Nice summary! I was also surprised that the flu didn't come into it. It seemed like an important part of things going to hell on the homefront.
the problem was that the Western leaders mostly did not believe in racial equality, the concept threatening their imperialist domains, and the Asians thought of the concept as symbolic of their recognition on the world stage rather than including absolutely everyone (like Africans).
"Like Africans" is interesting phrasing. Of course, indigenous people of Australia would also be excluded. South America is a mixed bag of mostly-independent former colonies and not-very-stable states. But still, by this standard, the following peoples would be recognized on the world stage: Canada, the US, basically all of Western Europe, the parts of South America that are still colonies of Western Europe, Russia, and let's say three-quarters of Asia. At this point, recognition is not about an elite group that's extra special, but about normal people that have insulated themselves from an inferior minority.
But Tooze cautions against reading into these events what mostly happened later
I haven't been reading the book but I've been reading the comment threads, and I've wondered how often that's happening. Right here, for example, you/we/he is/are discussing race relations and an inability to agree on which people count as people, and it's clear that that inability contributed to parts of World War II. Last week, there seemed to be consensus that everyone would have been better off if Germany had rejected the peace treaty and got themselves invaded. That wouldn't have been better off for the Germans who died in the invasion, but given that they were going to be on the wrong side of World War II, it's easy to write them off. I know at the time some people were saying that another war was inevitable, but there's a difference between that and our actual hindsight.
Basically, when I see people talking about stupidity or short-sightedness from Wilson or other people in these threads, I wonder how much of it was really apparent at the time and how much is read into based on events that happened after.
I'm not sure what Tooze suggests America should have done economically. He says it needed to be an engine for the world, and should have dropped, or not raised tariffs. That part makes sense. But what actually were the alternatives to raising the interest rate? The inflation rate was terrifying and they had to something. Go off gold and just inflate away, force everyone to raise wages? Gold orthodoxy was so entrenched then I don't think that's a reasonable thing to expect anyone to do. And if they had creditors would have taken a beating, which would be fine except that 'creditors' now included the entire body politic who'd been arm-twisted into buying Liberty bonds.
I wonder how much of it was really apparent at the time and how much is read into based on events that happened after.
That's a question I've often had in reading and I don't know that an answer exists, but it's been interesting to think about anyway!
"Like Africans" is interesting phrasing
A little earlier than this, Gandhi was activating in SA, for civil liberties for Indians. Africans he deemed self-evidently inferior. Apartheid for them was fine. White people have never been the only ones buying into racial hierarchies.
Yeah, I also wondered if it was actually standard practice to include the opposing party in treaty negotiations. But given the need for treaties to be ratified by Senate supermajority, it does seem like their concerns need to be taken into account one way or another.
Because of the colder climate in northern regions of the world, white people are better at buying into racial hierarchies than people from other races.
the parts of South America that are still colonies of Western Europe,
Given that this is 1919, what are we talking about here? Aruba, the Falklands and British Honduras? Seems barely worth mentioning them, to be honest.
how much of it was really apparent at the time and how much is read into based on events that happened after
If you do read the book (or watch the movie), Tooze does talk about this quite a lot, like talking about better alternative policies that were actually proposed at the time. The lack of an alternative like that was kind of striking for this economics chapter.
and let's say three-quarters of Asia.
I don't know about this. Japan, sure. China, the book shows, had formal independence but with explicit spheres of foreign influence, the concessions, unequal treaties, the ongoing indemnity from the Boxer Rebellion, etc. India's recognition in the League was a formality to keep Britain happy. Southwest and Southeast Asia were both formally colonized. I'd say overall Asia was half-included at best.
9: I'm not sure what it says about me that I'd much rather read a 500-page book than watch a youtube video, but definitely that is the case.
It means you're a better person, Thorn! However, others might be less enlightened, and they should not be forgotten.
India's recognition in the League was a formality to keep Britain happy
Super interesting in itself that Britain wanted that. The way Tooze paints it, at least a big faction of the British ruling class were quite sincere about incremental liberation and inclusion of subject peoples, in India at least.
parts of South America that are still colonies
The racial politics of L. America are their own whole thing. Also a little before this, Argentina was trying to encourage Northern European immigration (because those Mediterranean types are such shiftless sleazebags, you know), and to their quotas counted Afrikaners fleeing the British. who settled in Patagonia. (Said Afrikaners of course maintained their British citizenship to get access to British hospitals, and mostly fled right back when they realized how fucked up Argentina was.)
8, 14: Eh, fair enough, I only spent like 10 minutes researching that. I still think the trend is interesting, though.
13: Wasn't it partly (not entirely, to be sure) to have more assured votes? That was one of the Lodge Reservations: "The United States assumes no obligation to be bound by any election... in which any member of the League and its self-governing dominions, colonies, or parts of empire, in the aggregate, have cast more than one vote."
The trend is interesting, and still continues. Unless this recession proves permanent, we're well on the way to a world where Africa is poor and almost everywhere else is at least middle-income; and in the US AIUI, the only minorities that aren't being assimilated into the 'white' normal are Africans and part-Africans*. Interesting times!
*Did the blog discuss this a couple of months ago? We should.
16: partly, yes, and there was certainly lots of pragmatic politics around all Indian policy, but the liberal ideological component seemingly was there as well. I'd always assumed the tutelage and white man's burden stuff was just BS, but no.
The way Tooze paints it, at least a big faction of the British ruling class were quite sincere about incremental liberation and inclusion of subject peoples, in India at least.
