associated with African immigrants in
the city, a more likely reason for the official silence is the official understanding of the sensitiveness of the issue. Africa is increasingly more
important in China’s “one belt, one road” economic and political strategies, and social problems associated with Chinese immigration in Africa
are in fact more numerous and serious than the ones in China associated with African migrant workers. To give just one example, in Ghana,
a single African nation, the problem of galamsey (illegal gold mining)
participated in by Chinese migrant workers (many of them are illegal)
has not only brought devastating effects on the environment and mineral resources but also led to a liaison between Chinese businessmen and
local elites, a network of wealth and power that destabilizes governance
at the local level (Burrows and Bird 2018).
While concerns with public safety issues are perfectly legitimate in
societies receiving large numbers of foreign immigrants, what makes
the above discussions problematic is that they racialize the problems:
Africans are not only blatantly portrayed as racially inferior but also as
socially dangerous. This racialization ascribes some of China’s serious
social problems to Africans in China. The Africans constitute a threat to
the future of the Chinese nation through polluting the Chinese blood,
which invokes a century-old ghostly haunting imagination of “nation
destroyed, race exterminated.” Africans are predators of morally vulnerable Chinese women, a gender bias against women prevalent in Chinese
society, which sharpens its concern over gender imbalance (a 2015 population survey showed male population exceeding female population by
thirty-three million). The population of African-blood people in China
increases at a geometrical rate while the Chinese population increases
arithmetically (especially among urban and educated youth who, partially due to high costs of living, are unwilling to have children). All of
these sound too familiar to the ears of those informed of the history of
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 217
racial politics in the twentieth century. An even more intriguing aspect
in the discussion is the racial interpretation of the rise and fall of civilizations, a type of topic increasingly popular in China’s professional as
well as amateur historical discussions in recent decades as China continues to rise.
Furthermore, the discussion for the first time shows an interaction
of anti-African racial rhetoric between anonymous social media users
and the highly publicized national political forum. Pan Qinglin is a successful overseas Chinese businessman very active in promoting the official agenda in his capacity as a celebrity. He has initiated a number of
proposals—some of them are purely political such as the one in 2015
that proposed to theorize “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—at
annual meetings of the National Political Consultative Conference. Due
to his business ties with Japan, he has been named by the People’s Daily
as a “non-official ambassador of friendship” and had the honor to meet
with Japan’s new Ambassador to China in the Zhongnanhai State Guest
House (January 26, 2018), an occasion normally reserved for the party-state leaders’ meetings with foreign dignitaries. The official silence to
his proposal was ominous when we consider this high honor given to
him shortly after his proposal was met with concerns and debates especially from the international media (Stultz 2017). Pan’s case shows that
a blatant racist rhetoric can be tolerated at the highest political level and
the leadership can simply dismiss international criticism that defends
universally observed norms of race-related political correctness.
The rampant anti-black rhetoric on the Chinese internet and occasionally more on public forum continues to draw attention from international China studies scholars. In a society where public opinion is tightly
controlled and manipulated by the government, politically explicit and
provocative discussions spontaneously participated in by netizens can
reveal trends and undercurrents (Yang 2011). In analyzing this phenomenon, some analysists have concluded that anti-African r­acism
actually provides an arena for a political critique of the government
without consequences, a practice exercised by pro-democracy students
during the 1980s as previously analyzed. An Africa receiving Chinese
aid and Africans living in China become scapegoats especially for policies that arbitrarily and unfairly distribute wealth and opportunities
218 Y. Cheng
by the government. For one thing, netizens often vent their discontent
regarding the contradiction between a poorly facilitated education for
Chinese children and the generous aid for African schools and scholarships for African students in China. In framing such criticism blaming
the government, Africans are often portrayed as less intelligent, lazy,
rude, and socially irresponsible, unworthy of resources created by the
Chinese people. Such a racialization of an Other magnifies the absurdity of the government policies (Pfafman 2015). This type of scapegoating undoubtedly enhances bias and stereotypes against Africans, a typical
example being that racism is often the result of intensified political and
socioeconomic contradictions and conflicts in a society, rather than an
intellectual and cultural development of a pure and abstract concept
regarding human differences.
Racial Perceptions of Blacks in Popular Culture
The Chinese perception of black people includes their images in
­various forms of popular culture, such as the logos of consumer goods,
images in advertisements, art exhibits, and TV programs. They show
an astonishing disregard of race-related sensitivity observed elsewhere.
An everyday example are the logos of toothpastes that use a contrast
between glowingly whitened teeth and a black face, or an image of such
a contrast to impress consumers with the product’s whitening effects.
Today there are two toothpastes branded as “黑人牙膏” (Black Man
toothpaste) and “黑妹牙膏” (Black Girl toothpaste) on the Chinese
market and available everywhere, even grocery stores in the Chinatowns
of many countries. Black Man toothpaste is a product with a history
of more than eighty years. The brand was created in the early 1930s
in colonial Shanghai by the Hong Kong-based Hawley and Hazel
Chemical Company, which sounds Western but was in fact a Chinese
company. With Darkie, a racially derogatory term as its trademark
name, the toothpaste’s logo featured a comical black person whose white
teeth contract his black face. The logo design was inspired by America’s
racist popular minstrel performances that comically exaggerated black
people’s facial features. The designers were impressed during their visit
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 219
to America as they watched such performance and posters. The toothpaste had a significant market share in East and Southeast Asia for half
a century. In 1985, Colgate-Palmolive acquired Hawley and Hazel and
began to sell the product in North America. Due to protests against
the racism of the trademark and the logo, the company apologized
and renamed the product Darlie, featuring a racially ambiguous face
on the packaging. In East Asia, according changes were made but the
two Chinese characters rendering the words “black man” have remained
along with the English word “Darkie.” In 1997, the time of Hong
Kong’s return to China, the toothpaste factories moved from Hong
Kong and Taiwan to China’s Guangdong Province and the product has
remained the most popular toothpaste on the market in the Chinese
world. Earlier, after Colgate-Palmolive made a change to the trademark,
an advertisement shown on Chinese TV assured customers that “Black
Man Toothpaste is still Black Man Toothpaste” (黑人牙膏还是黑人
牙膏). Inspired by its success and in an effort to enter the market, a
chemical company also in Guangdong Province trademarked its toothpaste “Black Girl” in 1985. The packaging of the product does not carry
an image of a black female but the name of the brand apparently takes
advantage of the success of “Black Man” by invoking the imagination of
the contrast between shiny whitened teeth and a black face. As a marketing strategy, the company has made deals with many hotels in China
to distribute it in mini packaging as complimentary offerings.
The history and the popularity of these toothpastes are part of the
consumerism in the aforementioned Chinese world that uses racial
stereotypes to promote sales. There must have been something historically and culturally resonant between the post-bellum American South
and China (semi-colonial, republican, and then so-called socialist)
that found mockery of the black face hilarious and consumable. It is
truly a problem not just in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—although
put together they already make up the largest population group of the
world—but in the entire Chinese world including diasporic Chinese
scattered all over Southeast Asia, which further reveals a deep-seated
complex of race and culture. Since the toothpaste’s success starting in
the early 1930s, Darkie and the caricature of a black man has been
used to name a number of medical ointments (an everyday necessity
220 Y. Cheng
in subtropical regions to treat bites by mosquitos and other insects).
The racism in the brand names is radically enhanced by adding words
literarily meaning “black devil” or “nigger.” A web search simply by
typing the Chinese characters rendering the meanings of black devil
ointment or nigger oil will return numerous photos of different products made in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaysia. Some of them boast
to be “authentic black devil ointment” (正黑鬼油) while others mark
the packaging with “one-hundred year old traditional black devil ointment.” Some of them are branded as “chop blackie” oil or “conquer
all demons” oil (克黑鬼油) with ideas that clearly dehumanize black
people (black people resemble dangerous bugs to be exterminated
by these products). On the packaging are images of black people—
although not so many today—some seem to be darker-skinned South
or Southeastern Asian natives who wear a white headscarf while others look more like Africans. Such images reflect the racial hierarchy
concept constructed with the kunlun nu in the traditional Chinese
world and the Western colonial racism that denigrates Southeast
Asian natives as primitive but symbiotic with their subtropical, insect-­
infested natural environment. It is noteworthy that one of such products even carries the photo of Barack Obama—the former American
president—on its advertisement poster. Overall, these trademarks and
their packaging designs not only convey a complex of a racially unabashed contempt and fear of darker-skinned people but also mix them
with a fantasy of exorcism—by invoking its name and image, the devil
will be expelled.
In recent years, images of blacks or Africans have appeared more
frequently in mainland China’s media for commercial, cultural, and
political propaganda purposes as part of the trend in popular culture.
However, some of them have provoked accusations of being racially discriminating against or stereotypical of blacks or Africa. The derogatory
views were so blatant but were not noticed by the Chinese until they
drew attention from the international media. An advertisement for a
laundry detergent aired in 2016 showing a young black male squeezed
into a washing machine with the detergent stuffed in his mouth by a
pretty Chinese girl with whom he is flirting but she is obviously fooling
him—as soon as he approaches her and is ready to kiss her, she squeezes
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 221
the detergent into his mouth, pushes him into the machine, and sits on
its lid. When the machine’s cycle ends, a handsome young Chinese man
with a very light skin emerges from the machine while the black man
and his color—stained and dirty—disappear. The advertisement had
been aired for quite a while and surprised no one in China but caused
an uproar outside the country (Guardian 2016). After weeks of silence,
a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to the controversy at a press conference claiming that the advertisement was just a
company’s idea and did not represent any racial bias against black people in China.
In 2017, a photo exhibit titled “The Face Reflects the Mind” (相由
心生) and held in the municipal museum of Wuhan, the capital city
of Hubei Province, paired photos of facial expressions of Africans with
those of animals (mainly gorillas and beasts such as lions) in Africa.
Both expressions looked ugly and ferocious. The photos were allegedly
taken by a professional photographer in Africa. The exhibition’s title
and the way it paired Africans with animals, both of whom are native
to the continent, are a clear example of the perception of Africans as
non-­human and Africa as an animal habitat. Savagery is the state of
the people and the continent. After receiving protests from the international media and Africans living and working in China, the museum
terminated the exhibition but issued no apology. It is noteworthy to
point out that the English translation (for example the one in YouTube)
of the title of the exhibition—This is Africa—misses the more sinister
racist meaning of the title: the Africans are animals. Responding to the
criticism of racism against Africans, the museum claimed that the purpose of such pairings was to educate people about the Chinese zodiac
which associates human characters with those of animals (YouTube2
2017). It is not racism, but a form of Chinese culture. Such a defense
sounds ridiculously absurd but it has been a typical response to international criticism of racism in China. Chinese characteristics and Chinese
exceptionalism are not just about politics, ideology, and law, but are also
applicable to race and ethnicity.
Compared with the detergent advertisement and the photo gallery
in Wuhan, a skit in CCTV’s 2018 Spring Festival Gala instantly made
the racist perception of Africa and Africans at the official and national
222 Y. Cheng
level internationally known. It also reveals the connection between this
racism and the party-state’s political agenda exploiting Sino-African
relations for Chinese patriotism. Titled “同喜同乐” (The Same Joy,
the Same Happiness ), the skit takes the genre of a family drama setting
in a comic scenario of an African mother pushing her daughter to get
married. Her daughter comes of age and is training to be a train attendant in China. The skit tells the Chinese audience and the world that
the Chinese-built Mombasa-Nairobi railway line in Kenya, part of the
“one road, one belt” program in Africa, has provided Africans with an
employment opportunity, professional training, a breaking of traditional marriage customs, a window on the world, and even good luck in
marrying Chinese men to seek a better life associated with China. The
skit ends with the mother and daughter shouting on the stage “I love
China!” The mother, played by a Chinese actress with artificially filled
body parts to exaggerate her assumed African female features, appears
on stage wearing a black face and is accompanied by a monkey of adult
human size (allegedly played by an African). The background of the skit is
an animal-scattered safari with dancing and singing Africans (BBC 2018).
Because the Gala enjoyed global live coverage, the skit instantly
caused international criticism. Amid journalistic sensation, Chenchen
Zhang, a political scientist in Copenhagen, sharply points to “a bigger
problem than blackface and fake bottoms”—which are taken by many
in the West as blatant racist stereotypes. The sexist bias—prevalent in
China but rarely raising public criticism—in the skit is also noticed.
Zhang contextualizes this particular skit in the history of CCTV’s
Spring Festival Gala to show the increasing emphasis on patriotism
and political loyalty by hammering into the brains of the audience
the concept of the family-state so as to reinforce the legitimacy of the
party-state (Zhang 2018). Indeed, “Love China” has become the theme
of such national festivals and celebrations. However, this time words of
gratitude are unabashedly put in the mouths of Africans whose assumed
racial and sexual characteristics are enlarged in the limelight to meet the
audience’s century-old jaundiced perceptions about the continent and
its people. It is a perfect example of how African-related racism serves
the political agenda of the party-state whose paternalistic attitude is now
extended to patronize Africans globally.
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 223
The Chinese government responded to the international criticism
with an ambiguous statement made by its Foreign Ministry spokesperson: China opposes any form of racial discrimination; any efforts to sow
discord between China and Africa is doomed to fail; and “African people know much better than anyone else about the Sino-African relationship and Sino-African cooperation” (Spokesperson of Chinese Ministry
of Foreign Affairs 2018). While this official statement might sound like
a vague and euphemistic admission of something obviously inappropriate, the skit did not lack its defenders citing grounds of public opinion.
Some Chinese scholars dismissed the criticism of racism. They argued
that the connection between blackface and racism is rooted in the
specific history of race relations in the West where “blackface and the
mockery of racial stereotypes in minstrel shows is associated with the
systemic oppression of black people.” It is therefore rather “Eurocentric”
to accuse China of being racist in this regard. They further contended
that in the Chinese tradition wearing blackface or painting the body
black had no negative connotations (Zhang 2018). This type of defense,
of course, is just one example of the typical Chinese exceptionalist argument with regard to race-related controversies.
To be fair, the skit was indeed met harsh criticism from Chinese
audiences and online comments were almost overwhelmingly negative.
However, if read attentively, many people were obviously more repelled
by the clichés of patriotic propaganda and its awkward presentation—a
chronic source of the Gala’s lack of popularity—than the racist offensiveness to Africans. In other words, just being blatantly racist against
Africans does not concern many Chinese, or at least they don’t view it
as a matter of significance. Many of them indeed mentioned racism but
their anger was more directed to almost being forced to watch such a
silly racial caricature—to ensure the ratings of the Gala, it is an official policy that most provincial and local TV channels have to broadcast the Gala’s life coverage from the CCTY headquarters. Human
dignity should be like the sun shining on everyone. The racism against
Africans is part of the same cloud that eclipses the sunlight of human
freedoms—including that of watching different TV programs—in
China. Unfortunately, such connections seem to be far-fetched for
many Chinese.
224 Y. Cheng
Racially mocking Africans has helped China’s vast online gaming
industry with “lucky players being termed ‘Europeans’, while unlucky players are referred to as ‘Africans’,” such as in Onmyoji, a fantasy strategy game
for mobiles developed by NetEase, a popular web server and search engine
in China. “The terms are still evolving, with ‘African tribal chief’ now used
to describe the unluckiest players, and ‘European emperor’ referring to the
luckiest. If there is a turnaround in a player’s fortune they are described as
‘stealing into Europe from Africa,’” which might be interpreted as an allusion to African refugees or illegal immigrants in Europe (Wang 2018).
Upon questioning, some users might admit that it was indeed “a bit racist,”
but it “was for fun and not intended to cause offence”—a typical Chinese
defense of racism being ignorant but innocent. Such a racialized image of
Africa continues the tradition of discourses of race among some Chinese
youth that essentializes blackness and Africans as being less lucky in gaming and inferior in reality, a pitfall to avoid in the imagination of social
Darwinist struggle that has hunted many generations.
People who are familiar with Chinese pop music may point to the
fact of the success and popularity of some African singers in China as
examples of Chinese respect for African culture, for example, Nigerianborn singer Uwechue Emmanuel and his younger brother Steven. Little
known in their native country, the brothers are now not only pop stars
in China with millions of fans but also have achieved high honors in
national competitions involving Chinese singers. They even appeared
at the CCTV New Year’s Gala, something dreamed of by all Chinese
musicians. Rarely performing African or Nigerian songs, the brothers’ success and popularity is owed to their perfect signing of Chinese
songs in the Chinese language with their particular tone and distinct
charm. From contemporary urban love songs to traditional folk songs,
ethnic minority chants, revolutionary hymns (the so-called “red songs”
or Maoist songs), and even Peking Opera, a tough challenge even to
native Chinese singers, the Nigerian brothers are an example of cultural
sinicization and therefore help Chinese nationalism. “Without seeing
their faces, I would never believe they are foreigners”—many Chinese
are so amazed by their linguistic and cultural adaptability. They are
known in China by their Chinese names haoge and haodi (the pronunciations sound identical to Chinese terms “good elder brother” and “good
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 225
younger brother”) respectively, and their Nigerian names are never used.
The Nigerian brothers’ experience actually represents that of many foreign singers in contemporary China’s pop music market. Their success,
therefore, is actually more of a case of assimilationism that enriches and
colors the Chinese national culture than cross-cultural exchange and
integration. The enthusiasm they have aroused among audiences is more
of a sense of national pride and a confidence in native culture than a
cultural internationalism and globalism.
Africa has also been found to be an exotic source that inspires a more
politically nationalist popular culture. In 2017, a movie titled War Wolf
II was a sensational hit. Two years earlier, War Wolf I already whipped
up nationalist passion by combining the characters of American Rambo
and British 007 to create a non-traditional, more individualistic patriotic hero who defies his army superior but beats American mercenaries
who are legendarily fearsome Navy Seals (albeit retired) sneaking into
China. Part of the hero’s assignment is to frustrate an American plot
to steal Chinese DNA samples in order to make biological weapons to
wipe out the Chinese race. War Wolf II sets the story in Africa in which
the hero (the same actor and the same character as the antagonist in
War Wolf I ) fights to evacuate Chinese migrants out of chaotic African
nations and to defend the honor of China in a continent ridden by
tribal networks, warlords, civil wars, corruption, drug dealing, diseases,
etc. In a way the movie fictionally satisfies the request for protection of
Chinese workers and national interests in Africa demanded by many
internet users in discussion years earlier. Now the “one belt, one road”
projects and the Chinese Navy’s limited presence in the Red Sea area
have enabled China to meet at least some challenges, such as evacuating
Chinese nationals from troubled regions. The movie has been promoted
as being patriotically themed and earned significant box-office revenue.
However, reviews, especially online comments, show a significant disagreement and even a derision of its coarse patriotism aimed at box office
ratings. Patriotism has been commercialized to guide popular culture, a
phenomenon analyzed in Chapter 2 regarding racialized patriotic songs.
This time, many Chinese people working in Africa joined the criticism
by pointing out the movie’s ignorance, bias, and stereotypes of Africa
and Africans. Indeed, the most positive reviews were excited about
226 Y. Cheng
the movie’s demonstration of China’s capability, though fictional, in
overseas military actions, ignoring the fact of whether or not the Africa
in the movie is the real Africa and how Africans themselves would feel
about such a description.
In this way the movie, as a nationalist fantasy, does have a precedent
in popular culture around six hundred years ago, an even more ignorant and fictional account of the encounter between China and Africa
that satisfies a sense of civilizing mission based on self-claimed superiority. Luo Maodeng, a Ming dynasty novelist who lived roughly between
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, wrote a novel entitled Zheng He’s Expeditions of the Western Oceans (三宝太监西洋记通
俗演义) based on some sketchy materials collected from the famous
Zheng He’s expeditions (1405–1433). It is the first fictional version
of Africa of any length and is reasonably well known known to readers of romance and adventure literature in China. Zheng He’s voyages
reached the coast of East Africa but did not make well-documented
observations of the places and the people. Luo’s novel is an example of
how Chinese intellectuals indulged themselves in imagining the world
in a China-centered universe. The author, who lived in Shaanxi, an
inland province, did not even know that Islam was the religion popular among many African peoples and mistook it for a variation of
Buddhism. The book has little value as far as knowledge about Africa
of the time or Zheng He’s voyages is concerned, but it is a showcase of
the Chinese view of Africa. It portrays Africa as a land of chaos dominated by ignorant but arrogant tribal kings and reckless warriors, and
invested with wizards and witches associated with demons and evil spirits. These savage forces resist the advancement of the civilized Chinese
by ignoring edification and enlightenment and by rejecting reasonable
requests offered by the harbingers of benign imperial might. Eventually,
after many battles assisted by the more powerful gods of the Chinese,
Zheng He’s mighty fleet subdues all of them and proclaims: “It is for
you to keep in mind that my dynasty is like the Sun in the sky that you
can never defy. … [my mission is to] civilize you various barbarians and
allow you to benefit from my heavenly kingdom’s paternalistic dominance” (Luo Ming dynasty; Liu 2000). Some researchers suggest that
Luo wrote the novel to insinuate his real concern about the Japanese
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 227
piracy rampant in coastal Eastern China and his wish to subdue the
Japanese barbarians with Chinese might and gods. If that is true, then
the description of Africa was even more subject to the China-centered
world imagination.
