5
Introduction
Even in the years immediately following the fall of the Manchu dynasty, racial theories were confined mainly to political texts concerned with reform or revolution. But racial discourse was given a new leash of life by the New Culture Movement. As the Republic of China, established in 1912 to put an end to the problems created by the Qing, seemed to be floundering, widespread disillusionment with traditional culture set in. Scholars and students rebelled against Confucianism and called for the creation of a new culture based on modern values, in particular democracy and science. This iconoclastic campaign was most pronounced in the cities along the coast, where the social structure was evolving rapidly in the wake of the revolution against the Qing.
The First World War was a prosperous period for coastal regions, which benefited economically from the fall of the imperial system and its restrictions on commerce as well as from the decline of European trade. During this ‘golden age’ of economic expansion, cities like Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton became outposts of modernisation, where local politicians and influential intellectuals rubbed shoulders with teachers, journalists and clerks, while wealthy entrepreneurs mingled with artisans, small shopkeepers and industrial workers.1
Nationalism was a prominent feature of the coastal civilisation. The entire social structure was imbued with a sense of national renewal, which encompassed far-reaching questions about collective identity: after the collapse of a millenarian empire, what was China and who were the Chinese? These issues were a vital aspect of the New Culture Movement, which thrived thanks to new forms of expression, in particular the baihua vernacular style of writing. In a new, colloquial idiom that was much closer to the spoken language of ordinary people, followers of the New Culture Movement turned away from the classics, attacked traditional ethics and introduced science and democracy instead.
The widespread need for a new culture, distinct from the Confucian heritage yet able to provide a sense of meaning and continuity in a modern world, was largely articulated by the intelligentsia. Many young intellectuals (zhishifenzi, a newly coined term), often educated in either Japan or the West, were determined to integrate foreign science and culture into their society. They urged their readers to part with what they called the ‘stagnant elements’ of ‘traditional culture’ and to accept foreign democracy, science and culture as the founding elements of a new order. Western thought thus came to play a central role in the effort of cultural reconstruction. If opinions diverged about the extent to which the country should be ‘westernised’ (xihua), most intellectuals agreed that the West was the ultimate norm by which change should be measured.
Through a process of polarisation, the ‘West’ was forced into an artificial relationship of opposites with ‘Confucianism’. This binary vision rested largely upon the substance-application school (tiyong) formulated by the 1860 generation of reformers and was expanded during the New Culture Movement. Similarities between China and the West were discarded, continuities were ignored, analogies were rejected; the diversity of human experience was forcibly channelled into opposed directions. The radical reformer Chen Duxiu, like so many of his contemporaries, focused only on what he perceived as the ‘fundamental’ differences between China and the West, the ‘yellow’ and the ‘white’ ‘races’: the West was individualistic, China was communalistic; the West was utilitarian, China was ritualistic, Westerners emphasised struggle, the Chinese preferred tranquillity.2 This dualistic vision was given its quintessential expression by the conservative Liang Shuming: the East was ‘spiritual’, the West was ‘materialistic’. Whether as an idealised version of itself or as a polluted alien, the West became China’s alter ego.
With the collapse of the imperial system and the attack on the Confucian world order, the West was used as the ultimate source of authority. The reformers of the nineteenth century had used the tiyong concept: the ti (substance) applied to China, the yong (application) to the West: ‘Chinese learning for substance, Western learning for practical application’ (Zhong wei ti, Xi wei yong). By placing China and the West in a dialectical relation of ti and yong, the reformers had exposed the authority of Confucianism to doubt. In his Kongzi gaizhi kao (Confucius as a reformer) of 1897, Kang Youwei had revisited the classics to represent Confucius as a progressive reformer. With the fading away of Confucian authority at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘Western thought’ was compelled to cover cultural iconoclasm with a cloak of authority. But in many cases the relationship to foreign systems of thought was indirect and oblique, and at times minimal. Attitudes of course varied from author to author. Hu Shi, for instance, was a renowned intellectual, deeply committed to foreign schools of philosophy such as Dewey’s pragmatism. But certainly in the early years of the republic, some students rather enthusiastically attributed their own thoughts to the West, much as Abelard of Bath ascribed his own ideas to Islamic thought during the Middle Ages when there was an infatuation with Islamic science. This was particularly evident in the many textbooks, primers and digests that poured forth from the presses of republican China, introducing the reading public to this or that aspect of the West in an often highly simplified manner.
Despite these limitations, an extraordinary amount of hithero unavailable information about the world found its way to the reading public, just as water seeps through parched earth. And this, in turn, introduced a comparative perspective that stimulated all kinds of creative ideas. The entire republican era could very well be qualified as a golden age of engagement with the world, as people, things and ideas moved in and out of the country. These global flows fostered an unprecedented degree of diversity. By the end of the republican era, professional academics were able to match their foreign peers in many fields, ranging from avionics to zoology. People of all walks of life were often familiar with the world beyond their community, as illustrated magazines and radio programmes disseminated information about every aspect of the modern world, whether new agricultural techniques or the fluctuating price of silk on the international market. Striking developments also took place in the social sciences, especially anthropology, ethnology, biology, human geography and demography.3
This chapter looks at the spread of racial discourse in the Republic of China from 1912 to 1949. The sources include newspapers, popular periodicals, introductions to biology, medicine, evolution, anthropology and genetics, primers on science, medical handbooks, marriage guides, schoolbooks and even caricatures. Most of these publications were written in simplified vernacular, produced as cheaply as possible and widely distributed in all major cities. They addressed readers across the social spectrum, and became particularly popular among the new social classes along the country’s coastal civilisation.
