James Fallows opened fire at The Atlantic:

Let’s not even get into the logic of the ad — eg, the fact that China’s formula for creating jobs has involved more public spending and more public “guidance” of industry than America’s. Let’s skip to the bonus points for racial imagery in the ad, apart from the obvious.

1) The “Chinese” woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, “Me likee!!”-style.

2) The ad’s words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about — ‘Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country’s rise — ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it’s because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

The accompanying website underlined the charges, hammering the point home with liberal use of takeaway-carton lettering. A brief post at Talking Points Memo noted that, in the page’s source code, images of the Asian woman are identified with the label “yellowgirl”: a possible reference to her shirt, but “probably just another level of the unfortunateness.” (See update below.)

Accusations soon arose that the Hoekstra campaign was deleting critical comments from its Facebook page. A spokesman, meanwhile, insisted that the ad was satirical, and that its use of broken English was intended to highlight China’s great achievements in language education. From Politico:

“You have a Chinese girl speaking English – I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now,” Hoekstra spokesperson Paul Ciaramitaro told POLITICO. “It exhibits another way in which China is competing with us globally.”

America’s two million first-language Chinese speakers include a growing number who speak Mandarin, some of whom are presumably boys. In addition, there are some 60,000 elementary and secondary school students learning Chinese. These are not large figures compared with China’s 300 million English learners, but neither, perhaps, are they “absolutely insanely” or “unthinkably” small. Ciaramitaro continues:

“I think that China is our global competitor and the facts are what they are. They hold $1.1 trillion of our debt, their economy is booming, ours is not. It’s not a racial overtone to compare yourself to competitors on the global stage,” added Ciaramitaro. “I think the viewer of an ad is going to recognize satire. … I wouldn’t agree of the characterization [of the ad] as racial.”

FOX News’ Juan Williams suggested that the ad may have been a tactical error, with the controversy detracting from its intended message:

[Williams] sees the ad as a wasted opportunity for Hoekstra and not great publicity for the Republican party, “which is often accused of being insensitive toward immigrants.”

“Pete Hoekstra is a very bright guy, but what he is trying to get across here, his concerns about spending and debt, that’s now being obscured by charges of racism,” said Williams. “These charges of racism are resonating right now instead of his views on reigning in the national debt.”

While both Ciaramitaro and Hoekstra claimed that talk of race came from Democrats lacking a substantial response, criticism of the ad was refreshingly bipartisan. “Semi-defrocked senior GOP Political Consultant” Mike Murphy commented that it was “really, really dumb. I mean really“. While some Republicans attacked the ad’s tone or political wisdom, others accused Hoekstra of hypocrisy based on his own spending record. From The Associated Press:

GOP consultant Nick De Leeuw flat-out scolded the Holland Republican for the ad.

“Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement,” De Leeuw wrote on his Facebook page Sunday morning. “Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done ….”

“Saving America from the Washington, D.C., politicians who gave us this crippling debt and deficit crisis, Republican and Democrat alike, means Hoekstra and Stabenow should both get benched,” [Hoekstra's GOP Senate primary rival Gary] Glenn said in a release.

The Michigan Democrat Party has similarly focused on Hoekstra’s credentials as a crusader for low spending, playing up Republican and Tea Party accusations that he had supported big spending as a congressman and lobbyist.

As The Detroit Free Press’ Bob Campbell pointed out, the MDP has itself played the China card in the past, in a 2006 ad attacking GOP gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos for exporting jobs. The factories to which they were relocated were, again, curiously absent from the China on screen:

Hoekstra’s ad has so far attracted little attention on the other side of the Pacific, however. From Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy:

… There is scant chatter of it on Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo, the two most popular Twitter-like microblogging services. The NFL, lacking the popularity that Yao Ming brought to the NBA, is rarely watched in China anyway, and the ads this year that drew any attention were mostly car commercials.

Only a handful of Twitter users wrote about it in simplified Mandarin (the way Chinese is written in Mainland China, unlike the traditional characters which the Debbiespenditnow website inexplicably employs). One who did so is a software engineer working in the Netherlands who tweets under the name lihlii. “I don’t think it’s racist,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s about America losing jobs ….”

Those who did object to the ad generally did so in an American context. Michael Anti, a popular blogger who has lived in the U.S. as a Nieman Fellow, wrote on Twitter:

“I think the problem with the ad is that it’s racist, not anti-Chinese. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of prejudicial defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese.”

Update: James Fallows noted that the “yellowgirl” reference in the site’s code has now been changed to “yellowshirtgirl”. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell took aim at “yellowshirtgirl” herself. From Mediaite:

“I want to know exactly what she was thinking,” he noted, and then turned back the Hoekstra, in effect accusing him of hiding behind her image and suggesting one thing is for him to expound ideas and another “for him to hire an actor to do his dirty work for him.”

“It can be stopped right now, tonight, by a pledge of simple decency that all member of the Screen Actors’ Guild can make,” he noted, putting his right hand up as to make a promise: “I will not play dirty politics… that means that you will not play a character in political ads.” After his attack on the actor in the video, however, he explained that many actors engage in such things because of money problems, recounting the story of an actor he once “talked out of playing Hitler’s daughter” by asking if, in the worst case scenario that that was the last part she ever played, she would want to be remembered by it. “I have done things that I’m not proud of,” he concluded, “but I have not done anything I am ashamed of.”

While the Hoekstra campaign insists that talk of race is a desperate evasion by Democrats, the ad’s argument has also received a sound thrashing. From Asia Society:

Yunfan Sun, Program Officer at the Center on U.S.-China Relations [pointed] out glaring flaws in Hoekstra’s polarizing “Pete Spend-it-Not” position.

“It is precisely the ‘Spend-it-Not’ mentality in the United States that has been sending jobs overseas, where cheaper labor and materials, as well as tax breaks, lead to increases in the bottom lines of big corporations,” Sun said. “And the fact that the U.S. government can’t or won’t spend on infrastructure is precisely why Chinese companies get to build things like new subway lines in New York City.”

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos pointed out other problems:

For all the xenophobia and mistakes, the thing that might really worry a voter is that a man can get this far in the U.S. political system without a basic grip on the mechanics of his government. “You borrow more and more,” the N.P.S.A. [Nondescript Presumably Scary Asian] says. But that is false, says the U.S. Treasury. Chinese holdings of U.S. treasury bonds, in fact, declined from November of 2010 to November 2011. “China has not been a major buyer of U.S. treasury notes on the margin for a couple of years now,” Victor Shih, an expert on Chinese economics and politics at Northwestern University, told me.

When Hoekstra’s point collides with fact, he calls in the help of a large font: he describes China as “the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities”—which is true—but then describes China’s holdings as increasing from 9.6 per cent in 2002 to twenty-six per cent in 2010. A voter might blanch at the idea of a foreign country holding over a quarter of U.S. Treasury debt, except that it’s not true. The twenty-six per cent is China’s holdings among foreign holders, not overall debt, and “the overall share of treasury held by foreign entities declined in the past couple of years,” Shih told me. (“One thing that Americans have to realize is that China may be a net lender internationally, but the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises borrow a huge amount of money domestically,” Shih added. “The racist caricature of those thrifty Chinese who take advantage of debt-loving Americans is widely off the mark because China is one of the most indebted countries in the world.”)

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: James Fallows, Michael Anti, racism, United States, US debt, Vietnam
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As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells.

Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for “illegally petitioning” the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do.

“Prison bosses make more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” Liu told the Guardian. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off ….”

According to figures from the China Internet Centre, nearly £1.2bn of make- believe currencies were traded in China in 2008 and the number of gamers who play to earn and trade credits are on the rise.

A 2007 New York Times article described the gold farming phenomenon in greater depth, including the campaigns of extermination frequently waged on gold farmers by other players. These can have serious real-world consequences for the farmers: in-game death costs time and treasure, leading to missed quotas and firing or, in the case of prisoners like Liu, physical punishment.

It isn’t that WoW players don’t frequently kill other players for fun and kill points. They do. But there is usually more to it when the kill in question is a gold farmer. In part because gold farmers’ hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer’s harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like “Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die” and “Chinese Farmer Extermination,” players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming — a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like “vermin,” “rats” and “extermination”) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.

Min’s English is not good enough to grasp in all its richness the hatred aimed his way. But he gets the idea. He feels a little embarrassed around regular players and sometimes says he thinks about how he might explain himself to those who believe he has no place among them, if only he could speak their language. “I have this idea in mind that regular players should understand that people do different things in the game,” he said. “They are playing. And we are making a living.”

Gold farming is frequently conflated with Chinese nationality (PDF), according to Lisa Nakamura of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:

Constance Steinkuehler’s analysis of Lineage II, a Korean MMO uncovered some the ways in which the condemnation of virtual currency buying is far exceeded by a visceral hatred of gold sellers or farmers. This hatred is strongly articulated to race and ethnicity: since many, but not all, gold farmers are Chinese, and there is a decidedly anti-Asian flavor to many player protests against “Chinese gold farmers.” As Steinkuehler notes, hatred of gold farmers has given rise to polls querying players on North American servers “Is it OK to Hate Chinese Players?” (32% of players responded “yes,” and the majority, 39%, replied “I don’t hate China, just what they stand for in L2,” and 10% checked “I am CN and you should mind yourself, you racist pig”).(Steinkuehler 2006, p 200) Though she notes “calling someone ‘Chinese’ is a general insult that seems aimed more at one’s style of play than one’s real-world ethnicity,” the construction of Chinese identity in MMO’s as abject, undesirable, and socially contaminated racializes the culture of online games, a culture that scholars such as Castronova have claimed are unique (and valuable) because they are exempt from “real world” problems such as racism, classism, “looksism” and other types of social inequality.