IMHMHB the involvement of a relative in the construction of New Delhi in the early part of the 20th century. At the time there was a huge public debate (in, eg, newspaper letters pages) over whether the new capital should be constructed using Western (specifically British) building methods and styles, or traditional Indian ones. Relative was on the Indian builders' side, arguing to the effect of "We all know that India will be self-governing very soon. What we need to ask ourselves is: do we want self-governing India to have a capital city that makes them proud to be Indians, or one that serves as a constant reminder of the days when they were under [his exact phrase] foreign occupation?"
The various Government of India Acts, especially 1919, were overtly aimed at eventually building a representative democratic government in India. It would be fair to say that if you'd asked the British ruling class in 1919 "what do you want India to look like in 2019" they'd have described a loose federation of generally democratic states, many with a constitutional maharajah or some such taking care of the ceremonial side, with a (white) Viceroy on top exercising more or less the same responsibilities as the Governor-General of Canada.
2: Until reading Tooze, I hadn't realized how odd it was not to invade Germany. I'd heard all the arguments that it would have been better to do that, of course, but for whatever reason I thought they were farther from actually doing it.
That was one of the Lodge Reservations: "The United States assumes no obligation to be bound by any election... in which any member of the League and its self-governing dominions, colonies, or parts of empire, in the aggregate, have cast more than one vote."
This argument surfaced again at San Francisco in 1945, when the Soviets, apparently seriously, requested fifteen seats in the UN General Assembly, one for each member republic of the Soviet Union.
What are the responsibilities of the Governor-General of Canada? I always thought that it was strictly ceremonial.
Cermonies, and provoking constitutional crises.
I just linked to Australia instead of Canada because as far as I can tell they're the same country.
Another thing that struck me was China's striking deals with the Soviets, and with Germany for military assistance. It suggests Nationalist China was an insurgent power like them, and that makes a lot of sense, with the bloodiness of Chiang's rule. It also makes more sense of Mao, permanently mobilizing like Stalin and Hitler, except that his war never came.
25: I think the timing is a bit off there - the Karakhan Manifesto was 1919-1920 (multiple versions), and Chiang didn't lead China until the mid-twenties; indeed the Kuomintang was dormant at the time and only revived in October 1919. From my reading, to the extent China could be called insurgent at the time, it was more diplomatically, over the shabby way they'd been treated. More so in the 1920's, when the USSR was allied with the KMT.
Also, maybe Tooze acknowledged this later and I missed it, but it seems the Soviets quickly walked back their many unilateral concessions to China in that document, and by 1925 "traditional Russian interests and rights in China, including control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, were reaffirmed in a series of secret agreements" (the Wikipedia entry linked above).
Sino-German cooperation accelerated from the mid 20s onward, but really picked up after Hitler's rise to power. It was mostly a relationship of mutual benefit--Germany needed raw materials and China needed military and industrial technology, but the Chinese Nationalists did share with Nazi Germany a sense of betrayal by Western powers over their treatment after WW1; a strong dislike of Communists (Chiang purged Communists from the KMT in 1927); and, for the Chinese, a sense that Fascism provided an alternate and more attractive model of nation building than liberal democracy or communism. Although Nazi-style racism didn't develop the same way in China as there is not the same concept of race, Thomas Mullaney in his book on ethnicity and nation-building in China points out the the KMT did adopt Nazi ideas of the nation, particularly a sense of necessary ethnic and national unity.* What "one nation one people" would mean in China was ambiguous and never really dwelt on by the KMT (it's pretty clear it didn't mean genocide, as it did in Germany), but it certainly made China's ethnic minorities uneasy. During WW2, the Japanese tried to capitalize on this uneasiness by fanning fears that the KMT would engage in ethnic cleansing, but this failed pretty clearly. It did allow the Communists to make inroads with ethnic minorities by promising that a Communist China would be a "multi-ethnic state," and ethnic minorities would get political representation, which they have to this day.
*Eugenics was also a key part of both the KMT's and CCP's platforms, but in both cases it did not take the overtly racial tone it did in the West. The KMT did adopt Nazi language to talk about purifying the race, but again what exactly this meant in the Chinese context (where again race as a concept doesn't really exist) is quite ambiguous. For the Communists, it meant a focus on public health and nutrition, anti-incest campaigns, and education about genetic disorders. The term "eugenics" (yousheng) fell out of favor after WW2, but it was revitalized by the CCP in the 1970s as a crucial component of the one child policy, which is based on a logic of "quality over quantity." At present the Chinese government provides free natal care, WIC-style nutrition program, vaccines, and baby-care education as part of its current "eugenics" program.
21. To which the US replied "so we get 50, right?"
26: I was projecting back from the 1920s, yes.
27: This book? One of the benefits of living here is reading headlines like "Koumintang leadership takes strong stance on pork imports". T-rex become pigeon, makes me chuckle every time.
Don't be ridiculous. Jesus created the US with 50 states 6000 years ago. It's in the Bible.
21
The US responded, "Sure, then we'll take 48 seats." As it was the USSR got seats for Ukraine and Byelorussia.
Pwned by 28 but at least I got the number right. Right?
Pork imports are important!
Nice summary. In personal news, I am now 16 chapters behind on the re-reading project. Winning!
To 3, isn't the answer "Bretton Woods"+Marshall Plan? I.e., retain something like a gold standard, have international cooperation, let banks and the US government pump tons of money into the rest of the world to jump-start reconstruction. I don't actually know enough to know how that would have been structured, but ITSTM you had exactly the same issues at the end of WWII and somehow it got worked out then.