The periodical press, which had been launched by the reformers in the 1890s, played a particularly prominent role. A wide variety of specialised magazines and periodicals were introduced during the New Culture Movement, managed by established publishing companies or by independent associations. Many sought to popularise science, to introduce foreign schools of thought and to build up a new culture. Periodicals became so popular that writers often chose to contribute articles rather than write books. The spread of the periodical press was supported by the rise of new publishing houses, the introduction of modern printing methods, the growth of a modern education system after the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905, the spread of educational associations and, more generally, by a general increase in functional literacy. The Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), for instance, achieved a circulation of 45,000 in 1931, and a single issue might be consulted by ten to twenty readers.4 Copies were deposited in public libraries and reading rooms and were frequently rented, resold or loaned.
Many of the publications consulted for this study were published as part of popular self-study series, or congshu. Congshu books were written by members of the academic community, yet they reached a large readership; some used only a limited vocabulary and an elementary grammar to ensure the widest possible circulation. Wang Yunwu, who from 1921 onwards became editor-in-chief of the huge Commercial Press, applied the notion of ‘mass production’ to congshu books, lowering production costs and extending the distribution network.5 These books became very popular during the 1930s, and had a significant influence on the shaping of urban culture in republican China.
Some authors had participated in the revolution of 1911, many were active during the New Culture Movement, and quite a few filled prominent positions in the new colleges and universities established after the collapse of the empire. They maintained close links with one another and forged academic networks for mutual support.6 The returned students were as small a proportion of the entire population as the metropolitan graduates (jinshi) had been in imperial China. Some were direct descendants of reknowned scholar families. Pan Guangdan, for example, was a graduate of Columbia University; his father had been a member of the prestigious Hanlin Academy under the Qing. Like their imperial predecessors, the newly educated elite firmly believed that the scholar should operate on behalf of society as a whole. Having grown up in an age of rapid political change, they were convinced that national reconstruction was the responsibility of the intellectual elite. They also took upon themselves the task of promoting science and bringing knowledge to the wider public. China, wrote Hu Shi in 1915, needed a form of government that would ‘enable the enlightened class of people to utilise their knowledge and talents for the education and betterment of the ignorant and indifferent’. Jiang Menglin, a prominent educator, commented that ‘our motto is government of the people, for the people, and by the educated class.’7 From benevolent Confucian scholar to activist republican intellectual was only a small step.
Origins
The search for racial origins continued unabated after the fall of the empire, but was now carried out in the name of science. Wei Juxian, for instance, published an important article in the journal Forwards on the origins of the Han ‘race’. Wei was born in 1898, was attached to Beijing Normal University as a researcher, and accepted a professorship at Jinan National University in Shanghai in 1933. He had numerous official positions and was considered a specialist in the conservation of archaeological artefacts. After the communist takeover in 1949 he moved to Taiwan, where he authored a study showing how the Chinese had originally discovered America.
In his 1933 article, Wei identified the Xia, named after the first dynasty in China to be described in ancient historical chronicles, as the genuine descendants of the Yellow Emperor. Many historical documents were produced to demonstrate that the Xia had deep-set eyes, high noses and beards similar to those of the Aryans. ‘The Xia race’s physical appearance, language, customs and clothes are all similar to those of the Aryan race, of which those who are heavily bearded are Caucasians.’8 The Yin descended from the Emperor Yan and had intermarried with the Xia to generate the Han ‘race’. Wei situated the Xia’s original homeland in the Caucasus. They were a ‘white’ and ‘pure’ race. The Yin were ‘red barbarians’ from an area of China now known as Sichuan province. The mixing of white and red had given birth to the yellow Han. Wei Juxian maintained the idea of racial purity by locating the source of pollution in an alien group: southern barbarians had undermined the original purity of the divine descendants of the Yellow Emperor.9
Chinese scientists of international repute were also in search of purity. Li Ji published The Formation of the Chinese People: An Anthropological Inquiry with Harvard University Press in 1928.10 Li contested the idea that the Chinese had been an unchanging and homogeneous people. He began by gathering all the data available on Chinese skulls, and found that 14.41 per cent were dolichocephalic (a long and narrow shaped head), 42.12 per cent mesocephalic (an intermediate shape) and only 43.47 per cent brachycephalic (a broad shaped head). Li also measured noses, and discovered that the platyrrhinic type (flat nose) was a minor element in the physical make-up of Chinese physical traits. Results were distributed by province. Li then reconstructed the routes along which cities had evolved in order to follow the historical movements of what he called the ‘We-Group’. This painstaking exercise was based on the records of 4,478 city walls, thus enabling building activity in different provinces at different periods to be charted. In a chapter on surnames, Li assumed that surnames of the same origin denoted a blood relationship. The term ‘We-Group’ came to signify the ‘Descendants of the Yellow Emperor’: Li attempted to disentangle the original surnames created by the Yellow Emperor from the surnames of other people. He classified 4,657 names on the basis of ethnic and geographical significance in sixty-two maps. Finally, he took the study of the migration of the Yellow Emperor’s descendants further by investigating the census figures appearing in the official dynastic histories of China.
The conclusion Li Ji drew from all the evidence he had gathered so meticulously was that the prevalent type of the ‘original race’ was brachy-cephalic-leptorrhine (small nose). A group of narrow-headed Tungus were responsible for diluting the divine race of the Yellow Emperor by intermarriage. The Tungus were a group of people from Siberia, of which the Manchus were thought to be a branch. Li Chi ended his inquiry on a note of hope: ‘In the future one may expect a continued leptorrhinisation of the south and a rebrachycephalisation of the north’, a process by which the pure type of the Yellow Emperor would come to replace the inferior elements of China’s racial composition.
