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China news tagged with: racism (14)

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TV Talent Show Exposes China’s Race Issue
From CNN:
It all started with the lure of the glitz, the glamour and the dream of being China’s next pop star. But, as with many reality shows, Lou Jing’s instant fame came with unanticipated consequences.
Lou Jing was born 20 years ago in Shanghai to a Chinese mother and an African-American father. According to her mother, who asked not to be identified in this report, she met Lou’s father while she was still in college. He left China before their daughter was born.
Growing up with a single mom in central Shanghai, Lou Jing said she had good friends and lived a normal life. “When I was young, I didn’t feel any different,” she said.
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- December 21, 2009 8:47 PM
China’s Changing Views on Race
The New York Times has run an online forum about race in China, featuring Yan Sun, political scientist, Ho-fung Hung, historical sociologist, Zai Liang, sociologist, and Dongyan Blachford, professor of Chinese studies. From Yan Sun’s comments:
When it comes to ethnic relations and perceptions, China is a paragon of contradictions: its majority ethnic group, the Hans, are non-racist in the sense that most are not aware of their own multiethnic background and care little about it.
The surname of the Chinese leader Hu Jingtao is multiethnic in origin, meaning “foreign, barbarian.”
But they hold prejudices, not only about China’s minorities and foreigners but also about members of their own group, in that those deemed more “developed” receive deference, while those deemed “backward” are looked down upon. If Western racism is about genetic dispositions, Chinese prejudices and racism are more about achievements and standing in the world as applied to individuals or groups.
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- December 13, 2009 11:02 PM
China Cautions ‘Black’ Obama Over Meeting Dalai Lama
From the Times of India:
China on Thursday invoked Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery philosophy to persuade US president Barack Obama from meeting the Dalai Lama… ”He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.
Qin pointed out the Chinese government had abolished slavery, which was widespread in Tibet during the regime of the Dalai Lama, in 1959. Obama should also realize that the Dalai Lama was trying to split China and was a serious challenge to its national unity.
“Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States,” Qin said while referring to Obamaâ€™s admiration for Lincoln. China’s stance on the issue is similar to that of Lincoln, he said.
Read more about how Obama’s race is playing into Chinese perceptions of him, via The Hindu and the Washington Post.
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- November 14, 2009 11:44 PM
China’s Black Pop Idol Exposes her Nation’s Racism
The Guardian reports on Lou Jing and racism in China:
The 20-year-old daughter of a Chinese mother and an African-American father who left the country before she was born, Lou was a highly unusual entrant to Shanghai-based Dragon TV’s Go Oriental Angel. Her appearances – she became one of five finalists – have provoked a storm of abuse on the internet, a rare debate on racism in the media, and a bout of self-examination in a country where skin colour is a notoriously sensitive subject.
Dragon TV initially had doubts about allowing Lou to perform, but then realised that her presence would do much to attract publicity for the show. But few executives can have expected the fury contained in many of the blogs and online posts that accompanied her performances. The internet is the only place in China where the public can express views with near-freedom – although they are rapidly cut off by an army of state censors if they stray into territory that attracts official disapproval. The huge online interest in Lou clearly does not fall into this category.
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- November 1, 2009 11:02 PM
Can a Mixed-Race Contestant Become a Chinese Idol?
When Lou Jing, a 20-year-old Shanghainese woman, competed on a Chinese version of American Idol, her participation ignited heated discussion in Internet chatrooms, due to the fact that her father, whom she has never met, is African-American and never married her mother. Time Magazine reports:
The marketing gurus for the series could hardly have dreamed of a better promotional gimmick when they started to investigate the backgrounds of the dozens of pop-star wannabes to root out the competitors’ mushy stories of triumph over adversity that are a well-worn staple of the genre. Here was a tale guaranteed to attract eyeballs: a girl of mixed race, brought up by a single Chinese mother, struggling to gain acceptance in a deeply conservative, some would say racist, society.
The strategy worked — perhaps too well. In August, Lou’s appearance on the show not only boosted viewer numbers but also sparked an intense nationwide debate about the essential meaning of being Chinese. Over the past month on Internet chat rooms, where modern China’s sensitive issues are thrashed out by netizens long before they reach the heavily censored mainstream media, Lou’s ethnicity has been the subject of a relentless barrage of criticism, some of it crudely racist. Many think she should not have been allowed to compete on a Chinese show, or at least not selected to represent Shanghai in the national competition. She doesn’t have fair skin, which is one of the most important factors for Chinese beauty. What’s more, her mother and her biological father were never married; morally, the argument goes, this kind of behavior shouldn’t be publicized, so she shouldn’t have been put on TV as a young “idol.”
