In the early 1970's, I was Secretary of the University of York branch
of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). Later, I was
a long-time member of the New Zealand-China Friendship Society. I have
seen China change from an idealistic, if brutal, country, where you
you weren't allowed to say anything bad about the Cultural Revolution,
to a -- still brutal -- country, where "To Be Rich is Glorious" (a quote
from Deng Xiaoping) is the main ideology, and you aren't allowed to
say anything good about the Cultural Revolution. One thing that the
Cultural Revolution fought against was “Great
Han Chauvinism” (Da Hanzuzhuyi) -- Chinese majority racism.
See also: http://www.uyghuramerican.org/researchanalysis/unfulfilledpromise.html
and http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/whitepaper/4(7).html
.
In New Zealand, as a teacher of Mandarin Chinese (as an international
language), I found that bullying was a major activity of Chinese people
in New Zealand, as they enjoyed China's march towards big-power status
-- see, for example, the photograph of the restaurant (in Wellington,
New Zealand), above, with its brazenly intimidatory slogan ("An Egg
Should Never Argue With A Stone"). Some ethnic Cantonese -- native speakers
of Cantonese, who are visibly different from Northern Chinese native
speakers of Mandarin -- acted as if they had ownership rights over me.
Their ownership rights were enforced by my boss, Maggie Friend. My
Mandarin teaching colleague, Ms. Ying Li, even threatened to have me
beaten up -- no doubt encouraged by the beating up of a New Zealander
for refusing to sell a number-plate to a Chinese man ! The Chinese in
tiny New Zealand classify as "racist" any non-Chinese who is insufficiently
deferential, and people in the New Zealand Establishment, hyper-aware
of Chinese economic and military power, have cottoned onto this very
fast (like the Thais and others before them).
Another "charming" feature of the Chinese in New Zealand (whether
they be visiting students or resident Chinese), is their tendency to
"accidentally" drop the words "bomb" or "war" into their utterances.
One of my Cantonese students of Mandarin (by correspondence) blew into
her tape-recorder's microphone, at the time of the last, well-publicised
French nuclear tests in the Pacific, producing a good simulation of
the sound of a nuclear blast !
New Zealanders and Australians have always feared the "Yellow Peril",
because of the obvious disparities in population densities, and, while
they were under the protection of the British Empire, New Zealand reacted
by imposing an (obviously racist) poll tax on Chinese immigrants --
and Australia had a "White Australia" policy. Now the British can no
longer protect New Zealand, and so attempts to shut Chinese people out
have changed into attempts to appease them. |
The point here is not so say that Chinese people are more racist
than are Whites, Maoris, or other races. As a multilingual, ethnically
mixed, intelligent, and much-travelled person, I can state categorically
that every race is potentially equally racist -- their racism just becomes
more obvious when their power increases, as Chinese power has been increasing
in New Zealand in recent years. If this was popularly acknowledged,
there would be no need for this page.
The trouble is that ethnic minorities in White-majority countries
profit from an ideology propounded by the Media-University Complex (MUC),
according to which it is, in practice, implicit that only Whites are
racist (and only men are sexist). This allows these minorities to be
as racist as they naturally are, with the automatic presumption that
they are in the right in any dispute with a member of the majority Whites.
An example of this double-standard on racism is the book "Among Ghosts"
(see image above), written by a Cantonese New Zealander and published
by "Learning Media", the Government's main educational publisher. Not
only is the racist term "Ghosts" (which is a well-known Chinese racist
term for pale-skinned Whites) not banned or criticised by the New Zealand
authorities -- it was actually taught in schools as an exercise in multi-culturalism
! |