“Discovering China in Africa”?
In recent years Chinese scholars and in particular those associated with
think tanks or policymakers have produced a significant amount of
research on the subject of Africa and Sino-African relations mainly from
political and economic perspectives. Some of them have found the relationship to have more of a macro and transhistorical implication, giving
a very pragmatic engagement a profoundly metaphysical significance
that subjects Africa’s development to China’s self-realization.
Such a perspective is represented in Discovering China in Africa,
a book collectively written by a group of scholars and based on a conference under the same title and published in 2015 as part of a series
of books titled National Interest. Shi Zhan, a historian at the Chinese
Foreign Affair University, a think tank institution under China’s Foreign
Ministry, articulates this discourse in the book’s preface and two chapters. A rising scholar of Chinese nationalism, Shi distinguishes himself
from most pragmatically minded and policy-focused international relations scholars with a vision of China from a self-claimed world historical and historically philosophical perspective.
For Shi, the distance between Africa (sub-Saharan Africa, as he
clearly indicates) and China can be viewed as either “distant” or “close,”
depending on how one sees the relationship. His perception of such a
distance is not geographical or physical, but “historically philosophical.”
“Only historical philosophy can determine a nation’s self-consciousness;
it also tells this nation where it should go, and defines national interests
accordingly. The physical existence of a nation is only materials subject
to being molded by political and historical philosophies.” Shi observes
that although China “has substantially benefited from Africa, its
responsibility to Africa has not been sufficiently recognized, and much
of China’s aid to Africa often falls rather short of the desired goals.”
228 Y. Cheng
The most profound cause for such a deficiency in realizing national
interest, Shi argues, is in the problematic self-consciousness of China
as the nation rises but lacks a “historical philosophy.” Now is the time
to establish such a self-consciousness of “world responsibility” and
“historical responsibility” by using Africa as a reference. That is what
“Discovering China in Africa” means.
Shi adopts Aristotle’s “four causes” theory—especially a dialectic relationship between the causes of “material” and “form”—in explaining
China’s plight in Africa. According to him, both Africa and China are
rich in “materials” but weak in “forms.” “Africa entered world history as
‘material’” and has never developed a “form” to fit the “material.” The
form of nation state and the ideology of nationalism since independence
“are not the genuine expression of African political consciousness” and
“have no connection with ordinary people’s spirit but are camouflage
for the ambitious political elite.” Shi names this phenomenon “form of
poverty,” which has led African countries to be “failed states” (Shi 2015,
pp. 79–81). As for China, Shi asserts that, fundamentally different from
Africa, China is essentially a “country of mega scale,” due to its massive
“material” (territory and population), and even a single Chinese act will
have a global impact. “Therefore, China’s ‘form’ naturally includes implications of both national and global orders” (Shi 2015, p. 82). In history, China used to provide “order”—namely, the externalized national
“form”—to East Asia, but since the beginning of modern times China
has not been able to act as the provider of such an international order.
Shi names this history and its current state “poverty of form.”
Shi believes that as China rises and Sino-African economic relations
deepen, a time for both Africa and China to solve the problems of each
other’s “poverty” and realize their respective “forms” has come. Africa’s
position in the division of the current global economy determines that
it can only exist as “material.” Shi argues that the “form of poverty” in
Africa has already proven the incompetence of the system of African
national states—they can neither solve socioeconomic development problems nor bring spiritual emancipation to the continent. Therefore, Shi
asks “why not place the hope for a complete ‘form’ of Africa in individual units—more specifically Africa’s traditional communities defined
in the context of a traditional culture that includes all individuals?”
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 229
He clearly asserts that the function of African nations should be weakened
and they should only act as “tools” in serving society (Shi 2015, pp. 91–92).
In other words national community and national sovereignty, both as concepts and as institutions, are neither desirable nor realistic in Africa.
The negation of the main representation of modernity—the nation
state—will give “form” to Africa and eventually “emancipate” the
“spirit” of the continent, as Shi argues. Such a dispossession of African
peoples’ rights to a nation state is articulated in a rather sophisticated
and circular rhetoric. Shi believes that the value of Africa lies in its relatively primitive and natural state, still unpolluted by industrial revolution. “An Africa that has restored vitality will become the home and
garden for the original spirit of humanity,” as he benignly put it. With
this idyllic and pure Africa in mind, Shi assigns the continent a place in
the world, where the “traditional communities and individuals within
them can only regain their vitality when placed in the organic working of the order of global [economic] division. Although they cannot
participate in the construction of such a global order, their identity of
the guardian for the home and garden of original human spirit will give
them a unique dignity.” Such a “home and garden of original human
spirit” will be recognized as the international tourism, local culture, and
aboriginal arts that people elsewhere are willing to pay for and they will
come to the continent in search of “peace of mind or spiritual inspiration” (Shi 2015, p. 90).
Then what about China? Where is China in such a “global order”
that assigns Africa to “the guardian of the home and the garden of
human spirit”? Shi envisioned an interdependent Sino-African relationship that would lead to a dialectic outcome: both Africa and China
would overcome their “poverty” and obtain their “forms.” Shi believed
that China’s rise had provided the world the only approach to development other than a Western one, therefore Africa—on behalf of
itself—had no choice. “With China’s help, a rich and stable Africa will
become provider of the raw materials China needs as well as a market
for China’s products. There lies China’s national interest!” Shi wanted
to make it clear that the implication of such a relationship had a more
metaphysical implication at the level of human civilization. On the
Chinese side, this Sino-African interaction would become the “spiritual
230 Y. Cheng
fulcrum of the revival of the Chinese nation, enable us to acquire
spiritual fulfillment and ultimate confidence politically. It will address
the world historical significance of China’s rise, that is, China’s development means world development, the problems the world faces will
become China’s internalized ones.” On the other side, “the fulcrum
for Africa’s revival will also be established, and Africa’s self-confidence
as well as dignity will be represented by Africa’s conservation of its traditions and its role as an antidote to the desire of a modern material
world” (Shi 2015, pp. 92–94).
In 2018, Shi published a new book entitled The Pivot: China in
3000 Years. Joining in the discussion that has obsessed many Chinese
intellectuals in recent decades with a single question “What is China?”
the book was originally titled Re-Narrating China: the Birth and Growth
of A World Historical Nation. The impact of the book was phenomenal
according to press coverage to promote its sale. In an interview with a
major official internet media based in Shanghai (Thepaper.cn, January
6, 2018), titled “Why Has China Become the Pivot of World Order?”,
Shi asserts, “based on China’s development, the Third World will be
able to accomplish their development,” a thesis that had already been
articulated in his discourse on Sino-African relations years earlier, but
which has now expanded to the extent of the global Third World. It was
perhaps because of its being too brash that the interview disappeared
from the website of the media shortly afterwards.
To a great extent, Shi’s rhetoric and discourse strategy represent a
trend in historical discussions regarding China’s rise and its global significance among Chinese nationalist intellectuals. It justifies China’s
demand for international recognition of its global power status with
various metaphysical and transhistorical concepts that moralize China’s
material needs and pragmatic agenda. Starting with Aristotle’s “four
causes” but essentially adopting the Hegelian dialectic concept of a
“world spirit” manifesting itself in the course of the historical process
of a national revival, Shi uses Africa as an object with which China’s
self-consciousness not only as a global power but the maker of the world
order will interact and realize itself. “Poverty of form,” “form of poverty,”
and China’s domestic problems being “externalized” to become international problems and international problems being “internalized” to
4
Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception … 231
become China’s domestic problems—these elusive phrases are actually
just euphemistic expressions of naked “national interest.”
While Shi, as a “historical philosopher,” appealed to Aristotle and
Hegel to philosophize his country’s national interest in Africa by “discovering” China as a “world historical nation” against the background
of a land of perennial safari and a people devoid of “form,” such a
national self-image also has a more down-to-earth version among metaphysically less-informed people. The legend of Baoding villages illustrates this national self-image constructed in the remote continent. The
legend began in 2007 with CCTV broadcasting an interview with Liu
Jianjun, a former local government official in the city of Baoding, Hebei
Province. Liu introduced his business of building migration networks to
bring Chinese farmers to Africa since 2005 and explained that he had
established settlements known as Baoding villages—agricultural settlements that Chinese farmers from Baoding created in more than two
dozen African nations. Liu described how easily Chinese farmers could
make a fortune in Africa because the soil was so fertile, but the people
there were so unaccustomed to skilled and hard work and were poorly
informed regarding agriscience. In the subsequent media frenzy that
continued for several years, an image of ordinary Chinese farmers in
Africa not only as successful planters but also as an “agricultural God”
(神农 in Chinese mythology) and praised as altruist “angels” by
Africans was established and propagated. More recent scholarly investigations have shown that the legend of the Baoding villages is significantly exaggerated, and most African praise and gratitude were words
put in their mouths by the Chinese media (Liu 2018). Whatever the
truth, the media frenzy surrounding the Baoding village and those
miraculous, benign Chinese farmers exploring a new frontier in the
“wild Africa” constituted part of the China “discovered” in Africa theme
associated with a strong sense of racial superiority and practical purpose.
An overarching theme of this chapter is an argument that images
of Africa and black people have been portrayed and constructed as a
non-Chinese Other throughout history that often reflects China’s own
problems and desires. From the premodern Sinocentric world outlook
that associated darker-skinned foreigners with an unfree social status
to the racial hierarchy of modern times, a despicable loser in the social
232 Y. Cheng
Darwinist struggle that wasted China’s resources for its own modernization, a threat to China’s pure bloodline, and finally a place with its
people who cannot master their own fate but whose resources are indispensable to China’s global power agenda. Whatever the particular circumstance, however, a relationship between two racially superior/
inferior human groups is either implied or demonstrated in the narratives and discourses of such an interaction. Even Shi Zhan’s theory of
“forms,” which not only does not use any racial terms but even praises
Africa as the place where the human spirit will find sanctuary, completely dismisses Africa’s independence and subjects the will of Africans
to the march of a kind of awakened world spirit epitomized by China’s
rise. From the kunlun nu to “the guardian of the home and the garden
of original human spirit,” Africa has remained timeless, ahistorical, forever primitive, to be either despised or salvaged by the civilized Chinese.
Like other African-related opinions, such a point of view is not limited
to mainland China but encompasses almost the entire Chinese world.
As Liu Xiaopeng believes through his research on Taiwan’s agricultural
aid to Africa during the 1960s, what Taiwan gained through such a relationship was more than political: a “backward Africa” admired Chinese
culture and looked upon Taiwan as a big country which truly represented China (Liu 2017). Without a hidden racialized perception of all
the peoples of the world, such an unabashedly nationalist arrogance is
simply unimaginable.
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5
Racism and Its Agents in China
In early 2011, a film promoting the Chinese national image was shown
on New York’s Time Square’s digital video screens and later in similar
public spaces of other global cities. The short film was named China
Experience and was part of the campaign to improve China’s international image masterminded and financed by China’s State Council
Information Office but commissioned to an advertisement company. It
attempted to impress the world with a group of individual Chinese who
possess extraordinary intellectual, physical, and moral characters, such
as Hong Kong’s richest man Li Ka-shing, China Unicom CEO Wang
Jianzhou, NBA basketball star Yao Ming, the first astronaut Yang Liwei,
CCTV host Chen Luyu, world-famous pianist Lang Lang, film director
John Woo, hybrid rice scientist Yuan Longping, and Alibaba founder
Jack Ma, etc. Female figures were overwhelmingly young beauties
who were either film stars or famous dancers (“China National Image
Film” 2011). The creation of the film marked the advent of China’s
state-sponsored international public relations initiatives and represents
the trend analyzed in Chapter 2: the party-state outsourcing talented
artists onto the popular culture market to promote its agenda.
© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_5
239
240 Y. Cheng
However, the film provoked controversies in China. Many doubted
the wisdom of such a political advertisement and its effectiveness, while
others complained that the figures in the film were all elite and many
of them or their family members had obtained foreign citizenship. To
these questions, Zhu Youguang, the director of the film, explained that
the film was meant to show the world that the “Chinese are beautiful,
benevolent, smart, and of a fine quality. … What we are expressing here
is that we are a people of fine Chinese descent with first-rate DNA, and
we have no problem to march forward with the world.” As far as the citizenship status was concerned, Zhu’s answer was “We chose these individuals because their businesses are based in China. Regardless of their
nationality, they all come back to China to serve the country with constructive contributions.” Using Zhen Zidan (a famous Chinese-America
actor shown in the film) as an example, Zhu said “all his movies are
patriotic. So, you see, how much does his [American] passport really
mean to him?” (Chen 2011).
In Zhu’s view, the Chinese were defined by DNA; Chinese DNA
is first class; and the Chinese were by nature benign. Regardless of the
nationality on their passport, as long as they were Chinese by blood, they
were forever Chinese and they were proud of serving the country of their
ancestry. It was a political message that had been constantly sent out to
the global Chinese diaspora by the CCP regime since the early 1980s (see
Chapter 2). Such a discourse was a conceited and narcissistic portrait of
the pure, moral, and noble Self of a rising power, an outright and clearcut racist proclamation, literarily a duplicate of nineteenth and twentieth
century orthodox racism. One might argue that taken into consideration with the historical context of being a victim of Western as well as
Japanese racism, and to some extent still racially stigmatized by them, the
fine quality of the Chinese here actually sounds more defensive, as if it is
meant to assure the world that we Chinese are racially capable of making
progress just as you did. However, if that is a legitimate interpretation, it
only attests to Mr. Zhu’s racist connotation in a reverse way.
The racial belief that “we” are so “unique” is also expressed in China
in more subtle forms that do not appeal to any biological or physical
references. This type of idea seems so natural to many in daily conversation whenever perceptions of China, Chinese people, or Chinese
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 241
civilization are involved, so much so that many discussions that normally do not necessarily involve these major terms are now often
equally affected. For example, the director of the movie Tangshan
Earthquake (a story about Chinese people’s courage when facing a devastating earthquake in 1976 and shown in 2011) discussed the movie
in a CCTV program about how the movie portrayed the unique moral
qualities of the Chinese. One episode in the movie shows a husband
risking his life by breaking into the disintegrating house to find his wife,
after rescuing their child. “Such a strong family tie and human affection,” as the director explained, “that we wanted to show in the movie,
is unique to Chinese people” (CCTV 2011).
The previous chapters have illustrated discourses of race in contemporary China in the fields of popular music, the scientific debate regarding
racial ancestry, and the Chinese perception of black people and Africa.
This chapter will further introduce various manifestations of discourses
of race in contemporary China and analyze their agents and how they
address the issues in relation to domestic and international problems. As
an ideology, racism or racial discourses do not exist for their own sake or
by themselves but always reflect power relations that may be addressed
in other social hierarchy-based or identity-related discourses. In China
today, racial thinking can appear in various discourses addressed to the
political and ideological needs of the party-state, cultural and intellectual elites, and ordinary citizens: nationalism, patriotism, statism,
social Darwinism, Han Chauvinism (or Hanism), non-Han ethno-nationalism, populism, and the Chinese civilizational supremacism in
general (associated with the traditional ethnocentrism of China). It
is also an intellectual source for Chinese liberal democrats who aspire
for political reforms to modernize China, the idea that inspired the
student pro-democracy movement during the 1980s. In recent years,
Chinese public opinion has begun to respond to major trends in the
West marked by discussions and policies regarding all sorts of issues
related to political correctness. The Chinese responses not only display
a strong racial attitude towards peoples of color and foreign immigrants
in Western societies, linking the issue to China’s own racial, ethnic, and
religious situations, but also reveal a twisted racial complex expressed in
the creation of new political terminologies such as “white left.”
242 Y. Cheng
Novelist, History Teacher and Nationally
Known Scholar
In 2014, an essay entitled “It’s So Scary to Be a Child of Chinese
Parents” was circulated on social media. The author claimed to be
a non-traditional Chinese mother who granted her adult son many
freedoms in his private life, in particular that of choosing the type of
women he wanted to marry. Then the author continued,
One day in Singapore, I was sitting in a restaurant for lunch, I saw a very
fine Chinese boy, very gentle looking, handsome, educated, and well
mannered. But—believe it or not—he was sitting with an Indian girl! She
is so black that if the light was dimmer I would have thought he was talking to the blackness of the night!
The author said that she “felt heartbroken.” Afterwards she firmly and
resolutely told her son: “You remember this: never find yourself a wife
of Indian or African extraction. Mom cannot accept a grandson whose
hands look like they have been rubbed with dirt falling from … . Just so
hard to wash them. Let alone their mouths are full of birdsong.” When
her son asked “how about white women?” She paused a while and said:
‘still cannot be compared with Asian women; Chinese women are the
best’” (Liu 2014).
Liu Liu, the author, is a novelist known for her dramatized yet realistic portrayal of how modern people in urban China strive to live a moderately decent life and the ethical dilemmas such struggles engender.
Woju (2007, literarily translated as “a living quarter as small as a snail’s
shell”), her masterpiece, describes how China’s skyrocketing housing
prices dominate and distort love and family relations among the urban
young and middle-class couples. It was a bestseller and a national hit
after being adapted into a thirty-five episode TV series (2009). The
essay was meant to be a rejection of Chinese parents’ desire to control
the lives of even their adult children, an attitude inherited from traditional culture. Set in this social context, however, the author, whose
son seems to be exposed to a multicultural social environment, excludes
freedom of interracial marriage between Chinese and darker-skinned
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 243
peoples from a parent-child relationship that she advocates. She also
excludes Indians, especially darker-skinned Indians, from “Asians,”
which is another problem among many Chinese—for them, the world
means the white West and Asia (or the East) refers to the yellow or fairskinned China. Whites are acceptable marriage mates for Chinese yet
still not desirable.
The interracial marriage scenario is hardly realistic for the author’s readers but she felt strongly enough to single it out as a warning, and the language of the section reads so negatively against darker-skinned peoples.
The reader cannot help but ponder the roots of such an urge and abhorrence. The scene is set in Singapore, a city state with Chinese as the largest and Indians as the third population group by size, and the city state’s
extent of modernity and development is far above that of China. Sitting
in such a cosmopolitan and multicultural scene, however, the author sets
prohibition the marrying of a darker-skinned girl as a bottom line for
her son’s freedom from the mother, who she believes is an exceptionally
enlightened and liberal woman among her fellow Chinese.
Many Chinese would simply ignore the author’s disdain of colored
peoples and defend her objection to such a marriage with reasons such
as that the mother has the right to like or dislike the type of women
her son marries. Her attitude just reflects individual preference, which is
psychological or cultural and has nothing to do with the assumed good
or bad personal characters of specific types of women. Do people have
the right to say what they like or dislike? They often refute the critique,
but the most common response would be an indifference—seeing
nothing controversial or worthy of notice in such a blatantly racist statement, which is why the essay was disseminated as a forceful criticism of
the traditional values that protected parental despotism at the cost of
the freedom of the young generation, while the strong sentiment against
darker-skinned people encountered no criticism. Enlightenment,
progress, and modernity—in this case reflected in a more liberal parent-child relationship—are incompatible with interracial marriage with
darker-skinned peoples. Such an idea resembled the one that sparked
Chinese students’ anti-black student movement of the 1970s–1980s:
the relationship with darker-skinned people was somehow unsuited to
the goal of modernization, liberalization, and democratization.
244 Y. Cheng
For many pro-democracy and liberal intellectuals, America is perceived as the “torch of freedom,” a country they tend to idealize and
admire. Their attitude towards racism in America often seems to be a
complex of ignorance and tolerance—or even worse, is blatantly antiblack. For example, in portraying African-Americans, a high-school
history teacher in Beijing told his students that despite the abolition
of institutional and legal racism and the implementation of ­policies
preferential to African-Americans, “you cannot force people how to
think in their mind. Basically, as soon as a black person moves into an
apartment building, white people begin to move out and eventually
the entire building will turn all black.” He listed the “passing rate” of
SAT tests among different racial groups: Chinese 100%, Asians 87%,
Whites 60%, Latino 25%, blacks 7%. Therefore “black people don’t go
to college but just hang out … run marathons and play ball, or swings
his body whenever he hears music like he’s being electrocuted. That’s
what he can do. You never see any scientists among black people. There
are Rice [Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State 2005–2009], Obama,
Obama is not purely black but half black, and Powell [Colin Powell,
Secretary of State 2001–2004], they are too rare, not ordinary blacks.”
(Yuan1, 2016).
This is one of the recorded model classes put online that can even
be watched outside of China on YouTube. Laughs from students could
be heard in the background as they listened to these remarks. Yuan
Tengfei), the speaker, is a nationally known teacher for his talk show
style of pedagogy. Yuan continues to tell students that black people
have no inherited DNA to study; in America people never truly respect
them and avoid running into them in the street. Only Koreans, who are
known for being ill-tempered due to “eating too much hot pepper,” dare
to confront blacks and even shoot shoplifting black kids on the spot.
African countries have no sense of shame; whoever [the mainland or
Taiwan] gives them more money gets their recognition; “their hearts are
darker than their faces.”
