Here’s an interesting article about Africans in China: Chocolate City
While picking through clothes, Cote claimed that he had many Chinese friends here. To prove his point, he walked up, and pats the store-owner on his head. Or, he playfully kicks at the store-owner’s leg. He’ll loudly greet them, “Friend, how are you recently?” His “friends” don’t respond. Some pull out a cell phone and intentionally ignore him. Others impatiently wave at him, and say in a combination of Chinese and English: “if you’re not buying anything, then go… quickly GO!”
It seems friendship only exists between the Africans. When he runs into a fellow clothes dealer, Cote trades fists and claps with them, and quickly chats in their native tongue. Not many travel alone like Cote, most are in groups of twos or threes. They walk all of the malls from afternoon until the evening. They fold up the plastic bags full of clothes, and use a rented car to haul it away.
On one stall, Cote is told that the jeans he’s interested in are 20 RMB a pair. He fiercely throws the pants at the stall-owners head, angrily asking, “how it can be that expensive!?” He turns and goes. After the shocked stall-owner recovers, he stares at the back of the thick shoulders of the departing Cote. He opens his mouth, and then closes it, changing to a single phrase in Cantonese: “Crazy black guy!” (痴线黑佬)
Some people have been claiming that this article is racist since it depicts Africans in a negative light. I think it’s pretty equal in showing both the negativity of the Chinese who deal with the Africans as well. But I’m not going to talk about the article too much. It’s just a starting point.
The relationship between the Yellows and the Blacks is complicated. There was this one time when I got into a ‘confrontation’ with several black youths on the BART (the San Francisco Bay Area’s light rail system) train. I was tired after a long day in the accounting office and was just staring blankly out the window. The four black youths were loud, dancing around in the empty car and annoying the few empty passengers around. They tried to hit on this white college student, but she ignored them so they called her a bitch and moved on to the next victim. Eventually they got to me.
It all started with the usual racist stuff. You know, they asked me what ‘ching chong’ meant in Chinese. So I told them (stupidly) that ‘ching chong’ meant ‘I’m a fucking idiot’. Which of course leads to all four of these thugs to stand and sit uncomfortably close to me while they hated on me. Finally, they got to their stop so they spit at me before they left.
Now let’s go over to China. There was one foreign teacher who liked to ride his bike in the rural area around our university. He’s just doing his own thing, minding his own business and taking a break on the side of the road, when this group of high school Chinese kids ride by on their bike shouting things at him in Cantonese. Now this foreigner speaks Mandarin so he smiles and tries to talk to them. Instead of replying, the kids just shout ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ in English, laugh as if it was hilarious, and ride off on their bikes.
What can we learn from these experiences? Well, first of all, people are bigger jerks when they have their buddies with them. And… well, that’s pretty much it. We tend to remember the bad more than the good. Race relations are complicated because of cultural differences, but if the people in the interaction are of different economic, education, religious, or political backgrounds, there are even more complications. To blame it all on just ‘culture’ is just a cop out.
So before I end, I’ll mention some good interactions between the Yellows and Blacks to balance out the negative stories that I told above.
There was this one time when I was working at an event. There was this big black dude from Florida who was trying to sign up students for a Washington Mutual back account. In return, he would give them a free t-shirt. I helped him set up his table and he would talk in a heavy southern accent about how much he liked California and how he hoped to start his own business. He asked a lot about Chinese culture and wanted to know where he could get good Chinese food around the area so I gave him the location of my uncle’s soup joint in Oakland. After the event was over, we scavenged some left over pizza, I helped him lug his stuff over to the Washington Mutual van, and he gave me a free t-shirt.
Another time I went out to eat with a British-Black foreign teacher in Guangzhou and he ordered something off the menu by pointing. When the food came, he said they brought the wrong thing, but they showed me the menu and apparently he pointed at the item below what he wanted. Instead of getting angry at him, they scolded me for being a stupid Chinese who was incapable of giving good hospitality to the ‘foreign guest’ before bringing out a replacement dish.