34: Tooze doesn't offer an alternative (at this point anyway), which bugged me. I don't know enough either, but things weren't exactly the same at the end of WWII, because production in the US had expanded to meet demand, so inflation wasn't nearly as high. And, as far as I can make out, the dollar wasn't on gold in 1945, or at least not in the same way.
34.3: Yeah, and also critical is that a bunch of debt forgiveness (both inter-Allied and reparations) would have had a very similar effect to a Marshall Plan, removing the drag on the various European economies. This comes up in later chapters.
Also, RT, I'm quite serious about those lectures I linked to. They cover pretty much the whole book in about 3 hours.
Also, the point from a few chapters ago that Keynes proposed something like that right at Versailles, and got the UK government behind him, and the US vetoed it.
This argument surfaced again at San Francisco in 1945, when the Soviets, apparently seriously, requested fifteen seats in the UN General Assembly, one for each member republic of the Soviet Union.
Hey, the E.U. has a whole bunch of seats. Although Premier Angela Merkel has so far not pursued central rule or interstate population transfers to the degree of Stalin.
37, 39: No argument about the debts and stimulus, but in this chapter Tooze was talking specifically about the US raising rates to control disastrous inflation. I don't see how cancelling the debts would have affected that. Also, IIRC payments on those debts were actually suspended at that point anyway.
Oh, right. Well, in chapter 19 he talks about how the rest of Europe took more limited, less punishing deflationary measures than the US and UK, but I don't know if they could have done it that way if US/UK hadn't led they way.
It's not like alternatives to the gold standard had never occurred to anyone. The gold standard was an issue in American politics for years before. Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech is the obvious example, but William Grieder's "Secrets of the Temple" documents the rich anti-gold-standard tradition.
The gold standard was an issue in American politics for years before
And had, eventually been resolved, in the interest of creditors. Reopening it would have been a drastic move. And depreciating the currency (assuming going off gold did that) would have meant diluting those war debts, which again, have been distributed right through the electorate.
Nice summary Minivet.
I think that Tooze gestures at alternatives that cumulatively (over the rest of the book) are the alternate economics program. I don't know if they'd have been enough, but loan forgiveness + less tariff hikes + humanitarian relief seems likely to have kept Europe, especially France, better able to act.
The sharp break in inflation did seem to benefit the whole world, after a few years of recession and recovery. Given how young the Fed was at that point, it seems like an important proof of concept.
That's the other thing. The only analogue I know for this is the Volcker recession in the early 1980s, which AFAIK did work, albeit very painfully.
So many Arnie thinkpieces to write. Endearingly, Chrome doesn't recognize thinkpiece as a word.
46: Yes, the Volcker recession was my reference point too.
...but again what exactly this meant in the Chinese context (where again race as a concept doesn't really exist) is quite ambiguous.
Without posting battling quotes, unless you want to, Frank Dikotter in The Construction of Racial Identity in China and Japan seems to disagree. Not just the instrumental and political use of Han vs Manchu 1890-1925 say, but to the current day.
Oh hell, this is nice from Dikottter:
Three conclusions might be drawn from this chapter. First, racialised identities are central, and not peripheral, to notions of identity in China: precisely because of the extreme diversity of religious practices, family structures, spoken languages and regional cultures of population groups that all define themselves as 'Chinese', ideologies of biological descent have emerged as powerful and cohesive forms of identity. Chineseness - in Taiwan, Singapore or mainland China - is primarily defined as a matter of blood and descent: one does not become Chinese like one becomes Swiss or Dutch
As far as wringing out inflation in a Keynesian economic regime, still working on it. Always been a problem.
Without posting battling quotes, unless you want to
I want you to! Let's you and her fight!
Come on teo! Buttercup is fun when she fights!
27:I am not really sure about Sino German cooperation in the 20s being built on a rock of shared anti-communism, because at the same time Germany had a much closer relationship with the Soviet Union. The tactics the Nazis used against Poland, France and the USSR were developed and practised in the USSR itself, on Red Army training grounds.
because at the same time Germany had a much closer relationship with the Soviet Union
Doesn't mean they liked each other, or that Germany didn't want a hedge against the USSR in the east. After all, Anti-Comintern pact was 1936, Nazi-Soviet 1939.
But we're talking about the mid 1920s here, not the mid 1930s.
We're talking anticommunism versus pragmatic strategy, and the same weighting holds in 1920s and 30s. USSR was more useful than China and/or Japan throughout, but Reichswehr/Nazis were also anticommunist throughout.
56, 58
You might want to read more carefully. I wrote, "Sino-German cooperation accelerated from the mid 20s onward, but really picked up after Hitler's rise to power....the Chinese Nationalists did share with Nazi Germany a sense of betrayal by Western powers over their treatment after WW1; a strong dislike of Communists"
Nazi Germany != Germany in the mid 20s. But also, 59 is also correct.
51, 52
I think (as do many others), Dikotter is really wrong on race in China. I'm actually working on a paper on this, but the short answer is, we have a hard time thinking about descent outside of concepts of "blood" or "genetic essence" it's hard to conceive of that being possible. In China however, while descent is an important concept, "blood" is not. In Chinese culture, there isn't the same concept of biological immutability or essentialism as there is in the West.
In his final example, he's also confusing citizenship laws with senses of racial belonging. A person of color can easily "become" Dutch, as in get Dutch citizenship, but that doesn't mean they're recognized "Dutch," as in the sense of being "ethnically" Dutch (which is what we're talking about when we're talking about 'race.'). It's far easier to become "Chinese" than it is to become "Dutch," as in the sense that being Chinese is not and has never mapped on to a sense of ethnic uniformity (to the extent 'ethnicity' even has existed as a concept.) Also, China has always seen itself as having a vast and endless capacity to assimilate others into "Chineseness," which has by and large been the case.
