Carola Binney - Beyond the pale: China’s cheerful racists
NB: The commercial is worth seeing, I request readers to watch it once. Apologists of the regime may kindly reflect upon this blatant racism in the public domain after seven decades of rule by the Chinese Communist Party - DS..
Setting off to spend a year teaching English in Zhejiang province in south-eastern China, I expected plenty of surprises. But what struck me most was something they tend not to tell you about in the guidebooks: the racism. It started when I went around the classroom, asking pupils which city they were from. When I got to a slightly darker-skinned boy, his classmates thought it was hilarious to shout ‘Africa!’ It’s a theme. A girl with a similar complexion was taunted with monkey sounds; her peers refused to sit next to her, saying she smelt bad. I apparently erred when, teaching the word for wife, I showed my students a picture of Michelle Obama. The image of the then First Lady was greeted with exaggerated sounds of repulsion: ‘So ugly!’ they said. ‘So black!’
Setting off to spend a year teaching English in Zhejiang province in south-eastern China, I expected plenty of surprises. But what struck me most was something they tend not to tell you about in the guidebooks: the racism. It started when I went around the classroom, asking pupils which city they were from. When I got to a slightly darker-skinned boy, his classmates thought it was hilarious to shout ‘Africa!’ It’s a theme. A girl with a similar complexion was taunted with monkey sounds; her peers refused to sit next to her, saying she smelt bad. I apparently erred when, teaching the word for wife, I showed my students a picture of Michelle Obama. The image of the then First Lady was greeted with exaggerated sounds of repulsion: ‘So ugly!’ they said. ‘So black!’
Such comments would
have been treated harshly in a British classroom a quarter-century ago, let
alone today. But my own protestations were met with confused faces
— crestfallen that they’d disappointed their teacher, but clueless as to
the nature of their mistake. And this stretches far beyond the classroom. To
many Chinese, ideas about racial hierarchies are not outdated anathema but
unquestioned belief.
In Britain, a
politician who uses a defunct idiom like ‘nigger in the woodpile’ loses the
whip. In China, racism is a standard undercurrent of public debate. A few
months ago, Pan Qinglin, a Tianjin politician, announced to reporters that he
had found out how to ‘solve the problem of the black population in Guangdong’
— a province with a small amount of African migration. Warning that the
new arrivals brought drugs, sexual assault and infectious diseases, he urged
local policy-makers to tighten controls to prevent China turning ‘from a yellow
country to a black-and-yellow country’.
The Chinese don’t make
a big deal about their racism: it’s so commonplace it can seem almost cheerful.
An advert for a detergent shows a black man chatting up a Chinese woman, only
for her to shove him in the washing machine until he emerges a fair-skinned
Asian. The advert aired for months before it was picked up by an English-language website and caused uproar. The company, Qiaobi, apologised — to its non-customers. Its analogy of black skin and dirty laundry made perfect sense to the Chinese… read more:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/08/beyond-the-pale-chinas-cheerful-racists/