Ok so here’s what I don’t get: People of the supposed “white race” have done far more harm over the course of history (opium wars, colonies, blowing up embassies, etc.) than those of the so-called “black race” (I can’t even think of anything that black people have done against China), yet Chinese people here on the mainland still look down on black people while they’re generally quite friendly and accommodating to white people.
I understand the whole Africa being poor and looking down on it and by extension its people, but that’s the only excuse I’ve really come across.
Just as an example of this lunacy, I was talking to my fudao the other day about the American election this year, and how it was interesting that Obama got the ticket.
Immediately she interuptted “Oh there’s no way he can be president!”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because he’s black!”
James,
You must understand that most mainland Chinese look down on every non-Chinese – blacks, whites, browns,… They are there to be exploited, period. This is the Chinese characteristics they inherited from 5000 years of history of being the top-dog in world politics, until the last 200 years. They only do what they think they can get away with. With blacks, they think they can get away with being rude, but not with whites.
I’m not sure if China had much exposure to other races, especially blacks, until recently. And often foreigners were highly respected, e.g. Buddhist monks from India. A 5000-year tradition of exploiting other races seems dubious to me.
Any case, a while ago the Mutant Palm had a post on Liang Qichao and his pseudo-Darwinian racial theories. He wasn’t the only one to have such beliefs. I think many people believed that white superiority was shown by science, how they had colonized Africa and India, and so on. If Asia didn’t want to follow, the “yellow” race must unite or whatever. Sometimes a struggle between whites and yellows was envisioned, other times a melding (e.g. Kang Youwei!). If one wants to find intellectual or cultural roots of racism, I think that’s where one should first look. Though I would agree with Stupid Pig that culture isn’t enough to understand racism in China.
As the original translator of the article above, some of the above comments reflect a rather pretty disappointing understanding of Chinese attitudes towards blacks and other races. Some criticism is valid, and some isn’t.
On the issue of Obama, for example, if your Beijing fudao told you Obama isn’t going to win the US presidency… it’s probably because he/she thinks America is too racist, not because China is.
@ all – I’ll start from the most recent. I agree with Buxi that the fudao’s comments was probably because she thinks America is too racist. That’s a common belief of American society in China because of the education system as well as the large amount of American movies that depict race as a dividing issue.
The problem with China today isn’t ‘most mainland Chinese look down on non-Chinese’. By western standards of political correctness, yes it’s true that most Chinese would be considered racist. However, most of China lacks the racial consciousness that residents of say… the San Francisco Bay Area would have. That’s why there’s all these comments from foreigners within China that ‘all Chinese are racist’.
Like what Shao Ping said, the only western style racial awareness that China has is the social darwinism that came about in the early 20th century. Liu Xiang even made statements about ‘yellow tornados’ and the evolution of the Asian body towards atheletics. I mean Eugene Chung never (Korean-American Offensive Lineman) talked about his success to being attributed to overcoming his racial weaknesses.
Even with the minority people in China, there isn’t much mixing. My friend from inner mongolia, who’s Han, doesn’t really have any Mongolian friends. Uygurs and Han are also pretty segregated. Maybe some of the ‘more Han’ minority groups, like the Hakka, are more accepted, but it’s more because the Hakka are becoming more ‘Han-like’.
So to compare it to America, China would have their black and hispanic ghettos for some minorities while other minorities would be similar to ‘bananas’ and ‘coconuts’ (white-washed Asians and South Asians). This is a crude comparison, but I think it’s a model that exists in most countries.
Now part of the problem that exists in China is cultural, but at the same time it’s also economic status. A rich black man would probably get much more respect than a poor African trader. A rich black man would probably get more respect than a poor construction worker from Anhui.
I lost track of what I was talking about. But yeah, the only way for the situation to improve in China is for the Chinese people to stop watching terrible mono-racial sitcoms from the States like ‘Friends’ and for more immigration and emmigration to increase the chance of cultural exchange.
they are taking over the world one woman at a time.