It's far easier to become "Chinese" than it is to become "Dutch," as in the sense that being Chinese is not and has never mapped on to a sense of ethnic uniformity (to the extent 'ethnicity' even has existed as a concept.) Also, China has always seen itself as having a vast and endless capacity to assimilate others into "Chineseness," which has by and large been the case.
That's interesting; so you're saying there are lots of examples of people who we in the west wouldn't regard as "ethnically Chinese" (like, say, African-looking people) being assimilated into "Chineseness" and generally accepted, by typical Chinese people, as "just as Chinese as me, but admittedly a bit taller, darker-skinned and with curly hair"?
Does Mullaney discuss 60 last?
a vast and endless capacity to assimilate others into "Chineseness," which has by and large been the case
How deep does that assimilation go? My ill-informed impression is that there's always been a very extensive and unified official China which was actually a quite thin and fragile layer on top of a very fissiparous unofficial China.
In fact, are you saying that the whole concept of "that guy looks Chinese" would be alien to a Chinese person, because they don't define "Chineseness" in terms of ethnic uniformity, any more than we define "Britishness" in terms of whether someone is left- or right-handed. Two guys on a train in Wuhan, one black, one what we would call East Asian, both dressed identically, both reading the same Chinese newspaper, and your typical Chinese person would think "yep, that's two Chinese guys there, and the one on the right probably doesn't have to worry so much about sunburn".
In America, the black guy and the East Asian guy would each have their own copy of the paper, because coupons.
Also also, in that context this bit is a bit puzzling:
"it certainly made China's ethnic minorities uneasy. During WW2, the Japanese tried to capitalize on this uneasiness by fanning fears that the KMT would engage in ethnic cleansing, but this failed pretty clearly. It did allow the Communists to make inroads with ethnic minorities by promising that a Communist China would be a "multi-ethnic state," and ethnic minorities would get political representation, which they have to this day. "
Because if China has this "vast and endless capacity to assimilate others into Chineseness", then how come it still has all these various and distinct ethnic minorities, after all this time - centuries under Chinese rule? Shouldn't they all be successfully assimilated Chinese by now?
In the mid-19th century less than half the population of France spoke French as a first language. Now that is what successful assimilation looks like.
65: Again, ill-informed but I think those represented minorities are on the periphery of modern China: Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Guanxi. And those areas haven't been under Chinese rule for centuries: only decades, most of them, or intermittent occupations scattered over millennia.
And AIUI the huge majority of Chinese people even today don't speak Mandarin as a first language, or at all, hence my question at 62.
Also, the PRC has gone far out of its way to settle those peripheral territories with Han Chinese*, which argues for some significant concept of ethnicity.
*As commonly called in Western media. I assume Buttercup will school me on nuances.
I think those represented minorities are on the periphery of modern China: Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Guanxi
Many are (I think you mean Guizhou not guanxi there), but not all. There are Miao throughout southern China, Hui muslims in the Yangtze valley, Manchu in Manchuria...
Guizhou not guanxi
I mean Guangxi, because it's an autonomous region rather than a province. You're right there are minorities all over China, but don't know what political representation they have outside those autonomous regions.
Per wiki, there are autonomous minority areas at every level of government, throughout China (from region/province down to county).
Noticing physical difference isn't the same as having racial categories. Chinese people have noticed that Westerners tend to have tall noses, pinker skin, and lighter hair and eyes, and Africans tend to have darker skin and much curlier hair. What they don't have is socially meaningful categories of physical which pick out certain physical differences as salient over others. Chinese people also recognize that race is a hugely important category for the West, and as such is something that should be understood. But like most foreign things, they find the weird idiosyncrasies hard--why is the difference between white and beige skin not important in terms of contemporary racial difference, but between beige and slightly darker beige more important? Why do those two nose shapes not mean anything, but those two other nose shapes indicate some sort of meaningful ethnic difference? Why are racial terms based on color when they only vaguely map onto skin color, and then not very accurately? e.g. Why are Koreans Asian (yellow) when they have white skin, but Greeks white when they have "yellower" skin than Koreans? Why isn't hair color more important than skin color for determining racial difference?
There are also hierarchies of people which are based primarily on national economic development. They happen to map on reasonably well to Western racial hierarchies, so they look superficially similar, but they're not based in race. Africans are looked down on by Chinese because African countries are less developed economically than China. It doesn't really have to do with skin color or hair texture. If you prod, Chinese people will admit there's nothing biological about African inferiority or European/American superiority, nor is there anything inevitable about current rankings.
62
That's not wrong, but then you have to ask what "Chinese" means, if it's both all-encompassing and simultaneously nowhere to be found. Mandarin is a good example--Mandarin isn't the same as "Chinese," and all Chinese people will claim they speak "Chinese," even if few people will claim to speak good Mandarin. Since Chinese isn't synonymous with Mandarin, it also doesn't have to be synonymous with a language spoken by Han Chinese. There's also a sense that, since Chinese isn't really a biological category, becoming Chinese is a matter of adopting Chinese language and social mores. If you notice, ethnic minorities who don't actively resist assimilation end up "Chinese" within a few generations, from Manchus to Mongols to Jews, in a way which is pretty hard in Europe. (E.g. Turks don't just become "German" in three generations because they eat sauerkraut and speak German. France is a bit more like China, as ajay is not wrong to note, but still, North Africans are finding it hard to become French. Jews in Europe lived there for thousands of years while still being seen as different on some level, whereas the Jews who ended up in China pretty much entirely assimilated within a few generations.)
