{"id":10481,"date":"2012-08-01T08:20:08","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T23:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=10481"},"modified":"2012-08-05T06:23:10","modified_gmt":"2012-08-04T21:23:10","slug":"tangent-newsweek-column-on-rising-ugly-nationalism-towards-foreign-residents-hm-how-about-an-eye-on-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=10481","title":{"rendered":"Tangent: Newsweek column on “rising ugly nationalism towards foreign residents” in China. Hm, how about an eye on Japan?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Hi Blog. \u00a0As a tangent, here’s an article looking at issues of race and ethnicity in China through a veil of vignettes. \u00a0A lot of the issues raised can be (and have been) applied to Japan. \u00a0Just not as harshly. \u00a0\u00a0I’ve made the point before<\/a>\u00a0about how the Western media seems to give Japan a free pass regarding racism as a “friendly” state. \u00a0Yet, as per the Newsweek article below, Western media couches racism more as representative of the spectre of Chinese nationalism and bad treatment of expats. \u00a0Compare: \u00a0When we had the ultimate example of racism in Japan during the Otaru Onsens Case (1999-2005)<\/a>, the overseas press took it up handily<\/a>, but we also had oodles of apologists<\/a> rise up en masse to dismiss or defend it. \u00a0Including Western toadies like Gregory Clark (see how clumsily Clark took up<\/a> this USA Today article of March 8, 2000 by Peter Hadfield\u00a0on racism in Japan<\/a> back in the day), who defended it as Japanese cultural uniqueness<\/a> and exceptionalism to “global standards”<\/a>\u00a0(said pundit even went so far as to claim\u00a0“antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people”<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0while in the process getting even the exclusionary onsen’s name wrong). \u00a0But I digress.<\/p>\n

Again, I’m not sure why Japan is so seductive to the Western media (Dower would perhaps claim it’s part of the GOJ’s media savviness, starting with the Imperial duck hunt charm offensive of SCAP that saved the Imperial system (Embracing Defeat, p. 299-301)), while China keeps getting treated as devious. \u00a0The only theory I can come up is geopolitics (and the fear that the future of democracy and economic growth will have Chinese uniparty characteristics). \u00a0What say you, Readers? \u00a0Arudou Debito<\/p>\n

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/<\/p>\n

China Grapples With Issues of Race and Ethnicity<\/strong>
\n Jul 30, 2012 Newsweek Magazine<\/strong>
\n By Duncan Hewitt<\/strong>
\n Courtesy of the Daily Beast and CD<\/strong>
\nhttp:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/newsweek\/2012\/07\/29\/china-grapples-with-issues-of-race-and-ethnicity.html<\/a>
\nSUBTITLE<\/strong>: \u00a0As China grapples with rising nationalism and an influx of foreign residents, the country\u2019s long and contradictory relationship with outsiders is coming to the fore\u2014and it\u2019s turning ugly.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Beijing\u2019s Sanlitun Village mall is the very image of cosmopolitan, modern China. Its quirky and colorful glass-fronted modern buildings are filled with top international name-brand stores. In its paved plaza, smart young Chinese shoppers rub shoulders with foreign residents and visitors of every age and nationality. Groups of young foreign students mix with smartly dressed professionals and diplomats. It\u2019s a scene that seems to embody the \u201cinclusiveness\u201d that, according to an official slogan on the street nearby, is now part of the \u201cBeijing spirit.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a seamier side to the neighborhood too\u2014on the small street just behind the village, several stores have sprung up with signs proclaiming, in English, the words \u201cSex Shop.\u201d Pictures of attractive young women try to tempt passersby into nearby nightclubs. And over the years, local residents have complained about noise and drunkenness from the area\u2019s bars and clubs, which attract a sizable proportion of foreigners among their clientele.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In recent months, tensions over the unsavory behavior of some of Beijing\u2019s foreign residents have come to the fore. In May there was a furious public reaction after footage was posted online showing the aftermath of an alleged attempted sexual assault on a young Beijing woman by a drunken British man. The pictures showed angry locals beating up the supposed perpetrator. This was soon followed by film of an incident on a train in which a Russian cellist from the Beijing Symphony Orchestra insulted a Chinese passenger who asked him to take his feet off the back of her chair. The cellist eventually made a public apology, but still had to resign his post.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Amid a mood of public anger, at least in online forums, the Beijing police announced a three-month campaign to crack down on \u201cforeigners illegally staying in the capital\u201d\u2014including those who had jobs but no work permit or who had overstayed their visas. They also set up a hotline and encouraged locals to \u201creport such violations,\u201d according to Chinese media. Several other cities, including Shanghai, also stepped up spot-checks on the documents of foreigners, in the most visible campaign of its type since the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

