Nationalism/Racism in the East Asia
China: Late Qing/Early revolutionary movement – racialized discourse strongly influenced by the Social Darwinism and racism of Europe. Liang Qichao (b. Feb. 23, 1873, Hsinhui, Kwangtung province, China - d. Jan. 19, 1929, Peking) – “superior” and “inferior” races. Idea of China as “Yellow” “race” (also linked to the ancient descent myth of the Yellow Emperor), and strong believe in the superiority of the “White” and “Yellow” “race”, and inferiority of the “reds and blacks”.
“Chinese” are, for the anti-Qing revolutionaries, a different “race” from the “Manchurians” – thus great “racial” hatred of the “Tartar scums”. Typical: Zou Rong (鄒勇) and his anti-Manchu racist Social-Darwinist treatise, stressing the “competition for survival” and “extermination of the enemy race”, along with the “struggle against the white race for leadership” and some incipient (USA-inspired) democratic principles : Zou Rong , The Revolutionary Army. Born in Sichuan province in West China in 1885 to a merchant family, Zou received a classical education but refused to sit for the civil service exams, preferring instead to work as a seal carver while pursuing his idiosyncratic classical studies. He gradually became interested in Western ideas, and went to Japan to study in 1901, where he was exposed to radical revolutionary and anti-Manchu ideas. This tract, published in Shanghai in 1903, is his most important work and one of the most important radial tracts published in China before the 1911 Revolution. Zou was arrested for publishing the tract, and died in prison in 1905.
“1.Introduction
Sweep away millennia of despotism in all its forms, throw off millennia of
slavishness, annihilate the five million and more of the furry and horned
Manchu race, cleanse ourselves of 260 years of harsh and unremitting pain, so
that the soil of the Chinese subcontinent is made immaculate, and the
descendants of the Yellow Emperor will all become Washingtons. Then they
will return from the dead to life again, they will emerge from the Eighteen
Levels of Hell and rise to the Thirty Three mansions of Heaven, in all their
magnificence and richness to arrive at their zenith, the unique and
incomparable of goals - revolution. How sublime is revolution, how majestic!
I
follow thereupon the line of the Great Wall, scale the Kunlun Mountains, travel
the length of the Yangzi, follow to its source the Yellow River. I plant the
standard of independence, ring the bell of freedom. My voice re-echos from
heaven to earth, I crack my temples and split my throat in crying out to my
fellow-countrymen: revolution is inevitable for China today. It is inevitable
if the Manchu yoke is to be thrown off; it is inevitable if China is to be
independent; it is inevitable is to take its place as a powerful nation on the
globe; it is inevitable if China is to survive for long in the new world of the
20th century; it is inevitable if China is to be a great country in the world
and play the leading role. Stand up for Revolution! Fellow-countrymen, are
there any of you whether old or in middle years, in your prime of life or
young, be it man or woman, who is talking of revolution or working actively for
revolution? Fellow countrymen, assist each other and live for each other in
revolution. I here cry at the top of my voice to spread the principles of
revolution throughout the land.
Revolution is the universal principle of evolution. Revolution is the
essence of the struggle for survival of destruction in a time of transition.
Revolution submits to heaven and responds to men's needs. Revolution rejects
what is corrupt and keeps the good. Revolution is the advance from barbarism to
civilization. Revolution turns slaves into masters
4. For revolution, race must be clearly distinguished
The
yellow and white races which are to be found on the globe have been endowed by
nature with intelligence and fighting capacity. They are fundamentally
incapable of giving way to each other. Hence, glowering and poised for a fight, they have engaged in battle in the world of
evolution, the great arena where strength and intelligence have clashed since
earliest times, the great theater where for so long natural selection and
progress have been played out.
When men love their race, solidarity will arise internally, and what is outside
will be repelled. Hence, to begin with, clans were united and other clans
repelled; next tribes were united and other tribes repelled, finally the people
of a country became united and people of other countries were repelled. This is
the general principle of the races of the world, and also a major reason why
races engender history. I will demonstrate to my countrymen, to allow them to
form their own impression, how our yellow race, the yellow race of which the
Han race is a part (and I refer you to the history of China) is able to unite
itself and repel intruders.
6. The purport of Revolutionary Independence
(…)
I do not begrudge repeating over and over again that internally we are slaves
of the Manchus and suffering from their tyranny, externally we are being
harassed by the Powers, and we are doubly enslaved. The reason why our
sacred Han race, descendants of the Yellow emperor, should support
revolutionary independence, arises precisely from the question of whether our
race will go under and be exterminated.
With
the rapid advances in science, the superstitious doctrine whereby a man becomes
an emperor through the gift of heaven and the spirits can be destroyed. With
the rapid advance in world civilization, the system whereby the rule of a
single man in a despotic form of government can cover the whole country may be
overthrown. With the rapid advances in wisdom, everybody will be able to enjoy
his or her natural rights. If today our great Han people are to throw off the
bonds of the Manchus, to retrieve all the rights we have lost, and is to take
its place among world powers (for we wish to preserve in its entirety our
natural equality of status and independence), we cannot avoid carrying out a
revolution and safeguarding our right to independence. Alas, I am young,
ignorant, and brutish, not equal to speaking for the fundamental principles of
revolutionary independence. Wary and fearful, I have carefully modeled (my
proposals) on the principles of American revolutionary independence. I have
summarized them under a number of headings, and with the utmost deference I
offer to my most revered and beloved 400 million countrymen of the great Han
people to prepare them for the path they are to follow.
