Are the Chinese racist?

Yesterday The Observer reported an alarming row over a TV talent contest in Shanghai. One of the leading contestants, a 20-year-old girl named Lou Jing (pronounced Low not Loo), has attracted enormous opprobrium from all over the country. Some of the comments in the Chinese blogosphere are almost unbelievable. Sounds familiar, you might think. But the only allegation levelled at her is that she has dared to appear on television while being of mixed race, her father being a black African who was not married to her mother.

For a start, Lou Jing is extremely lucky to be alive. I thought I’d seen it all in China, but I’ve never seen an African/Chinese mixed race person there. You don’t actually meet all that many people born out of wedlock at all. This is not, as the prissy blogosphere would have it, because of the superior virtue of Chinese maidens. It is because illegitimacy is so socially unacceptable that (at a guess) 99 per cent of such pregnancies are terminated. If the mother suspected that the pregnancy had resulted from an affair with a black man, I would have said until today that that figure was 100 per cent. And this 20 years ago! Lou Jing’s mother is one extremely brave woman.

And so we come to the big question: how racist are the Chinese? The China Daily quotation used in the Observer piece – “anyone who marries a foreigner is deemed a ‘traitor’ to his or her race” – is vastly simplistic. First of all, the modern PC “his or her” is inaccurate. There are sexual as well as racial psychopathologies at work here. I am quite sure that no Chinese family objects to a son bringing home a blonde daughter-in-law. But for some reason the proportion of women to men marrying foreigners has until now been probably north of 100:1.

But even as regards daughters things have changed. (Slowly: as recently as 2004 my Chinese girlfriend, now my wife, had the police knocking on her door on a Sunday morning after some neighbour had grassed about my frequent visits.) To the sexual and racial prejudices has been added a third: economic status. Even if not all white men are rich, they will be assumed to be, and a woman who has travelled and hooked a white guy has automatically raised her status thereby.

I will confess to slightly cold feet the first time I was taken to see my prospective in-laws in Chongqing. I was assured that there would be no problems, but I knew that they were solid conservative Mao-era party stalwarts and I wasn’t so sure. Furthermore, we were met at the airport by my fiancée’s sister, whose small son cowered in terror. Actually, the whole family was extremely kind and welcoming – even the little boy, given a few hours to adjust – and I have never felt a breath of hostility on the grounds of my race or nationality. Later this month they will acquire their second English son-in-law. (The remaining daughter is married to a Canadian. But a Chinese-Canadian isn’t a foreigner at all.)

But I have asked my wife whether she would have been prepared to marry a black man. Emphatic negative. She is not personally prejudiced, and has adjusted happily to multicultural Lancashire – but she would simply not have been able to do it. It is the social conditioning: she would be too fearful of what they would say back in Chongqing. Everyone in China “knows” that all Africans have HIV. And, if a child were to be born, she could never have emulated the self-confidence of Lou Jing’s mother.

The social status of foreigners among the Chinese depends solely on their perceived economic standing. Once I was walking around a market town on the China-Russia border, and noticed that the locals were being a lot less polite than is normally the case. I realised, from some unpleasant expressions being bandied about, that they thought I was Russian – there were plenty of ragged Siberians mooching about. Once I had explained that I was British, attitudes changed noticeably.

So it’s not just racism. But it’s not not racism either. I have posted a few times on Chinese economic activity in Africa. Not that it’s necessarily politically sinister; but the phenomenon worries me. I can foresee a habit arising of expat Chinese entrepreneurs despising and maltreating their African workforce, culminating in a wholesale massacre of Chinese in Africa. Believe me, it could happen.