Some archaeologists, too, sought evidence of human beginnings in China. Lin Yan, for instance, carefully examined all the theories that traced the origins of the ‘Chinese race’ to alien migrations: all lacked ‘scientific proof’. Like others, he cited the discovery of Beijing Man at Zhoukoudian as evidence that the soil of the Middle Kingdom had been inhabited since the earliest stage of human history. Excavations supported his hypothesis by demonstrating that migrations had taken place only within the empire. It was concluded that China was inhabited by ‘the earth’s most ancient original inhabitants’.11
Both Li Ji and Lin Yan used their discoveries to propose a vision of the nation which actually included ‘minority peoples’. They suggested that all inhabitants of China had descended from a common ancestor. In doing so, they anticipated a much broader definition of the nation which would become common in the People’s Republic after 1978, as we see in the last chapter of this book.
But most researchers focused on the Han. Zhang Junjun’s search for purity, for instance, revolved around the concept of blood. He was born in 1897 in Hunan province, taught anthropology at Jinan National University in Shanghai, and became a popular writer on the idea of racial degeneration. He studied psychology with Robert Woodworth at Columbia University, but read anthropology and eugenics—the pseudoscience of race improvement—in his spare time. The premise of Zhang’s approach was that all the ancestors of the Han ‘race’ had O group blood flowing in their veins, a purity subsequently vitiated by intermarriage with barbarians.12 Each province was analysed and classified according to blood type. The A group was predominant in the north, where the original O group had been bastardised by frequent foreign invasions. In Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, however, the O group was found in more than 50 per cent of the population, whereas in the south it hovered around 40 per cent. The results of Zhang’s inquiry demonstrated that the nation was a mixed association of an original race, preserved mainly in the region of the Yangzi River (Jiangsu and Zhejiang), and a variety of barbarian tribes.
Next Zhang tried to find out in which provinces the greatest concentrations of intellect could be found. He classified 15,089 famous historical personages by home province. The majority, unsurprisingly, came from Jiangsu (2,428) and Zhejiang (1,974), the two provinces where the original ‘race’ was supposed to dominate, ranking far above other regions (Hunan held third place with 1,200 historical figures; at the bottom was Heilongjiang province with a mere dozen). Zhang thus reconstructed the itinerary of the original ‘race’: the first branch of healthy and superior (youxiu) Han, taught by the Gods and blessed by Heaven, had moved into the Yellow River region. Barbarian invasions, famine and internecine wars had caused migrations towards the region around the Yangzi River. During both phases, the original race had degenerated by intermarriage with inferior tribes.
Like many other intellectuals of the 1930s, Zhang Junjun was inspired by the pioneering study of Liang Boqiang on the Han race’s blood. Liang took the blood’s ‘index of agglutination’ as an indicator of purity. He maintained that the Han were ‘purer’ in the south, where it had never intermarried with barbarians. The index of Guangdong province, for instance, was the highest in the country.13
The idea of degeneration by infusions of inferior blood was not universally accepted. The historian Gu Jiegang pointed at the contributions of non-Han peoples through cultural admixture as well as biological amalgamation.14 Lin Yutang, professor of literature, journalist and writer of popular books, was also a typical exponent of the theory of ‘blood infusion’. In his widely read My Country and My People he could certify that each foreign invasion had been conducive to ‘a kind of phylogenetic monkey-gland grafting [sic], for one observes a new bloom of culture after each introduction of new blood.’15 The nation’s racial vigour was explained by the periodic addition of fresh plasma, a phenomenon thought to have occurred with striking regularity in the country’s history.
Colour
Racial theories gained institutional grounding after the revolution of 1911. Chen Yinghuang, who was born in Hunan in 1877 and became a radical student in Japan around the turn of the century, was appointed as the first professor of physical anthropology at Beijing University. In 1918 he produced a comprehensive survey of ‘human races’ which perpetuated the tension between hierarchy and unity so common among racial thinkers.16 In his preface he claimed that all people contributed equally to humanity, regardless of their skin colour or ‘degree of evolution’. The imposition of a hierarchical vision on the conceptual unity of all humans, reminiscent of Kang Youwei’s datong, was embedded in his opening definition of anthropology: ‘Anthropology studies all races, from the Chinese and the English down to the dwarf slave and the black slave.’17
Like other anthropological studies in republican China, Professor Chen’s book was highly critical of racial theories that purported to demonstrate the superiority of Europeans and their descendants. Whiteness as a factor in racial categorisation was dismissed as pure myth. Chen noted that Europeans rarely had white skin, as it was often stained by impure brown particles. A genuine white complexion was to be found only among the northern Europeans, but even they turned dark under the tropical sun; their skin peeled and became freckled. He quoted a Japanese scientist who had apparently demonstrated that Europeans, too, had spotted buttocks.18
Chen’s work was echoed by a popular Précis of Human Physiological Health Science, published in 1921, which explained how the quantity of ‘pigment granules’ in the epidermis accounted for the ‘different colours’ of the human race.19 This explanation was adopted by some writers critical of skin tone as a measure of superiority. Too few authors, unfortunately, extended these critical comments to Africans by noting that racial theories were based only on a spoonful of melanin.
The variability of skin colour was often underlined. In his History of the Progress of Mankind and Culture (1926), Gong Tingzhang asserted that even some Africans could acquire a light complexion. Southern Europeans were dark, whereas Nordics revealed a pink hue, as blood vessels ran underneath a translucent skin. The United States was also undergoing a racial mutation: blacks were turning white, whereas whites were becoming ‘slightly red, the hair increasingly dark, the cheekbones more protuberant and the lower jaw larger’.20 Gong Tingzhang was a professor of literature in various institutes of higher learning, including Beijing Normal University. His book was published by the Commercial Press as part of a cheap congshu series written in the vernacular for mass consumption.
