7
Race and class under Mao
Racial theories became taboo following the communist takeover of China in 1949.1 Anthropology departments were suspended by the end of 1949, and ‘bourgeois’ social sciences like anthropology and sociology were proscribed a few years later in 1952.2 Propaganda campaigns under the supervision of reformed anthropologists were launched with the aim of eradicating racial discrimination, and anthropologists came under bitter attack during the anti-rightist campaign of 1957.3 They were accused of having used disrespectful anthropometric methods that insulted the national minorities. It was also suspected that many of their studies were meant to prove racist ideas of ethnic inferiority.4 Zhou Jianren, the author of numerous pamphlets advocating eugenics in the 1930s, became an official mouthpiece of the party and published a radical critique of eugenics and racial discrimination, now portrayed as imperialist tools of domination over the working class.5 Pan Guangdan, who had made eugenics a household word in China, was singled out for severe criticism in 1957.
Genetics and physical anthropology were also denounced as ‘bourgeois science’. As in the Soviet Union, Lysenko’s doctrine became dominant in the 1950s and ‘60s while Mendelian laws of inheritance and T. H. Morgan’s chromosome theory were rejected for ideological reasons. Supporters of Lysenko argued that acquired characteristics could be inherited while environmental influences could be manipulated so as to alter an organism’s features. Genetic research received only limited support during the years of Lysenkoism, although some work in genetics was carried out in a handful of research hospitals.6
But ‘race’ was too resilient a notion simply to be abolished by decree. And while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appealed to ‘class’ as a unifying concept, it did not abandon the politically vital distinction between a ‘majority’ on the one hand and a range of ‘minorities’ on the other. The communists perpetuated the idea that linguistically and culturally diverse people in China actually belonged to a single, homogeneous group united by ties of blood called the Han. As the political boundaries of the country claimed by the communists corresponded largely to those of the Qing empire, people in the strategically and economically vital border regions of Xinjiang and Tibet were portrayed as ‘minorities’ in their own homelands. The communists swiftly proceeded to classify forty-one so-called ‘minority nationalities’ (shaoshu minzu), a number which increased to fifty-six by the time of the 1982 census.7
Although the idea of equality between different minzu was promoted by the regime in order to combat ‘Han chauvinism’ (Da Han minzuzhuyi), the representation of the Han as an absolute majority endowed with superior political and cultural attributes and hence destined to be the vanguard of the revolution and the forefront of economic development dominated official discourse during the Maoist period. In a manner recalling the racial taxonomies used by the revolutionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘minority nationalities’ were represented as less evolved branches of people who needed the moral and political guidance of the Han to ascend the scales of civilisation. The idea of the Han as a politically more advanced and better endowed minzu pervaded the early decades of the communist regime, when assimilationist policies were eagerly pursued. Immediately after 1949, hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers, petty thieves, beggars, vagrants and prostitutes were sent to help develop and colonise the Muslim belt which ran through Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai and Xinjiang. Colons were also sent to Tibet and other border regions dominated by people who were once in the majority, but were now referrred to as ‘minorities’.