All this caused some anxiety, notably among foreign residents in Beijing. And tension was stirred up further by a post on Weibo, China\u2019s equivalent of Twitter, by Yang Rui, host of one of China Central Television\u2019s main English-language programs. The show Yang fronts is called Dialogue, and its stated aim is to promote intercultural understanding. But that appeared to be the last thing on Yang\u2019s mind when he tweeted, in response to the two incidents, that China should kick out \u201cforeign trash.\u201d He also warned of foreign \u201cspies\u201d shacking up with Chinese women as a cover while they tried to steal state secrets, and he gloated over the expulsion from China in May of Melissa Chan, the Beijing correspondent for Al Jazeera TV\u2019s English channel.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yang later sought to cool the controversy, emphasizing that he thought there were many good foreigners in China, and arguing that he had not called Chan a bitch, as had been widely reported\u2014but rather, in his own translation, a \u201cshrew.\u201d And he received some criticism online, as well as from China\u2019s official English-language newspaper, Global Times, which said his comments were \u201ctoo harsh\u201d and had \u201ccaused misunderstanding,\u201d though it rejected calls for him to be sacked.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet while the paper sought to reassure readers that what it described as \u201cthe anti-foreigner campaigns seen in some Western countries will not be staged in China,\u201d a column in another official paper, China Daily, put Yang\u2019s comments in the context of the Opium Wars and past foreign humiliation of China. And with the nation in the midst of a sensitive political transition and anxieties about social stability growing, some observers have suggested that a more nationalistic mood is quite likely over the coming months. Chan\u2019s expulsion (the first of a foreign journalist in more than a decade) and recent threats to other foreign journalists that their visas might be canceled if they report on sensitive subjects were seen as further evidence of a changing mood.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Not everyone thinks that China is witnessing an upsurge of xenophobia: Daniel Bell, a specialist in Chinese philosophy and values at Beijing\u2019s Tsinghua University, says Yang\u2019s \u201cnationalistic\u201d remarks are \u201cunrepresentative\u201d of a society that has, he says, historically welcomed outsiders who accept its values\u2014indeed, he notes, even some of the country\u2019s more hawkish commentators have argued that China\u2019s current economic strength provides a prime opportunity to \u201ccompete with the U.S. to hire foreign talent,\u201d citing the example of China\u2019s \u201cgolden age\u201d in the Tang dynasty when foreigners are said to have served in official posts.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Hu Xingdou, an outspoken social critic and professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, believes that nationalism has risen in China in recent years, partly in step with the nation\u2019s growing economic strength. Consequently, he says, \u201cif foreigners are seen to be behaving inappropriately, this may prompt some extreme comments.\u201d But he suggests that overall, Chinese people are welcoming to outsiders\u2014the country\u2019s problem, he suggests, is not so much one of \u201cracial prejudice,\u201d but rather of putting too much emphasis on \u201cdifferentiating people by race.\u201d Since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, he notes, it has made a point of identifying people by their ethnicity\u2014the identity cards carried by all Chinese citizens specify which of the country\u2019s ethnic groups they belong to. In these circumstances, he say, \u201cit\u2019s more likely that people who don\u2019t have so much experience of the world will see an outsider and say, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s a foreigner,\u2019 or \u2018There\u2019s a black person.\u2019?\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