Higher spheres of academic research also toyed with the concept of skin colour. Zhu Xi, a professor at Sun Yatsen University in Canton and a specialist in the field of artificial parthenogenesis in Chinese frogs, published a study on human ancestry. He distinguished ten shades of skin colour: pure white (no example was given), red-white (Scandinavians, North Germans, English), ash-white (Mediterranean), dark yellow (American Indians, Indo-Malaysians, Polynesians), yellow-brown (Malaysians), red-brown, black-brown (Australians), deep brown, black, and pure yellow, reserved for the Chinese. Zhu Xi reclassified the American Indians as ‘American yellows’.21
Hair
Pruner-Bey’s classic article ‘Chevelure comme Charactéristique des Races Humaines’ was published in 1863, but hair remained relatively unimportant in physical anthropology. Although some writers divided hair into a ‘leiotrichous’ type (straight and wavy, i.e. European) and a ‘ulotrichous’ type (crisp, woolly or tufted), skin colour and headshape were the cornerstones of racial categorisation. In China, however, hair sometimes assumed much greater significance. Professor Chen Yinghuang questioned the scientific validity of skin colour, which he rightly regarded as a myth manipulated by arrogant Westerners. His anthropological survey began with a detailed analysis of hair systems. Three pages were devoted to the classification of different types of beards, whiskers and moustaches.22 Chen Yinghuang subscribed to the neo-Lamarckian paradigm, viewing evolution as an inevitable ascent through a preordained hierarchy of developmental stages. Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation was central to this belief: embryological growth was thought to pass through the earlier stages of evolution, starting with the amoeba and ascending to the level of fish, reptile and, finally, mammal. As it evolved in the womb, the human foetus gradually reached the last stage and lost its hair after seven months. Some barbarians had never evolved beyond the simian stage, and retained an overdeveloped hair system. The wonu was given as an example. Wonu, or ‘dwarf slave’, was an age-old derogatory term applied to the Japanese. It was also an approximate phonetic transliteration of Ainu, the name of a minority from the Hokkaido region. A drawing depicted a naked wonu, heavily bearded and covered with hair from top to toe (see illus. 4).
Zhang Zuoren, professor of zoology at Sun Yatsen University and a colleague of Zhu Xi, also considered the absence of body hair to be the most striking feature among human variations. Like Chen Yinghuang and other scientists of that period, Zhang was not a Darwinian but a neo-Lamarckian who butressed his views with references to Ernst Haeckel. Zhang noted that regression to a previous level of evolution was always possible, and reprinted a picture of a hirsute man ‘born in Russia’. Chinese examples were also provided: in 1921, a certain Miss Wang had given birth to a hairy baby, later exhibited at the Agricultural Experimental Ground in Beijing.23 Racial atavism highlighted how the beast was lurking just underneath the surface of human civilisation. You Jiade’s Origins of Mankind (1929) also drew extensively on the theory of recapitulation. The ‘fine and long hair’ covering the foetus was similar to that of a monkey: it normally fell out at the moment of birth.24
Recapitulation was one of the arguments used in support of racial discrimination in the West. ‘Coloured people’, it was argued, were inferior because they retained certain juvenile traits—and hence were unfit to rule themselves. Lin Yutang, who addressed an English-reading public in his My Country and My People (1935), was aware of the misuse of recapitulation theory, and defended his country by distinguishing between race and culture. The Chinese, according to Lin, were culturally old but racially young. Havelock Ellis, who had characterised the ‘Asiatics’ as racially infantile, was misleading: Lin preferred the term ‘prolonged childhood’.25
The non-Darwinian model of unilinear evolution had great appeal in the republican era because it underpinned a message of hope: people could change themselves by altering their environment. ‘Race’ was not a fixed category determined by genes, but a flexible unit open to change. From the communist theories of historical stages to a fascist vision of the millennium, time was viewed along an axis with one direction: forwards. The theory of evolution (jinhualun), or ‘theory about the transformation forwards’, replaced the more traditional opposition between centre and periphery. Gong Tingzhang, like so many others, divided humanity into three stages of civilisation. The lowest stage was reserved for the shengfan, or ‘raw barbarians’: they fed on raw meat, blood, grass and roots, and dwelt in the dark forests of the mountains.26 These raw barbarians were coated with thick hair. Gong reproduced Chen Yinghuang’s drawing of the ‘dwarf slave’ by way of illustration. ‘Cooked’ barbarians attained the second level of evolution. The final stage was civilisation. English and Chinese had patches of body hair only on the chest and on the legs. In his Evolution of Organisms, Zhu Weiji also asserted that the ‘yellows’ and ‘whites’ alone had attained the highest level of civilisation.27
Racial theories were often devised by university professors, but they gained a wider audience in booklets and textbooks published in the congshu series mentioned above. Zhang Ziping, for instance, was a Japanese-educated mineralogist turned novelist. He wrote several books on geography and evolution for the Commercial Press, as well as a pamphlet on Ernst Haeckel.28 His widely read Human Geography (1924) selected hair as the most reliable standard for racial categorisation. Skin colour was not a genuine factor: some Asians were white, whereas Europeans in Africa could have a ‘pure black colour’.29 Craniology was also dismissed, and here Zhang pointed out that headshape tended to vary very little between different groups of people. Zhang produced a drawing of different hair types that corresponded to his fivefold classification of humanity. Six years later, Zhang listed the straight-haired races (i.e. Chinese) and the curly-haired races as two distinct branches in human biology (straight hair was judged ‘more beautiful’ than curly hair).30
The theory of recapitulation corroborated an age-old link between hair and savagery. Absence of hair from face and body was considered a sign of development. Lin Yutang searched even further for evidence of racial superiority:
A study of the hair and skin of the [Chinese] people also seems to indicate what must be considered results of millenniums of civilized indoor living. The general lack or extreme paucity of beard on man’s face is one instance of such effect, a fact which makes it possible for most Chinese men not to know the use of a personal razor. Hair on men’s chests is unknown, and a moustache on a woman’s face, not so rare in Europe, is out of the question in China. On good authority from medical doctors, and from references in writing, one knows that a perfectly bare mons veneris is not uncommon in Chinese women.31
The association of hairiness with bestiality became a major feature of anti-Japanese caricature during the 1930s.32 The midget’s kimono concealed a coat of bristles and hair, embodying the beast-like attributes of the invader. In many caricatures, the stubbly and furry dwarf was a molester of Chinese virgins, personifying the rape of civilisation by barbarism. The clog and the furry leg, trampling on Chinese sovereignty, became a widely used symbol of Japanese imperialism during the 1930s. Women in kimonos used international treaties to wipe their hairy bottoms, revealing both the island nation’s disdain for law and the subhuman features of the female gender. Where claws, fangs and horns emerged, the unregenerate dwarf receded from bestiality into the darkness of devilry. In the pictorial world of wartime China, ghoulish hobbits roamed lands laid waste by the forces of evil. Westerners also partook in the iconography of malevolence. Drunken, debauched, brutish and loathsome, crouching among moneybags and armaments, the unshaven capitalist became a popular stereotype of Chinese socialist caricature in the 1930s.