Mullaney's argument is that the Communists adopted a Soviet policy of ethnicity, which was extremely challenging given that ethnicity was not an emic category, so an ethnic policy required first establishing 'ethnicity' as a concept. That is, after the revolution, western-trained social scientists had to inculcate a concept of "ethnicity" into China's ethnic minorities in order to make good on their promise to provide political representation. In 1950 Chinese sociologists went to do an ethnic survey of SW China. They asked the question, "what is your ethnic background." In their survey of Yunnan province, they ended up with over 4,000 ethnic minorities, over half of which had a population of 1. They returned to Beijing, and were told to go back and return with a manageable number. Drawing on survey work of British anthropologists before the war, they cobbled together what seemed like a manageable number of different ethnic groups based on linguistic relationships, and then spent the rest of the 50s trying to train people to identify as a member of X group.
Africans are looked down on by Chinese because African countries are less developed economically than China. It doesn't really have to do with skin color or hair texture. If you prod, Chinese people will admit there's nothing biological about African inferiority or European/American superiority, nor is there anything inevitable about current rankings.
OK. So there would be no difference in the way that a black American and a white American (or an Asian-American) would be regarded, because all three are Americans, and it's all about economic progress etc.
In the real boonies of rural China, among some old people, you can actually get people who don't actually recognize physical difference as being meaningful of ethnic or national difference at all. On rare occasion, I had people ask me, "why are you such a funny looking person?" or "what sort of Chinese person are you?" because it never occurred to them that I wasn't Chinese. At the most extreme, I had someone who didn't even know if I was human or not, because I was just so outside the interpretable norms of what people looked like.
72
That's actually right. If a black person is readable as African-American as opposed to African, they're treated very differently.
73.last: Did he try the "Let me show you this thing we Earthman call 'Love'" line?
Chinese-Americans are called, "bananas," and it's hard to get people to understand that's actually a really offensive term in the US. My good friend who was born in China but raised in the US came to visit me, and after she left, my friends would always ask, "how is the banana doing?"
I've actually heard stories along similar lines in Europe, that African-Americans get treated better if they're not mistaken for African.
becoming Chinese is a matter of adopting Chinese language and social mores
all Chinese people will claim they speak "Chinese," even if few people will claim to speak good Mandarin
Fascinating. So to a Chinese person, "Chinese" denotes any of a large group of languages (and mores?)? How is that group defined? Does it relate to the state at all? Like, what about Chinese people in Thailand? And do the "Chinese" languages map onto linguistic families? Like, could Uighur be considered "Chinese" if Uighurs assimilated?
my friends would always ask, "how is the banana doing?"
My friends are much more discrete.
Actually, speaking Chinese is a pretty bright line. Chinese-Americans who speak fluent, accentless Chinese are Chinese, until they do something to reveal their "banana" status, but still they're Chinese. Chinese-Americans who don't speak Chinese are first and foremost American. It's not uncommon, if I'm next to a Chinese person and a non-Chinese speaking Chinese-American, the Chinese person will turn to me and say, in Chinese, "you're more Chinese than she is." It's a bit jokey, but not really. As a fluent Chinese speaking white person, when in China I get told all the time* that I should settle permanently in China and "have a Chinese baby" with a Chinese man.
By contrast, to most Norwegians, I'm fundamentally more Norwegian than a Somali immigrant who's fluent in Norwegian, even though I speak very little Norwegian.
*As in, at least once a day.
The (literal) party line is that they're dialects, not languages. Victor Mair compromises with the less-loaded term "topolect." Basically, any of the Sinitic languages that are descended from Middle Chinese and could at least plausibly be written with Chinese characters.
As for Uighur assimilation, yes, I imagine so, especially if they've moved away from Xinjiang. Han ethnicity has historically been a big tent.
I'm sort of curious about 73. In what way does a person indicate that they're not sure whether you're human?
Asking "What color is the sky on your world?"
It would be awesome if there was a form of Chinese that wasn't genetically related to Middle Chinese at all, but was considered Chinese because it was written with Chinese characters. Five minutes looking at Wikipedia demonstrate we do not live in such an awe-filled world.
Contrary to that, it'd be interesting to know if most Chinese people think of the Dungan people and language as Chinese. I suspect they would, even though it's written in Cyrillic.
I guess the easier question would be whether Hui people are Chinese.
It's not even a little bit surprising to me that China wouldn't have a category of "race" that maps onto Western categories (hell, even British and US categories don't match -- "Latino" or "Chicano" is obviously a race in California and is obviously not one in London). It seems to me however that if China had large numbers of immigrants of obviously different ethnicity based on physical characteristics something like racial categories would emerge in a way that's different than assimilating different "Chinese" "dialects" -- ie if there were significant black African migration to Beijing or Shanghai their descendants wouldn't more easily become "Chinese" by virtue of adopting Chinese cultural norms than would Malians in Paris or Vietnamese in Berlin or Nigerians in London. Which is to say that they could easily become citizens but the "racial" issues wouldn't just vanish because it's China.