These kinds of posts on the most popular chat rooms have attracted thousands of comments.
China Daily also reports on the controversy:
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- September 27, 2009 8:39 PM
Out of Africa and into China, Emigres Struggle
South Africa’s Mail and Guardian reports on the rising tensions between residents of Guangzhou and the growing number of African immigrants moving to their city:
In the past few years, tens of thousands of African and Arab traders have thronged to export hubs such as Guangzhou and Yiwu in eastern China to seek their fortunes — sourcing cheap China-made goods back home to massive markups in a growing, lucrative trade.
But just as mass Chinese immigration abroad has fanned recent social tensions in Africa and other places, the influx of large numbers of foreigners, particularly Africans, into China is altering the social fabric of cities like Guangzhou and proving a headache to authorities.
While this rising tide of foreigners has brought vast economic gains, the edgy cosmopolitanism of melding cultures and liberal ideals has been laced with racial and social tensions, along with the problem of illegal overstayers resorting to crime.
[...] Some neighbourhood committees bar Africans from living in residential complexes, while internet forums such as Tianya buzz with heated, at times xenophobic, discussions of “black person” issues in the city.
[...] On the streets, while explicit racism is rare among conservative Chinese urbanites, fights do sometimes break out between Africans and Chinese over business disputes.
“Racial stereotypes on both sides do exist … it’s indicative of starkly different cultures,” said Martyn Davies, a China expert at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University.
Read more about Africans in China and racism, via CDT.
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- August 25, 2009 10:40 AM
Howard French: China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race
The New York Times’ former Shanghai bureau chief Howard French is visiting Shanghai and writes a commentary on what China could learn from the painful history of race relations in the U.S.:
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.
The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.
Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.
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- July 31, 2009 11:36 AM
This Is Why Hong Kong English Levels Are Declining
Canadian journalist Joyce Lau writes in her blog about some observations about teaching English in Hong Kong, wherein her brother was denied a teaching post, even though he was a native speaker of English:
A potential employer basically told him he would not be hired because he is not white. The explanation was that his English is “not native English enough” because his skin is not white.
[...]I told an American colleague this, expecting outrage. But he just shrugged. His argument was Chinese parents don’t know better. Schools, being profit-seeking companies, just want to please parents, so they play into their prejudices. It’s not the parents’ or educators’ fault, it’s the government’s fault for not legislating.
[...]But, typical for Hong Kong, they will put appearances (“face” for Chinese parents to brag about their token white teacher) before actually teaching our children.
Read more about Hong Kong’s Anti-Racism Law.
Joyce Lau also comments in her blog on the importance of English declining in Hong Kong due to the increasing need to learn Mandarin (or Putonghua), the standard dialect of Mainland China, after its return in 1997 from British rule.
An article from The Economist corresponds these sentiments in an article about Hong Kong lifting a requirement to teach Cantonese, a native dialect, in its schools.
In related news, a recent article on Xinhua reports on the 14th National English Speech Contest that reinforces the importance of learning English in Mainland China:
Learning English became a fashion and even a fever since China adopted its reform and opening-up policy 30 years ago. Almost all college students in the country study English as a touching stone to apply for overseas studies. In recent years, English skill has become a necessary quality to get a good job.
For a long time, English teaching in China emphasized more on reading and writing instead of listening and speaking, therefore, students could easily get high exam scores despite poor spoken English.
Liu Xianghong, a Ministry of Education official, said the competition not only gives students a platform to showcase their language skill, but also encourages Chinese schools to improve communication-oriented teaching methods of English.
Related to teaching English is Li Yang’s Crazy English phenomenon where teaching English is promoted to a nationalist agenda. See also CDT’s articles on Crazy English.
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- October 17, 2008 12:52 PM
Are Chinese Racist or Simply Politically Incorrect?
Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, (Flickr photo/PEEL)
Allen Yu from Fool’s Mountain: Blogging for China comments on a recent Times article about the U.S. presidential candidate, Barack Obama, and racism in Asia, and debates whether it is racism or political correctness:
It’s common knowledge that when it comes to racial remarks, Chinese people (and perhaps Asians in general) are not the most politically correct people in the world… Recently, I came across an interesting article in Times Magazine (in relation to the U.S. Presidential politics) regarding racism in Asia. Unfortunately, I believe the author falls into many pitfalls that many Westerners make when it comes to Asian racism.