Intelligence
The credibility of craniology, or the study of the shape and size of the skull, encountered a fatal blow when Franz Boas demonstrated in 1908 that headshape is influenced as much by diet and upbringing as by genetics. His discovery could only undermine one of the goals of physical anthropology at the time, namely racial classification, and his work was burnt by the Nazis a few decades later.
The study of skulls played only a minor role in racial discourse in republican China. Wu Dingliang was a rare exception. As director of the Institute of Physical Anthropology, he had obtained 358 skulls from a public graveyard outside Kunming during the Second World War and was struck by the high proportion of metopism, a cranial anomaly consisting of a separation of the two lateral halves of the frontal bone. Wu noted that metopism was generally attributed to a greater development of the frontal lobe and was sometimes associated with racial superiority. He compared his findings with cases occurring among other ‘races’ and found that all had inferior rates. He concluded that the Chinese were ‘at least as superior as the Europeans’.33
But rare were those who, like Wu Dingliang or Zhang Liyuan, believed in a link between intelligence and cranial capacity.34 Most authors mentioned cranial measurements but questioned their accuracy. Zhang Junjun had a slightly different take on the issue. He accepted the idea that cranial capacity could be measured, but doubted the idea propounded by some Europeans that the Chinese brain weighed slightly less than that of the average Caucasian. Zhang did not think that such small differences were sufficient to establish the inferiority of the ‘Chinese race’. He correlated the weights of body and brain to obtain a figure indicative of the relative brain capacity of different ‘races’: ‘The average body weight of our race is less compared to that of the Europeans, but the cranial weight, by contrast, is almost the same, so the relative cranial weight of our people is superior to that of the Europeans. Thus one can deduce that the cranial coefficient of the Chinese race is very high, and one may conclude that the development of our race’s cranial strength is not inferior to that of any other race!’35
Zhang Junjun also challenged IQ tests current at the time. He contended, rather sensibly, that most tests like Goddard Binet, Stanford Binet and Army Beta were biased. The number of tested specimens was too small, a significant variation in age appeared in interracial comparisons, and the tests failed to take cultural differences into account. He relied instead on the work of his colleagues. Lu Zhiwei, a noted linguist and psychologist who had graduated from Columbia University, had demonstrated by means of the Binet and Pintner-Paterson Performance tests that Chinese children were as intelligent as their American counterparts.36 But this did not lead Zhang Junjun to dismiss racial categorisations altogether. Instead, he concluded that the ‘Chinese race’ belonged to the ‘superior category’.
Tong Runzhi, a respected specialist in education and the president of Jiangsu Provincial College of Education, also expressed concern about the intelligence of the ‘Chinese race’ in the prestigious Eastern Miscellany. He noted how Westerners scorned the Chinese, called them ‘yellow dogs’ and proscribed intermarriage: but were they really as inferior as other races? His review of various IQ tests revealed the low scores of ‘blacks’ and ‘reds’. Tong fully endorsed the results, ascribing a ‘feeble intelligence’ to those ‘races’. But the achievements of Chinese children were rarely inferior to those of Americans, except when tests did not take into account their cultural background. Moreover, Tong noted, most IQ tests were based on immigrants, whose intellectual capacity did not reflect the vast potential of the Chinese mind. Tong proposed the spread of education and the implementation of eugenic policies in order to exploit the hidden resources of the Chinese intellect.37
Not all scientists indulged in detailed comparative studies. Was not the superiority of Chinese civilisation the result of a unique intelligence? For Chen Jianshan, a marine biologist who wrote popular textbooks on evolution, the ordinary European brain was simply smaller than the Chinese.38 Chen Yucang, director of the Medicial College at Tongji University and a secretary to the Legislative Yuan, boldly postulated in his Research on the Human Body that the degree of civilisation was the only indicator of cranial weight: ‘If we compare the cranial weights of different people, the civilised are somewhat heavier than the savages, and the Chinese brain is a bit heavier than the European’s.’39 Jiang Xiangqing, head of physical education at Fudan University, related civilisation to height and intelligence in a popular introduction to the ‘science of body measurements’ for athletes. Savages were on the whole smaller than civilised people. Chinese and Japanese were relatively taller than Europeans. Jiang concluded that ‘the dumber (yu), the smaller’.40
Lin Yutang, China’s crusader for racial rehabilitation, thought that his people’s only fault was that they suffered from ‘an overdose of intelligence’. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not believe that intelligence was confined to the educated elite: ‘One rarely sees in the slums and factory districts that type of big, husky animal of a similar class in the West, distinguished only by his big jaw, low forehead, and brute strength. One meets a different type, with intelligent eyes and cheerful appearance and an eminently reasonable temperament.’41
Stereotypes
Early anthropology in Europe was fixated on the link between Africans and apes, legitimised by comparative studies that had begun with Peter Camper in the 1770s. For Sir William Lawrence, a major figure of British racial science, ‘the Negro structure approximates unequivocally to that of the monkey. It not only differs from the Caucasian model; but is distinguished from it in two respects; the intellectual characters are reduced, the animal features enlarged and exaggerated.’42 Such ideas, underneath a thin veneer of science, reproduced in a different guise an age-old prejudice. Despite the Christian doctrine of humanity’s unique nature, analogies between humans and animals had existed for centuries. Popular mythology blurred the boundary between them. According to Keith Thomas, the early modern period abounded with half-human, half-animal ‘missing links’. ‘It was also believed that offspring could be engendered by sexual unions between man and beast.’43
In contrast to racial thinkers in Europe and the United States, writers in China rarely made analogies between humans and apes. But they did not hesitate to point out that Africans were at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Since ancient times in China, blackness was the mark of the slave, a belief that could still be found at university level in the 1920s.