Yet on the ideological spectrum of today’s China, Yuan certainly
belongs to the progressive, liberal, and pro-democratic wing that hopes
to bring more political reforms to China. He often takes on politically
sensitive histories in a sometimes light-hearted and satirical tone with
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 245
extra details normally avoided by official narratives. His lessons have
been widely disseminated on the internet and he has published some
popular history books. His bristly comments and insinuative criticism of the darker side of modern and contemporary Chinese history
has made him something of an iconoclast in history classrooms and
an enemy of “nationalists,” “patriots,” and Maoists who have asked the
authorities to punish him for his “vicious attacks” on Mao and “historical nihilism” (a vague accusation of historical discussions that deconstruct official narratives of both modern and ancient histories).
However, in lessons that involve a context in which non-Western,
colored people interact with Westerners or Western societies, Yuan not
only reveals a blatant social Darwinist and racist view but also seems to
indulge in such matters by adding comments and jokes playing on sentiments that deride the weak and the powerless. For example, in a lesson—also videotaped and available online—about American Westward
Expansion, Yuan told the students that the textbook said a large number of American Indians were massacred but underdeveloped areas were
developed. Yuan explained to students that just as they discussed regarding the West’s expansion in the world, historical progress was always
made at the cost of someone. Today, if American Indians still lived in
those places, then those places would have very likely remained as primitive prehistorical civilizations. However, today the Indians in America
were “like Giant Pandas in our country” which are in danger of extinction and therefore protected. They had no obligation to do military
service nor to pay taxes. “If you see someone smoking in places with
‘No Smoking’ signs, they are certainly Indians; if you think you have a
yellow face [like theirs] and this means that you can smoke there too,
you are dead” (Yuan2, 2016). When discussing the Haitian Revolution
(1791–1804), Yuan said that the Haitians rejected [French] red wine
and bread and chose to eat dirt. Now the country is listed by the UN
as one of the poorest nations. Students have to see both sides of history,
Yuan told them. China indeed suffered a great deal from Western colonialism, but now “we admit [the West] also brought with them civilization; and Africa and Latin America were still in a prehistoric state before
the White man’s invasion.” The implication is as China now admits,
that the positive effect of the West’s colonization should receive more
246 Y. Cheng
positive recognition from less-civilized African and Latin American
peoples.
This rhetoric could be addressed in a subtler tone but reveals the
similar concepts of values that rank the peoples of the world in a less
racial but apparently social Darwinist manner. Yi Zhongtian, a very
senior scholar with a national reputation as an erudite historian who
has authored multiple volumes of histories of Chinese civilization and
culture, gave a public lecture at Peking University entitled “The Will
of Civilization and the Place of China.” Yi divided human civilization into two categories: one global and the other regional or national
with “different historical positions, roles, influences, and obligations.”
These two categories could be further grouped into three worlds. Yi
elevated Western, Islamic, and Chinese civilizations as the first world.
The civilizations in the second world were “generally ranked: Slavic,
Indian, African, Japanese, and Latin American.” The rest of the
world was lumped into the third world without necessarily being further ranked among themselves. Yi asserted, “Therefore, in the future
world, Western civilization, Islamic civilization, and Chinese civilization will be the protagonists; while the position of the third world is
like retail investors; predatory investors are the top three: the Western,
the Islamic, and Chinese civilizations. That is the place of Chinese
civilization” (Yi 2013).
Discussions regarding how to position China among the world’s civilizations have found an increasingly large audience in the era of China’s
rise. As a very active media historian who frequently appears in popular
historical and cultural forums or TV shows, Yi’s sweeping generalization regarding world civilizations catered to this popular interest. While
it remains unclear on what measure Yi ranked individual civilizations,
what one cannot help but wonder, however, is what made Yi feel it so
natural, necessary, and useful to rank civilizations and accordingly claim
influence, responsibility and, conceivably, the discursive power in global
politics that different world civilizations are entitled to.
The metaphoric terms of retail investors and predatory investors
are disturbingly flippant terms that relegate human endeavors in creating civilizations to stock market opportunism and unpredictability.
However, the metaphor is also socioeconomically specific to China
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 247
today: millions of Chinese families gamble their wealth or life savings
on the nation’s stock market, which is notoriously unpredictable due
to the lack of regulations and transparency. The government-­financier
complex is an investor that never loses and often manipulates the
stock market. Numerous families or individuals have seen their investments evaporate or significantly shrink overnight during the last two
decades, but the country’s massive urban population with high saving
rates always ensures the next wave of stock buyers—“retail investors”
for whom the state-owned enterprises are “predatory investors” sucking
their savings. However, those retail investors resignedly accept this reality and just want to try their luck and indeed a significant number of
them do get their share. Yi’s metaphor makes the long history of the
rise and fall of world civilizations as well as complicated contemporary
global politics as simple as gains and losses on stock market, an everyday
reality, for ordinary Chinese people’s comprehension. The world has
been a stock market of Chinese characteristics and civilizations claim
rights and reap rewards based on ranks established and rules accepted
in such a stock market. Low-rank civilizations have chances to survive,
just like many retail investors in the Chinese stock market do, but only
predatory investors have the power to determine the outcome. Social
Darwinist cynicism with Chinese characteristics has been an undertone
to many popular history discussions and finds a populace receptive to
such a rationale and feeds them with vulgar metaphors and superficial
analogies.
Liu, Yuan, and Yi are not ordinary social media users but nationally
known intellectuals—arguably public intellectuals or opinion leaders—
with large numbers of fans. From different perspectives, the social and
political problems they address in professional and public arenas concern millions of Chinese, but their apparently problematic opinions
on race-related and macro-historical issues encounter no resistance. At
least for a great number of Chinese, humanitarian concerns and critical thinking come under the influence of social Darwinism or even
racism so naturally that they are simply blind or numb to such vicious
discourses and concepts that dehumanize all of those Others, who are
deemed to be losers or inferior, dismiss their cultural achievements
and ignore their ethnic distinctions. Ruthless exclusions and utmost
248 Y. Cheng
contempt often characterize such discussions. It is not a contradiction
but a default position in modern Chinese nationalism that aims for the
nation’s progress through modernization and even democratization.
Reverse Racism: An Intellectually Misinterpreted
but Politically Exploited Concept
The discussions in previous sections have shown the absence of a consciousness regarding race-related sensitivity in China. However, if China
itself is not the discriminator but the discriminated in a perceived racial
relationship, then such a sensitivity can become heightened to channel
discussions or even explode into mass indignation. This selective, double-standard racial perception is commonplace in Chinese nationalism
and patriotism. The root for such a problematic attitude comprises two
possible reasons: one is ignorance of the concept of racism and the other
a distortion of the concept. One is cognitive and the other political.
A case at hand for an analysis of this attitude is the concept of reverse
racism (逆向种族主义) that has been used since the late 1990s by some
nationalist intellectuals and has gained currency. In the West the concept often refers to a variety of situations in which the traditionally discriminated or disadvantaged groups are now granted preferential rights
(affirmative actions, for example) or can even publically express their
hostile attitudes towards racially “superior” ones. However, in China it
identifies a racial self-debasing or self-denigration. Such a self-discrimination is believed to have been prevalent in the discourses of liberals and in their critical views of not only the regime but also of society
and even Chinese civilization, according to Wang Xiaodong, the inventor of the concept of reverse racism. A researcher at the China Youth
Research Center, Wang has been introduced by Baidu.com as “the standard-bearer of Chinese nationalism” since the 1990s and has gained recognition internationally. His nationalist claim was expressed systematically
and clearly first in his On Contemporary Chinese Nationalism (2005)
and then in books such as Unhappy China: The Great Time, The Grand
Goal and Our Internal/External Dangers (2010, coauthored). Another of
his books is titled The Great Country Is China’s Manifest Destiny (2008).
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 249
As Baidu highlights in the biographical entry for Wang, “Wang believes
that the denial of the ‘living space’ theory is either pedantic stupidity
or intellectual hypocrisy.” He says, “one of the most basic problems of
our planet is unequal distributions of living space and natural resources
… many difficulties China now faces are created by [the lack of ] living space. We must pierce the windows of paper [meaning ignoring the
taboo and frank speaking of truth].” Wang therefore believes that “‘the
might is right’ is still the dominant role of the world … as the world and
human society have so obeyed for thousands of years” (Wang 2012b).
According to Wang, reverse racism believes that “the Chinese is an
inferior race, while Westerners and Japanese are fine [superior] races.”
It is “an intellectual self-dwarfing that affects a nation’s independence
and the confidence of being its own master. It will not only affect
national security but also suffocate the Chinese nation’s inventive capability in science, technology, humanities, and thoughts.” Wang analyzed the roots of this reverse racism. It started in late Qing times and
developed in the early republican era as a result of China being defeated
and humiliated by Western powers. Hu Shi (1891–1962), the most
influential liberal and pro-Western intellectual of the time, represented
this racism and deplored that China had nothing to be proud of and
even said “if China does not perish as a nation, there would be no heavenly rule” (Wang 2012a). Wang believes that such a self-­debasing or
cultural masochism disappeared during Mao’s time but since the 1980s
it has revived and even come to dominate the thinking and the mood
of most Chinese intellectuals, especially liberals. The reason for this
revival, Wang acknowledges, has a lot to do with mistakes made during Mao’s time, such as political campaigns, purges, and economic mismanagement. However, for Wang, the main victims of these disasters
are Chinese intellectuals who were singled out and suffered under Mao
at that time and now they felt inferior to the West after China opened
up to the world.1 This experience not only leads to the revival of reverse
1Maoists
and Maoist nationalists may admit mistakes or even disasters during Mao’s time, but
instead of the loss of millions of lives and crimes against humanity, they emphasize the loss of
time for China’s modernization and the victimization of intellectuals as consequences, and apologize both with international circumstances and the party’s political agenda of the time.
250 Y. Cheng
racism but links it to a complete negation of Mao’s China: whatever
happened during that time was wrong.
There is no doubt that since the late Qing dynasty a cultural and
sociopolitical self-criticism and even self-denial has significantly marked
the self-reflection of many Chinese intellectuals, and it has been revived
during the 1980s in particular—“the decade of ‘cultural fever’” as it
has been remembered. A multi-episode documentary titled The River
Elegy epitomized such an intellectual trend. A provocative TV program before the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, the documentary
praises Western civilization as “blue,” ocean-oriented, and progressive
and portrays Chinese civilization as “yellow,” land-locked, and ­therefore
backward. But is this discourse actually racist? The symptoms Wang
lists are mainly cultural, social, and political. For example, he says that
many believe that the Chinese spent more time dealing with interpersonal relationships unnecessarily complicated by Chinese culture and
tradition, which is a reason why they cannot focus on creative work,
while in the West such a relationship is much simpler. Wang says that
in fact office politics are equally complicated and even hurtful to efficient working relationships in the West, “just watch those America TV
dramas,” as he put it. Many Chinese argue that China was beaten by
the West in the nineteenth century because its legal practice was inhumane and unacceptable to those Westerners as they came to China for
business. Wang says that it is nonsense—the Chinese legal system might
be more medieval, but that does not justify the Western invasions of
China. This reverse racism even believes that Westerners sit around a
rectangular table for their dinner while the Chinese sit around a circular
one, which shows a different pattern of thinking with social and cultural
consequences. In summary, Wang says, according to this reverse racism,
everything in Chinese society and culture is either inferior to the West
or simply wrong.
Such a cultural and social self-debasing or self-denial reflects the
plight of contemporary Chinese liberal-democratic intellectuals. Since
they cannot explicitly criticize the regime, they blame traditional culture
and national characteristics for autocratic politics and the denial of individual rights. Following the logic of this analysis, they contend that cultural conservatism and social inertia dominated society and smothered
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 251
the spirit of invention and creation. Despite such an apolitical tone,
this discourse strategy still confronts the official nationalist propaganda
that portrays China as a great nation, and the people a great people,
whose major setbacks were inflicted only by foreigners. One example
of such an official standing is that immediately after the 1989 pro-democracy movement was crushed, The River Elegy was denounced during
the propaganda campaign as “bourgeois liberalization,” “historical nihilism,” and was blamed for creating ideological confusion among Chinese
intellectuals and students. Despite the official criticism, this discourse
strategy has survived to some extent in fields such as cultural studies and
social psychology. The inherent problem of this strategy—blaming culture and people’s social behavior for problems more directly caused by
ideological and political factors and being overly critical of the culture
and the people in this regard—later inspired Wang to label it as racist,
because it sounds like the Chinese are socially and culturally inferior to
peoples elsewhere.
The concept of reverse racism reflects a fundamental problem in
China: super-sensitivity to anti-Chinese racism but super-insensitivity
to Chinese racism. Wang racializes his opponents’ discourse strategy to
devastate their status, but it reveals his ignorance of the meaning of racism as a concept and his double standards of racism. On the one hand
the main examples of such a self-discriminative racism as he describes
can be explained from political, social, and cultural perspectives and
have very little to do with physical or biological features. On the other
hand, his invention of the term reflects his shrewd awareness of the
political implication of the concept in China’s ideological debate, which
nonetheless only points to the discrimination of the Chinese by foreign
enemies as well as their collaborators in China. Chinese civilization
and Chinese people have been the innocent victim of foreign racism
throughout history, and today such an anti-China racism is even internalized among a great number of Chinese intellectuals whose criticism
of their own country has undermined the self-confidence of the Chinese
nation as the country is marching towards the goal of a great nation
destined by its mandate. Such is Wang’s argument. However, whether
China has its own racism targeting racial Others seems out of the question here.
252 Y. Cheng
Social Darwinism as an Ally of Racism:
The Current Discussions
Discussions in the previous section have shown an affinity between discourses of race and social Darwinism in contemporary China. As a matter of fact, society-wide rhetoric and concepts reflecting or under the
influence of social Darwinism have been more prevalent than discourses
of race throughout modern and contemporary Chinese history, because
the former can address or camouflage itself in the language that reads in
general as more political and social while the latter often appears to be
more biological and physical. The relationship between these two theories is that if a society in which social Darwinist discourse comes out
blatantly, it is often also a safe haven for racist thinking. One prominent example is Mao’s speech in 1956 at a meeting for preparing the
next national people’s congress that would set goals for economic development in the next five years. Mao compared the outputs of steel of
the United States and China, set a goal for 10 million tons for the next
Five-Year Plan with an expectation for a 20 million ton output in ten
years, enabling China to eventually surpass the United States. Then he
warned the party that within fifty or sixty years, China certainly ought
to overtake the United States. “You have such a big population, such a
vast territory, and such rich resources, and what is more, you are said to
be building socialism, which is supposed to be superior; if after working
at it for fifty or sixty years you are still unable to overtake the United
States, what a sorry figure you will cut! You should be read off the face
of the earth” (Mao 1956).
The social Darwinist implication of this quotation of Mao deserves
some scrutiny. The general context of his warning—a half-century of
competition between a new China and the United States would allow
China enough time to catch up with America—shows that for Mao,
the nature of the competition between socialist China and capitalist America was also a struggle for “the survival of the fittest.” Given
favorable natural conditions and a would-be superior social system, if
China still could not surpass America and leave it behind, such a result
would only be interpreted as a sign of the actual inferiority of Chinese
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 253
society and people, rather than just an indication of the failure of the
sociopolitical system. Such is the significant difference between Mao’s
ambition to surpass the United States and Nikita Khrushchev’s famous
“Kitchen Debate” in which we only hear his faith in communist ideology and socialist superiority. The fatalistic tone in Mao’s talk sounds
similar to what Adolf Hitler believed during the last days of his life that
if Germany lost the war, it only proved that the nation did not deserve
to live in a world of struggle for survival. It is worth noting that “be
read off the face of the earth” is a rather euphemistic translation of kaichu qiujie (开除球籍), Mao’s original wording in Chinese. The phrase
literally means “being expelled from the Earth” and qiujie renders the
meaning of being deprived of the membership of a club. Fifty-five years
later, in celebrating the ninety-fifth anniversary of the CCP, Xi Jingping
proudly announced that under the leadership of the party, China “has
completely got rid of the danger of ‘being expelled from the Earth’ and
has once and for all solved a historical problem that has troubled the
Chinese nation since the beginning of modern history” (Yan 2016).
The danger of “being expelled from the Earth” that obsessed Mao
and its disappearance at the hands of the party that Xi claimed credit
for show an embedded social Darwinist mentality and a consciousness
of the nation as a racial group among CCP leaders of different generations. The ideology of the CCP after Mao has increasingly moved
towards nationalism and patriotism rather than socialism and particularly communism, and the party asserts that the nation owes it for saving the country from the abyss of “the nation destroyed and the race
exterminated.” A social Darwinist victory of survival and revival, not a
Marxist triumph of socialism over capitalism, now underlies the CCP’s
rhetoric. A fine or even superior racial stock has also been projected
to convince foreigners that China is capable of catching up with the
world in its progress, which, on the other hand, also reflects a complex
of racial inferiority, and is evident in the “National Image” displayed in
NYC’s Time Square.
Since Xi Jingping became the boss of the party-state, a set of core
socialist values has dominated the CCP’s propaganda. It lists twelve
such values, all of which are actually universal principles (from democracy and freedom to dedication to one’s occupation and moral integrity)
254 Y. Cheng
and have nothing to do with socialism as a political and economic system. The value placed at the top of the list, fuqiang (富强), meaning
being rich and powerful, is essentially a social Darwinist concept with
Chinese characteristics. It is one thing for a country to work hard to
become rich and powerful, but it is quite another to promote the goal
as the number one core value of the society. Interestingly, while all other
eleven core values are translated into English word for word, the translation of fuqiang is “prosperity,” which only renders the meaning of
fu (being rich) but leaves out the meaning of qiang (being powerful).
Obviously, the translator sensed that a literary translation for fuqiang
would not bring anything positive to the image of China in the world.
The word fuqiang derives from Legalism, an ancient Chinese political theory created during the Warring State period (475–221 BC). It
is notorious for its exclusive emphasis on the strength of the state and
Machiavellian-style statecraft and social control. The original wording
was uguo qiangbing (富国强兵), meaning “rich state, strong army.”
The concept of fuguo qiangbing was later adopted by Japanese statists
and militarists during the Meiji Reformations as the most important
nationalist slogan of Fukoku kyōhei, a word for word translation into the
Japanese language from Chinese. In China, the phrase fuguo qiangbing
was later abbreviated to mitigate the excessive statist and militaristic
connotation. This history and meaning of fuqiang is a fact to Chinese
and Japanese historians. Crowning such a concept on the list of core
socialist values can only be interpreted as evidence of the lasting influence of social Darwinism among China’s political elite. Its English version, however, reveals the consciousness of the term’s political sensitivity
among the same group of people. The discrepancy between its original
and translated versions therefore shows the profound understanding of
the appeal of social Darwinism in Chinese society, even if internationally it may tarnish China’s carefully crafted image as a self-claimed lover
of peace.
A social Darwinist mindset admires success and worships wealth and
power on the one hand, and ignores and despises those who lose on the
other. It only acknowledges the ends and dismisses questions regarding the legitimacy of the means. Internationally, this mindset vindicates the undemocratic and illiberal approach leading to China’s rise as a
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 255
powerful nation, and disregards the cost to civil rights, natural resources,
and the environment. Domestically, it addresses itself in crudely discriminatory language to assess an individual’s success—or compatibility with
success—in everyday life. This language rates people based on their place
of birth, family background, residence (all cities are ranked into four tiers
with rural areas beyond consideration), education, social network, gender, and age, to name only the major criteria. TV reality shows in which
participants seeking marriage partners detail such personal information to give people an idea of their whereabouts in such a rating system.
Numerous buzzwords on social networks reflect this attitude. Food chain
(shiwulian 食物链), discrimination chain (biansjilian 鄙视链), highend population (gaoduan renqun 高端人群), and low-end population
(diduan renkou 低端人口) are now popular urban idioms. Diaosi (屌丝),
an extremely obscene word, has been used to describe those “losers” who
take a self-depreciating attitude to make their life bearable. The irony is
that many people who call themselves diaosi are not necessarily at the very
low end of the chain of survival by some measures, but they still use it to
describe their low status as measured by other things.
The negative effect of this social Darwinist attitude often occurs at
the level of individual situations. However, in the winter of 2017, in the
name of public safety a massive campaign directed by the government
and enforced violently by the police and paramilitary to evict migrant
workers in Beijing threw out at least half a million of these people from
their rental accommodation or huts in a matter of a few days. Although
the motives for such a massive domestic eviction remain unclear and
might have been complicated, the term “low-end population” used in
local government documents and public notices posted in some neighborhoods to identify the target groups clearly show a social Darwinist
attitude towards these people (although the government later denied
using such a label). The campaign can be regarded as evidence of a
social Darwinist mindset in action at government level.
Such a pervasive social Darwinist mindset even extends to openly
rank individuals’ compatibility and marketability by their physical
appearance. This is taken for granted by society as a whole. It is social
Darwinist sexism which applies to both sexes. The term yanzhi (颜值
appearance value) has been created since the early 2000s and has
256 Y. Cheng
entered everyday usage—sometimes even official media—to the extent
of almost replacing words such as beauty, handsome, or good looking,
which appreciate physical attraction but do not necessarily convey a
sense of appearance-based social hierarchy. Today, “he/she has a high
‘yanzhi ’” or “it is a high yanzhi team” are actually used not to appreciate
the individuals’ physical attractiveness but to impress people with their
yanzhi rank and therefore justify their advantages in the competition for
resources and recognition. Indexes of such appearance value have been
created and placed online that calculate (even by illustrations) the popularity of individuals based on their appearance. Two sets of idioms typify the popularity of yanzhi ranks among the younger generation that
essentialize the connection between physical appearance and social status: baifumei (白富美 white, rich, and pretty) for girls and gaofushuai
(高富帅 tall, rich, and handsome) for boys. The much appreciated correlation between physical appearance and material possessions explains
and legitimizes individual success or failure. People who are uncomfortable with the blatant discriminatory and humiliating nature of such
commonly accepted idioms may encounter difficulties in their attempts
at socialization. It is not going too far to say that in today’s Chinese
society, social Darwinism that justifies all types of identity-based social
inequality finds itself the richest soil.