The article started out fair enough:
“Early this year my wife and I watched Venus Williams, one of the world’s finest tennis players, compete in Hong Kong. During the match several young men sitting near us kept referring in Cantonese to Williams as “black demon,” as well as another unprintable epithet. They shut up when my wife, an American citizen who is ethnic Chinese, berated them for their racist language. (Williams, by the way, won the tournament.) What, I wonder today, would those men say about Barack Obama, who soon could be the U.S.’s first African-American President?”
While the term “black demon” (黑鬼) can be used as a derogatory term for black people (equivalent terms for white people include 洋鬼子 (western demons) and 鬼佬 (foreign devils)), in the South, especially in the Canton area, the term 黑鬼 appears to have been incorporated into daily language and currently carries no derogatory connotation.
To really carry negative connotations in the Cantonese dialect (one of the most “colorful” of Chinese dialects), you would have to add explicit expletives as in 死黑鬼) – i.e. “damn black demon.”
And while misunderstanding of racism by a Western journalist is understandable, the history of discrimination is not completely unfounded. The original Times article by Zoher Abdoolcarim continues on the anti-racism law in Hong Kong and the idea of institutional racism in other Asian countries:
In many countries, ethnic divisions are institutionalized, with strict laws governing what one race can and cannot do. In largely homogenous Japan, it’s extremely difficult for a non-Japanese to become a citizen even if born there. In Malaysia, an affirmative-action program gives preference to Malays over the country’s sizable Chinese and Indian populations in everything from university places to government contracts. In Pakistan, Punjabis, the dominant ethnic group, are favored for key positions in the powerful military and civil service. Government leaders argue that these kinds of measures help maintain harmony. Maybe so, but it is a superficial harmony that reinforces stereotypes and hinders the creation, in the long run, of genuine tolerance and understanding.
Even Hong Kong, one of the world’s worldliest cities (and where TIME has its Asian headquarters), can be astonishingly parochial. For instance, Hong Kong enacted antidiscrimination legislation only very recently. Before, it was perfectly legal for a landlord to deny renting an apartment to an otherwise qualified tenant simply because of his or her skin color. One of my colleagues, an Indian national who has lived in Hong Kong for more than two years, still gets stopped by police for no given reason and told to present his ID. When he complains, the cops merely shrug. In Asia, it is acceptable to be racist, or at least unapologetic about being so.
A similar argument on race and the U.S. presidential race has been debated in Japan in the Asahi Shimbun.
While the Times article comments on general racism, more news stories have focused on ethnic minority discrimination.
Read also CDT’s stories on Chinese racism and the Chinese reactions to the current 2008 U.S. election.
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- October 17, 2008 9:48 AM
Authorities Order Bars not to Serve Black People (UPDATED)
Tom Miller reports in the South China Morning Post, via shanghaiexpat.com:
In our series looking at preparations for the Games, Tom Miller reports on plans to crack down on “undesirables” in the bars of Beijing
Beijing authorities are secretly planning to ban black people and others it considers social undesirables from entering the city’s bars during the Olympic Games, a move that would contradict the official slogan, “One World, One Dream”.
Bar owners near the Workers’ Stadium in central Beijing say they have been forced by Public Security Bureau officials to sign pledges agreeing not to let black people enter their premises.
“Uniformed Public Security Bureau officers came into the bar recently and told me not to serve black people or Mongolians,” said the co-owner of a western-style bar, who asked not to be named.
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- July 19, 2008 9:00 AM
HK’s Half-Baked Anti-Racism Law
From Time:
On July 10, Hong Kong’s legislative body passed the Chinese territory’s first-ever law against racial discrimination. The bill was in the works for more than a decade, the product of tortured haggling over clauses and amendments and tireless campaigning by members of the city’s vocal civil society. Yet the passage of this landmark legislation has been met by anything but elation. Its original proponents see it as too weak, while some suspect the Beijing-backed government would rather it had not passed at all. “It’s very shameful,” says Fermi Wong, director of the minority advocacy group Hong Kong Unison. “There has been a lack of commitment throughout.”