Gu Shoubai, a popular writer with the Commercial Press, for instance divided Africans into a ‘black slave race’ (heinu zhongzu), a ‘little black slave race’ (xiao heinu zhongzu) and a ‘standard black slave race’ (zhun heinu zhongzu) in his popular introductions to human geography.44 Professor Gong Tingzhang reproduced a picture of an African in suit and tie: the caption read ‘black slave from Africa’.45 Gong further remarked that Africans and Australian aborigines had ‘small brains’ and had attained the level of civilisation of ‘dumb peasants’ (yunong) in China.
Nonetheless, several authors pointed to the similarities between apes and Africans. Chen Jianshan, the popular evolutionist, classified the ‘black slave’ with the chimpanzees, gorillas and Australians as a branch of the propithecantropus.46 A popular zoology textbook first published in 1916 included a paragraph on the differences between humans and hominoids. The ‘inferior races’ (liedeng zhongzu) had a facial index similar to that of the orang-utan. Polygenism accounted for the inequality of mankind. The ‘black slave’ was classified in the gorilla branch, and Malays were descendants of the orang-utan.47
Traditional stereotypes about foreign people found their way into textbooks and studies written in the guise of science. Anthropology, one of the earliest anthropological treatises to be published in China and still bound in the traditional manner, described the Burmese as lazy, the Thai as cowards and the Vietnamese as frivolous and dishonest.48 Gu Shoubai, mentioned above, replicated traditional barbarian imagery well into the 1920s. His books were inexpensive and widely distributed by the Commercial Press. Africans were ‘racially inferior’, and only the aborigines of Australia and South America could be ‘more barbarous’. Abyssinians ate meat from living horses, Australian aborigines were cannibals, Taiwanese barbarians went about decapitating people ‘when they are idle’ (Gu distinguished between ‘raw barbarians’ and ‘cooked barbarians’), and Malays existed on mud and human flesh.49
The Great Dictionary of Zoology (1923), the first reference work of its kind, analysed human races according to their hair type. The ‘woolly-haired’ had ‘a rather long head, many protruding teeth, and a quite low forehead, so that their face is inclined towards the back. This type of people have a shameful and inferior way of thinking, and have no capacity to shine in history.’ Australian aborigines were ‘the most inferior race on earth’.50 Liu Huru, in his widely-used treatise on human geography, published in 1931 as part of the New Age Historical and Geographical Series, proclaimed that most Africans ‘like to sing and dance and love ornaments’. Their customs, however, were judged ‘low and ugly’, and their character ‘ferocious’. In New Guinea and Australia, aborigines had a ‘vulgar and low intelligence’ and ate grass and insects.51
Not even Japan, a close neighbour, was immune to racial stereotyping. When they were not referred to as ‘dwarf slaves’, their size was ridiculed: Zhou Qichang called these ‘yellow or darkish’ people a ‘race of tiny men’ (airenzhong).52 The early treatise Anthropology mentioned above divided the Japanese into a ‘beautiful race’ and an ‘ugly race’, the latter characterised by a ‘fat body, large and square heads, protruding cheeks, slant eyes, a flat nose and a big mouth’.53
It would be wrong to assume that these cliches have been gathered here simply by sieving the new print culture of republican China through a filter that retains racial imagery. A dredger would be needed to gather up all the stereotypes which abounded in China, and, needless to say, in the West, during the period between the two world wars and well beyond. These stereotypes were pervasive and influential, and they were rarely challenged.
Hierarchy
Racial discourse was first and foremost about human categorisation. As the language of science on which racial theories were premised evolved, from the appearance of genetics to the decline of craniology, so did the various categorisations devised by racial thinkers. But the fivefold system elaborated by the reformers at the end of the nineteenth century remained remarkably stable in republican China. A few writers invoked Blumenbach, the German anthropologist who first proposed that the human species consisted of five distinct ‘races’. The Great Dictionary of Zoology introduced the work of Daniel G. Brinton, an American ethnologist who associated five ‘races’ with five continents.54 Zhou Qichang also retained Brinton’s fivefold scheme after reviewing alternative classificatory models.55 But reformers and revolutionaries had classified races by five continents well before the work of Brinton was ever introduced to China. Professor Zhu Xi mentioned Huxley’s division into Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloid, Xantochroid and Melanochroid ‘races’, a system similar to that of the reformers.56 More popular publications also classified humanity into five races. Riyong baike quanshu, or daily encyclopedias, were a direct continuation of the riyong leishu evoked in Chapter 2. An early encyclopedia of 1919 divided mankind into a yellow, white, black, red and ‘kite’ (yuan) race,57 the latter being a popular term for a skin colour ranging from dark brown to light black.