Some of these minority people were given an empty gift called ‘autonomy’. All over China autonomous districts, autonomous counties, autonomous prefectures and autonomous regions appeared in the 1950s. Xinjiang, where Muslims had long dreamed of a Uighur Republic, was carved up into different portions, for instance the Sibo people near Gulja, the Kazakhs in the north and the Tajik in the Sarikol area of the Pamir mountains. In October 1955 the Uighur presence was formally recognised by naming Xinjiang an Uighur Autonomous Region. But borders of the ‘autonomous’ parts of the province were drawn in such a way that no ethnic group could control an area they dominated numerically. Territories with a relatively homogeneous minority were divided up, while cities and prefectures with large Uighur populations were denied any autonomous status. The Ili Kazakh autonomous prefecture was set up in a region dominated by Uighurs, while Korla was the capital of a Mongol autonomous prefecture mostly populated by Uighurs. It was a predictable strategy of divide and rule, or, to borrow from ancient Chinese tactics, a case of ‘using barbarians to deal with barbarians’. And from top to bottom the party controlled every important decision in these government structures.8
The communists also asserted their leadership over the rest of the developing world, in terms which formally invoked ‘class’ but were more reminiscent of ‘race’. As the political scientist Stuart Schram has written, ‘Mao’s appeal is not merely to a union based upon revolutionary principles, but to the visceral solidarity of peoples long oppressed and humiliated by the white powers of Europe and America.’9 In an often quoted speech, delivered in 1963, Mao claimed that ‘in Africa, in Asia, in every part of the world there is racism; in reality, racial problems are class problems.’10
The resilience of racial thinking was apparent in attitudes towards both Europeans and Africans. Official propaganda, for example, fostered the idea that only Westerners could indulge in racism, as the Chinese had become the leaders of the victimised ‘coloured’ people in the historical struggle against ‘white imperialism’. It was an important ingredient of anti-imperialist propaganda, which reached almost hysterical proportions during the Korean War and the Cultural Revolution.11 Louis Barcata met some Chinese intellectuals in 1967 and was particularly struck by a professor from Shanghai:
Whatever his views on domestic issues, in foreign policy the professor stood by Mao unconditionally. He hated the Russians who, he claimed, behaved more like opponents than comrades. He regarded the Vietnam conflict as a ‘holy war’, and as the prelude to an inevitable conflict between the races. For this professor, who had done some traveling in the world, and who had once gone to South Africa to study apartheid, the white man is the only creature on earth whose behavior is fundamentally warped, whose being suffers from a mechanical flaw; the white man is the ‘greatest source of discord in all creation’. The others who took part in the discussion agreed with him completely. I was taken aback by the very vehemence of their posture. These seven men saw the history of mankind as nothing but a sequence of brutal injustices inflicted by the white man on the colored peoples of the world. These Chinese intellectuals were convinced that the coming world conflict would be ignited not solely by an ideological confrontation but by racial antagonism. It would be an epic struggle between the races—an Armageddon in which China would lead the exploited colored peoples in their battle against the powers of white reaction.12
In its propaganda about revolution, China placed itself on the top of a global racial hierarchy, leading the ‘coloured peoples’ on the bottom towards liberation. This was apparent in Africa, where China tried to capitalise on a common racial identity, urging that ‘we blacks stick together’ against the ‘white race’, an idea which was met with scepticism on the African side.13 Acting troupes endeavoured to propagate the idea of racial solidarity, as was exemplified by a play performed in Rwanda in the early 1960s:
A tableau depicted a black man sitting on a throne; a Chinese actor with a white mask then entered and knocked him off [groans from crowd]. A Chinese with no mask entered, knocks the ‘white man’ in turn off the throne, picks up the African from the ground and helps him back on to the throne [cheers from crowd].’14
Despite the communist imagery of racial unity with the victims of imperialism, many Chinese adopted an aloof and exclusive attitude during their stay in Africa. Africans studying in China, on the other hand, were often the victim of indirect or overt discrimination. Emmanuel Hevi, a Ghanaian studying medicine in Beijing in the early 1960s, testified to the continuous discrimination Africans had to endure in China. He perceived paternalism as an important form of prejudice: ‘In all their dealings with us the Chinese behaved as if they were dealing with people from whom normal intelligence could not be expected.’15 As Michael Sullivan has pointed out, Mao’s assistance to Africa reinforced the negative image of Africans as passive recipients of the fruits of higher civilisations, and intensified popular discontent at wasting wealth on Africans when many Chinese lived in extreme poverty.16
Race and nation since 1978
The emphasis on class struggle and doctrinaire insistence on ideology at the expense of economics was reversed after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. After the ascent to power of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and the gradual opening of the country, the language of science started to replace communist ideology in a number of politically sensitive domains. One of the effects of the revival of biological science was massive research on the ‘national minorities’. Instead of portraying them as culturally or ‘racially’ distinct groups of people, a whole range of studies started claiming that they were organically linked to the majority of Han people. This was not an innovation, but harked back to the republican era, when the Guomindang, the party founded by Sun Yatsen, had already proposed a vision which emphasised both the organic unity of all the peoples living within the political boundaries of China and the inevitable fusion of non-Han groups into a broader Chinese nation dominated by the Han. Chiang Kaishek (1887–1975), the effective head of the country from 1927 to 1949 and leader of the Guomindang, clearly expressed this vision of the nation as a culturally diverse but racially unified entity in his important work entitled China’s Destiny, written during the fight against Japan in the Second World War:
Our various clans actually belong to the same nation, as well as to the same racial stock. Therefore, there is an inner factor closely linking the historical destiny of common existence and common sorrow and joy of the whole Chinese nation. That there are five peoples designated in China is not due to differences in race or blood, but to religion and geographical environment. In short, the differentiation among China’s five peoples is due to regional and religious factors, and not to race or blood. This fact must be thoroughly understood by all our fellow countrymen.17
A few other studies by conservative thinkers in the Guomindang appeared in the 1930s making the same point. Xiong Shili, for instance, argued that the five ‘races’ that Sun Yatsen had identified (Manchu, Mongols, Hui, Tibetans and Han) were actually related branches of the same line of evolution in which the Han were dominant.18 Li Ji and Lin Yan, as we have seen in Chapter 5, argued that all the inhabitants of China had a common ancestor. Chiang Kaishek referred to this line of descent as a ‘Chinese nationality’ (Zhonghua minzu). Although this approach remained marginal in the republican era, it became mainstream in the People’s Republic after 1978. The notion of a ‘Chinese nationality’ became the basis for arguing that the political boundaries of the country were based on biological markers. Tibetans and Uighurs, for instance, were depicted as people who were merging biologically into a larger ‘Chinese nationality’ of which the Han formed the core.