Social Darwinism insidiously permeates Chinese society through
popular culture. In 2004, a novel titled Wolf Totem (狼图腾) won
acclaim from both the circle of literary critics and from general readers with a much weaker critical voice. A bestseller in China, it was
adapted into a film by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud in 2015.
The novel portrays and praises the “spirit of wolf ” that has enabled the
animal to survive against all odds in the prairies of Inner Mongolia
since the beginning of the species. Jiang Rong, the author, was a young
student sent down to the savannah from Beijing during the Cultural
Revolution. He claimed to have been inspired by his observations of the
wolf ’s way of life in his understanding of history. His main argument,
as articulated in the novel, is that what determines the rise and decline
of world civilizations has been the extent of the preservation of the wolf
spirit (or the nature of the wolf ) in human societies. The wolf spirit is
a primitive, cold-blooded, instinct-based, and ruthless propensity that
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 257
determines the attitude towards other species in the vicinity. He constructs a historical paradigm of nomadic people vs. settled society in
which the former preserved and acted upon the wolf spirit while the
latter’s primitiveness and instinct were sapped by a sedentary life. In the
ancient world, barbarians invaded settled societies and forced them to
respond with a similar attitude, which led to the establishment of big
empires. In modern world history, the rise of the West epitomizes such
a spirit in its imperialist expansion and colonization. In Chinese history,
the periodical barbarian invasions infused primitive blood into the veins
of sedentary Han people and that is the reason why the Han civilization
has survived. According to Jiang, all other ancient agrarian civilizations
have disappeared, only China has survived, thanks to those nomads
scattered in the immense northern grasslands. Although Jiang’s interpretation of Chinese history subverted the Han-centered paradigm and was
criticized by Hanists, his book was met with enthusiasm from general
readers. Many admitted that such an interpretation opened their eyes
in their efforts to find an answer to the question that has tormented the
Chinese for more than a century: why are China and the Chinese people so weak in modern history?
It would be too naïve to believe that the majority of readers who like
the novel take such a nomads vs. settlers paradigm as a truly credible
interpretation of human history. Many of them know that such a paradigm is fundamentally flawed and even dismiss it as nonsense, but
they accept the novel as an effective and artful metaphor. What they
appreciate is the author’s frankness, courage, and especially craftiness in
challenging politically and ethically correct but practically useless and
even harmful concepts. The primitive wolf totem invalidates modern
sociopolitical taboos. This wolf-totem metaphor helps to reinforce the
already strong social Darwinist attitude in society: the world and ­society
are just like a savannah inhabited with animals. In order to survive,
nations and individuals alike have to act like a wolf. Some companies
have included the concept of the wolf spirit as part of their business culture and asked their employees to read the book. In the words of a wellknown novelist who came to prominence in the early 1980s and who
is also a pioneering Chinese feminist author and the wife of the novel’s
author, “there is no alternative; the Chinese nation has to adopt the way
258 Y. Cheng
of wolf as the way of heaven (tiandao 天道)” (Zhang 2004). The commentary was published under the title “Wolf and the Scientific Concept
of Development.” The “Scientific Concept of Development” was the
guiding socioeconomic principle proposed by Hu Jingtao, the General
Secretary of the CCP when the novel was published. The connection
between a fictional animal character, an ancient Chinese concept of
the universal way, and the party-state’s guiding principle, ought to be
understood as something much more than a complimentary review to
promote the book’s sale.
Wolf Totem is a social Darwinist thinking explaining the history of
human civilizations articulated in a straightforward manner and common language. A much more nuanced version of the same thinking
concerning the future of human civilizations was provoked by a science
fiction novel entitled The Three-Body Problem (santi 三体). Authored
by Liu Cixing and published in 2008, the book was also a hit on the
book market, won national and international prizes (the Hugo Award),
and has been adapted into a movie. The novel portrays the universe as
a battleground in which every civilization’s goal is to survive by finding resources. Since resources are finite and no alien civilization can be
assumed to be friendly (or quite the opposite, is certainly unfriendly,
thus the phrase “the chain of suspicion” as a norm for survival in the
novel), the existence of each civilization is described as a hunter hidden
(meaning not showing any signs of its presence) in the dark forest. This
forest is full of fatal camouflages, tricks and traps, and civilizations have
to launch attacks preemptively on any detected alien civilization even
before it has developed any hostile intention. The hair-raising scenarios
portrayed in the novel even made Barack Obama feel his uphill fight
against the Republican-controlled Congress “fairly pretty—not something to worry about” (Rocket 2017).
Unlike the author of Wolf Totem, who certainly approves of the wolf
spirit, Liu portrays such a callous and brutal way to survive in the universe in a neutral and subtle manner and narrates deliberations and
options made by civilizations in scientific and logical paradoxes or contradictions. Moral judgements are absolutely out of the place in such
a process not because they are irrelevant but because they are simply
out of context. In this way the author distances himself from criticism
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 259
of being cynical and even immoral, but his remarkable imagination in
constructing such a pathetically anti-humanistic situation with realistic
details inevitably invites questions from sensitive readers: since it seems
like the dark forest metaphor exposes the ultimate plight of human
morality and ethics, does the author intentionally set such a hypothetical social environment for a point of view that is otherwise unspeakable?
In any case, the novel has won high praise, particularly from millions of
young and educated readers.
Social Darwinism as an Ally of Racism:
The Historical Roots
The racial discourses and social Darwinist concepts are often combined
to address domestic and international issues by the cultural, intellectual,
and political elite. The “National Image” short film epitomizes such a
combination and the intent to convince the world of the nation’s much
greater success in the future. Most individuals in the film are successful and wealthy professional elites while the most visible female characters impress the audience with their beauty and elegance. The director’s
interview attributes these individuals’ achievements, appearance, and
character to the race’s superior DNA. The creators of the film didn’t see
any problem in such a connection and conviction. Neither did millions
of Chinese viewers. That is a big problem in today’s China. This chapter will provide more cases of discussions articulated by cultural and
intellectual elites as the agents and promoters of such a thinking and
rhetoric—whether they are aware of such a role or not—in relation to
different political and ideological standings in contemporary Chinese
society.
The key to understanding the relationship between social Darwinism
and racism in China involves first of all a historical juncture, the
1890s, when the former was introduced into China and gave the existing racial ideas a scientific basis with significant political implications.
Together they formed a trendy discourse and answered the serious
question that had perplexed Chinese intellectual and political elites for
260 Y. Cheng
decades since the Opium War: why was the West strong and China
weak, and how should China be made strong? This discourse dominated Chinese nationalism in the last decade of the Qing dynasty and
the first decades of the republican era. Racialized ideas and racial categories, often taking the form of ethnic identity consciousness and ethnic politics had developed in Qing dynasty. An empire that was ruled
by an ethnic-minority Manchu people, Qing was a multi-ethnic state
facing intrusions from racially distinctive Westerners. This complex of
domestic and international tensions of ethnic-racial relationships had
concerned imperial politics and intellectual discussions, but during
the 1890s such a relationship was formulated into a powerful doctrine
that addressed the agenda of rising Chinese nationalism.
In 1897, Yan Fu, a reformist intellectual educated in England, introduced social Darwinism to China’s intellectual and political elites.
Yan presented Darwinism through his crafted translation of Thomas
Henry Huxley’s pamphlet Evolution and Ethics (1893). Huxley,
while a Darwinist in terms of his view of the natural world, rejected
the expedient application of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest
to human society in the second part of his pamphlet. Huxley believed
that although “men in society are undoubtedly subject to the cosmic
process,” social progress was also subject to “the ethical process” which
may make those ethically the best “the fittest” (Nitecki and Doris,
Mathew, 67). However, Yan Fu only translated Huxley’s Evolution part
and left out his Ethics part. Not only that, Yan also reinforced the social
Darwinist tone in his translation to make it more intense and forceful.
His translation is therefore more in line with Herbert Spencer’s social
Darwinist theory interpreted in the context of the Chinese national
crisis.
The immediate impact of this doctrine was, as Xu Jiling argues,
that the center of the cosmic order in traditional Chinese philosophical thinking was harmony and virtue, but it could not explain the
nineteenth century world politics and China’s plight, while social
Darwinism sees competition as the law of the nature and force as the
determinant factor that decided a nation’s place in this new order.
Upholding this doctrine, the reformist intellectuals believed that
the reason for China’s weakness was the absence of the concept of
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Racism and Its Agents in China 261
competition and force in traditional Chinese thinking, therefore they
dismissed traditional moral teaching as pedantic and useless in the
face of the new reality. From now on the value of everything should
be determined by its usefulness in the struggle for survival. It was certainly not a careless omission by Yan Fu to leave out the ethical part
of Huxley’s thesis. Ethics and morality were deemed to be no good for
China if it were to be a strong nation (Xu 2010).
Prior to the translation and publication of Huxley’s work, Yan Fu
had already engaged racial discourse in his discussions on Darwin
and Spencer. He was the first Chinese intellectual to systematically
introduce evolutionary theory into China by dividing the world into
a racially hierarchical order of four groups: the yellow, the white, the
brown, and the black. For Yan, racial superiority and inferiority were
the results of a constant struggle for survival among human groups.
Associated with the idea of racial competition as part of the natural process, Yan also contemplated the idea of a racial war between the yellow
race and other races (Dikötter 2015, p. 41). Such a competition would
certainly happen between the yellow race and the white race, since they
were ranked as the most superior. He also warned of the possibility
of the racial extinction of the Chinese by citing examples of Western
enslavement of other non-Western peoples, an idea that later developed
into “the nation destroyed and the race exterminated.”
Yan Fu’s theoretical work that connects evolutionary theories, social
Darwinism, racial thinking, and Chinese nationalism was quickly
embraced as a guiding principle and further elaborated by Chinese
intellectuals of his time, most of whom engaged in reformist or revolutionary activities against the Qing dynasty with a clear understanding of the connection between theory and practice. Among them, Liang
Qichao’s approach was rather historically philosophical. “What is history? History is nothing but the account of the development and strife
of human races,” as he put it. He categorized peoples of the world as
historical races and ahistorical races, with the latter subjugated to the
former’s will. Only white and yellow races were actors in the drama of
human history (Dikötter 2015, p. 42). During his travels to America
and Hawaii, he acquired firsthand knowledge about blacks and aboriginals that led him to ponder the connections between racial hierarchy
262 Y. Cheng
and racial extinction. It echoes his categorization of historical and ahistorical races: the black and brown peoples were not even aware of the
danger of their racial extinction, while the Chinese were. In the Chinese
nationalist psyche, the preservation of the race was a more fundamental
goal than maintaining China as a united nation.
Yan Fu is regarded as one of the “most progressive Chinese who were
turning toward the West to seek truth for China,” as Mao once commended. Growing up in the years of Yan Fu’s prevalent influence, Mao’s
obsession that China would have been expelled from the Earth showed
the influence of social Darwinism half a century later. The influence
manifested itself in an even more simplistic and cruder form: China
must exceed America in steel production. The competition between
China, a yellow race nation, and the United States, a nation dominated by the white, is also reminiscent of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao’s
view of a competition between races or even a race war. As a matter of
fact, the similar idea of a racial conflict would resurface again in China’s
neo-nationalism at the turn of twenty-first century as the nation rose to
become a global power. In addition, Liang Qichao’s division between
historical race and ahistorical race is echoed in contemporary Chinese
nationalist discourse with similar philosophical tones, such as Shi
Zhan’s argument that Africa still has not acquired its spiritual form and
his vision of the appropriate positions of China and Africa in the new
world order that China partakes in its creation.
Anti-Manchu Racism and Racial Hanism
The prime target for this Chinese nationalism at the time of its creation and proliferation was the Qing court. With the ideas that racial
quality determined a nation’s strength, the overwhelming majority of
Han Chinese intellectuals and political activists believed that the ruling Manchu people were racially inferior to the Han people, and that
was why China had failed to meet the challenges posed by Westerners.
A republican revolution that would overthrow the Qing dynasty and
install Han elites as policymakers and aristocrats was also conceived as
a racial revolution. Most reformists and especially revolutionaries were
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 263
anti-Manchu Han racists, Han supremacists, or chauvinists to various
degrees. “To expel the Northern Barbarians and to restore Zhonghua
(China), to establish a republic, and to distribute land equally among
the people”—this popular anti-Qing slogan that mobilized millions
of Han people clearly showed that a politically republican and socially
egalitarian revolution would come with a racially or ethnically driven
exclusion of Manchu people. It regarded Manchu people not only as
non-Chinese but also uncivilized. From the very beginning, racism and
social Darwinism are symbiotic with each other within the theoretical
framework of Chinese nationalism. Chinese nationalism was created
with anti-Manchu as well as anti-imperialist consciousness in a context
of a global racial hierarchy.
Because racial discourse was more politically expressed in anti-Qing
ideology, and prevalent among most revolutionaries and reformists,
its disappearance had led to a misperception of Chinese nationalism
as basically devoid of racial elements. Historians and other scholars
agree that the anti-Qing revolutionary ideology appealed to the power
of racial thinking as an effective tool in mobilizing the majority Han
people, that is to say they admit that Chinese nationalism before the
fall of the Qing dynasty was indeed a racial discourse. After the 1911
Republican revolution, however, this discourse was basically finished
as the mainstream Nationalist nation-building theory now included
Manchu people as one of the five main ethnic components of the
Chinese nation (Han, Manchu, Hui, Mongol, and Tibetan), represented by Sun Yet-sen’s concept of “five zu [ethnic group] under one
republic.” Although some historians point out that even after proposing the idea of “five zu under one republic,” the remnants of the “great
Hanism” are still discernable in Sun Yat-sen’s thoughts about nation
building, in which he believed that since the Han people was the overwhelming majority of the population, the Chinese nation could be seen
as “completely Han people, with the same blood, the same language,
the same religion, the same habit; completely one zu.” Sun’s approach
toward the “one republic” can also be described as assimilationist—
the non-Han peoples should be assimilated into the Han as much
as possible to form a Chinese nation (Huang 2017, pp. 144–145).
This idea contradicts the “five zu under one republic” (wuzu gonghe
264 Y. Cheng
五族共和) framework, but the contradiction has nevertheless reflected
the tension within Chinese nationalism—the principle of ethnic equality
and the reality of Hanism—since the beginning of the republican era.
Hanism is an ultra-ethnic supremacism and it comes close to racism in its way of essentializing differences in a condescending manner,
a kind of “mindset, the psychic structure, and the ideological practice” that assumes the Han people as representative of the Chinese. As
Kuan-Hsing Chen contended, it sees the relationship between Han and
non-Han as “We are equal, yet you are not quite human enough,” an
“unspoken political unconscious (Chen 2010, p. 261).” This Hanism
was later reinforced by the nationalist mythmaking of ancestry during the anti-Japanese war which enhanced the need for a more cohesive and uniting nationalist discourse. The myth of “descendants of the
Emperor Huang” (or in some cases “the descendants of the Emperors
Yan and Huang”) was established by both Nationalists and Communists
and a protocol of annual ritual in honor of the emperors was observed.
However, both emperors were clearly perceived as ancestors of the Han
people, especially the northern Han groups. This Han-ancestor worship concerned some intellectuals but had no impact on practice and
discourse. In the meantime, a condemnation of national traitors labeled those collaborators of the Japanese occupation army as Hanjian
(汉奸 traitors of the Han people), and such labeling also prompted
some scholars to propose replacing it with Huajian (华奸 traitors of
the Chinese people), but did nothing to affect the term’s popularity.
Hanjian remains the most common term in today’s Chinese nationalist discourse, not only to refer to those national traitors during the war
against Japan, but also for all other people deemed to be traitors of the
Chinese nation, past and present.
As a matter of fact, the history of the term Hanjian clearly shows the
development of its racial implications, as Wang Ke analyzed. The Qing
dynasty originally invented it to refer to the Han people who conspired
against the dynasty through secret activities. “Jian ” rendered the meaning of being devious, evil, and destructive. But the term also implied
that the Han people who accepted the Manchu as legitimate rulers of
the Chinese state as non-Hanjian, i.e., good subjects. In this way the
term’s ethnic or racial meaning is ambiguous but efficient: on the one
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 265
hand it set the Han people as the ethnic Other of the Manchu, but on
the other hand it admitted a unity of Han and Manchu under the Qing
court. In the later years of the dynasty, however, the term was used by
Han revolutionaries to condemn those Han people who did not want
to break with the Qing court, for example Kang Youwei, a leading figure among the conservative Han reformists who advocated a constitutional monarchy of the Qing rule. This term thus rendered a more
racial connotation. As Wang argued, “the revolutionaries held high the
flag of combating Hanjian, because they wanted to establish a standard
for ‘citizens’ who were Han people only. They believed that they must
apply a racist perspective in their dealing with the Qing dynasty, otherwise they were ‘Hanjian ’ themselves.” Such a Hanjian label essentialized
differences between “same zu ” and “different zu ” and between “same
race” and different “race.” It was a racial thinking of nation building
that identified “China” with the “Han state” (Wang, p. 70) and treated
political treason as racial betrayal.
Therefore, the use and popularity of Hanjian reifies an identity consciousness for a single-race nation state, or at least it was perceived so
by its users. As Wang examined, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, China’s
neighbors in East Asia who were also facing the issue of constructing a
national identity at the time, used words simply meaning national traitors without any ethnic or racial specifications. It should be said that
the term national traitors is universal when cases of national disloyalty
occur. A national traitor is labeled as a traitor of the interest of a particular ethnic or racial group—this is perhaps unique to China, because
even in similar single race-based (or perceived as such) nation states
such as Nazi Germany (said to be Aryan or Nordic nation by Nazi)
and militaristic Japan (Yamato people), there were no terms equivalent to Hanjian. Yet the irony is that unlike Korea, Mongolia, Japan,
or Germany, China is an ethnically much more diverse nation, judged
not only by numbers of minority groups but even more so by the size
of their lands. This irony projects the incongruity within the Chinese
nation state: nationalism and patriotism are popularly phrased in the
language that excludes—or simply ignores—the Chinese identity of
minority groups, despite the criticism it has received.
266 Y. Cheng
This Hanist notion of the Chinese nation as the representation of
its own cultural tradition and ethnic characteristics is quite discernible to foreign researchers. Anthropologist Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi’s
recent work specifies a set of markers of the Han-ness conceived by a
great number of interviewees or responders involved in her fieldwork.
Most of these markers are positive, progressive, and humane: modern,
open, historical, cultured, smart, industrious, assimilative, family and
interpersonal relationship-oriented, kindhearted and gentle, patriotic,
and politically leading. Joniak-Luthi believes that these perceived or
imagined markers “reproduce specific power relations that bind the Han
minzu, its ‘minority others,’ and the state” (Joniak-Luthi, pp. 49–51).
The center of these power relations is of course the Han-ness as the core
of the Chinese identity.
The Han Clothing Movement: A Ritual
Racialization of Han Identity
Since the early 2000s, a spontaneous and grassroots fashion movement of Han cultural renaissance has been developing in many Chinese
coastal and provincial cities. It is one of few nationwide, publically visible social movements since the crushing of the 1989 pro-democracy
movement under the government’s watchful eyes. The movement claims
that Han clothing began at the time of the Yellow Emperor and developed a distinctive style with cultural and spiritual values, but was forcefully and brutally replaced by Manchu culture after the mid-seventeenth
century when China was conquered by the Manchus. During the twentieth century, the Chinese dress style came under heavy Western influence. As a result, the clothing style in today’s Chinese society is mainly
a hybrid of two non-Han cultures for the majority of the population
but almost all non-Han groups have their officially recognized distinctive ethnic clothing. Now it’s time to rediscover the long-suppressed
and forgotten Han clothing. Borrowing Prasenjit Duara’s phrase regarding the tension between historical narrative and the nation state, this
effort might be called “rescuing Han distinctiveness from the formless
Zhonghuamingzu (Chinese nation).”
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 267
The majority of those participating in the movement are young intellectuals, professionals, and students who are organized in civil societies
and communicate through social media (Han, p. 39). The movement
centers on Han-style garments and advocates their national adoption as uniform Han clothing, especially for official occasions. It does
so through advertisements and presentations at various social gatherings and sells the garments in fashion stores. The movement closely
affiliates itself with other non-official initiatives advocating the revival
of traditional culture—Han culture, as they see it—through learning Confucian classics, practicing traditional calligraphy, painting, and
musical instruments. Fellowships and lectures inculcating traditional
female virtues are also opportunities for the movement to expand its
influence. Politically, the most meaningful public displays have been
held at historical sites that are particularly associated with the glory or
misery of the Han Chinese, such as the tomb of martyrs of a famous
anti-Manchu rebellion in Guangzhou (Carrico 2017, p. 137).