Li Xuezeng’s treatise on Racial Geography in Asia deserves special mention, since it highlights how traditional imagery continued to play a role in the racial theories developed by scientists even after the Second World War. Li placed Asia at the centre of a chart that represented the origins of ‘human races’. The centre was occupied by the ‘Mongoloids’. The first concentric circle remained empty, the second circle was assigned to the Nordics, the third to a ‘tribe’ from the Canary Islands, the fourth to the ‘Negroids’. Three more circles followed, dedicated respectively to the ‘Australoids’, the Negrillos and Neanderthal man.58 Li’s chart bore a striking resemblance to the cosmological plan of the Tribute of Yu, which, as we saw in the first chapter, had divided the world into five concentric circles more than two thousand years earlier.
Racial categorisation in the republican era was not confined to the writings of a scholarly elite. As soon as the imperial examination system was abolished in 1905, textbooks purporting to introduce the young reader to world geography and ‘human races’ appeared. One of the first, compiled in 1907 from Japanese sources, had a chapter dedicated to the human species. A paragraph entitled ‘Each Race’s Superiority or Inferiority and its Future’ correlated skin colour to cultural development. The ‘most superior white race’, the young reader was told, dominated the world, but the Chinese were the elect of nature, chosen to replace them in the future.59 The textbook even provided illustrations of the most ‘characteristic races’. The original Japanese version, however, displayed a narrow-headed, flat-nosed, dreary Manchu for the ‘Chinese race’ (see illus. 2). The picture was judged offensive by the editors, who glued a sticker showing a noble Confucian scholar over the original in every copy.60
After the foundation of the Republic of China in 1912, readings on racial hierarchy became part of the curriculum in many schools. The opening sentence of a chapter on ‘human races’ in a 1920 textbook for middle schools declared that ‘among the world’s races, there are strong and weak constitutions, there are black and white skins, there is hard and soft hair, there are superior and inferior cultures. A rapid overview shows that they are not of the same level.’ Among the five races, the young student was told, the ‘whites’ were the most powerful, but the ‘yellows’ were the most fertile, spreading gradually to all five continents.61
Even at primary school, children were introduced to racial categorisation:
Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Because the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution… Among the contemporary races that could be called superior, there are only the yellow and the white races. China is [i.e. belongs to] the yellow race.62
Another schoolbook, Essentials of World Geography, inculcated notions of a ‘white race’ against which the ‘four coloured races’ had to fight.63 Poems on racial self-determination were read daily, calling for national unity and help for the ‘weak and backward races’.64
Armageddon
What many writers contested was neither the notion of ‘race’ per se nor even the practice of racial categorisation, but discrimination against the elite. ‘In Shanghai many of the most mediocre Englishmen despise noble-minded, erudite scholars. They believe that a race with a yellow skin and straight hair is categorically not of their kind and can definitely not surpass their level of superiority!,’65 exclaimed the ethnologist Wu Zelin, a University of Wisconsin graduate. Widespread resentment against racial prejudice abroad, in particular the Exclusion Act in the United States which was only abolised in 1943, fuelled complex and contradictory feelings in some scholars. As Frederick Hung, a professor of geography who had a brilliant career in Canada ahead of him, put it:
Most of the [Chinese] people, however, continue to think of our race as inherently superior to that of our neighbors of lighter or darker skin. Indeed there is very often a set of superiority and inferiority complexes stirring within those who have constant or occasional contacts with foreigners. He constantly persuades himself of his unexplainable superiority over the foreigner, but frequently has to rationalize in order to disperse the inferiority complex.66
Professor Lu Xinqiu, a noted biologist and author of a book on human genetics, denounced these feelings of inferiority: ‘Naturally we cannot categorically state that the Chinese have a long history and civilisation and that they are the most superior race of mankind, but it is not necessary to lower oneself.’ He reassured the reader: ‘From a scientific point of view, the constitution of our body also has many superior points.’67 Another writer vouched that ‘the Chinese are not an inferior race. The intellectual and physical strength of the Chinese people are not inferior to that of other races […] We should resolutely not be too proud, but we need not have an inferiority complex and despise our own creative ability.’68
Other writers were more belligerent and interpreted global politics in terms of racial warfare. Tao Menghe, a professor at Beijing National University and future director of the Institute of Social Science, produced tabulations on the expansion of the ‘white race’ over the five continents. The whites, ‘eternal rulers of all races’, ruthlessly destroyed the feeble and weak in the course of their conquest of the world. Tao Menghe believed that a new era in racial warfare had begun with the Abyssinian defeat of the Italian army in 1896: ‘This is only the first thunderclap of the coloured races’ attack on the white race.’69 The biggest blow was the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905. Professors Wu Zelin and Ye Shaochun, on the other hand, compiled statistics and tables on the comparative growth of the ‘human races’. The future looked bleak: ‘The Caucasian race expands every day, the coloured races will decline. If we look at the future, we actually cannot but shudder and fear.’ The whites were ‘the turtle-dove occupying the magpie’s nest’.70
A few even invisaged a racial armageddon, among them Zhou Qichang: ‘Readers, do you understand the key to the problem? The crux of the matter is not struggle between states, but struggle between races! Have not the other three races already lost in the battle?’71 Military vocabulary undergirded an aggressive discourse. Hu Huanyong, in a textbook published as part of a Youth Elementary Knowledge Series, claimed that the Chinese had ‘the longest history, the highest culture, the largest population, a great and proud country’, and were now ‘reinforced’ by Japan and Turkey, ‘two yellow upcoming youngsters’. Together they would fight against the whites, whose ‘main camp’ was situated in Europe.72 A popular ABC of Human Geography deconstructed the white race as follows: ‘Latins are the advance forces, Teutons are the central army, Slavs are the rearguard.’73 Others described Asia as the ‘great barracks of the yellow race’.74 Such phraseology was not without affinity to contemporary militant black writings. Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, considered African Americans to be the ‘advance guard of the black race’ in its historic struggle against the ‘whites’.75
Some of these belligerent feelings were no doubt fuelled by exposure to racial discrimination abroad, which often strengthened rather than weakened belief in the existence of a racial hierarchy. In a few cases a feeling of deep alienation abroad led directly to feelings of superiority about the homeland, a trait which found expression in the poet Wen Yiduo.76 Wen sailed for the United States in 1922, but even on board ship his courage ebbed away as he became increasingly apprehensive of racial discrimination abroad. In America he felt lonely and homesick: he described himself as the ‘Exiled Prisoner’. ‘Homesickness led him to over-idealize his country and prejudiced him against anything non-Chinese,’ notes his biographer.77 Wen wrote home: ‘For a thoughtful young Chinese, the taste of life here in America is beyond description. When I return home for New Year, the year after next, I shall talk with you around the fire, I shall weep bitterly and shed tears to give vent to all the accumulated indignation. I have a nation, I have a history and a culture of five thousand years: how can this be inferior to the Americans?’78 His resentment against the West cumulated in a poem entitled ‘I am Chinese’:
I am Chinese, I am Chinese,
I am the divine blood of the Yellow Emperor,
I came from the highest place in the world,
Pamir is my ancestral place,
My race is like the Yellow River,
We flow down the Kunlun mountain slope,
We flow across the Asian continent,
From us have flown exquisite customs.
