The standard view amongst most Chinese, indeed, is that they are not racist, that racism is essentially what happens to the Chinese in Western societies, and that Chinese societies are more or less unaffected by it. [796] To cite one example of many, in 1988 the then general secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, told a meeting on national unity that racial discrimination is common ‘everywhere in the world except in China ’. [797]
The pervasiveness of racism applies not only to China but also to Taiwan, [798] Singapore, Hong Kong and even the overseas Chinese communities. Thus it is not simply a function of parochialism, of China ’s limited contact with the outside world. Take Hong Kong, for example, which, in contrast to China, has enjoyed a highly cosmopolitan history as a result of colonialism. Although in 2001 the then chief executive Tung Chee-hwa typically described racism as a minor problem, requiring no more than an extremely low-budget, low-profile educational campaign, in fact, it is endemic amongst the Hong Kong Chinese, who comprise around 96 per cent of the population. [799] In a survey of South-East Asians, South Asians and Africans in Hong Kong conducted by the Society of Community Organizations in 2001, around one-third said they had been turned down for a job on the basis of their ethnicity, a similar proportion had been refused rental of a flat, one-third reported that the police discriminated against them on the streets, while nearly half had experienced racial discrimination in hospital. [800] The most common targets are foreign ‘helpers’, usually known as ‘maids’, mainly Filipinas and Indonesians, who are frequently required by their Chinese domestic employers to work absurdly long hours, are treated abysmally, paid little, granted scant freedom, and, in a significant minority of cases, subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Their conditions not infrequently resemble a latter-day form of indentured labour, as is also true in Singapore and Malaysia. [801]
It might reasonably be argued that Hong Kong Chinese racism is a legacy of British rule. After they took possession of the colony following the First Opium War, the British practised systemic racism: English was the sole official language until 1974, the Chinese were prohibited from living in the exclusive Peak area from 1902, there was a miscellany of petty apartheid laws – such as the requirement, until 1897, that Chinese carry night passes – and they were excluded from high-level public employment until as late as the 1970s and, in some departments, until the mid 1990s. [802] With a truly breathtaking disregard for the truth, in 1994 the British had the gall to claim that ‘racial discrimination in Hong Kong is not a problem’. [803] The fact that racism was the currency of British rule only encouraged the Chinese to behave in a similar way towards those whom they regarded to be their inferiors, namely those of darker skin. It would be naive, however, to think that British behaviour was the main cause of Chinese racism: it was clearly a contributory factor, but the fundamental reason lies in Chinese history and culture. After a major campaign in response to the death, in 2000, of Harinder Veriah, a Malaysian of Indian descent, who complained about serious racial discrimination in a Hong Kong hospital, the government was finally forced to acknowledge that racism was a serious problem and in 2008, mainly as a result of this case, belatedly introduced anti-racist legislation for the first time. [804] But Hong Kong, cosmopolitan and international as it is, remains an essentially biracial city, with whites enjoying a privileged status, along with the Chinese, and those of darker skin banished to the margins as second-class residents or migrant workers. [805]
So what of racism in China itself? When a people and government are in denial of their own racism, then evidence of that racism depends on the witness of those who are the object of it and, as a consequence, predominantly on anecdote rather than anything more systematic. Once there is an established culture of anti-racism – as opposed to simply a culture of racism, which is the situation in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong – it becomes possible to paint a more accurate picture of the incidence of racism, though even then the great bulk of it still remains hidden from view. In Chinese societies, and China in particular, there is no culture of anti-racism except at the very margins because the dominant discourse of Han chauvinism has never been seriously challenged. [806] Racist attitudes are seen as normal and acceptable rather than abnormal and objectionable. As M. Dujon Johnson, a black American scholar of China, puts it:
