PREFACE TO THE REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

‘Races do not exist, they are imagined.’ So I wrote in the preface of The Discourse of Race in Modern China more than twenty years ago. This always seemed to me to be a rather uncontroversial argument, all the more since the concept of ‘race’ had been repeatedly exposed as a dangerous illusion by a broad range of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and biologists—one thinks of Richard Lewontin and Stephen Gould. But I underestimated the tenacity of racial discourse. As Marek Kohn underlined in his Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science, scientific arguments in favour of race are persistent and versatile.¹

The very fact that science itself is a complex and ever-evolving field speaking in many voices means that new claims purporting to demonstrate the existence of ‘racial differences’ continue to reappear. Recent advances in genomics, for instance the Human Genome Project, have even led to folk notions of ‘race’ being given renewed credibility today. Not only do some biologists claim that the ‘five races’ historically envisaged by Blumenbach and others several centuries ago really do exist, but it is also alleged that ‘black’, ‘brown’, ‘red’, ‘yellow’ and ‘white’ people have significant differences at the genomic level that lead to their susceptibility to particular diseases.² Neil Risch, while fully aware of the potential misunderstanding that might be caused by discussing race and genetics together, contended in 2004—with a number of qualifications—that ‘self-ascribed race and continental ancestry often have relatively high predictive value’ in medically significant terms: folk knowledge, it is even alleged, remains for the time being a good guide to genetic differences.³

In an even less subtle manner Armand Leroi, in an editorial for the New York Times in March 2005, asserts that there are different biological foundations in the human species by proclaiming that ‘races are real’.⁴ As the new chapter at the end of this revised edition shows, similar claims are common in the People’s Republic of China. The injunction from Yang Lien-sheng, with which the book concluded twenty years ago, is as relevant now as it was then: racial discourse should be ‘spelled out in order to be dispelled’, all the more as it has widespread currency in the world’s second largest economy.

Another trend since the publication of The Discourse of Race in Modern China belongs to a tradition sometimes referred to as the ‘cognitive and evolutionary approach’. Its proponents agree that racial classifications have no biological foundation, but believe that race is more than just a social construct: it is a basic cognitive category common to all societies, ancient and modern. Race, from their point of view, is not culturally and historically contingent. Racial categorisations might well be elaborated in slightly different ways, but, in the words of Edouard Machery, ‘humans tend to classify people when they meet other people with different phenotypes’.⁵ Race, in short, is a universal category based on human cognition. Proponents of this thesis agree that there are few cross-cultural studies to validate the presumed universality of racial thinking, in particular when it comes to non-European societies. Some have turned to The Discourse of Race in Modern China for evidence. Machery and others use the book to posit that ‘the Chinese’ classified other people in racial terms well before the advent of the modern age. The most recent example is Ron Mallon, who uses my book to buttress an article questioning the idea that ‘race thinking’ was invented in the West.⁶

This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of my book, and I would like to briefly address it here. As the title indicates rather unambiguously, the book is about modern China. Like most social constructivists, I argued that the concept of race is a recent, modern invention heavily dependent on the rise of science. There were no ‘white’ or ‘black’ people anywhere until racial theories appeared first in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then elsewhere. The first chapter in the Discourse of Race looks at the premodern era. The title of the chapter is clear: ‘Race as Culture’. It points out that the very distinction between ‘race’ and ‘culture’ is a modern invention which has no validity for the premodern era. In the case of China, what some would today term as ‘race’ overlapped with ‘culture’. The chapter gives several examples. In a twelfth-century description of African slaves, bought from Arab merchants by rich merchants in Canton, cultural change was believed to entail a physical transformation:

Their color is black as ink, their lips are red and their teeth white, their hair is curly and yellow. There are males and females… They live in the mountains (or islands) beyond the seas. They eat raw things. If, in captivity, they are fed on cooked food, after several days they get diarrhoea. This is called ‘changing the bowels’ [huanchang]. For this reason they sometimes fall ill and die; if they do not die one can keep them, and after having been kept a long time they begin to understand human speech [i.e. Chinese], although they themselves cannot speak it.⁷

In popular Daoism, a human had to change bones [huangu] in order to become immortal: by analogy, African slaves were expected to change bowels [huanchang] to become half-human. A physical transformation, in other words, was perceived to be an intrinsic part of cultural assimilation. Even in the nineteenth century, scholar-officials like Xu Jiyu who had extended contact with European traders and were familiar with world geography wrote how ‘the hair and eyes of some [Europeans] gradually turn black when they come to China and stay for a long time. The features of such men and women half-resemble the Chinese.’⁸

But to say that ‘race’ is a modern construct dependent on the language of science does not mean that it appeared out of nowhere. It is precisely because it is a historically contingent concept that it is important to look at the pre-existing moral and cultural traditions which have assisted, or on the contrary prevented, the appearance of racial thinking in China. This was the second purpose of the first chapter. It showed that while the concept of race did not appear until the end of the nineteenth century, there were many cultural, social and political traditions that had a strong resonance with the racial categorisations that would spread like wildfire after 1895. These are, among others, the symbolic importance given to the colour yellow, a negative view of dark skin and a patrilineal way of organising society which strongly emphasised lines of descent. Put differently, the book argued that racial discourse in modern China was not simply translated from Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, but was the result of a complex process of negotiation and appropriation, as racial thinkers constructed a new worldview with very complex cognitive, social and political dimensions. In brief, The Discourse of Race highlighted inculturation where others might see acculturation.

The first edition of The Discourse of Race had a brief epilogue on the Maoist decades. That epilogue has now been expanded into a full chapter that takes the reader up to the twenty-first century. I was well aware of the resilience of racial theories and attitudes in China when I wrote the first edition of this book. After all, I was one of the Europeans caught up in the assault on African students in Tianjin University on 24 May 1986, spending the night hunkering under tables in a dining hall where a party was being held. Some 300 students surrounded the building and hurled bricks through the windows until the police arrived in the early hours of the morning to take all Africans into ‘protective custody’.⁹ But I was reluctant, as a historian, to make too many connections between these seemingly isolated incidents and the prolific racial discourse of the decades before the communist takeover of 1949. And I also believed, rather naively, that racist attitudes were the result of ignorance after the country had been closed to the outside world for decades under Mao.

But I soon changed my mind. In 1998 I published a long article pointing out how the notion of ‘race’ was alive and well in China.¹⁰ Hundreds of studies were being undertaken in serology, genetics, paleaoanthropology and anthropometry to claim that ‘minority people’ in China, from Tibetans to Uighurs, were biologically linked to the Han majority, and constituted a relatively homogeneous line of descent with a unique ancestor. As Zhang Zhenbiao, the doyen of physical anthropology in China, put it in 1985 in the prestigious Acta Anthropologica Sinica, ‘It is beyond doubt that the Tibetans and the other nationalities of our country descend from a common origin and belong, from the point of view of physical characteristics, to the same East-Asian type of yellow race [huangzhongren de Dongya leixing].’¹¹ The borders of the People’s Republic, in short, are claimed to be founded on a much deeper biological entity, referred to as a ‘Chinese nationality’ (Zhonghua minzu).

The last chapter incorporates this material, and much more besides, drawing attention to the popular racism that has spread since the 1980s, aided in no small measure by the internet. Africans and African-Americans in particular are regularly the victims of racist abuse, from the riots against African students in the late 1980s to the hundreds of rants on the web directed at Condoleezza Rice after her visit to the country in 2005.

The material presented in the original chapters remains very much the same. But I have rephrased many a sentence, reorganised some paragraphs, and completely revised large sections in several chapters. I have not updated the bibliography systematically, since this is a new edition, not a brand new book, but where fresh and important research directly relevant to the topic at hand has appeared, I have edited the text and added new footnotes. I hope this new edition will continue to stimulate interest in the history of racial discourse as a global phenomenon, as it did twenty years ago when the first version appeared.

Preface

‘Race’ is a growing area of interest in the social sciences. In history, considerable research has laid bare the extent of racial thinking in the West. Racism, it is well known, was not peculiar to a bigoted and ignorant minority in Europe: it was an attitude shared by many highly respected people until the 1930s at least. In the United States, racial segregation did not disappear with the abolition of slavery, but was legally enforced until the 1950s and continues to persist without legal sanction to this day—ruining the everyday lives of countless people. Racial theories were upheld by popular bodies of opinion, political groups and scientific institutions until the end of the Second World War.

It is less well known, however, that racial theories also thrived in societies outside Europe and America. It is often assumed that racism can only be a ‘white’ phenomenon against other people, sometimes lumped together under the heading ‘coloured’. The narrow focus of such historical research, which is understandable given the extraordinary damage wrought by racism in the last two centuries and by the fact that ‘race’ was first and foremost a European invention, has obscured our understanding of racial thinking in non-Western countries.¹ In China, a discourse of ‘race’ first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century under the guise of ‘science’. The use of racial categories of analysis influenced many thinkers in China throughout the twentieth century, and to this day the foundation of ‘Chinese nationality’ is claimed by the People’s Republic of China to be an organic entity with an uninterrupted line of descent which can be traced back to Peking Man. Although the importance of racial thinking has been recognised by several historians, no systematic study of it has ever been undertaken.

The first chapter of this book presents the historical background to assumptions about ‘race’ in imperial China. It introduces a broad spectrum of material on traditional attitudes towards skin tone, the social perception of physical differences, the concept of ‘barbarians’, ideas of environmental determinism and ethnocentric theories. The second chapter considers the formation and composition of racial stereotypes during the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 discusses the emergence of a racial discourse among the reformers at the turn of the century. The reformers were the first to use evolutionary theories from Europe to present the world as an arena of different ‘races’ fighting for survival. Racial theories were further elaborated by the revolutionaries, who presented the ‘Han’ as a majority ‘race’ in China fighting against both the ruling Manchus and imperialist powers. Chapter 5 focuses on racial thinking in the academic community of republican China (1911–49). The last chapter is devoted to eugenics, the pseudo-science of race improvement. ‘Race’ remained an alternative form of discourse after the communist takeover in 1949; this is briefly discussed in the epilogue.

Races do not exist, they are imagined. Phenotypical variations like hair texture or skin colour are subjectively perceived and culturally constructed by social groups: some may focus on skin tone, others on eye colour. These biological differences do not in themselves induce cultural differences, but are utilised to legitimise role expectations: physical features, in other words, are given social meaning. Classifications based on physical appearance have no scientific foundation. The assignment of racial categories varies according to the sociocultural environment. As a result, race as an identifying construct does not have a fixed meaning, but can vary enormously over time. From this perspective, a history of racial discourse can only adopt a nominalist approach: it describes how ‘race’ has been defined, and how and why these definitions have changed historically. The word ‘race’ should always be enclosed in quotation marks, were there no practical or stylistic drawbacks. I translate as ‘race’ (zu, zhong, zulei, minzu, zhongzu, renzhong, in Chinese) terms that appear to stress the physical rather than the sociocultural aspects of different peoples. ‘Racial’ is used here as the adjectival form of ‘race’.

My analysis of racial theories in modern China is based on a wide range of source material. It incorporates the writings of leading intellectuals, influential political texts, scientific journals, popular periodicals, travel accounts, textbooks and translations, as well as scientific literature and popular texts on evolution, biology, medicine, anthropology, genetics, eugenics, racial hygiene and human geography. Most of these sources were produced by scholarly elites, who never amounted to more than a fraction of the overall population. If it is possible to distinguish between different cultural levels, then this study clearly represents an elitist history: it is concerned, on the whole, with the history of an idea among different groups of intellectuals. Popular culture has not been considered for practical reasons, mainly related to the fact that most reliable source material is limited to elite culture. Although the nature of the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture is an important point of debate, it may be hypothesised that a high degree of reciprocal influence existed between the two. A careful study of popular discourse would probably reveal many parallels to the views held by the educated elite. Similarly, it is beyond the scope of this work to examine ‘Han’ perceptions of minority people, with the important proviso that the very idea of the ‘Han’ as a majority group was precisely the result of racial discourse, as Chapter 4 demonstrates.² But racial thinking was at its most salient when scholars in China attempted to classify people around the world into different racial categories, not when they wrote about minority peoples. Despite many disparaging comments on the supposedly bestial origins of the minority peoples, most writings stressed sociocultural differences rather than presumed racial distinctions well into the 1930s if not beyond. This study investigates how different groups of scholars produced racial theories about ‘outside barbarians’ (waiyi), Europeans and Africans in particular, and about themselves in the process, and is less concerned about what was written about ‘inside barbarians’ (neiyi).

