When China Rules the World полностью

Given how historically entrenched these attitudes are, however, any serious change is bound to take an extremely long time. In the meantime, China’s ethnic mentality will inevitably exercise a powerful influence over its attitude and behaviour towards other peoples: the Chinese will tend to see the world in terms of a complex racial and cultural hierarchy, with the Chinese at the top, followed by whites, and, notwithstanding the anti-imperialist line of the Maoist era, those of darker skin somewhere at or near the bottom.

Another notable feature of the Chinese is their enormous sense of self-confidence, born of their long history and the dazzling success of their civilization for so much of it, a self-confidence which has withstood quite remarkably the vicissitudes and disasters of the century between the Opium Wars and the 1949 Revolution. These, nonetheless, have left their mark. In a book entitled The Ugly Chinaman, which was widely circulated in China in 1986, Bo Yang, a Taiwan-Chinese, described the Chinese as constantly wavering between two extremes – ‘a chronic feeling of inferiority and extreme arrogance. In his inferiority, a Chinese person is a slave; in his arrogance, he is a tyrant. In the inferiority mode, everyone else is better than he is… Similarly, in the arrogant mode, no other human being on earth is worth the time of day.’ [845] This captures the way in which the ‘century of humiliation’ has affected the Chinese psyche, and the consequent brittleness of emotion. It would be wrong, however, to suggest, as Bo Yang does, that the Chinese have ever felt inferior to everyone: towards whites at times, but never towards those of darker skin. Nonetheless, what remain most striking are not the periods of doubt but, given the problems that have beset the country for most of the modern era, the fact that the Chinese have continued to regard themselves as being at the summit of the global hierarchy of race. True, in moments of vulnerability, the Chinese sometimes acknowledge that they are second to whites, or perhaps equal with them, but this is only regarded as a temporary situation before normality is again restored. Chen Kuan-Hsing argues:

This universal chauvinism… has provided a psychic mechanism for the Han to confront imperialist intervention and to make life more bearable and more live-able – ‘These (white) foreign devils can beat us by material force, but can never conquer our mind’ -… but at the same time, exactly the same logic of racist discrimination… can be utilized to discriminate against anyone living at the periphery of China. A sharp-edged shield can be used for self-defence, but can also be a weapon to kill… [846]

Another Taiwanese writer, Lu Liang, is unambiguous about underlying Chinese attitudes: ‘Deep down the Chinese believe that they are superior to Westerners and everyone else.’ [847] No other people from a developing country possess anything like this sense of supreme self-confidence bordering on arrogance.

It would be wrong to regard this feeling of superiority as purely or perhaps even mainly racial in character. Rather it is a combination of both cultural and racial, and has been such for thousands of years. [848] The steady expansion of the Chinese empire rested firstly on a process of conquest and secondly on a slow process of absorption and assimilation. As we have seen, Chinese attitudes fluctuated between regarding other races as incapable of adaptation to Chinese ways, or alternatively believing they could be assimilated, depending on how self-confident the Chinese felt at the time and the precise balance of power. Expansion, in other words, was a hegemonic project, a desire to absorb other races, to civilize them, to teach them Chinese ways and to integrate them into the Chinese self. Given that the notion of ‘Chinese’ was constantly being redefined in the process of expansion and absorption – including the case of those dynasties, like the Qing, that were not Chinese – it is clear that the idea of ‘race’ was not – and could not be – static or frozen: it was steadily, if very slowly, mutating. Thus, while race is a particularistic and exclusionary concept in the present, this did not prevent the process of hegemonic absorption and assimilation in the long run.