78
I don't really know the full answer, and I'm not sure if people know themselves (I'd ask about stuff like this, and people rarely had a consensus, and most people were like, "I haven't really thought about it"). There's a strong sense living in the geographic boundaries of the PRC (inc. Taiwan) makes you Chinese.* There's also a sense that diasporic Chinese are still Chinese, especially if they speak Chinese. What makes a language "Chinese" is that it's spoken by "Chinese people," which is a bit tautological. Russian, Mongolian, and Korean are all spoken by "Chinese" people, officially, but people don't think they're Chinese languages (well, except for Mongolian).** Uighur is a Turkic language, and people acknowledge it both is and isn't Chinese, and Tibetan is Chinese. I do think Tibetans could be "Chinese" if they wanted to, and Uighurs could too, though it's acknowledged more so than with the Tibetans that they have a lot in common with Westerners. (In fact, most olive skinned Chinese-speaking Westerners get asked if they're Uighur).
*Ancestral homeland is an important concept, and there's an element, if your ancestral homeland is in the the geographic boundaries of the PRC, you're Chinese, which isn't the same as having shared 'blood.'
**At the school I was affiliated with for my research visa, there were several Mongolian international students. From my experience when forced to attend school outings,*** people would assume they were Chinese (they looked pretty Han), and then get impatient when they didn't understand Chinese. The Chinese teacher would explain they were Mongolian international students. The common response was, "Mongolia's not international! It's part of China!" The teacher would respond, "Outer Mongolia, not Inner Mongolia." People would chuckle and say, "well, that's really part of China too." I'd hear Chinese then say, "those are some international students and Mongolian students."
***The province would sponsor lots of hiking competitions and require foreign students to attend so the events could be billed as "international."
83
Use of inanimate pronouns. I had a woman point at me and ask, "what's this?" (zhe shi shenme). A somewhat rude way of asking what I was that would acknowledge I was human would be "what's she?" (ta shi shenme), and a more polite way would be asking "where's she from" (ta lazi nali?) or "what's her nationality?" (ta shi na ge guojia de ren?, or ta you shenme guoji?)
86
IME Dungan is considered "Chinese."
87
Yeah, possibly. I would argue there are key differences in how biological essence is viewed that would make Chinese racial categories quite different to the extent the term "race" might be a distraction to describe them. And certainly arguing that Chinese don't have an emic category of race isn't an argument that there isn't discrimination in China.
Right now you are getting large African minority populations in big cities, especially Shenzhen, and it's not very easy. You also get the chicken/egg problem where African migrants are economically marginalized and turn to the black or gray economy, and then face increasing discrimination for being poor and engaging in illegal activities. Again though, it's not simply about black skin. African-Americans are not grouped with Africans in terms of stereotypes, with real world ramifications. (e.g., English language schools will hire African-Americans but not Africans, African-Americans being asked to serve as spokesmodels or getting hired by multinational corporations but not Africans, etc.)
At the same time, the most marginalized people in Chinese cities are rural migrants, who occupy the same position as migrants of color elsewhere in the world. They're seen as being visually identifiably distinct dirty, inferior, immoral, criminals, despite being unquestionably Han.
Tune in next week for a discussion of race and Russia/the Soviet Union.
(this has been an interesting sub thread)
Buttercup, have you visited Taiwan (or Hong Kong/Macao)? I saw a poll recently (struggling to find it now) showing only tiny a minority of Taiwanese (IIRC ~4%) identifying as "Chinese" and small minority (IIRC ~15%) as "Taiwanese and Chinese", and those minorities much older than average.
Africans are looked down on by Chinese because African countries are less developed economically than China
Where does Japan fit in this on the mainland? Here, Japan has noticeable cachet (eg., my landlord took pains to point out the AC was Japanese, not local) which I guessed to be the colonial history, but maybe there's more going on?
94
I was in Taipei for a few days for a conference, but otherwise no. That's interesting--do most Taiwanese just identify as "Taiwanese?"*
95
Yeah, attitudes towards Japan are really complicated, because it's both an advanced industrial nation and at present, China's enemy #1 (the govt. is trying to promote anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism like crazy). Japanese commodities are highly valued, but people are pretty reluctant to extend that to Japanese people. IME in urban areas people tend to think quite highly of Japan and Japanese people, even if they don't like the Japanese government, and are highly cynical of current govt efforts to promote anti-Japanese sentiments. In rural China and among older people, anti-Japanese sentiment is still pretty strong. People tell anti-Japanese jokes, and there's still anger over "who are the Japanese to think they're better than us?" It's in marked contrast to S. Korea, which is widely admired as an advanced East Asian economy, and Germany, which is admired as a producer of high quality commodities. I remember at one point, a bunch of women at the yoga studio were talking about the high quality of German goods, and how it reflected well on the high quality of German people in general (this is a really common conversation). One young woman who'd just returned from working in Beijing then interjected, "Japanese electronics are just as high quality as German stuff, why don't we talk about the Japanese as being high quality?" and then there was a deeply uncomfortable silence before people were like, "yeah, but it's Japan."
*This reminds me of a funny story. 10 years ago when I was teaching English in China, I had an adult class and we were using a book clearly designed for ESL classes in America. For the lesson on nationality, the students had to read a paragraph and then complete the sentence structure: Bob is from X, he is X-ian (e.g. Bob is from Colombia, he is Colombia). One of the guys was from Taiwan, and the answer guide was to say he was "Taiwanese." My students all dutifully said, Phil is from Taiwan, he is Chinese. I informed them that that was a right answer, but you could also say he was "Taiwanese." One student muttered under her breath, "Taiwanese terrorists".
87: Does it make sense to merge the concepts of "ethnic rivalry" and "race"? Ethnic rivalry will emerge in a situation where different groups share space, but "race" seems more of an all-encompassing ideology.
I go back and forth on this question. (I've seen it come up in reference to whether Brexit was motivated by "racism".) On the one hand, the analogy with racism is clear. On the other hand, there's an extra pernicious element of permanent hierarchy that arose as an excuse for things like slavery and colonialism.
