To understand China you need to understand whiteness, yet it’s missing from the conversation
ANALYSIS
By Stan Grant
Stan Grant is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8.30pm. He also presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel.
Posted 8h ago
It is not possible to understand China without understanding race and racism. Specifically, without understanding whiteness.
… Australia had its own whites-only policy, excluding non-white races from the country.
Racial politics was also shaping China’s great foe, Japan.
The Japanese derided the Chinese as “yellow”. As Michael Keevak points out, Japan saw itself on par with Western powers.
Its imperialism mirrored the imperialism of white colonisers.
In the West, the Japanese were still seen as “coloured people”, Keevak says, but “maybe not as yellow as the Chinese”.
For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal.
China, like so many other non-white nations, has felt the sting of white imperialism.
The end of whiteness?
Chinese leaders have seen their struggle in racial terms. Mao Zedong styled himself as a revolutionary leader of the non-white world.
… China today is seen as a threat to the West. A threat to the so-called global rules-based order that is itself rooted in a race-based order.
So much of the commentary around China ignores the question of race. So many of the commentators discussing China — predominantly white voices — do not have the racial literacy to begin to understand how race and racism inform China’s rise.
In some ways, Xi’s China may represent the end of whiteness. Except that the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness.
The irony is Xi has also become what he opposes. He is a Han nationalist — his idea of Chinese power is ethnic Han superiority — persecuting non-Han, non-white people in his own country.
If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion.
The continuation of white power, in darker skin.