When China Rules the World (44 page)

The riots of 10 March 2008, which took place on the anniversary of the failed uprising in 1959 and were by far the worst since that occasion, show that this strategy has singularly failed. Tibetan rioters attacked Han shops and businesses in the old Tibetan quarter of Lhasa, setting them alight and killing many Chinese. The protests continued for five days, with around 100 Tibetan and Chinese deaths. The government blamed the riots on a conspiracy led by the Dalai Lama, accusing him, in traditional Chinese racial terms, of being a ‘wolf in monk’s robes’, ‘a wolf with a human face and heart of a beast’, ‘a jackal wrapped in a habit’ and the ‘scum of Buddhism’.
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The prime minister Wen Jiabao asserted that the protests were ‘organized, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique’.
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The two biggest Tibetan grievances concern their lack of cultural and religious freedom, and Han migration. They believe that they are systematically being turned into a minority in their own homeland and deeply resent their lack of cultural and religious freedom. The Tibetans see the Han population as having been by far the biggest beneficiaries of the economic prosperity: the Han live in the urban areas where economic change has been concentrated, run most of the businesses and shops, and dominate positions of power and privilege in the administrative apparatus. Relations between the Chinese and Tibetans are characterized by disdain, distrust and resentment, ‘by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear’.
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‘Our government has wasted our money in helping those white-eyed wolves,’ commented Wang Zhongyong, a Han manager of a Lhasa handicraft shop that was destroyed in the riots. ‘The relationship between Han and Tibetan is irreconcilable,’ said Yuan Qinghai, a Lhasa taxi driver. ‘We don’t have a good impression of them, as they are lazy and they hate us, for, as they say, taking away what belongs to them. In their mind showering once or twice in their life is sacred, but to Han it is filthy and unacceptable.’
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The rioting, destruction and burning of Han property, and resulting Han deaths, which were shown repeatedly on Chinese television, led to a wave of anger and indignation across China. The consequence was to stoke up further Han resentment against the Tibetans and potentially lay the basis for more draconian measures, although the government, concerned about the effect the riots might have on international opinion in the build-up to the Olympics, agreed to reopen talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama. It is inconceivable that Tibet will ever be granted independence - which is not a demand of the Dalai Lama in any case - given China’s attitude towards its unity and the strategic importance of Tibet. In fact, it is not difficult to sketch out the terms of a potential settlement: the Dalai Lama would renounce his vast territorial claims to Greater Tibet, which are spurious in any event, and refrain from continuing his Western-orientated anti-Chinese campaign, while the Chinese would allow the Dalai Lama to return to Lhasa as spiritual leader, grant limited self-rule and genuine religious and cultural autonomy, while restricting Han migration. There is a precedent for such an approach: Hu Yaobang, the former secretary of the Communist Party, visited Tibet in 1980 and apologized for the behaviour of the previous thirty years, promising more autonomy and less direct Chinese rule in Tibet, although nothing materialized.
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In practice, the kind of settlement outlined would mark a huge change not just in the policy of the Communist government but more importantly in age-old Han attitudes towards ethnic minorities.

Claims that racism is common in Chinese societies are invariably greeted with a somewhat indignant denial, as if it was a slur against the Chinese.
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In a very interesting - and rather unusual - exchange between Chinese-Malaysians on a Malaysian website, which was initiated by a writer who attacked Chinese racism, one participant wrote: ‘[the claim] that racism had been an element in China’s 5,000 years civilization is intellectually ignorant and by selling such unfounded statements to the non-Chinese and to Chinese friends who read no classical Chinese, it is dangerous.’ Another wrote: ‘The Chinese have been persecuted and been victims of racism the world over. We certainly don’t need our own kind to accuse us of racism.’
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The standard view amongst most Chinese, indeed, is that they are not racist, that racism is essentially what happens to the Chinese in Western societies, and that Chinese societies are more or less unaffected by it.
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To cite one example of many, in 1988 the then general secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, told a meeting on national unity that racial discrimination is common ‘everywhere in the world except in China’.