That the use of such phrases is seen as acceptable in China was highlighted by the fact that even when TV host Yang tried to play down the controversy over his remarks, he appeared quite happy to go on record as calling Chan a \u201cforeign shrew\u201d and did not seek to distance himself from the phrase \u201cforeign trash\u201d\u2014words that in many societies would be considered highly inflammatory.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s evidence of what many of China\u2019s foreign residents and visitors know well\u2014that it\u2019s not uncommon to be defined, even to one\u2019s face, by one\u2019s ethnicity: \u201cWhen I\u2019m taking my child for a walk in the lanes near our house in Beijing, people will often point and say, look, a laowai\u2014a foreigner,\u201d says Bell. It is, he suggests, something one gets used to, and he adds that the best solution is often to make a joke of the situation: \u201cSometimes I just turn round and look behind me, as if to see where they\u2019re pointing,\u201d he adds, \u201cand then everyone starts laughing.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Cultural commentator Hung Huang, a prominent writer and editor who lived for many years in the U.S., says that for most Chinese people, the use of phrases such as laowai \u201ccarries no intention of discrimination.\u201d China, she says, \u201cis more claustrophobic than xenophobic\u2014many people are still not used to foreigners and just feel awkward around them.\u201d Still, she acknowledges that such comments highlight the fact that China has never had a public debate on how to deal with issues of race and ethnicity. \u201cPeople are not so aware of ideas like political correctness. It\u2019s not like in the U.S.,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd in fact they tend to make comments about all aspects of people\u2019s appearance\u2014you\u2019re so fat, you\u2019re not pretty\u2014there are few taboos.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As a result, it\u2019s not uncommon, for example, to hear commentators on Shanghai television\u2019s coverage of European soccer matches pointing out that a certain player is \u201cblack.\u201d Times may have moved on from the late 1980s, when students at a university in Nanjing besieged a group of African students in their dormitory, following tensions over their relationships with local women. But a few years ago, when a Shanghai TV reality show featured a young Chinese woman whose father was black, the girl and her mother received a significant amount of abuse online.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Professor Hu, it\u2019s evidence that there is still some lingering \u201cfolk prejudice towards black people\u201d in Chinese society. Yiyi Lu, a Beijing-based sociologist, argues, however, that \u201cChinese people are not so much racist as snobbish\u2014they tend to think of Africans, for example, as coming from poor countries.\u201d Contact with wealthier Africans or African-Americans, she believes, will gradually break down such attitudes.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But not everyone is convinced. Frank Dik\u00f6tter, Chair Professor of Humanities at Hong Kong University and a specialist in Chinese attitudes to race, argues that China remains \u201cpermeated with racial stereotypes\u2014there\u2019s an obsession with skin color and a deep-rooted fixation with blackness,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cWhen I was a kid, if I stared at someone, I got a slap. In China, staring at foreigners is allowed, sometimes even encouraged.\u201d It is, he suggests, \u201ccompletely unacceptable in the 21st century\u2014and I\u2019m tired of the double standards people use in their attempts to find excuses for such attitudes in China.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Indeed, Dik\u00f6tter argues that Chinese government policy has enshrined the notion of foreigners being separate since its earliest days: in the first decades of communism, he notes, foreigners were either denounced as capitalists, or, if considered friendly and therefore permitted to visit China, they were treated \u201cas a special case and were given guides or mentors when they visited the country\u2014so the whole idea of foreigners was loaded with all sorts of meaning.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s no coincidence, then, that foreigners have often been seen in China not just as individuals, but also as representatives of their countries\u2014or, indeed, of the entire outside world. Some have argued that this applies particularly if they have done something bad\u2014not least because of the emphasis on the crimes visited upon China by foreigners during and after the Opium Wars of the 19th century, which have formed a major part of China\u2019s \u201cpatriotic education\u201d curriculum over the past two decades. Thus the alleged British assailant in Beijing and the Russian cellist on the train were widely depicted not just as individuals doing something wrong, but as symbols of how bad foreigners could be and the threat they could pose.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

But sociologist Yiyi says such attitudes work the other way, too\u2014she notes that Chinese media recently also played up incidents where foreigners had rescued Chinese citizens from drowning and from attacks. \u201cSuddenly the media were saying that foreigners were more public-spirited than Chinese people,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re still just too quick to generalize,\u201d she adds, pointing out that \u201cChinese society as a whole remains quite isolated\u2014we\u2019re just not cosmopolitan enough to know how to interact with foreigners.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an apparently contradictory attitude summed up in the phrase \u201cbeautiful imperialist,\u201d famously used by American academic David Shambaugh to describe China\u2019s view of the U.S. And Hung, the cultural commentator, feels that the radical shifts in official perceptions of foreigners over the past half century have left a legacy of both confusion and some bitterness among the Chinese public. After denouncing them in the Cultural Revolution, she says, China suddenly \u201celevated foreigners to special-guest status\u201d when economic reforms got underway in the 1980s: \u201cWe had hotels and shops that were only open to foreigners back then,\u201d she recalls, \u201cso for a long time Chinese people were artificially made to feel second class.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As a result, she suggests, there\u2019s still a tendency to treat foreigners as VIPs: if a foreigner commits a traffic violation, for example, she says, \u201cthe police are less likely to do anything about it\u2014they think it\u2019s too much trouble.\u201d Yet now, in a nation that has grown wealthier, many people feel they deserve equal status to foreigners, she believes. \u201cSo people are very sensitive about this.\u201d Add to this the fact that China\u2019s growing wealth gap has given many ordinary people \u201ca sense of resentment towards all privileged classes,\u201d and the continuing perception that most foreigners in China are well off, and it\u2019s hardly surprising that people have reacted angrily to the recent incidents of foreigners behaving badly, she argues. \u201cThe forced hospitality we had to show to foreigners in the past has actually been detrimental to our relations with them,\u201d she says.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The number of foreigners in China is still relatively low, at about 1 million, but they are becoming more common in most of the country\u2019s major cities\u2014and farther afield, too. As numbers grow, and China\u2019s economy attracts more and more such people, its citizens may have to get used to dealing with foreigners of all kinds\u2014not just the \u201cbeautiful\u201d and respected VIPs of past decades, but the arrogant or even downright criminal. It\u2019s clearly still a steep learning curve for both sides\u2014with foreigners\u2019 understanding of China\u2019s historical sensitivities often under scrutiny and Chinese attitudes toward race facing new challenges. China does not recognize dual nationality, and many people regard foreign nationals of Chinese ethnicity as basically still \u201cChinese.\u201d So how will the country cope with the growing number of mixed children being born? In Shanghai alone, there are currently around 27,000 Chinese citizens married to foreign spouses, yet the offspring of such marriages are still referred to by many people as being \u201cmixed blood\u201d (though this also now appears to be seen as increasingly desirable by some\u2014it\u2019s not uncommon to hear people commenting that such children are \u201cmore intelligent\u201d or \u201cmore beautiful\u201d).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