Serological studies were carried out in the 1980s to highlight the biological proximity of all minority people to the Han.19 Mainly initiated by Professor Zhao Tongmao, estimations of genetic distance based on gene frequency claimed that the racial differences between population groups living within China—including Tibetans, Mongols and Uighurs—were comparatively small. Serologists also observed that the ‘Negroid race’ and the ‘Caucasian race’ were more closely related to each other than to the ‘Mongoloid race’. Zhao Tongmao put the Han at the very centre of his chart, which branched out gradually to include other minority groups from China in a tree highlighting the genetic distance between ‘yellows’ on the one hand and ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ on the other. The author hypothesised that the genetic differences within the ‘yellow race’ could be divided into a ‘northern’ and a ‘southern’ variation, which might even have different origins. His conclusion underlined that the Han were the main branch of the ‘yellow race’ in China to which all the minority groups could be traced: the political boundaries of the People’s Republic, in other words, appeared to be founded on clear biological markers of genetic distance.20
In similar vein, skulls, hair, eyes, noses, ears, entire bodies and even the penises of thousands of subjects were routinely measured, weighed and assessed by anthropometrists in the 1980s and 1990s in attempts to identify the ‘special characteristics’ (tezheng) of minority people. To take but one example, Zhang Zhenbiao, a senior anthropometrist writing in the prestigious Acta Anthropologica Sinica, reached the following conclusion after measurements of 145 Tibetans: ‘In conclusion, as demonstrated by the results of an investigation into the special characteristics of the heads and faces of contemporary Tibetans, their heads and faces are fundamentally similar to those of various other nationalities of our country, in particular to those of our country’s north and north-west (including the Han and national minorities). 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).’21 The political implications of such research for minority people in the PRC was apparent in the government’s promotion of China as the ‘homeland of the modern yellow race’, of which even Outer Mongolia was described as an organic and integral part.22
To this day, within both scientific institutions and government circles, people in China are represented as one relatively homogeneous ‘Chinese nationality’ (Zhonghua minzu) of which minority people are organic parts. As W. J. F. Jenner puts it rather appropriately, the idea of a ‘Chinese nationality’ means, in effect, that ‘all the nationalities are, beneath their apparent diversity, one’.23
Belief in polygenism, the idea that humans have different origins, was also revived in the 1980s, and served to reinforce this nationalist vision of racial unity. Prominent researchers represented Beijing Man at Zhoukoudian as the ‘ancestor’ of the ‘Mongoloid race’ (Menggu renzhong). A great number of hominid teeth, skull fragments and fossil apes, discovered at different sites scattered over China since 1949, were used to support the view that the ‘yellow race’ (huangzhong) was in a direct line of descent from its hominid ancestor in China. Although palaeoanthropologists in China acknowledged that the fossil evidence pointed to Africa as the birthplace of all humans, highly regarded researchers like Jia Lanpo repeatedly emphasised that man’s real place of origin should be located in East Asia. Wu Rukang, also one of the most eminent palaeoanthropologists in China, came very close to upholding a polygenesist thesis in mapping different geographical spaces for the ‘yellow race’ (China), the ‘black race’ (Africa) and the ‘white race’ (Europe): ‘The fossils of homo sapiens discovered in China all prominently display the characteristics of the yellow race… pointing at the continuous nature between them, the yellow race and contemporary Chinese people.’24
Early hominids present in China since the early Middle Pleistocene (one million years ago) were believed to be the origin to which all the population groups in the People’s Republic could be traced back. Physical anthropologists also invoked detailed craniological examinations to provide ‘irrefutable evidence’ about a continuity in development between early hominids and the ‘modern Mongoloid race’.25 Scientific research on prehistoric fossil bones was carried out to represent the nation’s racial past as characterised by the gradual emergence of a Han ‘majority’ into which different ‘minorities’ would have merged.26 As one close observer has noted, ‘In the West, scientists treat the Chinese fossil evidence as part of the broad picture of human evolution worldwide; in China, it is part of national history—an ancient and fragmentary part, it is true, but none the less one that is called upon to promote a unifying concept of unique origin and continuity within the Chinese nation.’27