The movement fashions the features of Han clothing, including a
one-colored long gown with wide sleeves, with the collar on the left side
overlapping that on the right side, and with a gently tightened girdle
around the waist. There is a formal set (a one-piece long gown covering the whole body) and an informal set (two pieces, one for the upper
body and one for the lower, respectively, convenient for everyday labor).
It also requires a hair-wrapping and headdress style. Although the
basic design may seem not too different from the gown of an Anglican
Christian priest, the movement claims this clothing style is uniquely
East Asian and that it has been adopted with modifications in Korea
and Japan.
As a fashion movement, Han clothing has been sometimes derided and
dismissed by critics as a marketing strategy for a garment style that would
otherwise be hard to find a market for. However, those within the movement believe that such a clothing style not only stands for the moral values of Chinese humanism but also symbolizes the cosmic order detailed
in Chinese philosophy. As an intellectual historian at the School of
Confucianism of Renmin University sympathetically elaborates, the formal Han clothing set (the one-piece) best represents the spirit of Chinese
culture. It “symbolizes Oriental virtues such as harmony between heaven
268 Y. Cheng
and earth, bigheartedness, fairness, integrity, and tolerance for all things
in the world. The wide sleeves symbolize heavenly harmony; the right
angle created by the crossed collars represents the righteousness of earthly
integrity.” The same author also stresses the inherent correlation between
the fashion style and the assumed Han character, believed to be simple,
gentle, quiet, peaceful, graceful, and confident. Such a Han character has
unique Han aesthetics, perceived as unassuming, natural, subtle, and
elegant (Han 2012, p. 39). As so interpreted and adorned, its public
displays are often ceremonial. A fashion becomes a ritual.
The way the movement constructs, essentializes, and worships the
imagined Han-ness through a fashion style seems to be in affinity with
the Chinoiserie (“China spirit”) and “China elements” in the musical
trend analyzed in Chapter 2. The artistic trends of Chinoiserie (“China
spirit”) and “China elements” are similar efforts made to rediscover
and promote the assumed characteristics of Chinese aesthetics. Just as
Chinoiserie is believed to be only open to the Chinese mind, so is Han
clothing perceived to be the only clothing to reflect the Han spirit. Both
of them mystify and essentialize forms of an ethnic culture as eternally
unchanging and beings closed to foreign minds. This comes close to
cultural racism, an alternative racial thinking in a post-racist era.
While on the surface a racial thinking is clearly discernible, underneath the public display and interpretation a more explicitly racist
discourse has been revealed through close encounters with enthusiasts
of the movement. Kevin Carrico’s investigation of the Han Clothing
Movement through field research and interviews provides an insight
into the racial core of the movement. It is clear that for the most enthusiastic activists of the movement, a strong sense of Han racial superiority
underscores their fascination of and dedication to the assumed ethnic
clothing style. They would brush aside scholarly discussions debating
whether race exists as a meaningless question. They take for granted that
the purity of Han people is a self-evident biological fact since the Yellow
Emperor. Such a pure Han-ness set an absolute distinction between
the civilized Chinese and barbarians in history (Carrico 2017, p. 4).
Concerned with present-day threats to Han purity, they are deeply disturbed by the presence of African immigrants in China, especially in
Guangzhou, where the movement has gathered significant momentum.
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Racism and Its Agents in China 269
For them, Africans are the new barbarians who have endangered the
purity of the Han, a phenomenon that has periodically appeared
in Chinese history but now has a more pernicious basis: spreading
AIDS and taking Chinese women. Like many racists in China, these
Han clothing enthusiasts perceive the yellow Han as equal to white
Europeans and Americans, and the yellow and the white should be
bound by a racial unity in their relationships with other races. Carrico
tells stories about how the participants of the movement displayed blatant anti-African sentiments in front of him and expected him to have
similar opinions. Mr. Yu, a very active participant of the movement who
Carrico interviewed in Guangzhou, assumed that Carrico would hide a
racist view the same as his since Carrico is white but very likely would
remain tight-lipped for reasons of political correctness. While drinking
beer Yu attempted to entice Carrico to loosen his lips and air his true
opinions on the matter of race. Yu sighed to Carrico that “the America
of today will never again be able to become a purely white nation.” It is
such a gloomy prospect for a nation of a superior race that has spurred
Han clothing enthusiasts to take action to save their nation from similar
dangers (Carrico 2017, p. 6).
The racial superiority and inferiority can even be distinguished
when one listens to the musical instruments of the Han and the
African, one senior figure in Guangzhou’s Han Clothing Movement
told Carrico. According to her, in world history all races strive to
develop their culture except black people. The blacks in Africa spent
their time “shaking” and dancing in circles because they are simple
people and like percussion. “In this sense, they are similar to China’s
minorities and thus completely unlike the Han, who developed rituals and played more sophisticated and subtle instruments like the
guqin [古琴 a traditional Chinese string instrument often appearing
in scenes reflecting ancient literati life and therefore often used in ceremonial displays of Han clothing if music is needed].” She compared
guqing with drums, instruments that in her view are African. Drums,
she emphasized, are much louder and rougher than the guqin, a fact
she interpreted as reflecting the character of the two races that she was
comparing. This African “shaking music” was declared to be contagious as she went on to delineate the global route of the infection of
270 Y. Cheng
this racially inferior music: first it corrupted white American culture
in the form of shaking and rolling music (meaning rock and roll) and
now the whole world is shaking. But, as she so confidently assured
Carrico, such a cultural disease will fail to take over China because
Han people “do ritual” in their music (Carrico 2017, pp. 66–67). This
link between African music and primitiveness was actually established
decades ago in the case of nationalists and communists’ rejection of
jazz music (see Chapter 4) but now has found new application in the
Han Clothing Movement.
The Huanghan Racial Discourse and Non-Han
Racialized Ethnic Nationalism
The Han Clothing Movement is essentially part of a broader Hanist
movement to rediscover and promote Han consciousness through a form
of urban popular culture. It does not have direct political consequences,
despite the message of ethnic or racial superiority and cultural hegemony
hidden in its discourse. By comparison, the Huanghan (皇汉 meaning
imperial Han) is a more radically and directly political discourse. For this
reason it mainly expresses itself in social media and rarely in public or on
social occasions. Although the participants call it a social movement, in
this study I would like to treat it as a political discourse popular among
many sections of society. It is basically a restless intellectual and ideological undercurrent discernible behind many public discussions regarding
national, ethnic, and racial issues. Believing that official ethnic policies
are overly in favor of non-Han minorities at the cost of the Han majority, who had been victimized under the Qing rule and has never restored
its full rights since, this discourse directly targets the Han and Non-Han
relationship and advocates a fundamental change of state policies in legal
and social terms. It has been very much a narrative of modern Chinese
history in which the interest of the Han people has been compromised, their representation in the national stage has been diminished or
obscured (for example lacking their own ethnic clothing), and as a result
the vitality of the Chinese nation has been damaged. It is a discourse saturated with grievance and even revengefulness.
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 271
Judged by discussions aired on social media, the participants and
sympathizers of the Huanghan discourse to some extent overlap with
enthusiasts of the Han Clothing Movement. The movement comprises a wide range of Hanists whose agenda is more political than that
of the Han Clothing Movement. One big group consists of Guofeng
(国粉 the supporters of Guomingdang, the Nationalists) who believe
that the Nationalists who retreated to Taiwan in 1949 were true
nationalists while the Communists were for many decades a tool of
Soviet expansionism and later ruled China with a foreign ideology
that destroyed Chinese traditions. They even call the CCP “yellow
Russians (huanger 黄俄).” Some Huanghan people are anti-Japanese and
anti-Western (or any foreign country for any particular reason deemed
to be hostile to China). Others may be defenders of Han people’s
interest in particular geographic regions or public services in regards
to the distribution of economic or cultural resources. Most of all, they
are anti-Muslim and anti-black. There are still a great number of Han
intellectuals and professionals who do not necessarily have clear ideas
or standing regarding specific issues but in general or subconsciously
have a sense of Han cultural superiority. However, these categories still
cannot fully include the concerns addressed in Huanghan ideology. The
agenda of the discourse is so broad that it touches issues with profound
political, social, and cultural implications and even associates the discourse with many global debates.
An online statement (by an anonymous author) elaborates “seventeen key points of Huanghan.” It declares that the Chinese civilization is a Han civilization, and the Han is the leading ethnic group
of the nation. It negates the legitimacy of all non-Han dynasties in
Chinese history and claims that the Song and Ming dynasties that were
destroyed by Mongol and Manchu empires were the finest and true civilizations. The Huanghan advocates a national revival by rediscovering
and restoring the original Chinese civilization prior to the Qing dynasty
(1644–1911). It does not oppose the idea of democracy but regards
twentieth century China as being under Western influence and dominated by anti-traditionalism and reverse racism. It opposes introduction
and tolerance of foreign religious beliefs in China and cries out for a
revival of traditional Chinese beliefs. The Huanghan calls for intensive
272 Y. Cheng
studies of Han classics and Han culture, promotes Han clothing, Han
rituals, and Han customs, and insists that non-Han minorities are obligated to accept Han culture. It contends that the Han population must
be maintained permanently at over 90% of the Chinese population, and
advocates abandoning the “one-family one-child” policy for Han people
[this advocacy was made before the government allowed such changes
recently]. It urges putting an end to the administrative system of ethnic-minority autonomous regions as well as to relevant policies preferential to minority people at the cost of the Han people. Huanghan
opposes foreign immigration in China, but makes exceptions for foreign women marrying Chinese men and exceptional foreign experts settling in China. It opposes feminism, homosexuality, and abortion, and
calls for a return to traditional values and family relations with men and
women bound to their gender-specific obligations. It also opposes the
hypocritical animal rights movement, extremist environmental movements, and transgenic food. Internationally, Huanghan claims that all
religions originating from Abrahamic theological roots are the enemy
of the universalism of Chinese civilization and supports the export of
Chinese culture. It contends that the whole of East Asia and Southeast
Asia are China’s sphere of influence (Huanghanzhuyi 2011).
The statement is a broad political and social agenda. As far as the
issue of identity is concerned, to give one example, it involves subjects
as political as national identity and as private as sexual orientation. It
shows that those most politically motivated participants of the discussion understand the significance of their discourse as a national and
even global campaign against not only official policies but also the doctrines of political correctness that have been prevalent in the West but
have now also invaded China. They interpret the perceived plight of the
Han people in the context of not only a national crisis but also a global
social, cultural, and racial degeneration of nations or social groups who
created and have maintained civilizational and social normality and
convention. It is this broader connection that makes the Huanghan—or
more broadly, the Hanist—discourse different from many other nationalist rhetorics in China.
The term Huanghan has a long history in modern Chinese nationalism. Participants in the discourse are not only keenly aware of the
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 273
history but also regard their movement as a continuation of a century-long historical fight. The term was first made politically significant by
Zou Rong (1885–1905), a prominent anti-Qing revolutionary whose
The Revolutionary Army (1903) was the most passionate attack on the
Qing dynasty, arousing the Han people’s racial sentiment. In this political pamphlet he coined the term Huanghan to elevate the racially superior and majestic state of the Han people. In Chinese, the word yellow
and the word imperial are both pronounced huang, therefore Huanghan
perfectly conveys a meaning of a racially and socially superior group.
To summarize, the key to understanding the Han racism in Zou’s
ideas includes the points discussed below. First, the peoples of the
world were grouped into five races with some sub-races. The Han were
descendants of the Emperor Huang and ranked at the top of the yellow
race. The yellow race had some sub-races such as Miao, Manchu, and
Mongolian. Although Manchu was also included in the yellow race, the
difference between the Han and the Manchu was that the former was
“the imperial Han” (Huanghan ), clearly indicating an inner-racial superiority. Second, in the last hundred years, the population of the white
race had increased at the cost of significant decreases in all other races
(the yellow race, for example, fell from 800 to 500 million, according to
Zou). This demographic change certainly showed the working of social
Darwinist doctrine and sent a warning to China. Third, all dynastic
changes in China did not involve the destruction of the Chinese state
but just the replacement of imperial lineages, except the Yuan (Mongol)
replacing the Song and the Qing (Manchu) replacing the Ming. Fourth,
the republican revolution was also a racial revolution and those Han
people who were still supporting the Qing dynasty were traitors to their
ancestors (race) and therefore as despicable as animals. Fifth, had the
Manchus not been rulers of China then the Huanghan would have been
respected as the leaders of the global powers including Western countries and Japan.
Zou dedicated himself to the anti-Qing republican revolution and
died at an age of twenty, as a result of being incarcerated by the Qing
dynasty. His commitment to the revolution and his political influence
have made him a martyr of both the Nationalists and Communists.
From the perspective of the studies of race and racism in Chinese
274 Y. Cheng
nationalism, however, what should be discussed more is how his influence helped the construction of racial discourse in modern China. In
order to urge Han people to jettison their slavish mentality created
by the Qing dynasty’s political suppression and cultural indoctrination, Zou elevated the Han race to the equal of the whites, as he put
it, “the Yellow and the White races which are to be found on the globe
have been endowed by nature with intelligence and fighting capacity”
(Dikötter 2015, p. 74). In the meantime he denigrated the Manchu
to a non-Han, lesser racial status. However, his ideas were not just
a discourse strategy for a particular political goal but reflect his much
broader view on the natural and social worlds. He believed that the
competition and struggle between the white and the yellow, two superior races, made the world a battle ground of natural evolution that
would eventually decide who would be the winner or “the fittest.” This
idea of a race war was common among Chinese intellectuals of the time.
This understanding of the working of the universal law and its inevitable outcome apparently goes far beyond the agenda of a revolutionary propaganda at the time. In some Chinese historical narratives, Zou’s
role is comparable to Thomas Payne’s fervent but plain rhetoric in urging those Americans still hesitant to break from the British Empire in
1776. Zou, as the most passionate propagandist of the republican revolution, is particularly honored for his lucid and down-to-earth language
in persuading people of a republic in which equality and freedom would
prevail. However, the ideal of republicanism aside, what made Zou’s
discourse forceful and popular was an intense racial hatred of the Qing
and his utter contempt for Manchu’s Han collaborators and those hesitant to join the revolution whom he cursed as animals. A republicanism
with a strong racial sentiment is an inherent ideological discrepancy in
Chinese nationalism.
The most explicitly racist rhetoric in contemporary Huanghan discourse can address itself in a very devious manner. An essay titled “Does
Contemporary China Need Racism?” appeared on a major Huanghan
website several years ago. The essay was a revised and altered reproduction of an essay originally published on the website of the People’s
Daily. The title of the original essay was “Does Contemporary China
Need Nationalism?” written by Lin Zhibo, the director of Xin Hua
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 275
News Agency’s branch office in Gansu Province. A fervent Maoist and
a self-claimed “one hundred percent and unconditional patriot” who
only uses “made-in-China” consumer goods from his belt to his cell
phone and automobile, Lin has drawn significant public attention for
his defense of Mao’s China and his advocacy of a hardline nationalism
(Wan 2014). In 2012, he posted his article on his weibo (microblog)
to question the historical truthfulness of the death toll of the Great
Famine (1959–1962). Lin’s challenge was met with fierce attacks from
liberals and the public in general because the Great Famine is a fact
that even the party-state has never publically denied but only restricted
discussions on it. However, Lin was later appointed the Dean of the
School of Journalism of Lanzhou University, which showed the official
endorsement of him. Responding to criticism of rising Chinese nationalism in the early part of the century, Lin’s article “Does Contemporary
China Need Nationalism?” was published in 2004, in which he argued
that nationalism in contemporary China was far from as aggressive and as dangerous as Chinese liberals and the international media
claimed. He proposed that China needed more nationalism not only
for patriotic education but even more so for a minimum national
self-confidence.
Although a very radical and hardline nationalist, Lin did not
use the word race in his essay. However, the essay appeared on the
Huanghan website using his name as the author, apparently appealing
to Lin’s publicity. The essay replaced almost all terms such as nation,
national, nationalist, nationalism, and Chinese nation in Lin’s essay
with race, racial, racist, racism, and Chinese race with the title changed
to “Does Contemporary China Need Racism?” The essay also rephrased
or altered sentences and added words and sentences in some places to
make the whole essay read as more of a racial statement. With all the
replacements, rephrases, and additions, the essay read as a blatant racist declaration of China’s nationalism. Taking the opening paragraph as
an example: “Racism is a positive and motivating ideology and spiritual
force. Racism can inspire and arouse racial self-esteem and self-pride,
can call for, mobilize, and unite all forces and the strength of the race
to march towards the lofty ideal. For a racial state like China that is
on the road toward revival and greatness, it would be inconceivable to
276 Y. Cheng
overcome barriers and difficulties without a banner of racism.” It claims
that “race is the basic unit for the existence of human beings and a racial
state is the basic sovereign unit … racism is the foundation upon which
China can stand among the races of the world… . China’s revival is
the revival of the Chinese race” (Hanwang 2012). Among the additions made to the original essay, the most interesting concept is that of
a “Judeo-Anglo alliance” that is globally hegemonic and hostile to the
Chinese race.
Despite the essay retaining words and phrases in Lin’s text that soften
the tone, such as a moderate, a rational, or a peaceful racism (nationalism in Lin’s essay), the ghostwriter apparently felt that the Chinese
nationalism (or patriotism) addressed and defended in Lin’s essay was
just one step from Han racism—just a matter of changing the key word.
Or, in other words, Chinese nationalism and Han racism are two sets of
rhetoric differentiated only superficially by name and which coexist for
political expediency. They can easily be converted to each other without
a change of context. This attitude toward the difference between nationalism and racism is not a misunderstanding of the meanings of the
two concepts but just another example showing that for many Chinese
nationalists the two concepts have been inherently identical to each
other from the late Qing dynasty to the current rising China. The rights
of the yellow Han race and the demands of the Chinese nation are
essentially the same thing. Lin’s altered and racialized essay by unknown
but clearly shrewd racial nationalists addressed this sameness in a devious and pernicious way.
A timely response to the rising tide of Hanism in recent years as
described in this book, a critical Han studies scholarship has emerged
in the field of international China studies. Similar to critical racial
studies in the West that problematizes the majority racial or ethnic
groups’ assumed mainstream status, this scholarship continues some
earlier efforts to question the “commensuration of Han and Chinese.”
It exposes, cross-examines, and challenges the notion and the assumption that Han represents Chinese and Han-ness represents Chineseness.
It notices that contrary to the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries in which “China” and “Chinese” were used to name
the nation and the people, in recent decades “Han” has appeared
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Racism and Its Agents in China 277
either literarily or by implication to represent the same subjects.
Many descriptions of Chinese history have been “ethnicized as Han”
(Mullaney 2012, p. 5). The Chinese language is often called Hanyu
(汉语 Han language) instead of Zhongwen (中文 Chinese language).
This trend is actually more reflected in Hanban (汉办), the official
abbreviation of China’s state agency for promoting Chinese language
in foreign countries, which is combined with the Confucius Institute.
Han language and Han social philosophy therefore represent Chinese
language and culture internationally. Critical Han studies also points
to the vast and deep intra-Han divisions which make the constructed
nature of the Han even more obvious, and subsequently investigates the
political and nationalist agenda behind such an artificial ethnic categorization. The connection between that scholarship and this book is that
by highlighting the constructed racial features presumably shared by
all Chinese people (various non-Han regional and cultural groups are
lumped into the category of the Han), at least for the majority population, the concept of Chineseness seems less fugitive and intra-contradictory. However, such an expedient solution by appealing to a more
racialized identity is apparently inclusive and exclusive at once, which
on the one hand helps hold the majority population together, but on
the other hand can make disgruntled minorities even more alienated.
Racializing Non-Han Ethnic Nationalisms
In China, racialized ethnic and nationalistic discourses are not monopolized by Hanism. A result of a mix of imperial tradition and the Stalinist
concept of nationality, the PRC’s program on minzu shibi (minzu—or
roughly translated as ethnic—identification) between the 1950s and
the 1980s established a multi-ethnic national community in which
non-Han minorities were to various extents arbitrarily identified and
grouped to gain equal rights by law (Yang 2009). An unintended consequence of such a state-led identity construction was that it sowed the
seeds of essential thinking of ethnic and cultural differences. This essentialist thinking has developed and affected the discussions of cultural
elites of non-Han groups, often articulated in their critical interactions
278 Y. Cheng
or even clashes with Hanist discourses. Currently the most visible
form of such discourses and conflicts exists in various online discussion groups and platforms often joined by well-known intellectuals on
both sides. Due to the political sensitivity of such interactions (ethnic
relations in China), this phenomenon is rarely analyzed by scholars in
their publications. Yao Xingyong, a professor of ethnic minority literature and culture at Jinan University, is one of the few who take on this
phenomenon and is deeply concerned with its destructive consequences
to the unity and peace of a multi-ethnic Chinese nation. Grown up in
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in a Han Chinese migrant family, Yao has intimate life experience and knowledge about ethnicityrelated issues and has networked with intellectuals from both groups.