As China\u2019s interaction with the outside world grows, there\u2019s clearly going to be a lot to get used to. Some believe the outlook remains optimistic, however\u2014Professor Hu says relations between Chinese people and foreigners \u201cshould get better … We need to look at this with an inclusive attitude,\u201d he adds, \u201cbut I think society will become more mature and more welcoming.\u201d Still, he says, an antiracism law would help, too. Or perhaps the authorities could simply start by telling Yang, as the host of one of China\u2019s multibillion-dollar attempts to improve the nation\u2019s global image by expanding its English-language media internationally, that he might try to avoid using phrases such as \u201cforeign trash\u201d in the future.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

===========================<\/em><\/strong>
\n Duncan Hewitt, a former BBC China correspondent, writes for Newsweek and other publications from Shanghai. His book China: Getting Rich First: A Modern Social History (published in the U.K. as Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China) focuses on social change in the country and its impact on ordinary people\u2019s lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a tangent, here’s an article looking at issues of race and ethnicity in China through a veil of vignettes. A lot of the issues raised can be (and have been) applied to Japan. Just not as harshly. I’ve made the point before about how the Western media seems to give Japan a free pass regarding racism as a “friendly” state. Yet, as per the Newsweek article below, Western media couches racism more as representative of the spectre of Chinese nationalism and bad treatment of expats. Compare: When we had the ultimate example of racism in Japan during the Otaru Onsens Case (1999-2005), the overseas press took it up handily, but we also had oodles of apologists rise up en masse to dismiss or defend it. Including Western toadies like Gregory Clark (see how clumsily Clark took up this USA Today article of March 8, 2000 by Peter Hadfield on racism in Japan back in the day), who defended it as Japanese cultural uniqueness and exceptionalism to “global standards” (said pundit even went so far as to claim “antiforeigner discrimination is a right for Japanese people” — while in the process getting even the exclusionary onsen’s name wrong). But I digress.<\/p>\n

Again, I’m not sure why Japan is so seductive to the Western media (Dower would perhaps claim it’s part of the GOJ’s media savviness, starting with the Imperial duck hunt charm offensive of SCAP that saved the Imperial system (Embracing Defeat, p. 299-301)), while China keeps getting treated as devious. The only theory I can come up is geopolitics (and the fear that the future of democracy and economic growth will have Chinese uniparty characteristics). What say you, Readers?<\/p>\n

Newsweek: In recent months, tensions over the unsavory behavior of some of Beijing\u2019s foreign residents have come to the fore. In May there was a furious public reaction after footage was posted online showing the aftermath of an alleged attempted sexual assault on a young Beijing woman by a drunken British man. The pictures showed angry locals beating up the supposed perpetrator. This was soon followed by film of an incident on a train in which a Russian cellist from the Beijing Symphony Orchestra insulted a Chinese passenger who asked him to take his feet off the back of her chair. The cellist eventually made a public apology, but still had to resign his post.<\/p>\n

Amid a mood of public anger, at least in online forums, the Beijing police announced a three-month campaign to crack down on \u201cforeigners illegally staying in the capital\u201d\u2014including those who had jobs but no work permit or who had overstayed their visas. They also set up a hotline and encouraged locals to \u201creport such violations,\u201d according to Chinese media. Several other cities, including Shanghai, also stepped up spot-checks on the documents of foreigners, in the most visible campaign of its type since the run-up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,50,26,13,11,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussions","category-gaiatsu","category-ironies-hypocrisies","category-media","category-problematic-foreign-treatment","category-tangents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}