The only time I'd heard Japan and Germany lumped together is when people would joke that China should have lost WW2 as well, so the US govt. would have given them tons of money and technology and then they'd lead the world in high-end skilled commodity production too.
96.1: Apparently, yes.
More than 80 percent of respondents self-identified as Taiwanese, compared with 8.1 percent who identified themselves as Chinese and 7.6 percent who identified as both
When asked to choose between eventual independence and unification with China, more than 51 percent said they favored independence, while 15 percent favored unification and 25 percent favored maintaining the "status quo."And those numbers rising rapidly, even from a year ago.
96.2 and .3 are awesome, btw.
speaking Chinese is a pretty bright line
How does speaking versus writing play here? Asking as someone sort-of considering learning Chinese but seriously horrified by the writing system.
I've had a taxi driver mistake me for a Uighur (on account of my beard I presume) and scold me for my bad Chinese. He was really rude and appeared genuinely disgusted.
95:Young people like Japanese culture, like anime and fashion and stuff, but like 80 percent of TV shows are cheesy WW2 melodramas with scandalously evil Japanese.
95: Yes, visiting Taipei a few years ago I was struck by the fact that posters for cosmetics carried slogans in Japanese, obviously to add cachet in the same way that English (and sometimes French) is used in advertisements in Japan. I somehow doubt that's the case on the mainland.
(Though when I was in Osaka last month it was full of Chinese tourists shopping for electronics.)
101
I would say they're different, since they're actually quite different skills. Also, until relatively recently, illiteracy, especially among rural women, was very common. No one will take you seriously as an educated adult person if you can't read or write, but you'll be legible as a person in a way a non-Chinese speaking person isn't really.
102.1
Haha that's kind of funny. He probably thought the Chinese education system in Xinjiang was total shite. Did he get friendlier when you told him you weren't Uighur?
I read somewhere that Taiwan is the only place in the world (except maybe Okinawa? Or maybe not) that looks back upon its Japanese colonization with great fondness. That could be totally wrong but who knows.
105
I can certainly say Qingdaonese don't fondly remember Japanese colonialism. German colonialism is another matter though.
105 is impressionistically true. It is the only place that didn't have a totally awful experience with Japan, but did have a very awful experience with the "liberating" KMT straight afterwards. (Know nothing of Okinawa, except their involvement with Japan goes much further back, and they had a spectacularly awful WWII.)
The only time I ever get treated slightly poorly in China is if people think I'm Russian, and then I get sexually harassed by men. There is a pretty clear difference between how Chinese treat people they think are Western European or American and how they treat people they think are Eastern European. In addition to the sense that Eastern Europe (esp. Russia) is poor and backwards, there's also some disdain that they couldn't hack it at Communism.
105: Okinawa has a really complex relationship with the Japanese mainland. There's still massive resentment at how the islands and people were sacrificed at the end of the war to protect the mainland. Then you have the whole US base issue - on the one hand people still feel that they are being sacrificed by bearing the brunt of the US military presence protecting Japan, but on the other the bases support the local economy like nothing else. But I don't think many people feel "colonized," more that they're a distinct region of Japan that's been left behind economically and socially.
there's also some disdain that they couldn't hack it at Communism
Just...wow.
I don't suppose they take some consolation from the fact that Mr. Miyagi was from there.
104.2 Oh yeah, he was super embarrassed and suddenly of the opinion that my Chinese was music to his ears. Of course he was right the first time, I suck, but he was still being an asshole about it.
Yep. Chinese people are rude, especially on public transportation.
Got to say the Chinese are not coming out of this subthread well.
Nearly everybody who smacks me with their backpack is East Asian.
114: but, so much enlightenment! Thanks to all the old Asia hands.
118: In my experience, it's young-ish Europeans who are menaces with their backpacks.
I had a lot of fun drinking at the Chinese bar over the weekend, including with a very drunk guy with almost no English. I did get to hear an anti-Japanese joke, but it was so mild it was almost endearing.
121: You need to ride more public transportation in university towns
That reincarnated absolute monarch thing is bullshit. It did give us the The Tombs of Atuan, which pays for a lot, but still.
We don't even have youngish Europeans.
The young-ish Europeans I was referring to are the kids on hiking tours who get on trains with their giant camping backpacks and obliviously crush innocent bystanders with them.
I don't know whether young-ish Europeans are aggressive with ordinary backpacks.
Sure: the different sorts of backpack menaces are endemic to different ecosystems.
I had this exchange with a random local on the metro:
Random local: Hello! Where are you from?
Me: Hello! South Africa.
RL: Are you blind?
M: ...?
RL: All you see is black!
M: Ah, ha ha, right. [smile, nod]
I had assumed this was racist, but in light of Buttercup, maybe it wasn't! In any way I can easily understand, anyway.
118
If it makes you feel better, I once accidentally slapped the glasses off the face of some guy in the Beijing subway. It was super crowded, and I had my hand at a weird angle and turned and just ended up smacking this guy super hard in the face. I was abjectly apologetic and he was reasonably nice about it, but you could tell he was pretty pissed, as I'd be too if someone slapped me across the face.
128
Was this in Taiwan? Are you a white South African? I've heard from a white South African man on the mainland that he was treated noticeably worse than Europeans or Americans once he told people he was African, but I don't know if that's what your experience is like.
Yes, yes, and no that hasn't been my experience.
To clarify, I read it as racist at the expense of black Africans, not me. Also, the locals don't strike me as particularly rude, while they consider mainlanders notoriously so.