In 2012, in a rare instance, Yao published a rather long article under
the title “An Observation of Racial Ethnic Nationalism in Mainland
China” in a prestigeous journal of traditional culture studies. The article directly addressed the issue. Yao adopted the concept of race in the
discussions regarding ethnic identity in China. He used Zhongzu minzuzhuyi (种族民族主义) as the Chinese equivalent of “ethnonationalism” in English. However, the Chinese phrase includes the term 种
族 (zhongzu, race), which would find its equivalent in the English racial
nationalism or racial ethnic nationalism. As Yao explained, he used the
term race (zhongzu) to stress the “extremely exclusionist nature” of various ethnic nationalisms that are much more virulent than radical or
extremist nationalism (Yao 2012, p. 214). This Zhongzu minzuzhuyi constructs and idealizes ethnic groups as biologically pure, naturally born to
a homeland, culturally self-created, socially independent, and morally
innocent, but they often fall victims in the process of the making and
maintaining of China as a multi-ethnic country. Typical victimization
includes loss of land, purity of bloodline, language, cultural tradition,
historical memory, etc. This Zhongzu minzuzhuyi and its historical narratives reinforce the sense of alienation or even grievance among some
minority groups. The official call for national unity sounds ahistorical,
naïve, and weak in confronting such a spirited and emotionalized discourse of identity.
Yao’s approach is literary criticism that analyzes how cultural ethnonationalism has gradually developed into Zhongzu minzuzhuyi through
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 279
transitions of literary themes among ethnic minority writers, especially
poets, since the early 1980s. During the early 1980s, in an effort to
rectify extremist Maoist policies and pacify minority groups, the party-state allowed minority authors to express their genuine feelings and
sentiments in their writings. Unlike Han people who are well represented in national politics, the voices and images of non-Han people
are much more represented by literary and artistic elites. This literary
liberalization led to the emergence of a cultural ethnic nationalism that
promoted ethnic identity consciousness instead of lyrical praises of a
socialist multi-ethnic national family. The Zang and Yi poets formed a
leading group in this ethnic “root seeking” trend. Up to the end of the
1980s, “the imagination of heterogeneous, diverse, and localized ‘ethnic homes’ had basically replaced an imagination of a collective ‘nationstate,’” at least among elite ethnic writers (Yao, p. 219). During the
1990s, “as Han cultural nationalism and statist nationalism emerged
to integrate with the official ideology, more radical and exclusionist
racial and blood-related elements in ethnic nationalism addressed in
minority literature became more apparent and intensified” (Yao 2012,
p. 220). Meantime, postcolonial discourse was introduced to China
and was interpreted in the context of Han vs. non-Han relations, and
therefore reinforced the already essentialized and confrontational nature
of ethnonationalism. As a result, political ethnic nationalism became
inevitable.
Entering the new century, this trend of ethnonationalism has eventually become “radicalized to be exclusionist racial nationalism (Zhongzu
minzuzhuyi )” manifested on websites and other online platforms established as its home. An ideology originated in a literary liberalization
and used to address itself in poems, short stories, and prose has now
been articulated in sweeping but self-centered historical narratives. In
this virtual space people of different ethnic backgrounds network and
clash with each other. Despite disputes among themselves, it is often
possible to see ethnic minority commentators gang up together against
Han commentators. Verbal violence and the utmost contempt towards
each other often characterize such encounters. Right or wrong, true
or false, just or unjust, everything is determined expediently by one’s
ethnic identity. These online quarrels closely correspond to the ethnic
280 Y. Cheng
conflicts in real life as the relationship between Han and non-Han
groups deteriorates, further sentimentalizing those incidents. Deeply
concerned with this vicious undercurrent (since it is not heard in public
and official media or academic publications), Yao portrayed it as flocks
of “vultures hovering all over above China” (Yao 2012, p. 214).
The historical development of the discourse of ethnic minority from
cultural to racial as Yao portrayed and analyzed broadens our understanding of the discourse of race in China. As analyzed in Chapter 2,
during the late 1970s and the early 1980s, China, Taiwan, and Hong
Kong, were all experiencing an identity confusion or crisis. The emergence of racial discourse reflected in popular patriotic songs addressed
this identity anxiety or uncertainty. Now we can see that a similar phenomenon existed among non-Han ethnic groups, and it found literature and especially poetry as a suitable medium. In time, as the language
of Chinese nationalism became more racialized, this originally cultural
root-seeking literary movement among minority elites was also racialized and eventually emerged as a more popular and political discourse.
Apparently, the racial notions expressed in those patriotic songs, from
ancestor to blood, color, soil, and homeland, cannot excite the cultural elites of ethnic minorities. Also, ethnic minorities have their own
animal totems, but certainly not the Dragon. However, what ethnic
minorities Zhongzu minzuzhuyi, as Yao phrased, and the dominant Han
racism have in common is an essentialist attitude towards differences
between oneself and others. Han and non-Han racial thinking have historically evolved alongside each other and in reality they now coexist
and interact with each other.
“Baizuo ” (White Left): A Chinese Contribution
to the Global Racist Discourse
The discourse of race in China has been articulated in concepts and
terminologies mainly translated or paraphrased from the West (this is
not to say that the discourse of race has no cognitive or historical roots
in China, as argued in previous chapters). However, very recently, the
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invention and popularity of the term baizuo (白左 white left) shows
that China has joined the global discussion on race under its own initiative in response to an unfolding global situation. This section will first
introduce and analyze the origin, dissemination, and popularity of the
concept by engaging with existing discussions. It will then argue that
the creation and the popularity of the concept support the main thesis
of this book: discourse of race in China is by no means a purely foreign ideology. The term baizuo is significant in having a complex of
three implications: it perceives a yellow Han/white European/American
racial affinity in the global racial hierarchy; it identifies a racial Other
within by defining it as the traitor of the race, similar to Hanjian; and
the white left is part of a global ideological epidemic with a destructive
impact on developed civilizations including China. Chinese nationalists
must choose the side of the global anti-baizuo forces and take action
against its Chinese variant to defend China’s high civilizations. Last,
the section will engage critiques of political correctness in the West
addressed by political dissidents of the Soviet Union and racial nationalists in post-Soviet Russia, a similar sociopolitical setting as contemporary China, to analyze the deeper roots of the Chinese invention and
popularity of the concept of the baizuo.
As a derogatory social media buzzword labeling certain groups of
people, the term baizuo—sometimes also expressed as shabaitian (傻
白甜) meaning “stupid-white-sweet [left]”—entered online discussions
after 2015, largely as a Chinese response to developments in Europe
and the United States. It has been one of very few spontaneous and
widespread public discussions of an explicit political nature in China
since the 1990s. The discussion started before 2015 but has become
significantly more intense and forceful, and has involved more people
since then. The most urgent stimulus—or the one that triggered the
discussions—was the humanitarian crisis and socioeconomic situations
in Western Europe created by large numbers of refugees from North
African Islamic countries and the subsequent demographic changes.
Other less imminent but in the long run also consequential developments were the politics regarding rights and treatments of racial, ethnic,
religious, cultural, and gender-specific minorities (LGBT), and some
groups more protected by the social welfare system in Western society.
282 Y. Cheng
Environmentalism and the animal rights movements are often also part
of these discussions.
The term baizuo in general refers to those Westerners holding
left—or more precisely politically correct—opinions regarding all of
these issues. On many Chinese internet social media platforms, these
Westerners are described mainly as white people who are well-educated,
urban, and often either campus-based or media-based and whose lifestyle has a lot to do with a globalized network. These baizuo advocate
changes in government policies and popular attitude in favor of more
open immigration, a welfare state, multiculturalism, tolerance, and
legalization of all sexual orientations and non-traditional forms of family, along with stricter regulations on the protection of the environment
and animal rights. They are criticized as self-centered cultural and intellectual elites with a hypocritical humanitarian disposition. They only
care about and are even obsessed with political correctness for the sake
of satisfying their own sense of moral superiority. A historical connection between them and the more historical Western supremacists is that
both are arrogant—now more morally than politically—and ignorant
about the world, believing that they are the saviors of the non-West. The
danger of baizuo is that these people indulge themselves in a world of
ideas and have no sense of the real problems of the real world. Their
tolerance, generosity, and indulgence of all the negative trends and
non-contributing members of Western society have led to the undermining of their own civilization from inside rather than destroying
other civilizations from the outside.
As political confrontations between socially and culturally conservative and liberal sections of society have become more intense in
Western countries since 2015, the animosity to the baizuo in China
has become more inflamed and the term’s connotation can no longer
satisfy its opponents. A new and obscene term Shengmu biao (圣母婊
holy mother bitch) has therefore become popular. The term was originally just Shengmu (圣母 holy mother), sarcastically referring to female
members of the baizuo. At times it was also Shengmu ai (圣母癌 holy
mother cancer), to indicate its harmfulness to Western society. The users
of these terms believe that women are more uncompromising and thoroughgoing in holding their white left ideology. Therefore, as political
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 283
tensions rose higher in the West, the term for female baizuo in China
was accordingly changed from gender specific and socially slandered
to sexually insulting. Now, anti-baizuo people distain these women as
either super critical (an often-heard criticism of them in China is that
if they are truly sympathetic towards refugees, then why don’t they use
their own homes as shelters instead of demanding more public funds?),
or super naïve and stupid in that they even allow themselves to be victims of those rapist refugees. The repeated, sensationalized scenes and
alleged cases of northern European female baizuo being raped by black
and Islamic refugees have been spread gloatingly on social media but
mixed with laments for the self-destruction of a superior civilization by
its own political weakness and moral extravagance.
However, in 2016, major international developments including
Brexit, the upsurge of conservative politics in the European continent,
and especially Donald Trump’s winning in America’s presidential election, have whipped up anti-baizuo people in China as these political
changes have also done to similar groups elsewhere. Chinese opponents
of baizuo welcomed these developments as signs of an historical turning
point in the fight against the trend of political correctness for the sake
of preserving Western civilization, although the road ahead is still long.
At that moment, names of Western politicians deemed to be supportive
of political correctness for the sake of winning elections became prime
targets in anti-baizuo rhetoric. They were thought to be much more
dangerous than those obscure rank and file baizuo. Among those leaders
were Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Justin Trudeau, Hillary Clinton,
and, later on even George W. Bush was criticized as leaning towards
­baizuo. On the other hand, Trump was seen as the heroic champion
of the anti-baizuo movement and even as the savior of Western civilization. Since then, “chuanfen ” (川粉 the Chinese word for fanatical
supporters of Donald Trump) as a new political terminology has been
coined as the opposite of baizuo. It sarcastically refers to Trump’s supporters among Chinese people as well as Westerners.
The politically charged discussion on baizuo rapidly proliferated
across China. As a matter of fact, political correctness in today’s Chinese
social media is almost the same as political incorrectness in the West
(Qierjun 2015). However, baizuo and all related issues are problems of
284 Y. Cheng
the West. A casual observer may be confused by the extent of the empathy the Western anti-political correctness arguments and sentiments
have met with in Chinese society and wonder what experiential motivation lies behind such twisted correspondence. What is the connection
between a Western political phenomenon and China’s domestic situation? Why do so many Chinese have such a strong feeling about certain groups of Westerners who are apparently harmless to China and the
Chinese people? And exactly who are these angry Chinese people?
Several preliminary investigations have come to a number of conclusions. If an ideology is supposed to reflect the interest of a particular
group, baizuo ’s original popularity should be attributed to the overseas
Chinese community, largely in North America. Many members of the
community are first-generation immigrants who are either high-tech
professionals or owners of small businesses in the service industry. An
upbringing with a background lacking in an education of indiscriminately humanitarian equality creates a barrier in their mindset when it
comes to issues of social welfare and charity. A life experience of working
hard to earn a middle-class status in Western countries lead to a pride in
that success. Policies that in their eyes are overly protective of much less
competitive minorities are unfair to highly competitive ones. Born and
raised in a society where values and norms tend to be much more conformist, many of them are uncomfortable with and even hostile to concepts and practices originated from or legitimized by the general doctrine
of political correctness regarding religion, gender, sexuality, and family.
Also, in part because they grew up under the influence of developmentalism, which is perhaps much more doctrinarian and prevalent in China
than elsewhere, they are prone to the opinion that in a democratic society the environmental movement actually has an agenda serving electoral
politics and is often detrimental to economic development. For all of
these reasons, the term baizuo was therefore originally popular in various
forms of social media among groups of overseas Chinese, including on
websites created for overseas Chinese public discussions, IT professional
platforms, new immigrants BBS (online bulletin board), online discussion groups for Chinese students, etc (Qierjun 2015; Zhang 2017).
An information and discussion network of a global Chinese diaspora,
especially involving those in high-tech, middle-class, and professional
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Racism and Its Agents in China 285
sections apparently enables the discussion to find a more susceptible audience in China. A shared social Darwinist and elitist attitude
of these people—inside and outside China they all need to work hard
to earn and keep their status—constitutes a common ground of anti-­
baizuo ideology. As Chenchen Zhang puts it, it is a “brutal, demoralized
pragmatism in post-socialist China” that corresponds to the Western
idea of a “market-economy-cum-Hobbesian-society.” This socioeconomic justification is reinforced by a “general indifference towards race
issues, or even worse, with certain social Darwinist beliefs that some
races are superior to others, leading many mainland Chinese netizens
to dismiss struggles against structural discrimination as naïve, pretentious, or demanding of undeserved privileges” Zhang also postulates
that the government in general tolerates or even encourages discussions
portraying the West as divided and in decline, resulting from its democratic politics and liberal doctrines, or the so-called “universal values,” to
positively contrast with China’s superficially united strength under an
authoritarian regime. Even more likely, the party-state would like to see
the anti-Baizuo rhetoric describing Western politics in regard to human
rights as hypocritical and self-serving (Zhang 2017).
However, the anti-baizuo discourse does have more directly experiential native momentum than is reflected in overseas connections. The
refugee crisis in Europe and immigration policies in America that led
to the invention of the term provides a culturally twisted but politically expedient instrument for a complex of public opinions in China.
These Western problems have their Chinese equivalents: massive domestic migration from less-developed rural areas to urban centers, increasingly heightened ethnic and religious tensions largely between Han
and non-Han Islamic groups (a combination of the fear of terrorism,
Islamophobia, Han-ism and the local vs. migrant attitude has been
developed and intensified among urban Han Chinese for decades),
socially disadvantaged groups’ demand for a bigger stake in the social
welfare system, and growing conflict between the feminist and LGBT
movements and social and cultural conservatives. As a matter of fact,
given all of these contentious situations inside China, the term baizuo
has been increasingly used to refer to those Chinese whose position on
these debates is similar to that of the white left outside China. To this
286 Y. Cheng
label, the Chinese baizuo respond to their opponents with chuanfen, an
equally contemptuous label but one devoid of racial connotations. An
international ideological conflict has now been internalized largely with
an impact on the political opinions of intellectuals and middle-class sectors in China.
There are, however, Chinese critics whose disapproval of baizuo is less
passionate on the surface but more cogent due to their scholarly and
intellectual perspectives. They are largely public intellectuals scattered
in academic, media, and government institutions. Cong Riyun, a wellknown political scientist at the China University of Political Science and
Law, may be representative in this regard. Cong wrote an article published
in early 2018 entitled “The Plight of Western Civilization” (its online version, however, has a more interesting title: “Why the More Civilized, the
More Likely That the West Will Lose Its Competitive Power?”) Applying
Ronald F. Inglehart’s analysis that since the 1970s the West has entered a
post-materialist era, Cong argues that post-materialism has changed a significant number of Westerners’ political ideology, moral values, lifestyles,
and attitudes towards others. As he describes,
What concerns them the most are the ecological environment, race or
new immigrants, women’s rights and status, gender roles and sexual mores
(divorce, homosexuality, and sex outside marriage, etc.), freedom of choosing one’s own lifestyle (abortion, single-parent families, childbearing, religious attitude), public participation (public affairs, industrial enterprises,
NGOs), and world peace, etc. In the meantime, they have less respect for
authority, have become less concerned about safety and order, but care
more about the value of individual lives, harmonious interpersonal and
cross-ethnic relations, and a more tolerant attitude towards other nations,
religions, and lifestyles. They are more indifferent to family, religion, and
state, and they don’t care about distinctions between nations, countries,
races, and religions; their confidence from traditional mainstream culture
has been either lost or has diminished, and their willpower to defend their
country’s civilization is weak. (Cong 2018, pp. 36–37)
Cong believed that such a fundamental and wide-ranging change
had plunged the West into a deep crisis and even threatened the very
existence of Western civilization, a crisis perhaps equal to the one in
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Racism and Its Agents in China 287
which Roman civilization was destroyed by the barbarians. In this way
he approvingly quoted Trump’s speech made during his visit to Poland
(July 2017), “The fundamental question of our time is whether the
West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to
defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to
protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve
our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
(Trump 2017).
Cong did not refer to the term baizuo or political correctness in this
article, perhaps due to his caution regarding political sensitivity as well
as scholarly clarity associated with such a label or concept. Instead he
used post-materialism, a concept already used in Western intellectual
discussions. What he described certainly matches the profile of ­baizuo
in the anti-baizuo discourse. Unlike anti-baizuo fanatics in China, Cong
is more cool-headed and sophisticated. As one of those liberal and
pro-democratic public intellectuals, Cong is a student of Western philosophical and political tradition and has admired Western civilization—
and America in particular—for its values as a model for China’s political
and social reforms. For Chinese intellectuals like Cong, the turmoil and
anarchy in the West will be exploited by China’s authoritarian regime
for its own political agenda. His disapproval of post-materialism constitutes a more rational wing of China’s anti-baizuo discourse, although
the way he addressed his concern (why a more civilized West becomes
less competitive and even self-destructive) and the terminology he used
reveal a strong influence of social Darwinism and Western-centrism.
In this regard, Cong’s discourse exposes the limits of a racial liberalism
among Chinese intellectuals.
My argument is that from a historical perspective, the anti-­baizuo
rhetoric actually marks a new stage in the development of the discourses of race in China. First, the term has drawn significant international attention and has entered international political language with a
strong racial connotation. Today, a web search for the term will end up
returning numerous journalistic, scholarly, and ordinary web users’ discussions, explanations (from Wikipedia to the Urban Dictionary) and
audio-visual materials (on YouTube and others). The discussions of the
term have swiftly connected similar kinds of sociopolitical groups in
288 Y. Cheng
the West and China. Despite living under completely different political
­systems, people of baizuo and people of chuanfen in the West and in
China have found common values and a common mentality when facing similar social problems. The term and its connotation are a Chinese
contribution to the global discussion related to racial discourses.
Second, the term baizuo itself is an essentialized racial label. Just as
with many other racial labels, expressions, and epitaphs created and
popularized in the Chinese world, the creators and users of these words
are often numb to their racial connotations, even after such expressions have caused uproar among racial Others. Baizuo, literarily meaning white left, combines a racial feature with an ideological standing.
It is a uniquely Chinese way of conceiving of the relationship between
race and politics at a historical moment when race-related rhetoric and
concepts are more apparent, either consciously or subconsciously. In
the twentieth century, numerous fellow travelers or political pilgrims
in Western countries were drawn to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’ China,
and Castro’s Cuba, and many of them were long-time apologists and
defenders of these regimes. There were also left-oriented politicians
in the West as well, for example social democrats. The overwhelming
majority of these people were white, or even “whiter” (and also more
“left”) than many individuals among baizuo today. However, they have
been called “xifang zuopai ” (西方左派 Western left) by the Chinese
ever since, and never the white left. I argue that the plausible (and
not exclusive) reason for racializing a political faction is that in today’s
China, historically inherited racial consciousness has been sharpened
to enhance political discussions even without an awareness of its racial
nature.
Third, the anti-baizuo rhetoric inherits and continues the racial
discourse constructed in the late Qing dynasty. In that discourse, as
previously analyzed, the yellow race and white race were at the top
of the global racial hierarchy. The white race was leading and the yellow race was being left behind but had the potential to catch up. The
worst case scenario of the competition between these two superior
races would be a race war, but on the other hand, the Chinese discourse sincerely admired the white race as a stronger version of itself
in the mirror. Alerted by the racial and cultural damage that Western
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 289
colonization had brought to many non-Western societies, Liang
Qichao, however, during his visit to America, was concerned with the
demographic statistic in America showing a much higher birth rate
among non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants  and other minorities. He consoled himself with the thought that those people would be marginalized in an industrialized society anyway, therefore such a negative
demographic trend might not constitute a serious threat to the future
of Western civilization.
One hundred years later, Liang’s worry was revived among antibaizuo people who warned of a danger that “blacks and Muslims will
take over Europe.” If one tells these people that in world history only
Europeans and their descendants have populated and succeeded in
establishing colonies in the entire American continent and many
parts of the Pacific, they would very much likely justify that population replacement with social Darwinist tenants and civilizing-mission
arguments. Numerous incidents and discussions have revealed a racial
preference of whites to non-whites in Chinese society. The anti-baizuo
discourse, however, culminates this “of the same kind” racial mindset by
openly expressing apocalyptic anxiety about Western civilization being
destroyed by the degeneration and bastardization of its population.
The discourse identifies the same epidemic that endangers the superior
Western and Chinese civilizations from within: the lack of strong political will and ethical indifference to uphold social Darwinist doctrines.
Now is the time for anti-baizuo people in China and the West to unite
as the defenders of fine races and superior civilizations.
