Worldwide, there are numerous mythological narratives telling us how primitive humans acquired the knowledge of fire making and how critical it was to human physical and cultural evolution. The Chinese version attributes it to ç§äșșæ° ( suirensi , literarily meaning the one who makes fire by wood drilling), a mythical figure who taught primitive people to make fire by wood drilling. In addition to this simple folklore reflective of experiences common to many human groups worldwide, fire making has a more revered place in the narratives of Chinese nationalism expressed in anthropological and scientific languages. According to this narrative, fire making is not only an important contribution the ancestors of the Chinese made to world civilization but also is the key factor that distinguishes the Chinese as a race from other peoples.
In 2012, the Guangming Daily, a major national newspaper, published a lengthy article entitled âSome Philosophical Thoughts Regarding Human Evolution .â The author listed five biological and physical features to make a claim that the Chinese are the most developed human species in the course of evolution. One of these features involves the shape of mouth and the function of stomach. The author says that the Chinese mouth is shaped flatter and the Chinese stomach functions more weakly in digesting raw, cold, and hard food. This is said to be because the ancestor of the Chinese started to use fire earlier than the forefathers of other human groups. The food they ate was cooked for a long time and therefore required less chewing in the mouth and less digestion in the stomach. In this case, a less bulging mouth and a weaker stomach function testify to a more developed and therefore more civilized way of eating, thanks to the wisdom of the ancestors.
The newspaper published the article under the name Yong Chun , which is a pen name of Li Changchun , a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo Standing Committee and the Chairman of the Central Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee (both positions were held from 2002 to 2012. For a fuller quotation of Liâs argument, see Chapter 2). A career engineer known for his penchant for poetry, lyric writing, photography, and the social sciences, Li is regarded as a tasteful literatus by Chinese media, compared to his Politburo peers. He was in charge of propaganda, culture, and education for ten years, during which Chinaâs nationalist politics won significant support among elites as well as commoners, not only nationwide but also in the global Chinese diaspora.
Liâs rather bold but confident deduction that the use of fire and eating of cooked food have evolutionarily separated the Chinese from other peoples of the world is just a tiny part of the Chinese nationalist discourse with a strong sense of racialâmuch earlier it was ethnocentricâsuperiority. Since the time of Confucius, the Chinese language has used an idiom to describe the barbarian way of taking food as âeating meat with hairs and drinking the bloodâ (rumaoyinxue èčæŻé„źèĄ). The barbarian foreigners who were assimilated into Chinese society were described as being civilized from raw barbarians (shenfan ççȘ) to cooked barbarians (shoufan ççȘ). To help the wildest barbarians to survive in China, legend holds that cooked food had to be forcefully put into their mouths and then they would vomit for days and nights in order to civilize their internal organs. Contemporary Chinese anthropologists believe that the use of fire helped groups of Homo erectus in the land of todayâs China survive the last Ice Age while their peers perished elsewhere helplessly in the cold. Therefore they claim a native origin for Homo sapiens in China and refute the genetically-based âOut-of-Africa â hypothesis for the origin of all modern humans. In recent decades the site of Peking Man , an example of H. erectus who lived as early as seven hundred thousand years ago in the then China and is believed by the Chinese to be the earliest fire-using human, was held as a shrine where torches were ignited at ceremonies for national and international events. Popular culture and history education also portray the use or making of fire by ancestral Chinese as evidence of moral and spiritual strength. The flame created in the hands of the ancients is ritualized in Chinese nationalism (for a fuller discussion on the nationalist narrative of ancestral use of fire and fire making, see Chapter 2).
The racialized mystification and ritualization of the ancient flame constitutes part of anthropological discourse of Chinese nationalism . Contemporary Chinese nationalism , analyzed in the theoretical and conceptual framework of international studies of race and racism, consists of many elements combined with the anthropological one to construct the racial thinking. Some of them are intellectually sophisticated and employ rather scientific jargon but most others use straightforward language to address concepts of blood, soil, and color. The phrase âanalyzed in the theoretical and conceptual framework of international studies of race and racismâ means China should not be viewed as an exception in regards to the very nature of these discussions. Based on international standards, they are racial or simply racist, which means they are much more than âethnicâ or ânationalisticâ and certainly not just âculturalâ either, although they are associated with ethnicity, nationalism, and cultural tradition as they are in other societies.
I feel it is necessary to begin this study with such a statement because there seems to be a politically correct attitude known as the âChinese perspectiveâ that reminds us that China is so big, so historically and culturally independent (or isolated), and has gone through such a uniquely âEast Asianâ approach towards modernity that it has become an almost self-sustaining and self-perpetuating civilization. When scholars apply universally held principles and research paradigms to China, they have to be aware of their validity in that special country. China is a typical case of the application of cultural relativism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism on the one hand and the rejection of Orientalism, Eurocentrism, and Western cultural hegemony on the other. One of the most recent complaints about this Chinese perspective or viewpoint was made by anthropologist Kevin Carrico in his book investigating the Han Clothing Movement in China today. Instead of treating the movement as a nationalist effort to revive traditional culture as many would do although they may be dismissive of the movement as misguided and commercialized, Carrico finds that the movement has to be understood as part of an emerging Han racial nationalism. Avoidance of such a harsh critical point of viewâas I understand it but using Carricoâs wordsâby applying the Chinese perspective, would be ânot only dishonest but also patronizing,â or even worse, it ânot only ironically reproduces and reinforces the East-West binary that it claims to want to overcome, but furthermore provides a theoretical buttress for conservative and even xenophobic nationalism.â (Carrico 2017, pp. 9â10)
China used to be a country in which both foreignersâespecially Westernersâand the Chinese themselves would find no racism or racial thinking to talk about, at least not as a subject worthy of academic study. This has changed to some extent as part of an international trend. During the last three decades, as our understanding of racism has been further emancipated from its most institutionalized, extremist, and inhuman forms (from segregation and discrimination to lynching, holocaust, and genocide), we have begun to think about racism more in the subtle forms of ideas and concepts and their relationship with ethnic consciousness, cultural tradition (especially religion), nationalist sentiment, xenophobia, and scientific discussions on biological differences worldwide, and not just in a binary framework of the West and non-West or between whites and non-whites. This trend is in part driven by an identity crisis and ethnic nationalism in many countries, which had been suppressed by the global politics of the Cold War as well as the fight between socialism and capitalism but have now emerged and shown themselves. The trend also reflects the fresh dynamics brought about by the new reality of globalization, notably international and domestic migrations. In this regard, we are not in the so-called post-racist era yet.