Gold farmers face other dangers. Late last year, Global Voices Online covered the sentencing of a pair of gold-farm owners to six and three-year prison terms. The post includes translated comments from blogger Ruan Yifeng, who argued that the disproportionate harshness of the punishment was imposed for the sake of game developers Shanda:

It’s loathsome to see the state judiciary serve to protect the interests of a company in such a way, and to issue a judicial interpretation which benefits Capital and sends those who haven’t committed any crime to prison.

Now, with this judicial precedent, it’ll be far easier for Internet game companies to profit as anyone who dares use a mod can be sent straight to jail! Faced with such roaring profits, who will care about the rights of the little people? Dong Jie and Chen Zhu have had their lives destroyed, but who cares if, this way, we succeed in putting the fear in other thieves? In any event, nobody forced Dong and Chen to lose their heads and go start plucking the hairs off a tiger.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: forced labor, gaming, gold farming, online games, prisoners, racism
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The small-business landscape in China is littered with stories of customers who have felt swindled by investors who have fled the scene. When Mr. Cabo started teaching at the Shangxuele Children’s Activity Center in suburban Beijing a few months ago, he certainly did not expect to be embroiled in one of them. Nor did he expect to use his personal savings to reopen the center.

In mid-July, its owners hung up a sign saying the center was undergoing plumbing repairs. Then they disappeared, leaving about 100 students and about 20 staff members in the lurch. It was only after Mr. Cabo called Yao Gang, one of the three owners, that he learned the center had been closed permanently.

“You read about this in the newspapers, but you never think it’s going to happen to you,” Mr. Cabo said. “I just felt so bad for these children.”

Mr. Cabo also sensed a business opportunity. China’s ultracompetitive education system and the government’s population control policies, which generally limit urban families to one child, have created a vibrant market for extracurricular education. Almost every middle-class couple is willing to spend extra money to give their child a leg up when applying to top-ranked universities.

So Mr. Cabo emptied his bank account of about 60,000 renminbi, or about $9,000, and began paying the bills. Now he is struggling to keep the center open, dealing not only with parents but also with corrupt police officers, physical violence toward his staff and bewilderment on the part of many Beijing residents at his very existence.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: education, foreigners in China, racism
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Emma, the community leader, had just returned from telling a Nigerian family their son had died. He jumped from the sixth floor as he fled police and the hospital had concluded there was no point keeping him on life support. “He was 30. If not for the police he might be alive today,” she says.

Guangzhou public security bureau did not respond to queries. But Emma argued the raids merely pushed people underground and into crime, when the city should be benefiting from them.

Business has fallen by a third to a half, say Chinese vendors who depend on African clients. Migrants are already leaving Guangzhou for cities with more sympathetic officials.

Mary Ngum – not her real name – is here legitimately but says she would rather return to west Africa than endure police raids and wider discrimination.

Elegant and well-spoken, she sighs over the headmaster who refused to hire her to teach “because you are black”; the strangers who hold their noses when she sits beside them on the bus; the derogatory remarks she overhears. Many blame ignorance, not malice, but she thinks Guangzhou worse than other cities she has lived in: “They are always talking about colour,” she says.

Some fear popular prejudice is growing, and fuelling the crackdown.

Read more about Africans in China via CDT.

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Post tags: Africans in China, foreigners in China, Guangzhou, racism
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We’ll probably never know what motivated a team of editors and graphic artists working for People’s Daily and Xinhua, the Chinese state-owned wired service, to collaborate on — or at least greenlight posting — a slideshow of American celluloid celebrities photoshopped in blackface. But the results are causing an uproar. Yesterday, the slideshow, which featured celebs ranging from  Lady Gaga to Madonna to Jennifer Anniston, ran on both of those Chinese news sources’ web sites. The headline on the People’s Daily site was: “If hot stars were blackened.”

By the time the Wall Street Journal contacted Xinhua for comment, the slideshow link had been disabled, yet screen grabs are preserved here (by WSJ) and here (by the blog Shanghaiist). The credit line that ran with the original slideshow was “CRI Online,” which the Journal speculates may refer to China Radio International, a state-run news service. That fact, however, has not been confirmed.

Naturally, online protests have erupted. And there’s plenty to be said about the haphazardness of news judgment in China and about the hugely disconcerting mix of discrimination and voyeurism surrounding race in a country where prosperous eastern cities are largely racially homogenous.

See also an open letter to Xinhua over this issue by McClatchy’s China correspondent Tom Lasseter.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: racism, Xinhua
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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.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Lou Jing, multiracial, racism
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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.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ethnic discrimination, racism
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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 Obama’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.

© cschultz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dalai Lama, Obama China visit 2009, racism, slavery
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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.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Lou Jing, racism
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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:

(...)
Read the rest of Can a Mixed-Race Contestant Become a Chinese Idol? (323 words)

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Post tags: Lou Jing, online public opinion, racism
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