From this perspective, the racial implication of baizuo is precisely
the same as inferred in the term Hanjian. Both of them identify a racial
Other within by defining it as a traitor to the race. Both of them assume
a pure racial Self that is entitled to populate the whole national space
while ignoring the rights, claims, and even existence of racial Others.
Both of them express an extremely spiteful and hateful sentiment
against what they see as race traitors. The anti-baizuo discourse therefore not only reifies the sense of a racial affinity between the yellow and
the white, but also reveals a structural parallel between the Han racism
against non-Han peoples and the yellow race against non-yellow and
non-white races.
290 Y. Cheng
In this regard, the history teacher Yuan Tengfei’s definition of
Americans is illustrative. In a lecture on the rise of the West, Yuan
said that there were people of all colors in America today, but only the
“WASPs” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) are “zhengzongde meiguoren ” (正宗的美国人 true or pure Americans). Yuan used English in
spelling out these words, and explained them one by one to impress his
students. Everyone else by definition is not a true American. He even
disqualified Barack Obama from his true or pure Americans, saying
that he was black and non-Anglo-Saxon, and perhaps only partially
qualified as a protestant. The lecture video shows the Chinese students
in the classroom laugh as he racially derided Obama. Yuan then said
that George W. Bush’s family typifies WASPs (Yuan2, 2016). For many
Chinese pro-democracy and liberal intellectuals, it is so self-evident that
the West belongs to the white; the West and the white are essentially the
same thing. All others are Others.
The anti-baizuo discourse therefore sheds more light on our understanding of Chinese nationalism by revealing its hidden contradiction
regarding Sino-Western relations. Politically, many adherents of this
nationalism is anti-Western, but racially they are pro-Western, especially
when it comes to global issues involving race and race-related religious,
demographic, and cultural problems. The rise of a strong anti-Western
Chinese nationalism has marked China’s public discussions of international affairs since the 1990s, but the anti-baizuo rhetoric has for the
first time revealed a strong and even emotional pro-Western sentiment among many Chinese nationalists. The phenomenon poses an
interesting question to international China specialists: if the Chinese
nationalists regard a powerful and monolithic West as the main threat
to China’s rise, then why do so many of them oppose a sociopolitical
development that, in their opinion, has significantly divided and weakened Western society? Why don’t they welcome those politically suicidal
policies of their national enemy? The answer can be found in the longignored racial dimension of the Chinese nationalism which originally
admired the white race in the nineteenth century social Darwinist context and now regards the same race as ally at the level of the global relations between civilizations. This, of course, is not to underestimate the
extent of the conflict of national interests as well as political ideologies
5
Racism and Its Agents in China 291
between China and the West, but to stress the more complex nature of
Chinese nationalism when it comes to the issue of race.
There are some intriguing parallels between the Chinese anti-­baizuo
discourse and Russian racist nationalism narrated and analyzed in
Nikolay Zakharov’s Race and Racism in Russia. The similar concern
about the assumed corrosive effect that political correctness brought
to Western civilization appeared much earlier among former Soviet
and then Russian intellectuals, who expressed confusion and criticism of that aspect of Western political culture. Victor Kozlov, a leading scholar of nationalism and ethnic problems in the Soviet Union
and later the Russian Federation, expressed his “clearly ambivalent
feelings” and sarcasm when he was visiting an English family in the
early 1980s. The wife was a white professor and the husband was “a
Negro engineer from the West Indies.” The couple had three children
who “demonstrated the combination of a clear dominance of negroid
characteristics with an English upbringing.” Although in principle
Kozlov back then was a self-claimed advocate of internationalism and
ethnic integration, his tone changed when in reality he encountered
such practice. Later, Kozlov developed more explicitly scientific racist thinking—anti-scientific humanism—to attack theories supporting intellectual equality between different racial and ethnic groups
(Zakharov 2015, pp. 88–89).
What was expressed or implied in Kozlov’s anti-scientific humanism
was precisely what anti-baizuo people would like to say but they failed
to find a phrase that is theoretically more nuanced but makes more
sense, just as with the concept of post-materialism. Instead they came
up with a vulgar and explicitly racialized term. Anti-scientific humanism, by comparison, effectively addresses the argument that Westerners
who are committed to all sorts of political correctness are blind to naturally and plainly basic rules that have established orders of the physical
as well as human world. One can even postulate that such an argument
touches a subtle tension within the Enlightenment tradition between
scientism and humanism. For Kozlov, this anti-scientific humanism
would eventually lead to the decline of Western civilization, an apocalyptic observation echoed among China’s anti-baizuo people some thirty
years later.
292 Y. Cheng
More broadly, post-Soviet Russian racial nationalism resembles
­ost-Mao Chinese racial nationalism in many ways, as both nations
p
experience identity anxiety and crisis in their respective social transformations. Notably both of them claim the dominant and exclusive ethnic
and cultural characteristics of the ruling ethnic group (Russians in Russia
and Han in China) as the defining features of the multi-ethnic nation.
For the most radical nationalists, it is bloodline rather than culture that
defines a Russian and a Han individual. Both of them regard migrants
of non-majority ethnic groups (Muslins from the Caucasus and Central
Asia in the Russian case and from Western China in the Chinese case) as
the potent threat to the stability of the nation. Both of them have constructed self-centered civilizational discourses (Eurasianism in Russia and
“Tianxia”—all under Heaven—in China) that elevate the international
status of each other’s national prestige while a racial discourse gradually
develops and emerges as a more cohesive and less sophisticated nationalist
ideology. However, perhaps the most interesting parallel is a twisted racist
attitude towards the West. Russian racists enlist themselves as European
whites and are shocked to see how a “white Europe” has degenerated into
a bastardized continent, as Zakharov describes how Russian racial nationalists felt disappointed by not seeing many “pure” Northern Europeans
when visiting Sweden during the 1990s. From the racist point of view,
Russia’s enemy is not the West, but the non-West. It reflects precisely the
discrepancy between political nationalism and racial nationalism among
many Chinese racial nationalists. No matter how much they blame the
West for their nationalist frustration, they all bemoan the fact that the
West is no longer white and they have become more focused in their
domestic confrontations with their respective ethnic or racial Others.
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6
The “Red DNA”: How Discourses
of Class and Race Integrate
An examination of the discourses of race in contemporary China is
like a review of the history of classical racism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, although approaches and concepts created in the
post-racial era by critical race studies also matter. Léon Poliakov, in
his classical studies of the history of racism in Europe, shows how all
major European nations created their racial myths of the Self to answer
“Where do I come from and who am I?”, two questions that have constantly bothered people since the beginning of civilization. In this way
history is simultaneously anthropology. Without a conscious collaboration, “history, geography, comparative religion, and ethnography,
each shows that every society claims a genealogy, a point of origin.” In
ancient times, the social function of such a myth of origin “is to make
explicit those obscure emotional forces which determine the hostilities
or alliances between clans and tribes. Under a medley of ideological disguises, these forces are still operative in our industrial society, and the
Nazis attempted to appropriate them when they invoked ‘primeval intuitions of blood and soil’” (Poliakov 1971, p. 3).
A more subtle way to spell out this mythical notion of origin in
the time of empire and nation states is to stress national uniqueness.
© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4_6
295
296 Y. Cheng
In modern world history, established and rising (or revisionist) powers often emerged to claim such a uniqueness and backed that claim
with more unequivocal racial theories. In this way racism and the
perception of national character, which is often portrayed as cultural
and social features, are essentially interwoven. George L. Mosse, a
sociologist and historian of modern Europe, once noticed this correlation: “If nations identified a national character in a consistent manner, then nationalism and racism drew much closer together” (Mosse
1995, p. 167). Michael Weiner, a historian of modern Japan, had the
same observation, stating that “[w]hen a nation is assumed to possess
a set of unique characteristics which make it a nation and distinguish
it from other populations, these same characteristics may be used as
‘racial’ boundary markers. In these circumstances, rather than existing
as independent categories, ‘race’ and ‘nation’ may come together ideologically” (Weiner 1996, p. 96).
A contemporary example of such an interwoven complex of national
character and racial lineage can be found in post-Soviet Russia, which
is more relevant to the Chinese case in its historical background and
current circumstance. As in post-Mao China, the quest for a national
and individual Self has gripped the minds of millions in Russia, especially intellectuals, reflecting itself in various discussions regarding
Russianness, just as in discussions on Chineseness in China. After
more than two decades of theoretical evolution, for some influential
and radical Russian nationalists, the concept of Russianness has completed its process from being national and ethnic, to being racial. This
Russianness racializes ethnic differences and manifests itself in a presumed “biological feature that is passed down genetically, like the color
of one’s eyes,” or a mysterious link between the “Russian genetics” and
the “Russian landscape.” Russian history is therefore the “realization
of Russianness—a concept of an initial sameness of the Russian people that is biological in its essence,” or the formation of “a racial state
of mind.” This racialized Russianness has become the psychological basis for anti-immigrant xenophobia, especially against those from
non-Russian Islamic Caucasian regions, claiming that the Russianness
cannot be assimilated by those essentially non-Russians. A strong feeling of the danger of racial degeneration in Russia is associated with an
6
The “Red DNA”: How Discourses of Class and Race Integrate 297
apprehension of the racial hybridization of the West (Zakharov 2015,
pp. 89–91). All of these, especially the central notion of an essential
“national character” historicized in a narrative with racial connotations,
can find their parallels in China.
Identifying the nation with essentialized perceptions of culture
and history, let alone with explicit biological and physical (real or
imagined) features of a particular ethnic group, from a historical perspective, has inevitably led to racial nationalism in many countries. It
is a rather common phenomenon among many multi-ethnic nation
states, although we tend to only remember the most notorious cases and
ignore the lesser ones in which such a racism is stabilized or contained
by other sociopolitical factors and contingencies. In this sense, every
multi-ethnic nation lives on carrying this lesion in its social body.
How does a society that claims communism as its official ideology
embrace a racialized nationalism so naturally and smoothly, given the
fact that communists everywhere not only condemn racism but also
assert their ideology as a universalism detached from any group-specific
cultural and historical, let alone biological and physical, traits? Very few
theorists have engaged this question. Ian Law, in his Red Racism, argues
that sharing with the Western society a “solid” modernity with “grand
narratives and a rational belief in progress through highly controlled
use of technology, bureaucracy, and military power,” the communist
regimes also have their “racialized hierarchies” and “racialized internal
enemies.” “The complacency, arrogance and hypocrisy of these regimes
declaring themselves immune to racism has for too long been hidden
from scrutiny” (Law 2012, p. 157). The analysis of global racialization
ought to take these regimes into consideration.
What I tend to speculate in this regard is a structural similarity
between classism and racism in their logics and social functions: both
of them essentialize people’s social belongings and accordingly consign
them identities, and this type of given identity becomes the basis of
politics of differentiation, the fundamental instrument played by both
communists and racists in manipulating the population and maintaining their regimes. Neither a class-based nor race-defined political
system would allow citizens to freely claim their social identities, nor
would they treat people of different class origins or racial stocks equally.
298 Y. Cheng
Metaphysically, this similarity of identity politics stems from the “total”
nature of the two “isms”: both Marxist classism and racialism (assisted
by social Darwinism) promise an all-encompassing interpretation of not
only the human world but also the natural world. As a matter of fact, in
both isms, the law that governs society is determined by or derived from
the law that sets order for nature and the universe. It is for this reason
that both racist and classist regimes like to talk about philosophy and
science, such as we read in Li Changchun’s argument that the Chinese
are a more thoroughly evolved human species, based on his command
of Marxist dialectical materialism and Darwinist natural selection. The
similar hodgepodge cooked by philosophasters and pseudoscientists has
been on the menu of racial theories for a long time, from the antebellum American south to the Germany of the 1930s.
Hannah Arendt sensed this similarity between classism and racism during the high tide of Nazism and Stalinism. In her famous article “Racial Thinking before Racism,” Arendt argued that among “free
opinions which were allowed to enter into free competition during the
era of liberalism,” only class-thinking and racial-thinking grew into
“full-fledged ideologies,” which “essentially defeated all others.” What
differentiates an ideology from a free opinion is the way it persuades
people: “it claims to possess either the key of history, or the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.” Therefore one
“interprets history as an economic struggle of classes,” and the other
“interprets history as a natural fight of races.” Both of them had “tremendous power of persuasion” (Arendt 1944, pp. 38–39). Such a power
of persuasion is not only intellectual but even more political and action-­
oriented, drawing strength from people’s indoctrinated sense of identity
inclusion and exclusion.
China has a long history of various forms of social distinctions and
discriminations for certain groups of society based on the lineage that
prepared the ground for racial categories. However, it was under the
Maoist regime that such an inheritance-based population categorization was extended to cover the entire society. In this sense it was a
modern-day caste system based on class origin and regimented through
fixed occupational and residential status. During the early stages of the
Cultural Revolution in which class-based identity literarily determined
6
The “Red DNA”: How Discourses of Class and Race Integrate 299
a person’s fortune or misfortune, or life or death in many cases,
xuetonglun (血统论 blood lineage theory), created and advocated by
children of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites, unequivocally
revealed the continuation of the tradition from imperial China. This
theory held that the “red blood” these children inherited entitled them
political privileges to carry on their parents’ political cause—the country
is thus “ours.” Red aristocracy would be a more appropriate term than
just classism in their case. Society-wide, this type of essentialist thinking can easily slip from classism into racism, or from the political to
the biological, cultural, and social, with some gray and nuanced middle
ground assigning people fixed social identities. The significant possibility of social mobility in contemporary China foregrounds the tension
between the changing reality and the enduring and insidious legacy of
this essentialist thinking, which is now used to either defend or reject
the socioeconomic demands of various sectors, for example the invention of the category of “low-end population” for those migrant workers.
Since 2012, the salient and uncanny rhetoric of “red DNA” (红色
基因) or a “red-blood lineage” (红色血脉) that sounds suspiciously
racial has been used in official propaganda to stress the urgent need to
recruit party-state loyalists. These phrases were invented and dictated by
Xi Jinping himself, who became the leader of the party-state in 2012.
Xi has made this rhetoric idiosyncratic of his request for a more forceful
ideological indoctrination by addressing to the army, the party’s cadres,
and even elementary school students (Xi 2016, 2017). The most bizarre
example being “the red gene [in your blood] needs to be verified” (Xi
2018). The CCP’s Central Military Committee issued an instruction
in June 2018 titled “Outline Regarding the Implementation of the Red
DNA Inheritance” to the Chinese army (CCPCMC 2018). A member of the generation of the red aristocracy himself—otherwise called
Princelings by China observers,1 Xi has displayed a much stronger sense
of legitimacy crisis, both of his own as the party’s boss and his party’s as
1Xi
Zhongxun (1903–2002), Xi’s father, was ranked as one of the top CCP leaders. Many in
China believe that he was politically more open-minded and intellectually more enlightened than
his son.
300 Y. Cheng
the ruling aristocracy of the nation. The red DNA discourse epitomizes
how class-based essentialist thinking is now appropriating notions in
contemporary science to explain what biologically determines people’s
social identities. Linking this red DNA discourse to his claim that “We
inherit and continue to have black hair and yellow skin; we call ourselves Descendants of the Dragon.” Xi’s discourse shows how class-based
and race-based essentialist thinking integrate and spread pervasively and
profoundly among political elites of the CCP, interpreting national and
political identities at the same time. Seemingly articulated as a metaphorical expression, the connotations of this red DNA theory ought to
be read literally, and are reflective of an “epistemological foundation” of
the CCP elite’s views on the party-state’s “Order of Things,” to borrow
Kuan-Hsing Chen’s phrase in analyzing the Chinese Empire’s world
view.
In fact, the design of the national flag of the PRC to some extent
already reifies the idea of an integration of class and race. The flag places
a larger star, symbolizing the leadership of the communist party at the
left top corner, surrounded by four smaller stars, representing the working class, peasantry class, urban petite bourgeoisie, and national capitalists respectively (the inclusion of the last two classes reflects the CCP’s
social classification during the late 1940s and early 1950s). Against a
bright-red background (symbolizing revolution), all the stars are colored
a radiant yellow. Zeng Liansong, the designer and winner of a national
competition with the design in 1950, explained the five stars as signifiers of the party and the social classes included in the concept of “the
Chinese people,” and then said that he colored them with yellow because
the color represented the “Chinese nation [Zhonghua minzu] as a people
of yellow race” (Zhejiang Daily 2009). Born to a family of gentry literati
but joining the communist revolution, Zeng’s concept of the racial taxonomy of the Chinese clearly shows the enduring influence of the discourse of race constructed half a century ago. Zeng must have explained
this in his submission for the national competition, since the competition certainly required designers to give details about their designs.
From more than three thousand submissions, Zeng’s was originally
ranked thirty-second, but Mao himself picked it (Zhejiang Daily 2009).
6
The “Red DNA”: How Discourses of Class and Race Integrate 301
Red and yellow have been adopted as predominant colors in the designs
of flags and emblems of major political organizations in China: the
party, the army, the Youth League of China, and the Young Pioneers.2
In concluding this research, while facing myriads of analyses and
interpretations of race and racism, Arendt’s notion of racism’s “power
of persuasion” seems to be a straightforward and expedient analytical
framework for interpreting the strength and pervasiveness of the discourses of race in contemporary China. From CCP leaders at the top to
cultural and intellectual elites in the middle and to ordinary citizens at
the bottom, from Han to non-Han, from domestic populace to international diaspora, identity politics that constructs a blood-and-soilbased, ancestor-and-lineage determined, culturally pure national and
ethnic Self distinguished by color and other physical features enjoys significant popularity. An essentialist thinking facilitates an epistemological foundation for the sense of inclusion and exclusion in the struggle
for survival, as grand as the legitimacy of the party-state and as small
as an individual’s opportunity to share society’s resources. However, it
is apparently not an intellectual or cultural problem in the first place.
Rather, it reflects a society divided and segregated by political and socioeconomic problems, many of which cannot be addressed freely and
directly in a nondemocratic system and are therefore often aired in a
twisted, racialized manner.
Is racism originally and still uniquely a Western invention that has
been globalized among non-Western societies through Western ideological and cultural infiltration? Today’s international studies of global
2As
a matter of fact, the Soviet Union had used yellow in its most important flags and emblems,
since yellow sharpens red, making it seem brighter. It was very likely that originally, in the 1930s,
the CCP simply adopted the color from the Soviet Union for its own political symbolism, just as
they named their regional revolutionary governments in China, “Soviet governments.” However,
as circumstances changed, yellow was also perceived as the color of the race among other things
(mainly light and prosperity) on the national flag and other political symbols. An online search
for the question regarding the predominant adoption of the yellow color as a political symbol will
find no answer referring to Soviet influence and many would associate it with the color or the
Chinese as a race. In 2008, when Beijing hosted the Olympics, red and yellow adorned propaganda posters, billboards, and advertisements.
302 Y. Cheng
racialization have been more open minded in regards to this question.
A quick look at the reading list for students engaged in such studies often finds very few or even no titles from China, East Asia, or
Southeast Asia, but in media and cultural studies or ethnographic
research, there are many more examples of such work. My research
shows a contemporary non-Western racial discourse that originally took
form in the encounter between a strong native racial ethnocentrism
with Western racism around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (already analyzed by other scholars) but has since evolved
more spontaneously and inventively, especially in the post-Mao era as
China has risen. It has become a native ideology. Today, it casts a racial
image in national and ethnic identities domestically, and believes that
only the white and the yellow are creators and upholders of human
civilization internationally. It is a historically dialectical development
between national identity politics of the late nineteenth and early
twenty-first centuries.
I therefore argue that since the theoretical elaboration, conceptual
sophistication, idiomatic richness, and particularly the popular appeal
of such a racial discourse demonstrates the strength of native sources
and dynamics, it has established itself as an independent variation rather
than an imitation or reflection of Western racism in the racialization of
the world. Without this understanding, an analysis of contemporary
Chinese nationalism is flawed, and the perception of global racialization
misses an important point in identifying the roots, the universality, the
vitality, and the adaptability of racism.
What is the future of such a racial nationalist discourse in Chinese
nationalist politics? One very likely scenario is that it will remain part
of the nation’s complex ideological spectrum, balanced in real-life politics by various competing forces and contingencies. Many societies
have lived in such a state and with such a tension. Another possibility is
that it becomes more virulent at times when the circumstances become
more conducive. The main variable, as previous chapters have shown,
is to what extent the party state’s political agenda continues or steps up
efforts in using racial nationalism as the most effective tool in maintaining its domestic control and expanding its international influence.
As an African-American scholar commented regarding anti-black racial
6
The “Red DNA”: How Discourses of Class and Race Integrate 303
bias in the Chinese media, “The truth is that within China, the CCP’s
post-Mao ideological adhesive of nationalism is patently racialist. This
episode goes beyond personal prejudice and anti-African sentiment and
reflects a larger theme in the way the CCP maintains control—the ideology of race-based nationalism and xenophobia” (Stultz 2017).
If such a discourse played itself out in nastier ways, some nonHan ethnic groups would certainly become sacrificial lambs. However,
the likelihood of such a prospect is not limited to the domestic arena.