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The pervasiveness of racism applies not only to China but also to Taiwan,
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Singapore, Hong Kong and even the overseas Chinese communities. Thus it is not simply a function of parochialism, of China’s limited contact with the outside world. Take Hong Kong, for example, which, in contrast to China, has enjoyed a highly cosmopolitan history as a result of colonialism. Although in 2001 the then chief executive Tung Chee-hwa typically described racism as a minor problem, requiring no more than an extremely low-budget, low-profile educational campaign, in fact, it is endemic amongst the Hong Kong Chinese, who comprise around 96 per cent of the population.
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In a survey of South-East Asians, South Asians and Africans in Hong Kong conducted by the Society of Community Organizations in 2001, around one-third said they had been turned down for a job on the basis of their ethnicity, a similar proportion had been refused rental of a flat, one-third reported that the police discriminated against them on the streets, while nearly half had experienced racial discrimination in hospital.
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The most common targets are foreign ‘helpers’, usually known as ‘maids’, mainly Filipinas and Indonesians, who are frequently required by their Chinese domestic employers to work absurdly long hours, are treated abysmally, paid little, granted scant freedom, and, in a significant minority of cases, subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Their conditions not infrequently resemble a latter-day form of indentured labour, as is also true in Singapore and Malaysia.
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It might reasonably be argued that Hong Kong Chinese racism is a legacy of British rule. After they took possession of the colony following the First Opium War, the British practised systemic racism: English was the sole official language until 1974, the Chinese were prohibited from living in the exclusive Peak area from 1902, there was a miscellany of petty apartheid laws - such as the requirement, until 1897, that Chinese carry night passes - and they were excluded from high-level public employment until as late as the 1970s and, in some departments, until the mid 1990s.
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With a truly breathtaking disregard for the truth, in 1994 the British had the gall to claim that ‘racial discrimination in Hong Kong is not a problem’.
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The fact that racism was the currency of British rule only encouraged the Chinese to behave in a similar way towards those whom they regarded to be their inferiors, namely those of darker skin. It would be naive, however, to think that British behaviour was the main cause of Chinese racism: it was clearly a contributory factor, but the fundamental reason lies in Chinese history and culture. After a major campaign in response to the death, in 2000, of Harinder Veriah, a Malaysian of Indian descent, who complained about serious racial discrimination in a Hong Kong hospital, the government was finally forced to acknowledge that racism was a serious problem and in 2008, mainly as a result of this case, belatedly introduced anti-racist legislation for the first time.
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But Hong Kong, cosmopolitan and international as it is, remains an essentially biracial city, with whites enjoying a privileged status, along with the Chinese, and those of darker skin banished to the margins as second-class residents or migrant workers.
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So what of racism in China itself? When a people and government are in denial of their own racism, then evidence of that racism depends on the witness of those who are the object of it and, as a consequence, predominantly on anecdote rather than anything more systematic. Once there is an established culture of anti-racism - as opposed to simply a culture of racism, which is the situation in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong - it becomes possible to paint a more accurate picture of the incidence of racism, though even then the great bulk of it still remains hidden from view. In Chinese societies, and China in particular, there is no culture of anti-racism except at the very margins because the dominant discourse of Han chauvinism has never been seriously challenged.
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Racist attitudes are seen as normal and acceptable rather than abnormal and objectionable. As M. Dujon Johnson, a black American scholar of China, puts it:

In Chinese society one of the reasons that the issue of race and racism is rarely discussed openly . . . is because racism is universally accepted and justified . . . Racism is . . . an issue that is not addressed among Chinese because most Chinese see themselves as superior to darker-skinned people. Therefore, within the Chinese mindset it would be a waste of time to address an obvious fact of darker-skinned people’s inferiority.
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In the Chinese perception there is a clear racial hierarchy. White people are respected, placed on something of a pedestal and treated with considerable deference by the Chinese; in contrast, darker skin is disapproved of and deplored, the darker the skin the more pejorative the reaction.