Since the early 1990s, discussions regarding race-related issues in China have formed a small but distinctive stream merging into the enormous ocean of international Chinese studies, despite dissenting voices cautioning people against an understanding of Chinese concepts on their own terms, and insisting on the global influence of the hegemonic power of European-American discourses of race . Many scholars have engaged the issue of race in their more general studies of Chinese history since the Qing dynasty (1644â1911), although the definitive meaning of race may be a subject of debate, given the premodern and non-Western context in which the term is applied. For one thing, they stress the signs of a sharpened sense of ethnic difference between the Manchu rulers and their Han subjects and the subsequent ideological quest for political legitimacy. Prasenjit Duara , for example, considers that âthe Manchu search for its own separate identity may be traced back to a narrative which privileged ârace â as a definer of communityâ (Duara 1996, p. 53).
In terms of focused studies, Frank Dikötterâs The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992, revised 2015) has remained the only monograph on the subject. Through an intensively textual analysis of elite writings, Dikötter identifies a line of racial thought in ancient Chinese cultural discourse concerning the identity of the people and the distinctiveness of the civilization. It does this with an emphasis on a social hierarchy, a belief system, and the differences between the Chinese and non-Chinese determined by perceived ancestry, lineage, color, and blood, among other things. It was this native intellectual and cultural tradition that came to meet and integrate with the Western discourse of pseudoscientific racism and social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century to form a system of global racial hierarchy. This discourse manifests itself in statements of politicians and political organizations, patriotic literature, school textbooks, popular science writings, and other forms of cultural production, which have had a significant influence on the Chinese perception of the Self and the Other ever since. This perceived racial hierarchy, as a result of an identity crisis caused by forced transformation from a self-centered empire to a semicolonial nation state, placed the whites on the top and the Chinese (yellow people) second, as both were believed to be strong and intelligent, while most other peoples were seen as hopeless losers in the social Darwinist struggle. Dikötter highlights the dynamic correlation between this racialized discourse and Chinese nationalism since the late Qing dynasty that has often identified the nation with the race , as the then popular phrase ânation destroyed and race annihilatedâ (wangguomiezhong äșĄćœçç§) revealed. Patriotism was therefore not just about defending the nation but also protecting the race. In presenting the case of the Chinese, Dikötter argues strenuously, especially in his later publications involving other cases that racism is not merely a âWestern inventionâ imposed upon the world butâat leastâhas cognitive roots deeply embedded in many non-Western cultures. The development of global racism, or global racialization , as he argues, does not therefore follow a diffusion paradigm but is rather an interactive model (Dikötter 2012).
A salient example of this interactive model is the Chinese acceptance and propagation of the concept of the yellow race . According to Michael Keevak, the concept of yellow color or yellow race has a long and complicated history in the European racialization of the world. It did not necessarily denote the Chinese in the first place and later had derogatory and even vicious connotations. However, this ambiguous and ill-intended color-based concept was met with enthusiasm in very late nineteenth century China. âThe Chinese could appropriate the Western term because it fit preexisting myths about their own civilizationâ (Keevak 2011, p. 130). These preexisting myths included the perceived color of the Yellow River, the soil, and the imperial or royal majesty, but now the Western invention of a yellow race inspired Chinese intellectuals to give their nation a noble place in the racialized world that was reified by skin color. Yang Ruisong , a scholar in Taiwan , further analyzed how the late Qing intellectuals adopted the concept of a yellow race but almost reinvented it as a discourse of a race with racial quality equal to the white but superior to all other non-white races . These intellectuals even envisioned a race war between the white and the yellow as these two superior races would eventually be competitors for global power (Yang 2010, pp. 84â91). The construction of a global racial hierarchy with the white and the yellow at the top and a rather hypothetical scenario of a race war between the two superior racesâestablished right after the concept of race was introduced into Chinaâproves a spirited interaction rather than a passive acceptance between a foreign idea and its local comprehension. In short, a long-existing sense of Sinocentric superiority and a civilization vs. barbarianism world view found their modern manifestation in biological form and were compromised to the reality of Western dominance.
Other scholars have integrated the issue of race as an important factor in their interpretation of Chinese national identity politics. Although race is not their main priority, the way they link it to their particular topics helps to locate those junctures at which the idea of race enters and enhances the more general, popular, and mainstream discussions, and even racializes them. It has become clearer to many China experts or attentive observers that without engaging the concept of race and racial thinking at least to some extent, their interpretations of the strength of contemporary Chinese nationalism is somehow weak or even flawed. One example is Martin Jacquesâs When China Rules the World (2009, pp. 244â255) in which t...