Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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 Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2009 7:54 pm Post subject: How volleyball and pop have shaken China's idea of race |
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This article reminded me of an amusing quote in an earlier version of the Chinese Lonely Planet:
| Quoted Chinese Person wrote: |
| We don't have racism in China because we don't have black people. |
How volleyball and pop have shaken China's idea of race
| Quote: |
Earlier this year, China picked Ding Hui, a young man from Hangzhou, for its national volleyball team. Last month a 20-year-old Shanghainese, Lou Jing, made the last 30 in the Chinese version of Pop Idol. Neither event would have attracted unusual notice but for the one thing the two young people have in common: they are in a small, and for China, novel category of mixed-race citizens, children of black fathers. Their emergence into the limelight has forced the country into an uncomfortable and often shocking debate about what it means to be Chinese.
Both have been widely discussed on the Chinese internet in terms that have not been publicly acceptable in the US or Europe for half a century. Both Lou Jing and Ding Hui have been treated as frank curiosities: netizens comment on their white teeth, Ding Hui's athleticism and Lou Jing's sense of rhythm. On the show, the presenters repeatedly referred to Lou Jing as "chocolate". Contributors to the nation's websites indulged in altogether cruder epithets, indulging their imaginations on the subject of sex between a black man and a Chinese woman.
Lou Jing was brought up by her mother, a single parent, after her African American father had left China for reasons not explained. The crude abuse directed at her mother on the internet uncovered a deep well of prejudice that comes as no surprise to foreigners living in China, but which for years has been papered over by the official rhetoric of socialist solidarity with the developing world, including Africa.
Solidarity, however, does not necessarily denote acceptance or equality, let alone full citizenship. China has not been a country of immigration: its ethnic diversity has come from expanding borders rather than inward migration. Who is really Chinese is not the easiest question to answer in a country that officially has 56 ethnic groups � and in reality many more � but in which one group, the Han Chinese, is so dominant that it has the power to define the cultural and racial content of nationality.
The non-Han citizens � Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, Koreans and the many other cultural and ethnic groups � suffer accordingly: they are regarded as "civilised" to the degree that they come to resemble the Han majority. Many among that majority regard the relationship between the Han and the others as one of frank tutelage in preparation for assimilation. The Han, in other words, have a civilising mission to the more backward corners of the empire.
For decades following the revolution in 1949, marriages between foreigners and Chinese were rare and, in the xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution, they were banned. It wasn't until as recently as the mid-70s that the first petitions for permission were accepted, and such marriages remained relatively unusual for a further two decades.
Racism in what has thought of itself as a monocultural society is certainly a large element in the discussion. But the ambivalence about race is a reflection of profound and unresolved questions about the identity of modern China, as the world's most populous state reaches for a role in the 21st century after the painful dislocations of more than a century of political and social upheaval.
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