The Discourse of Race in Modern China by Dikotter

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Issues of race and national identity, nationalism, racism, and sexism are the most burnings in the modern world. People seem to understand nowadays that all races, nations, and ethnic groups are created equal and, consequently, possess equal rights as members of human society, but racist and nationalist conflicts often occur. It is also widely accepted to call racism the phenomenon that is typical for the white race in respect of all other non-white races.

In other words, people and scientists tend to consider racism only a Euro-American phenomenon, but nowadays more and more scholarly works appear that prove the presence of the same issue in the countries of other continents, especially Asia. One of the prominent scientists in the field of race and national identity in Asian countries is Frank Dikotter whose work about the concept of race in modern China is the subject of the current essay. Here, we are going to examine the main arguments given by Dikotter to demonstrate the significance of race and nationality issues in modern China and its historical perspective.

The author of the book under consideration is famous in the scientific world as a specialist in the field of the history and modern affairs that take place in China. Frank Dikotter published a lot of books that touch upon the different aspects of Chinese culture, history, and philosophy, such as “Opium in the History of China”, “Material Culture in the Modern China” and some others. But the special place in the work by Dikotter is taken by the topic of race and identity in the Chinese outlook of the world. The book “The Discourse of Race in Modern China” is one of Dikotter’s works on the topic, and it represents a huge amount of data about the concept of race in the Chinese culture of the late 19^th – early 20^th centuries and in the present period.

The work under consideration is a good piece of work in the field that has been studied not enough in recent years, that is why it acquires additional importance and weight. The main topics that are discussed in the book by Dikotter are the following: race in the Chinese culture, perception of race, political and social actions taken in China to create the clear purely Chinese race, etc. Dikotter also explores the topics of exclusion based upon the racial belonging, marginalization of certain ethnic groups in the Chinese society, and strengthening of the nation as the cultural and the political idea that dominated in China in the early 20^th century and can be still seen in the modern country.

To make his work more precise and scientific, Dikotter makes use of specialized terms such as type, species, seed, class, nation, and many others. All this makes the book by Frank Dikotter a rather valuable source in studying the issues of race in Asia on the whole and in China in particular (Dikotter, pp. 3 – 5).

Dikotter starts with the argument that races do not exist in real science, and thus the division of people into the ethnic group has no adequate scientific basis (Dikotter, p. viii). Thus, every division based upon appearance, the color of skin, the complexion of the shape of the eyes seems unnatural and absurd to Dikotter. Nevertheless, the author himself admits that the Chinese culture operates with the terms of race, nation, ethnicity, and others, and here the main controversy of the book can be seen. The existence of the main concept of the book is denied, but at the same time, it is studied as one of the basic elements of the Chinese culture in the late Qing period and further on (Dikotter, pp. 18 – 21).

Moreover, Dikotter delves into the issue of racism is not only the European anti-black phenomenon. They claim that at the beginning of the 20^th century the Chinese politics was dominated by racism against black slaves of African origin and non-white Europeans, was rather controversial in the political and historical sense, but Dikotter managed to prove it by using a lot of primary sources and made it one of the basic ideas of his book. To be more precise in his statements, Dikotter also implements the paradigm that was considered to be a usual thing in the Chinese society with its ideology of Cultural Othering. This paradigm presents the relations between the pure Chinese nation and the Barbarian ethnic groups related to China inside of the country or at its borders:

Inside Barbarian: Culturally Othered:: Outside Barbarian: Racially Othered

This relation represents the point of view that can be called the classical to some extent, as far as it resembles the attitude of the Ancient Greeks towards other nations, which is considered to be classical. According to Chinese idea, as far as the Greek one, people of other races who do not speak Chinese, or Greek in respect of the Greek view, and can not adjust to the culture are considered to be barbarian people irrespective of the level of development of the nation or ethnic group they belong to (Dikotter, pp. 9 – 10). On the whole, the term race discourse, which was introduced by Dikotter in this book, was not practically developed in the history of China as much as in Europe or the USA (Dikotter, pp. 9 – 10).

To conclude the essay, the book by Frank Dikotter is a rather valuable source of knowledge about the issue of race in Chinese culture and politics. There are certain advantages of this book, like precise information and use of primary sources, but also a considerable drawback, like the information about the absence in China of the cruel racism that was present in Europe while ignoring the points of Tibetan Independence and autonomy of Taiwan.

References

Dikotter, Frank, 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China, Hurst and Company, London.

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The Discourse of Race in Modern China by Dikotter

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