Finally, it should be emphasised that the study of racial thinking in non-Western societies is still in its incipient stage. This book does not pretend to be final. If it is able to generate a fruitful discussion, it will have achieved its main purpose.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is largely based on a doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Timothy H. Barrett at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and I would like to express my gratitude for his constant support and enthusiasm. I also thank R. G. Tiedemann, of the same institution, who was very generous with his time and knowledge. Particular mention must be made of Ladislas Mysyrowicz, University of Geneva: without his help, this book would not have been possible.

I acknowledge with gratitude a two-year scholarship of the Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique, generously granted by the Commission de Recherche of the University of Geneva: it allowed me to carry out most of the research and to complete the dissertation. The Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen of the Netherlands supported fieldwork in China. A grant from the British Council Central Research Fund enabled me to conduct fieldwork in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the summer of 1988, and the School of Oriental and African Studies made a contribution towards travel expenses. The thesis was revised with the help of a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship of the British Academy.

I wish to express my gratitude to Jerome Ch’en of York University, Toronto, Frederic Wakeman of the University of California, Berkeley, Erik Zürcher of the University of Leiden, and Erik Maeder for their encouraging and helpful responses to an early research plan. Professor Ch’en, whose incisive China and the West (Hutchinson, 1979) remains a model in the historiography of modern China, kindly commented on subsequent research outlines. Michael Banton was also very supportive. The structure of this book was inspired by his Racial Theories (Cambridge, 1987), a classic in the field of race studies. I also acknowledge the influence of two books on constructivism: Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (New York, 1966) and Siegfried J. Schmidt (ed.), Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus (Frankfurt, 1990). Pamela K. Crossley, of Dartmouth College, was very generous in sharing the results of her unpublished research with me. Her work on the ideology of Manchu rule and on ethnicity in modern China has been extremely helpful. Many thanks are due to the constructive comments of William T. Rowe of Johns Hopkins University. I would also like to convey my appreciation to Robert F. Ash, Contemporary China Institute at SOAS; Peter Bowler, The Queen’s University of Belfast; Jean-Claude Favez, University of Geneva; Alfred H. Y. Lin, University of Hong Kong; Herman Mast III, University of Connecticut; Werner Meissner, Freie Universitat Berlin; Frank Pieke, University of Leiden; Roy Porter, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; Kaoru Sugihara, Japan Research Centre at SOAS; Hans van de Ven, University of Cambridge; and Paul Weindling, University of Oxford. Many thanks also to Lillian Chia, who was very kind in guiding me with the Chinese character processing. I appreciate the help I received from Charles d’Orban, Assistant Librarian at SOAS.

I take pleasure in thanking many of the friends who helped to advance the writing of this book. Patrick McGinn critically followed the progress of the work from its very inception; Christian von Somm brought new developments in radical constructivism to my attention and Lars Laamann and Frank Pohlmann read and commented on the thesis. Apart from her interest in the progress of my work, Gillian Macrae was a most hospitable friend, especially when I first arrived in London. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Uschi Zurcher. I also wish to thank Fethi Ayache, Claude Bouguet, Colin Clark, Martin Jelenic, Martin Lau and Xiong Mei.

Responsibility for the views expressed in this book, as for errors and omissions, is mine alone.

Have you heard about the origin of the world’s human races? This is a story unique to us Hakka people. Before, when there was no trace of man on earth, Tai Bai decided to create mankind. He used clay, just as we make pottery or porcelain, and after having moulded it into a human figure, he put it into the kiln. The first one was fired for too long, and was badly burnt: it was all black! This was not so good, and Tai Bai threw it away, using all his strength, throwing it a long way. He threw it to Africa; hence afterwards everyone in Africa was black. As a result of this first failure, the second one was fired more carefully. It was allowed to bake only for a little while and then taken out of the kiln. Look: too white! This wasn’t very good either, and Tai Bai again threw it away. This time, he did not throw it so far. He threw it to Europe, hence afterwards everyone in Europe was white. Experience now allowed the third one to be baked to perfection: not too long, not too short. Pretty good! Neither black nor white, but all yellow. Tai Bai was very satisfied, and put it down on the ground. Hence afterwards everyone in Asia was yellow. (Taiwan Kejia suwenxue [Folk literature of the Hakka in Taiwan], retold by Zhou Qinghua, Taipei: Dongfang wenhua shuju, 1971, pp. 149–50).