Since the CCP has succeeded in constructing a blood-and-ancestorbased Chineseness (or a “Chinese heart”) in its global propaganda and
mobilization that openly disregards foreign nationality, citizenship,
or immigration status, as analyzed in more detail in Chapter 2 in particular, a China-focused international crisis would inevitably implicate
millions of overseas Chinese. As a matter of fact, recent developments
regarding Chinese-American scientists and technicians in the US
under the Trump administration have already sent a strong message to
Chinese-Americans. Given the history of anti-Chinese racial politics
from North America to Southeast Asia, the Chinese party-state’s strategy for a global blood-based Chineseness will perfectly facilitate such an
anti-Chinese racism. Racial nationalism preys not only on Others, but
often eventually victimizes the members of its own blood community.
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Index
A
Abu El-Haj, Nadia 146, 151
Adie, W.A.C. 191
Adorno, T. 67
Africa 13, 14, 22, 23, 105, 115, 116,
118–120, 129, 143, 163–166,
168, 174, 178–180, 189,
191–193, 196, 197, 199–201,
203–214, 216, 217, 220–232,
241, 245, 262, 269
African-Americans 9, 49, 185–188,
190, 200, 204, 244, 302
Africans 22, 115, 119, 134, 135,
143, 161–164, 166, 167, 169,
171–174, 178–180, 185, 188,
189, 191–212, 214–218,
220–226, 228–232, 242, 244,
246, 268, 269
African students 191–200, 218
Africa-originated Chinese (AOC) 22,
111, 116, 118, 120–122, 124,
128, 131, 132, 135, 138–145
Afrophobia 200
anti-black racism 19, 166, 193
anti-Qing Hanist racism 16
anti-Qing republican revolution 15,
273
Antisemitism 19
Applegate, Celia 87
Arendt, Hannah 298, 301
Aristotle 228, 230, 231
Aryan race 150
assimilationist logics 10, 12, 182
B
Baranovitch, Nimrod 35
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Y. Cheng, Discourses of Race and Rising China, Mapping Global Racisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05357-4
327
328 Index
Black, Davidson 步达生 104, 144
Bodomo, Adams 179
Burma Road (or Ledo-Kunming
Road) 186, 187, 190
Burrows, Edward 216
C
Campus Folk Song 校园歌曲 38,
39, 44
campus racism 24, 198–200, 212,
213
Cantopop 粤语流行歌曲 44, 45
Carrico, Kevin 4, 267–270
Caspari, Rachel 121, 122, 139, 145
Changan 长安 168
Cheng, Guofu 程国赋 172
Cheng, Yinghong 138
Chen, Kuan-Hsing 陈光兴 11, 12,
16, 69, 264, 300
Chen, Liming 陈黎明 74
Chen, Xuelian 陈雪莲 240
Chiang Kai-shek 蒋介石 7, 187
China Central Television (CCTV 央
视) 34, 39, 41, 46, 51, 54–56,
70, 72, 75, 100, 102, 120,
123, 143, 162, 221, 222, 224,
231, 239, 241
China National Image Film 中国国
家形象宣传片 239
China-originated Chinese (COC)
22, 100, 103, 111, 116–121,
124, 127–129, 131, 132,
138–144, 149–151
Chinese character 56, 57, 61, 74,
141, 219, 220
Chinese consciousness 31
Chinese exceptionalism 13, 15
Chinese Exclusion Act, the 19
Chinese indentured labor in Cuba
183, 201
Chinese nationalism 1, 3, 6, 7, 10,
16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 35, 42, 44,
66, 74, 77, 89, 94, 95, 100,
103–105, 107, 109, 110, 112,
122, 123, 128, 140, 142, 146,
163, 165, 189, 200, 202, 206,
214, 224, 227, 248, 260–264,
272–276, 280, 290, 291, 302
Chineseness 20–22, 24, 32, 34, 38,
41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 60, 61, 64,
65, 68, 70–72, 77, 80, 87, 88,
90, 103, 104, 112, 151, 164,
276, 277, 296, 303
Chinese school of elementary particle
physics 138
Chow, Yiu Fai 60–63
Chu, Jiayou 储嘉佑 113–115, 117,
120, 123
Circassian beauties 170
Cong, Riyun 丛日云 286, 287
critical Han studies 276, 277
Cuba 10, 183–185, 288
Cui Sheng 崔生 175
Cultural Revolution 28, 29, 35–37,
46, 55, 59, 128, 161, 192,
196, 198, 256, 298
D
darker-skinned 10, 23, 166, 168,
172–174, 178, 179, 187, 220,
231, 242, 243
de-imperialization 12
Deng Lijun or Terasa Teng 邓丽君
37
Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 30, 37, 47,
56
Index 329
Department of Propaganda of the
Chinese Communist Party’s
Central Committee (DPCCP)
100, 128
Descendants of the Dragon
(the“Dragon song”) 龙的传人
32, 34, 36, 38–41, 45, 46, 63,
64, 74, 81, 89, 92, 300
Dikötter, Frank 5, 6, 10, 135, 172,
173, 181, 182, 185, 261
Din, Din 丁.丁. 143
Discovering China in Africa 在非洲
发现中国 227, 228
Divine Land 神州 108
DNA 105, 113, 114, 117, 119, 121,
131, 145, 146, 225, 240, 244,
259, 299, 300
Dobler, Gregor 212
Doris, Mathew 260
Dower, John 85, 86
dragon 8, 22, 39, 65, 66, 74, 76,
104, 210
Duara, Prasenjit 5, 266
Du Bois, Shirley Graham 190
Du Bois, W.E.B. 185, 190
Dutch-Portuguese Battle over Macao
188
E
Eastern Europe 193
elementary particle physics 138
Emmanuel, Uwechue (Chinese name
郝歌) 224
Engels, Frederick 106, 129
Eoanthropus dawsoni (“Dawson’s
Dawn Man”) 147
ethnonationalism 278, 279
Eurasianism 292
European-Americans 5, 10
Europeans 6, 10, 87, 126, 136, 140,
150, 163, 164, 169, 173, 174,
185, 188, 207, 214, 224, 269,
281, 283, 289, 292, 295
exclusionist logics 10
exterminationist logics 10, 182
F
Fang, Wenshan 方文山 77, 79
Fang, Yi 方毅 197
Feng, Gong 冯巩 101
fengqing 愤青 214
“five zu under one republic” 五族共
和 263
Flying Tigers 飞虎队 188
Frazier, Robeson Taj 190
Fredrickson, George M. 174
French, Howard 147, 148
Fujimura, Shinichi 147–149
G
galamsey 216
Gallicchio, Marc 185, 187
Gangtai 港台 21, 32–37, 40, 41,
47, 48, 51, 58, 59, 61, 67–73,
78–81, 86, 88, 90
Gangtai patriotic songs 港台爱国
歌曲 21, 22, 24, 33–36, 40,
49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 67,
71, 73–77, 79, 80, 83, 87–89,
91, 94
gaoli bi 高丽婢 170, 171
Gao, Xing 高星 125, 126
Garvin, Vicki 190
330 Index
Gu Jiegang 顾颉刚 108
Gu, Shoubai 顾寿白 135
Gu, Xuewu 顾学武 208
guqin 古琴 269
H
Han (Hanism, Han-ness, Han people, Han racism) 11
Han, Xing 韩星 267, 268
haodi 好弟(Steven) 224
hei nu 黑奴 black slave 171, 172,
179
Hevi, Emmanuel John 192–195
historical nihilism 历史虚无主义
245, 251
Homo alpinus 112, 151
Homo erectus (h.erectus) 2, 3, 22, 43,
99, 103–105, 116, 118, 119,
122, 125–127, 129, 140, 141,
145–147, 151
Homo europaeus 112, 151
Homo heidelbergensis 147
Homo israelensis 112, 151
Homo sapiens (h.sapiens) 3, 9, 22,
105, 106, 109, 112, 115,
118–122, 124–126, 141, 142,
145
Homo sinensis 22, 112, 144, 151
Hong Kong 11, 21, 28, 32, 33, 35,
36, 38, 39, 42–46, 49, 51–60,
62, 64, 73, 87, 88, 91, 93,
100, 143, 148, 202, 218–220,
239, 280
Horai, Satoshi 114
Hou Dejian 侯德健 38, 40, 51,
62–64, 93
Huang, Bingheng 44, 45
Huang, Wanbo 黄万波 118
Huang, Weiwen 黄慰文 149, 150
Huang, Xintao 黄兴涛 263
Huang Yihe 黄一鹤 54
Huang Zhan 黄沾 James Wong 44,
45
Hughes, Langston 183
Hu ji 胡姬 unfree white singing/
dancing girl 169–171, 174
human evolution 1, 22, 99, 101,
105, 106, 118, 121, 124, 128,
129, 132, 133, 135, 147–150
Human Genome Project (HGP)
111–114, 144
Hupu 虎朴 142
Hu Shi 胡适 249
Huxley, Thomas Henry 260, 261
Hu Yaobang 胡耀邦 29, 56
I
“I Am Proud I Am a Chinese” “我骄
傲, 我是中国人” 75
“I Love You, China” “我爱你, 中国”
28, 30, 31
Inglehart, Ronald F. 286
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology
and Paleoanthropology (IVPP,
at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences) 117
Institute of Zoology of Kunming
in Yunnan Province (IZKYP)
116, 143
interactive model 6, 10
Isaac, Benjamin 150
J
Jacques, Martin 7
Index 331
Japanese Original Man 日本原人
riben yuanren 150
Jia Lanpo 贾兰坡 100, 118
Jiang, Huajie 蒋华杰 191, 193
Jiang, Rong 姜戎 256
Jianshi Man 建始人 103
Jin, Li 金力 113, 114, 117, 119,
120, 122, 124, 136, 140
Johnson, M. Dujon 9, 10, 12, 200
K
Kang, Youwei 康有为 182, 265
Korea 47, 147, 170, 265, 267
Kozlov, Victor 291
Kuo, Alan 50, 51
L
Lacouperie, Terrien de 142
Lai, Leon 黎明 60
Lamarckian 132, 137
Lantian Man 蓝田人 103, 143
Law, Ian 10, 11, 182, 286, 297
Lee, Robert 19
Leibold, James 7, 8, 91, 107, 109,
127
Liang, Jingwen 梁静文 172, 174
Liang, Qichao 梁启超 181, 182,
261, 262, 289
Li, Changchun 李长春 2, 132, 137,
298
Li Hui 李辉 136
Li, Jianfu 李建复 54, 63, 65
Lim, Mali 林玛利 117
Li, Ning 李宁 100
Lin Yutang 林语堂 135
Lin Zhibo 林治波 274
Li Ruihuan 李瑞环 92
Li, Tianshi 李天石 169
Liu, Bo 流波 140
Liu, Cixing 刘慈欣 258
Liu Dehua 刘德华 59, 61, 73, 74
Liu, Dongsheng 刘东生 101
Liujiang Man 柳江人 129
Liu, Junsheng 刘俊升 129
Liu, Liu 六六 242
Liu Shipei 刘师培 142
Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波 52
Liu, Xiaopeng 刘晓鹏 Philip
Hsiaopong Liu 164, 189, 190,
193, 205, 206, 231, 232
Liu, Yuanchao 刘源朝 172, 180,
226
Liu, Zhirong 1刘植荣 204, 205
Li, Xiaofeng 李晓风 124
Locke, Gary 骆家辉 88
Longguo Hill, 龙骨山 104
Lufrano, Richard 200
Lu, Guoyao 鲁国尧 140
Luo, Dayou 罗大佑 42
Luo Maodeng 罗懋登 226
Lysenkoism 114, 146
M
Macao 180, 188
Manchu 5, 8, 15, 16, 141, 142, 260,
262, 263, 265, 266, 271, 273,
274
Mao, Chongjie 毛崇杰 82, 83
Mao, Zedong 毛泽东 252
Marxist 13, 16, 91, 132, 138, 253,
298
Matusevich, Maxim 195, 196
media racism 212, 213
332 Index
Michel, Serge 212
Mi, Zhancheng 米暂沉 91
Moses, George 296
Mu le 穆勒 175–177
Mullaney, Thomas 277
Muslim 18, 91, 174, 214, 289
N
National Geographic 129, 130
National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NNSFC) 113, 115,
116
Ng, Wai-Ming 吴伟明 148–150
Nihewan 泥河湾 132
Nitecki, Mathew 260
Nixon, Richard 128, 129, 191
Nouvelle École 150, 151
O
Obama, Barack 220, 244, 258, 283,
290
Olympics, 2008 summer 74, 101,
301
Olympics torch relay, 2008 74
“One Belt, One Road” 一带一路
167, 216, 222, 225
One hundred patriotic songs 一百首
爱国歌曲 36, 78, 81, 94
Onmyoji 224
Open Letter to Fellow Chinese in
Taiwan 致台湾同胞的公开
信 91
“Operation Vanguard” 206
“Out-of-Africa” 3, 105, 114–116,
118, 123, 132, 140
P
Pääbo, Svante 119
Paleoanthropology 105, 110
Pan Qingplin 潘庆林 215
Pei, Wenzhong 裴文中 118
Pei Xin 裴信 175
Peking Man 北京人 3, 8, 22, 24, 77,
99–112, 114–120, 123–125,
127, 129, 131, 139, 141, 143,
144, 149–151
Peking Original Man 北京原人 150
Peking Union Medical College 北京
协和医学院 117
Peng, Hui 彭蕙 172, 180
Peng, Kunyuan 彭坤元 172
Pfafman, Tessa M. Carpenter 218
Piltdown Man 146–149
Poliakov, Léon 295
polygenism 121
Portuguese 174, 179, 180, 188
Primitive Love of Peking Man “北京
猿人的原始之恋” 102, 120,
131
Q
Qierjun 企鹅君 283, 284
Qinshihuangdi 秦始皇帝 61, 62
Qiu, Jane 125
Qu, Yixian 曲一线 102
R
Rabinow, Paul 113
race 1, 3, 5–11, 13–17, 19–24, 30,
31, 45, 57, 61, 70, 86, 90,
103, 105–107, 119, 121, 122,
Index 333
127, 132–137, 139, 142, 143,
145, 149, 163, 166, 168, 172,
176, 181, 182, 184, 189,
193–195, 201, 204, 213–216,
219, 221, 223–225, 241,
247–249, 252, 253, 261, 262,
265, 268, 269, 273–276, 278,
280, 281, 285–291, 295, 296,
298, 300, 301, 303
racialization 6, 20, 216, 218, 297,
302
Ramapithecus 129, 130
Rao, Yi 饶毅 124
Remote Eden, the 遥远的伊甸园 121
reverse racism 逆向种族主义
248–251, 271
rich and powerful 富强 169, 254
Roberts, Alice 122, 123
Robeson, Paul 190
Rocket, Stubby 258
Romey, Kristin M. 148
S
Sautman, Barry 8, 9, 104–107, 125,
145, 199
Schmalzer, Sigrid 106, 107, 109,
111, 119, 120, 125
segregationist logics 10
SHE (a group of three Taiwaness girl
singers) 70, 71
Shen, Guanjun 100
Shi, Zhan 施展 227–232, 262
Silk Road 167, 168
Sima Qian司马迁 130
Sina anthropuspekinensis 104
sinicization 11, 224
Sinocentric 7, 16, 105, 109, 164,
165, 171, 231
slavery 17, 166, 167, 170–174,
177–179, 182, 183, 185, 207
slave trade 166–174, 178
Smith, Anthony 151
Smith, Antony D. 151
social Darwinism 5, 16, 23, 164,
206, 241, 247, 252, 254, 256,
259–263, 287, 298
Solomos, John 19
Song, Jian 宋健 129, 130, 132
Soviet Union 10, 161, 194–196,
281, 288, 291, 301
State Administration of Radio,
Film and Television of China
(SARFT) 国家广播电影电视
管理局 69, 92
Stealing Hong Xiao “盗红绡” 175
Stultz, Kahlil 217, 303
Su, Bin 宿兵 114, 131
suirensi 燧人氏 1
Sullivan, Michael J. 199
Sun Yat-sen 孙中山 7, 263
T
Tagore, Rabindranath 186
Taidu 台独 69
Taiping Guangji 太平广记 176
Taiwan 6, 9, 12, 21, 28, 32, 33, 35,
36, 38–40, 42, 44, 46, 52–55,
57–59, 62–66, 69, 70, 88, 91,
94, 117, 144, 161, 188, 189,
205, 206, 210, 213, 219, 232,
244, 271, 280
334 Index
Taiwanese 9, 11, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43,
49, 50, 53, 54, 59, 63, 66,
69–73, 77, 117, 144, 164, 206
Tang, Caichang 唐才常 181
Tang dynasty 18, 167–169, 172,
174, 175, 177, 178
Tan, Jiazhen 谈家桢 114, 115
Tao, Dongfeng 陶东风 81
Tiananmen Square 28, 52, 53, 101,
199, 250
Tiananmen Square Massacre, 1989
30, 35, 42, 62
Tianxia 天下 292
Tibetans 11, 59, 75, 263
“two blacks and one yellow” (black
eye, black hair, and yellow
skin) 39, 41, 53, 54, 62, 63,
74, 89
U
Uyghurs 11
Weidenreich, Franz 魏敦瑞 118,
121
Wei, Futang 魏芙塘 102
Weiner, Michael 296
Wen, Bo 117
Whitefield, Susan 167
Wing Hang Record Trading Co. Ltd,
Hong Kong 44
wolf spirit 狼性 256, 257
Wolf Totem 狼图腾 256, 258
Wolpoff, Milford H. 119, 121, 122,
139, 145
Wong, Daniel K. 41, 42, 64
Worthy, William 190
Wright, John 173
Wu’erkaixi 吾尔凯西 53
Wu, Liu 145
Wu Xinzhi 吴新智 118, 119, 122,
123, 125, 131, 140
Wu, Zhen 吴震 171
Wu Zhuoliu 吴浊流 42
X
V
Vietnam 84
W
wang dao 王道 209
Wang, Huairang 王怀让 75, 76
Wang, Ke 王柯 265
Wang Lihong 王力宏 63, 66
Wang, Orange 224
Wang, Peng 王鹏 34
Wang, Sixiang 王思想 143
Wang, Xiaodong 王小东 248, 249
Wang, Xiaolin 汪晓林 76
War Wolf (movies 战狼 1 and 2)
113, 225
Xiao, Zhongchun 肖忠纯 172
Xie, Tingfeng 谢霆锋 61, 77
Xifang zuopai 西方左派Western left
288
Xi, Jingping 习近平 34, 76, 152,
253, 299
Xinluo bi 新罗婢 170
Xiong Shili 熊十力 108
Xiong, Xianghui 熊向晖 162, 163
Xu, Jilin 许纪霖 260, 261
Xu, Pingfang 徐品芳 128
Y
Yan, An 阎安 253
Index 335
Yan, Chongnian 阎崇年 8, 49, 55,
74, 76
Yan Fu 严复 181, 260–262
Yang, Guobin 217
Yang, Jing 杨瑾 171
Yang, Jintao 杨津涛 142
Yang, Ruisong 杨瑞松 6
Yang, Xuemei 杨雪梅 102
Yang, Zhiqiang 杨志强 94
Yang, Zhongjian 杨钟健 118
Yano, Christine 85
Yao, Xinyong 姚新勇 278–280
Yao, Zhengwu 姚振武 116
Yasukuni Shrine 43, 85
Ye, Fan 叶凡 75
Ye, Jiepu 叶吉浦 102
Yellow Emperor 黄帝 8, 89, 90, 107,
108, 266, 268
yellow race 6, 24, 47–50, 61, 62,
76, 77, 87, 89, 109, 133, 164,
171, 214, 215, 261, 262, 273,
288, 289, 300
Yellow trade 183
Yen, Hsiao-Pei 102, 109, 127
Ye, Ziqi 叶子奇 170
Ye, Zongyuan 叶宗元 92
Yin, Zhiguang 殷之光 76
Yi, Zhongtian 易中天 246
Yong Chun 永春 2, 132, 134
Yuanmou Man 元谋人 103,
128–131, 143, 149
Yuan Shuo 袁硕 124, 125
Yuan, Tengfei 袁腾飞 244, 245, 290
Yu, Mingmei 于闵梅 82
Yun, Lisa 184, 185
Yunnan-Burma Road 188
Yu Shu 玉素 176, 177
Z
Zakharov, Nikolay 291, 292, 297
Zeng, Liansong 曾联松 300
Zhang, Chenchen 222, 285
Zhang Huimei 张惠妹 69
Zhang, Kangkang 张抗抗 258
Zhang, Mingmin 张明敏 45, 46,
52, 54, 55
Zhang, Taiyan 章太炎 142
Zheng He 郑和 209, 226
Zheng He’s Expeditions of the Western
Oceans 三宝太监西洋记通俗
演义 226
Zhonghua minzu 中华民族 Chinese
nation 100, 109, 300
Zhong, Zhukang 钟祖康 143, 144
Zhongzu minzuzhuyi 种族民族主义
ethnonationalism 278, 280
Zhou Jielun 周杰伦 72, 73, 79
Zhoukoudian 周口店 99–103, 118,
120, 131, 144
Zhou, Yihuang 周溢潢 162
Zhu, Yaowei 朱耀伟 43
Zhu, Youguang 朱幼光 240
Zou, Kaiyi 邹开益 209
Zou Rong 邹容 zou 273