-China is the China of the Chinese. Countrymen, you must all recognize the
China of the Chinese of the Han race.
-Not to allow any alien race to lay their hands on the least rights of our China
-To expel the Manchus settled in China or kill them in order to revenge ourselves
-In each area and province a deputy to a general assemble is to be elected by vote in public elections. From these deputies, one is to be elected by vote to serve as provisional president to represent the whole country A vice-president is also to be elected, and all chou and hsien are to elect a number of deputies.
-The whole population, whether male or female, are citizens.
-All men have the duty to serve as citizen soldiers
-Everybody in the country, whether male or female, is equal. There is no distinction between upper and lower, base and noble.
-A
free and independent state has full rights and equality with other great states
in the matter of war and peace, treaties and trade, and all other matters
pertaining to an independent state.
-The law of the constitution shall be modeled on the American constitutional
law, having regard for Chinese conditions.
-The
law of self-government shall be modeled on the American law of self-government.
-Likewise in all matters of a national character, negotiations, the
establishment of official departments and the determination of the official
duties in the state American practice will remain a criterion.”
Other
important anti-Manchu racist and Social-Darwinist theoretician – Zhang Binglin
(章炳麟; 1868-1936), first stressed the ”yellow-white
survival struggle”, and then shifted to the ”struggle against the inferior
Manchu race with alien surnames”, using traditional ancestral worship as a tool
for nationalist indoctrination. Dispute with Kang Youwei, who was willing to
accept Manchus as Confucians (traditional culturalism). Still, he was against
the total slaughter of the Manchus (which many revolutionaries approved
of).
Republican Period: growth of the print capitalism, and shift of
the cultural discourse from the cosmology and ethics to medicine/biology:
“Chinese-ness” now is thought to be something corporeal, steeped in the cranial
capacity and blood qualities. Superiority even to the “whites” is claimed, not
even to speak about the “blacks” (“recognizable by the smell”, “no capacity to
shine in history”) and “southerners” (“Malays” – “the descendants of
orang-utan”). Wen Yiduo (聞一多;
1899-1946): the poem ”I am Chinese”: ”I am the divine blood of the Yellow
Emperor! I came from the highest place in the world (…) From us have flowed
exquisite customs. Mighty nation! Mighty nation!”. Popularity of the eugenics:
“the choice of the unfit partner harms the future of our race”
Sun Yat-sen (1844-1925), and his
Fundamentals of National Reconstruction (1923):
“Principle of Nationalism:
Revelations of Chinese history prove that the Chinese as a people are independent in spirit and in conduct. Coerced into touch with other people, they could at times live in peace with them by maintaining friendly relations and at others assimilate them as the result of propinquity. During the periods when their political and military prowess declined, they could not escape for the time from the fate of' a conquered nation, but they could eventually vigorously reassert themselves. Thus the Mongol rule of China (1260-1333 CE), lasting nearly a hundred years was finally overthrown by Tai Tse of the Ming dynasty and his loyal follower. So in our own time was the Manchu yoke thrown off by the Chinese. Nationalistic ideas in China did not come from a foreign source; they were inherited from our remote forefathers. Upon this legacy is based my principle of nationalism, and where necessary, I have developed it and amplified and improved upon it. No vengeance has been inflicted on the Manchus and we have endeavored to live side by side with them on an equal footing. This is our nationalistic policy toward races within our national boundaries. Externally, we should strive to maintain independence in the family of nations, and to spread our indigenous civilization as well as to enrich it by absorbing what is best in world civilization, with the hope that we may forge ahead with other nations towards the goal of ideal brotherhood.”
Mao Tse-Tung, “On New Democracy” (1940):
New-democratic culture is national. It opposes imperialist oppression and upholds the dignity and independence of the Chinese nation. It belongs to our own nation and bears our own national characteristics. It links up with the socialist and new-democratic cultures of all other nations and they are related in such a way that they can absorb something from each other and help each other to develop, together forming a new world culture; but as a revolutionary national culture it can never link up with any reactionary imperialist culture of whatever nation. To nourish her own culture China needs to assimilate a good deal of foreign progressive culture, not enough of which was done in the past. We should assimilate whatever is useful to us today not only from the present-day socialist and new-democratic cultures but also from the earlier cultures of other nations, for example, from the culture of the various capitalist countries in the Age of Enlightenment. However, we should not gulp any of this foreign material down uncritically, but must treat it as we do our food -- first chewing it, then submitting it to the working of the stomach and intestines with their juices and secretions, and separating it into nutriment to be absorbed and waste matter to be discarded -- before it can nourish us. To advocate "wholesale westernization" is wrong. China has suffered a great deal from the mechanical absorption of foreign material. Similarly, in applying Marxism to China, Chinese communists must fully and properly integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution, or in other words, the universal truth of Marxism must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula. Marxists who make a fetish of formulas are simply playing the fool with Marxism and the Chinese revolution, and there is no room for them in the ranks of the Chinese revolution. Chinese culture should have its own form, its own national form. National in form and new-democratic in content -- such is our new culture today.”