131
Yeah, I can see that.
To maybe be clearer, I don't think Chinese people don't say offensive things, or that they haven't picked up on racist discourses, or that they don't have ethnic/national stereotypes. What I would say is that at least in mainland China, "racist" discourses in China, which sound very much like those in the West (and are often picked up from Western media), don't have the same history of racism behind them and aren't undergirded by the same history of race/racial thinking, so it's hard to call them "racist" in a way we'd mean in the West. Of course, to us it's hard to not interpret them that way, because we're a product of our own cultures.
An example is that, all over China, people like to talk about human "quality" (suzhi). It's a pretty nebulous term, but it's used to rank people as being of higher or lower quality. It comes up frequently in national comparisons, as Chinese people frequently identify themselves as being of lower "quality" than Westerners, and it's pretty common for people to claim that Germans are the highest quality people in the world. To me, that's a supremely creepy statement, given the Germans' own history of declaring themselves higher quality, and it's hard not to read in Nazism or white supremacist logics into it (my visceral reaction if anyone tells me Germans are better than everyone else). If you press people as to why Germans are higher quality though, you'll get responses that range from "Germans really care about the environment" to "Germans make really high quality cars," or even "Germans have a low birthrate." If you ask people if there's anything inherent to "Germanness" that is high quality, they'll look at you like you're crazy. Where I lived, no one even knew what Germans looked like, and the Germans who did make it out there as tourists were either really tan or kind of fat (both considered ugly), so there was 0 idea that Germans were tall and blond and light-skinned, or in any way physically attractive. If you ask if Chinese people can be as high quality as Germans, the response is always, "of course!" What makes Germans high quality and what makes their high quality so worth mentioning is that China would like to become a high-skilled manufacturing global powerhouse, and Germany is one of the few industrialized nations that still has manufacturing as a major source of GDP.
Lamarckian concepts of inheritance are also really common, and I would argue they come out of Chinese philosophical traditions of the importance of and almost endless possibilities of self cultivation. Height and skin color are are mutable traits, and it's thought behavior has strong influence over them. Where I lived (the boonies), a "beverage theory" of skin color was really common. People would frequently* tell me that Europeans had light skin because they'd drunk milk for centuries, Indians and Chinese had "tea-colored" skin because tea was the beverage of choice, and Africans had dark skin because they grew coffee. (Yeah, the theory kind of falls apart there. Also IIRC Sweden has the highest coffee consumption per capita). Given this, milk drinking is highly encouraged for children because it's thought to lighten skin (something promoted in milk commercials.) When my Italian boyfriend visited, people were confused that he was beige instead of white. One person in the know then pointed out that he had olive oil colored skin, and suddenly it all made sense.
*Since I'm a "scholar of mankind," human difference and taxonomies of human types were something people would talk/ask me about all the time.
In my case, the first question people would ask me was almost always, "how did you get your skin so white," and then wait for me to explain my secret. If I said, it's natural, people would be skeptical and push for the "real" answer. If a friend was nearby, they'd helpfully explain, "oh, she's a white person, they're all like that." Then people would look me up and down me closely and then exclaim, "ohhh! A white person." Sometimes I had people then claim, "so that's why they're called white people." I'd also have people lick their thumb and try to rub my skin color off, as though I'd rubbed a white lotion or powder over it.
(Again, this is kind of the extreme boonies. Any Beijinger would probably die of embarrassment to know this was my experience in rural China.)
Had they ever seen actual Indian people? We should have anthropology threads more often.
While I'm serially posting,
Rude Chinese tourists is getting to be an issue the government is concerned with, since it's bringing shame on the nation and revealing Chinese people to not be very civilized. The government is running PSAs on how to be a tourist, involving exhortations to stand in line, not shout, not spit, not let kids poop on the sidewalk, not crowd, and not litter.
Now I have another reason to not drink grape Fanta. Or colloidal silver.
They could hand out plastic bags for kid shits.
Like they do in Ohio, except everybody on Ohio lies about it.
134
Generally, not really, although Bollywood films are popular on long distance buses. The people I know who did know anything about Indian/Indians were kind of like, "WTF why do Westerners think we're in the same league as these third world brown people??" (So yeah, kind of offensive.)
They can't really expect me to keep track of every country with a billion people.
For the record, I don't at all think China is in the same league as India, but my reasoning is not related to tea consumption. Also, do they have any idea how much turmeric Indians eat?
141
Now I'm thinking of what we'd look like if we were what we ate. Americans would probably be diet coke colored or egg mcmuffin colored.
I'd be curious to here more about what it's like as a South African in Taiwan. Besides the dude on the subway, are people surprised to find out there are white Africans?
142.1: Maybe cheeto consumption explains Donald Trump.
My Taiwanese relatives seemed mostly already identifying as Taiwanese when I visited in 2006.The relatives who came to the US in the 60s/70s seem less concerned with national independence, but always clearly distinguished themselves from PRC Chinese. Like "we're Chinese, but from Taiwan."
"It's like how you Americans had your Civil War, but if a bunch of Confederates fled to Cuba, took over, and got JFK and Nixon to argue over protecting them."
Only Nixon could make my mom cease to be from China.
are people surprised to find out there are white Africans?
If they are they don't say so. I've had reactions like "Where?" or "Oh! So far!" There are large numbers of ESL teachers including plenty from SA, so I think there is awareness, eg. everyone seems to recognize "Nanfei", if not "South Africa". Also, Taiwan and SA were outcast-allies in the 70s and 80s, which maybe left traces in popular consciousness.