These theories have not changed substantially with the appearance of new DNA evidence. Every new discovery in China, it seems, is jumped upon to question the ‘Out of Africa’ thesis. When an ancient skull was dug up in Henan in 2008, it was widely interpreted as evidence that most of the people living in China were descendants of a native lineage whose uninterrupted evolution could be traced back millions of years. As the China Daily put it, ‘The discovery at Xuchang supports the theory that modern Chinese man originated in what is present-day Chinese territory rather than Africa.’28
These were not the isolated musings of a few excentric intellectuals. The Acta Anthropologica Sinica, China’s flagship journal in human anthropology quoted above, was systematically investigated by a team of researchers. They discovered that between 1982 and 2001, all of the 779 articles directly related to the study of human variation used the notion of ‘race’ and none of them questioned its value. The authors of the survey contrasted their findings to those obtained in Poland and the United States, the two other countries they surveyed, and concluded that in China, ‘race seems to be accepted as “natural” by all generations of anthropologists.’29
Eugenics
Eugenics made a dramatic comeback under Deng Xiaoping.30 Medical experts and population specialists were put into powerful positions of responsibility after official policies aimed at population control were revived by the government in 1978. Besides the one-child family programme, by which the government only in exceptional circumstances allowed parents to have more than one or occasionally two children, an important component of these policies was the improvement of the quality of new-born babies. A prolific medical discourse appeared in the 1980s and 90s, concerned with the presumed dysgenic tendencies of the population. The journal Population and Eugenics, published for a popular audience by the Population Research Centre of Zhejiang Medical College in Hangzhou, specifically deplored the increasing number of ‘sub-products’ (cipin) and ‘reject products’ (feipin) born every year. In an astounding departure from the rhetoric of Maoism, the journal specifically targetted ‘peasants’, deemed to have ‘ugly habits’ (chengui louxi), not least contracting consanguineous marriages and having children outside of wedlock.31 As another author put it, peasants ‘do not read books, do not read newspapers, lead an unhealthy lifestyle, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, gamble and whore, and even take concubines and drugs, thus directly endangering the health of the next generation, engendering one batch after the other of retarded children.’32 Because inferior elements reproduced themselves so quickly in the countryside, natural laws of selection in which ‘the superior win and the inferior lose’ (yousheng liebai) were replaced by a more worrying trend of ‘the inferior win and the superior lose’ (liesheng youbai).33 Premier Li Peng put it in less ambivalent terms in a public statement made in 1991: ‘Idiots breed idiots’.34
Throughout the 1980s, numerous medical publications lobbied for a eugenics law. According to Zhou Xiaozheng, affiliated with the Population Research Centre of Beijing University, widespread prenatal testing should warrant the detection of birth defects at an early stage of pregnancy, while the abortion of foetuses with minor defects such as a harelip or supernumerary fingers could take place between the eighteenth and the twentieth week.35 The moral value and economic meaning of euthanasia was also regularly underlined in journals on demography and medical ethics in the early 1990s.36 In an article published in the respected Sociological Research and reprinted in the April 1991 issue of Demography, Mu Guangzong, a lecturer at the Population Studies Centre of the People’s University and one of the most vocal proponents of euthanasia, proposed a sociological definition of medical death called ‘zero worth’ (ling suzhi): individuals are intrinsic parts of a larger collectivity, and their worth is defined by the contribution they can make to society. As ‘inferior births’ have ‘zero worth’ and make no such contribution, society has the right medically to eliminate them. According to Mu Guangzong, the warning of the great Victorian scientist T. H. Huxley should be heeded: if quality of life were not strictly controlled, bad genetic mutations would accumulate and humanity would head towards suicide.37
