The pervasiveness of racialized ways of thinking is underlined by Frank Dikötter, who chronicles countless examples, adding:
It would be wrong to assume that these clichés have been gathered… simply by sieving printed material through a filter that retains racial utterances. A dredger would be needed to gather up all the racial clichés, stereotypes and images which abounded in China [as well as the West] between the wars. These clichés were the most salient feature of a racial discourse that was pervasive and highly influential; moreover it was rarely challenged. They were adopted and perpetuated by large sections of the intelligentsia. [772]
While this racism was clearly a product of imperial China ’s worsening predicament, an expression of a crisis of identity and a desire for affirmation and certainty, it was also a function of the cultural racism that had been such a strong feature of the Celestial Kingdom over a period of almost three millennia. The rigour of the racial hierarchies that now became endemic bore a striking resemblance to the cultural hierarchy of the Confucian social order – an illustration of the complex interplay between cultural and racial forms of superiority in Chinese society.
This racialized thinking heavily influenced the nationalists, led by Sun Yat-sen, who overthrew the Qing dynasty in the 1911 Revolution. Sun saw the Chinese as a single race and believed in the inevitable confrontation of the yellow and white races:
Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Because the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution… among the contemporary races that could be called superior, there are only the yellow and white races. China belongs to the yellow races. [773]
Elsewhere he wrote: ‘The greatest force is common blood. The Chinese belong to the yellow race because they come from the bloodstock of the yellow race. The blood of ancestors is transmitted by heredity down through the race, making blood kinship a powerful force.’ [774] Initially, he dismissed the Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchus and others as numerically insignificant: he was a Han nationalist who saw the Chinese exclusively in terms of the Han, and therefore as a nation-race. But after the Revolution he was confronted with the reality of inheriting a Qing China in which, though their numbers might have been small, the ethnic minorities occupied over half the territory of China. If China was defined only in terms of the Han, then the government would be confronted with the prospect of ethnic rebellion and demands for independence – which, in the event, is what happened. In the face of this, Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist government backtracked and redefined China in terms of one race and five nationalities, namely the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Hui: in other words, China was recognized as a multinational state, though still composed of one race, all sharing the same Chinese origins. Chiang Kai-shek continued with the general lines of this approach, but took a strongly assimilationist line, suppressing the ethnic minorities in the belief that they should be forced to adopt Han customs and practices as speedily as possible. [775]