Hong Kongers like to style themselves as denizens of a “world city.” The former British colony, which has a population of 7 million, has an undeniable cosmopolitan sheen as a financial center and budding cultural hub. Yet, lurking beneath the flashy skyscrapers, are hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities who don’t fit comfortably into this Chinese city’s conception of itself. Many, particularly among the South Asian community, have roots here that predate some of Hong Kong’s Cantonese people by generations, yet they are often made to feel like outsiders. Most Africans and South Asians living in Hong Kong have their own horror stories of racism, from humiliating police searches on the street to being blocked from entering clubs and bars. It’s not out of the ordinary for an Indian banker to be denied a flat for rent on the grounds that the landlord doesn’t want his property to smell like curry. “This has been going on too long in a city with world-class aspirations,” says David O’Rear, chief economist of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, which sat in during the drafting of the law. “It was getting embarrassing.”
Read also Hong Kong enacts controversial new anti-racism bill by Amrita Sheokand.
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- July 14, 2008 8:48 PM
“Chocolate City” – Africans Seek Their Dreams in China
Blogging for China translates a Southern Metropolis Daily report about the lives of African traders living in Guangzhou’s so-called Chocolate City:
Religion and business are the two things that most closely bind Africans and Guangzhou. Catholicism and Islam are the two dominant religions. Every Friday is the holiest day of prayer for the Muslims, and African Muslims also stop their work. They congregate at the mosque across from Yuexiu Park; carefully they wash their head, hand, and feet, and kneel in the direction of the mosque, saying their prayers to the true Allah.
After prayers are finished, Omar walks over to the adjacent hall, and joins a ceremony unique to African Catholics. A few hundred Africans clapped and danced to a religious music that only they can understand. With the dance finished, one person stood up, and called on everyone to raise their hands, close their eyes, their mouths muttered and gradually grew faster and faster; their faces showed a frantic expression. After Omar faithfully finishes the ceremony, he returns to his typical well-mannered attitude. Pulling out his cell phone, he uses fluent Chinese to tell his wife that the brothers are meeting for dinner that night, he won’t be returning for dinner.
Amongst the Africans who’ve come to Guangzhou, Omar belongs to the small number who’ve received higher education. He even studied Chinese in university. He came to China from Nigeria three years ago, thinking that his advantage in language would allow him to quickly adjust to this new life. But he tried Beijing, no luck; moved to Shanghai, still no luck; continued onto Zhejiang, and still no luck. At the time, one of Omar’s countrymen in America tried to talk him into going to the United States. There, people of different skin colors live together, and no one can tell at a glance that he’s a foreigner.
Finally, he ended up in Guangzhou and set down roots in Chocolate City. Guangzhou has the densest concentration of African businessmen in China. Areas and cities surrounding the area has thousands of factories that take tens of thousands of African orders, originating from Chocolate City, every day.
Read also a perspective from James Fallows: “A simple point about being a foreigner in China.”
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- June 16, 2008 2:35 PM
Crude Drug Raid Highlights Ignorance of Beijing’s Police – Chris O’Brien
Reuters and South China Morning Post reported on the recent violent police crackdown on suspected African drug dealers in noisy Sanlitun bar district in Beijing. Beijing based blogger, Chris O’Brien, has more stories to tell. From Beijing Newspeak:

I have no doubt the SCMP report can be taken as read as I consider the author of the article – housemate, friend of ten years and a member of my journalism class – to be a very reliable source. He was present at the scene of the chaos on Friday night, having a beer outside the Saddle bar opposite Tongli Studios. I feel it is worth detailing exactly what happened, away from the constraints of a limited word count and the news story format.
At about 1am, a group of five or six men in camouflage uniform charged past the Saddle towards Poachers’ Inn. Their average age was around 18 and 19 – some looked as young as 16, others maybe 25 – and their scruffy appearance, straggly hair and gangly limbs made them look decidedly amateurish… [Full Text]
See additional blog entries on this incident:

- Strange fruit in Beijing from China Law Prof blog

- Beijing: Chinese police beat up Africans from Africabeat

- Excessive Force or Racism by Beijing Police? from China Expat
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- September 24, 2007 9:28 PM
Martin Jacques: The Middle Kingdom mentality
From Guardian Unlimited:
Condoleezza Rice’s recent visit to east Asia concluded in Beijing, where she made clear her opposition to the new anti-secession law and her view that Japan should be a permanent member of the UN security council. With Sino-Japanese relations deteriorating and unification of Taiwan with China regarded as non-negotiable by the Chinese, it is hardly surprising that these remarks did not go down well. But what has not been reported in the western media is the reception Rice was given.
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- April 16, 2005 3:36 PM