Even eugenic writings from the 1930s were rehabilitated: ostracised for decades as a ‘rightist element’, Pan Guangdan was not only hailed as China’s ‘father of eugenics’ in popular literature, but his writings from the republican period were reprinted and uncritically recommended for their ‘scientific value’ even in Hereditas, the leading journal in human genetics.38
The costs of maintaining disabled people was often invoked in the 1980s to justify eugenic legislation. Chen Muhua, Vice-President of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and President of the Women’s Federation, declared: ‘Eugenics not only affects the success of the state and the prosperity of the race, but also the well-being of the people and social stability.’39 The Eugenics Symposium over which she presided in Beijing on 28 January 1989 judged that more than 30 million people in the People’s Republic were genetically defective: the total cost of their maintenance was estimated at seven to eight billion yuan a year, and the symposium advocated eugenic education and legislation. Similar to the articles and charts depicting the costs of keeping alive the impaired at the expense of the healthy in a number of European countries throughout the 1930s, meticulous calculations were made to estimate that each patient cost 25 yuan and consumed about 25 jin of cereals every month.
The first national exhibition on eugenics and the scientific control of human reproduction, entitled ‘Human Reproduction and Health’, opened in the Shanghai Exhibition Centre in November 1993 and used graphs to illustrate the ‘heavy burden’ represented by the country’s disabled.40 In these official calculations, human life was reduced to financial terms, while population health was seen as a negative balance sheet to be redressed in the interests of public well-being. The disabled were described as a financial burden and a drain on public resources, as a mere figure was adduced to illustrate the useless dissipation of costly medications.
Similar views, of course, existed in many developed countries until a few decades ago. Only very recently has the notion of a unique human value been associated with disabled infants in a small number of economically advanced societies. Eugenic programmes and sterilisation laws were an integral part of the welfare system in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden up till 1960.41 An efficient administration ensured that the laws were thoroughly implemented: by 1960, well over 50,000 people had been sterilised by the initiative of the Swedish government, at first on medical grounds but later for social reasons. In Finland till recently, many medical practitioners were in favour of sterilisation and few members of the public had the desire or opportunity to dispute expert opinion. In the absence of any substantial objections, almost 2,000 people were sterilised between 1935 and 1955. In marked contrast to the commonly accepted observation that eugenics declined rapidly after the Second World War, the total number of operations performed in Finland sharply increased, and by 1970 the total had reached 56,000. Forced sterilisations for eugenic reasons were performed in parts of Switzerland for decades after the end of the Second World War.42 Seen in a comparative perspective, eugenics in the PRC was not the exception so much as an integral part of far more widespread trends which have been prominent throughout the twentieth century.
But the PRC alone enacted eugenic laws as late as the 1980s. On 25 November 1988, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of Gansu Province passed the country’s first law prohibiting ‘mentally retarded people’ from having children. According to the law, those ‘mentally retarded people’ whose condition was either inherited or a consequence of marriage between close relatives were not allowed to have children; no ‘mentally retarded people’ were allowed to get married unless they had undergone sterilisation surgery; those who had married before the promulgation of the law were also to undergo sterilisation surgery; and pregnant women suffering from mental retardation were required to have their pregnancies terminated. Individuals who violated the law by allowing ‘mentally retarded people’ to have children would be punished by both administrative and economic means. A similar law was enacted by Liaoning province in February 1990, while Zhejiang province passed a law on the preservation of ‘eugenic health’ in June 1992 to combat the increasing incidence of ‘cretins’, who were estimated to number more than 300,000. The Henan eugenics law of 1992 required that if one partner in a married couple suffered from a ‘chronic mental disorder’ such as schizophrenia or manic depression, that partner should be sterilised. People who refused to be sterilised or anyone who impeded the sterilisation of another could be subject to penalties.