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People from other East Asian countries, traditionally regarded as inferior, are not immune. A Filipina friend studying at Beijing University was shocked by the level of discrimination she experienced. Unlike her white colleagues, who were treated with respect, she often found herself ignored in restaurants, with waiters refusing to serve her. Local Chinese would audibly refer to her as ‘stupid’ or ‘ignorant’. One day she was refused entry on to a bus by the conductor in a manner that suggested that she was afflicted with a disease that the other passengers might catch; after such public humiliation she avoided travelling by bus. Dujon Johnson, who conducted a survey of the experience of black Americans and Africans in China and Taiwan based on interviews with them, describes how people frequently moved seats when a black person sat next to them on public transport, or proceeded to rub that part of their body that a black person had innocently brushed against in a crowded place as if it required cleansing. Most depressingly of all, African interviewees indicated that they tried to avoid contact with the Chinese public as much as possible and ‘normally venture out only when it is necessary’.
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There has been a long history of discrimination against African students in China. Emmanuel Hevi, a Ghanaian who studied there in the early sixties, wrote: ‘In all their dealings with us the Chinese behaved as if they were dealing with people from whom normal intelligence could not be expected.’
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In December 1988, after an incident between Chinese and African students at Heihai University in Nanjing, there was a march of over 3,000 Chinese students to protest against the presence of African students, with demonstrations subsequently spreading to Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere.
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On some of these marches, the climate was so hostile towards African students that a number of universities decided to move them out of their dormitories because of a perceived threat to their physical safety. No attempt was made by the authorities to halt or prevent the demonstrations, which went on for many days, suggesting that they perhaps enjoyed a certain measure of tacit official sympathy.
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At Wuhan Industrial College, students marched demanding that ‘all blacks be removed from China’.
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According to Dujon Johnson, the race riots and demonstrations in 1988 were by no means unique: similar events occurred in Shanghai in 1979 and 1980, in Nanjing in 1979, 1980, 1988 and 1989, and in Beijing in 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988 and 1989.
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In September 2007 there was a report that a group of at least twenty black men, including students, tourists and the son of a Caribbean diplomat, had been arrested by a team of police in black jumpsuits in a Beijing night-club and severely beaten. A white American witness reported that: ‘He had never seen anything so brutal. There was blood on the streets. They were basically beating up any black person they could find.’
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It should be borne in mind that a black face remains an extremely rare sight in China: in 2006, there were reported to be 600 Africans in Beijing, 500 in Shanghai, 100 in Shenzhen, and over 10,000 in Guangzhou (with a population of 12 million), mainly as a result of the growing trade with Africa.
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No doubt this lack of familiarity with black people may partly explain the Chinese sense of suspicion and mistrust, but it cannot be the main explanation for the deep-seated racism. Dujon Johnson’s account of the black experience in China avoids recounting his own experiences except at the very end when he writes, ‘[my experiences] demonstrated to me on a daily basis how life in Chinese society is racially segregated and in many aspects similar to a system of racial apartheid.’
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In response to the visit of Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, to Beijing in 2005, there was a flurry of racist postings on the various nationalist websites. The veteran Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo was moved to write in protest:

I have browsed China’s three biggest portals’ BBS articles [blogs] about Rice’s six-nation visit . . . Just take Sina as an example. I examined over 800 BBS articles . . . excluding repetitions, there were over 600 articles. Among them, there were nearly 70 articles with racial discrimination, one-tenth of the total . . . There were only two with a gentle tone, the rest were all extremely disgusting. Many stigmatized Rice as ‘really ugly’ . . . ‘the ugliest in the world’ . . . ‘I really can’t understand how mankind gave birth to a woman like Rice’ . . . Some directly called Rice a ‘black ghost’, a ‘black pig’ . . . ‘a witch’ . . . ‘rubbish of Humans’ . . . Some lament: Americans’ IQ is low - how can they make a ‘black bitch’ Secretary of State . . . Some, of course, did not forget to stigmatize Rice with animal [names]: ‘chimpanzee’, ‘bird-like’, ‘crocodile’, ‘a piece of rotten meat, mouse shit, [something] dogs will find hard to eat’.
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