Mighty nation! Mighty nation!79
Fantasies of racial revenge led a few writers to seek salvation in Pan-Asianism, even after the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War transferred the German concessions in Shandong to Japan instead of restoring Chinese sovereignty over the area. This trend did not abate in the 1930s, as Japan occupied ever larger parts of China, starting with Manchuria. ‘Its writers’, recounts the famous author Lu Xun, ‘after studying the colour of different peoples, decided that those of the same colour should take concerted action: the yellow-skinned proletariat ought not to fight the yellow-skinned bourgeoisie but the white proletariat instead. And they took Genghis Khan as their model, describing how his grandson Batu Khan led yellow hordes into Russia to destroy its civilisation, enslaving its nobles and common people alike.’80
Morbid visions of racial revenge were projected upon the figure of Batu Khan, magnified as the historical leader of the yellow race in the destruction of Western civilisation. An extract from Huang Zhenxia’s 160-page poem ‘Blood of the Yellow Race’ is representative of this type of literature:
Hide, frightened European dogs!
Topple, Muscovite imposing high buildings!
Roll, Caucasian yellow-haired heads!
Fearful, the oil oozing from burning corpses,
The horror of putrid bodies strewing the ground;
The God of Death seizes white girls in frenzied embrace,
Beauties are turned into fearsome skeletons;
Cannibals struggle like beasts in ancient palaces;
A foul stench wafts from coffins a thousand years old;
There is sorrow on the faces of the Crusaders;
Iron hooves trample broken bones,
Camels utter wild howls;
God has fled; vengeful devils have raised the scourge of fire.
The Yellow Peril is here! The Yellow Peril!
Asian warriors’ bloody maws are devouring men.81
There were many calmer voices, but even those who favoured cooperation with the West seemed adamant that racial hierarchy was a basic fact of nature—even when they were confronted with extensive evidence to the contrary. One example is Pan Guangdan, a highly distinguished sociologist whose work on eugenics will be considered in the next chapter. Pan enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1922 to study zoology and two years later went on to Columbia University to read for a master’s degree in palaeontology and genetics. In a review of The American Negro, edited by Donald Young in 1928, Pan Guangdan expressed his disappointment in the contributors’ unwillingness to speak in terms of racial inequality:
But to be true to observable facts, in any given period of time sufficiently long for selection to take effect, races as groups are different, unequal, and there is no reason except one based upon sentiment why we cannot refer to them in terms of inferiority and superiority, when facts warrant us. It is to be suspected that the Jewish scholars, themselves belonging to a racial group which has long been unjustly discriminated against, have unwittingly developed among themselves a defensive mechanism which is influencing their judgements on racial questions. The reviewer recalls with regret that during his student days [in the United States] he had estranged some of his best Jewish friends for his candid views on the point of racial inequality.82
On the other hand, intellectuals who were steeped in racial thinking at home sometimes substantially changed their ideas when studying abroad. Fei Xiaotong, for example, read anthropology at Qinghua University under Pan Guangdan and Chen Da, two sociologists who firmly believed in racial hierarchy. Fei soon became interested in anthropometry: armed with calipers and anthropometers, he roved the capital’s prisons in search of the biological measure of crime. It was only after having studied under Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics in 1936 that he abandoned anthropometry and went on to write several classic studies of the Chinese countryside.83
There were others, besides Fei Xiaotong, who had their doubts about the validity of racial theories. A few intellectuals even openly denied the existence of different ‘races’ in the human species. Zhang Junmai, a prominent philosopher and political figure who had accompanied Liang Qichao on his tour of Europe, wisely excluded ‘common blood’ from his definition of the nation. The Han, he noted, had intermarried with so many different people since the Tang dynasty that they had lost their ‘racial purity’.84 The historian Qi Sihe criticised the use of racial theories in China, and pointed out how ‘race’ was a declining notion in the modern world.85
But these were isolated voices. Racial discourse became pervasive in the republican era and cut across most political positions, from the fascist core of the Guomindang to the communist theories of Li Dazhao.86 Its powerful appeal to a sense of belonging based on presumed links of blood, its authoritative worldview in which cultural differences could be explained in terms of stable biological laws, its seemingly objective nature buttressed by the language of science, all these aspects endowed racial discourse with singular resilience.