Under pressure from a variety of lobbies, mainly family planning experts and geneticists, the provincial laws finally culminated in the People’s Republic of China passing eugenic legislation at the national level at the beginning of 1995. The law aimed to prevent ‘inferior births’ from becoming a burden on the state and society. Renamed Maternal and Infant Health Law after protests against a preliminary draft entitled Eugenics Law (Youshengfa), it supported the systematic ‘implementation of premarital medical check-ups’ in order to detect whether one partner in a couple suffers from a ‘serious hereditary’, venereal or reproductive disorder, a ‘relevant mental disorder’ or a ‘legal contagious disease’: it asserted that those ‘deemed unsuitable for reproduction’ should be urged to undergo sterilisation or abortion, or to remain celibate, in order to prevent ‘inferior births’. Foreign observers, however, soon pointed out that the implementation of eugenic legislation not only undermined the rights of the person vis-à-vis the state, but was also based on controversial if not antiquated theories of human heredity. After foreign criticism of the eugenics law, the mandatory health check was dropped at the national level, but continued to be required by some provinces. Local doctors make the decision on who is ‘unfit’ to marry.43
Popular racism
While this chapter, like the rest of the book, is concerned mainly with racial categorisations developed by scholars and scientists, there is good evidence to show that since the country has become more familiar with the outside world after decades of Maoism, racist incidents have increased, rather than decreased. Friction between African students and local Chinese, for instance, marked the 1980s, leading to violent clashes involving casualties on both sides in a dozen cases. In 1988–9, thousands of Chinese students, fuelled by a variety of racist rumours, set about assaulting and destroying the dormitories of African students in Nanjing, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, shouting ‘Kill the black devils!’44 Yinghong Cheng, a first-rate analyst of racism in the People’s Republic, has made the important point that before these incidents, racism was a matter of belief: now it became one of racist behaviour.45
Individual African students were regularly targetted for harrassment in public. Boubacar Traoré, a student from Ghana studying philosophy in China in 1988, complained that ‘When we walk on the street, people insult us. They call us black devils, and so on. Even if we’re alone, they insult us. And if we’re with a girl, they say she’s a hooker and is doing it for the money.’46
Attitudes have not improved in the twenty-first century. M. Dujon Johnson calls it ‘Afrophobia’, noting how ‘In China today there is a clear social hierarchy based on the assumption of racial superiority’.47 But the victims no longer include students alone. In Guangzhou, where a thriving community of African merchants has emerged, some local people complain about what they call ‘chocolate city’. Here is how one resident described the dangers of this ‘racial invasion’: ‘African blacks are an inferior race. Children of Chinese and African blacks should be regarded as mixed but inferior race. If we take no action, this kind of race will blacken China. This has nothing to do with racial discrimination, but is simply a matter of eugenics. We should admit that the white is a superior race, the same as us. The children of whites and Chinese are accordingly relatively superior.’48
Such attitudes also have an impact on the children of mixed marriages. In 2009, an outpouring of racial hatred marked the appearance in a talent show of Lou Jing, who has a Shanghainese mother and an African-American father who left China before her birth. Some of the blogs, which demeaned her with racist slurs and demands that she leave the country, attracted tens of thousands of hits.
The internet has also been instrumental in spreading prejudice about Africans. An analysis of web comments showed how they are portrayed as as lazy, poor and oversexed. One online message posted during the Beijing Olympics in August 2008, for example, expressed amazement at African athletes: ‘it seems that the darkest among the Negroes are the most powerful ones’.49
Liu Xiaobo—one of the student leaders during the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement, a prominent dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2010—discovered just how deep racism runs when he surveyed the web after a visit to China by Condoleezza Rice in 2005. In hundreds of rants reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, popular websites attacked the US Secretary of State as a ‘black pig’, a ‘black devil’ or a ‘black female dog’. Liu noted that the racism he discovered on the web was so widespread that few readers in China were bothered by it.50
In the conclusion of the first edition of this book, published in 1992, I invoked the words of Yang Lien-sheng, a scholar and historian who wrote that racism should be ‘spelled out in order to be dispelled’.51 It is a sad indictment of how little racism has changed over the past twenty years that the only prominent scholar in China who actually studied the phenomenon and denounced it publicly, namely Liu Xiaobo, is now lingering in goal. It was still possible, twenty years ago, to imagine that the racism that could then be found in the People’s Republic was merely the result of ignorance after the country had been closed to the rest of the world for decades under Chairman Mao. Denial, rather than ignorance, appears to be the norm today.