Far from racism being a Western invention, it has ancient roots in both China and Japan. There is written evidence cited by Jared Diamond going back to at least 1000 BC which shows that the Chinese regarded themselves as superior to the non-Chinese and that the northern Chinese saw those in southern China as barbarians. [758] In ancient China, the ruling elite measured groups by a cultural yardstick according to which those who did not follow Chinese ways were considered to be barbarians, though the latter could subsequently be reclassified depending on the degree of their cultural assimilation. [759] Within the Middle Kingdom, the barbarians were typically divided into two categories: ‘raw barbarians’ ( shengfan), who were seen as savage and resistant, and ‘cooked barbarians’ ( shufan), who were regarded as tame and submissive. [760] Cooked barbarians were deemed as on the cusp of being civilized, raw barbarians as being beyond assimilation. Those living outside the borders of China were regarded as either raw barbarians or, worse, as akin to animals. The distinction between man and animal in Chinese folklore was blurred, with alien groups living outside China frequently regarded as savages hovering on the edge of bestiality and often described by the use of animal radicals (radicals are a key component of written Chinese characters), thereby identifying different non-Chinese peoples with various kinds of animals. [761] It is clear from this that the Chinese sense of superiority was based on a combination of culture and race — the two inseparably linked, the relative importance of each varying according to time and circumstance. [762] Frank Dikötter, who has written the major study in the English language on Chinese racism, argues:

On the one hand, a claim to cultural universalism led the elite to assert that the barbarian could be ‘sinicized’, or transformed by the beneficial influence of culture and climate. On the other hand, when the Chinese sense of cultural superiority was threatened, the elite appealed to categorical differences in nature to expel the barbarian and seal the country off from the perverting influences of the outside world. [763]

For the most part, however, the expansive rather than the defensive view prevailed.

Skin colour assumed an early significance. From the most ancient times, the Chinese chose to call themselves white, with a light complexion highly valued and likened to white jade. [764] By the beginning of the twelfth century, the elite attached a heightened meaning to being white, with colour consciousness amongst the elite sensitized by the maritime contacts established during the Southern Song dynasty (AD 1127–1279). During this period even the newly popular image of Buddha was converted from a ‘swart half-naked Indian to a more decently clad divinity with a properly light complexion’, rather as Jesus was whitened in the Western Christian tradition. [765] Of course, not all Chinese had light complexions. In particular, those who laboured long and hard in the fields under a fierce sun were weather-beaten and dark-skinned. The symbolic distance, and distinction, as represented by class, and made visible in skin colour, was thus projected by the Chinese elite onto the outside world as they came into growing contact with other peoples and races. White was regarded as the centre of the civilized world, embodied by the Middle Kingdom, while black represented the negative pole of humanity, symbolized by the remotest parts of the known world. As the Chinese became familiar with more distant lands during the Ming dynasty, notably through Zheng He’s voyages to Africa and South-East Asia in the fifteenth century, so their perception of skin colour and physical difference became more variegated, with Africans and aboriginals invariably placed at the bottom, and Malays and Viets just above them. [766]

During the Qing dynasty, racial categories became a central and explicit factor in the characterization of the barbarian. This represented an important shift from the cultural norms that had previously tended to prevail, even though the racial element had always been significant. [767] New racial taxono mies and classifications were elaborated, stimulated by the bloody wars of expansion that the Chinese fought in the west, which had brought them into contact with peoples very different from themselves who, throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century, they struggled to subdue, with only partial success. [768] But it was the increasing presence and power of Europeans following the Opium Wars, and the growing crisis of the Qing dynasty that this provoked, which was to prove the rudest shock of all and produce the biggest change in Chinese attitudes, not just amongst the elite, but also at a popular level. From the 1890s, the cultural racism of ancient China was articulated into a new and popular racist philosophy by a rising class of academics and writers, who were influenced by the racial theories and social Darwinism prevalent in the West at the time. Racism now became an integral part of popular thinking, articulated in a whole range of widely circulated publications, especially amongst the urban population of the treaty ports. The new racial discourse covered every aspect of physical difference, from skin colour and hair to height, size of nose, eye colour, size of feet and body odour: no racial stone was left unturned, each physical detail explored for its alleged wider mental and cultural significance. Barbarians had routinely been described as ‘devils’ since earlier in the century, but now they were distinguished according to their skin colour, with Caucasians referred to as ‘white devils’ ( baigui) and those of darker skin as ‘black devils’ ( heigui), terms that are still in common usage. Not all devils were regarded in the same way, however: white devils were perceived as ‘rulers’ and black devils as ‘slaves’. [769] The literature of the treaty ports was filled with contempt for those from Africa and India.

During this period, which coincided with the growing popularity of the term ‘Han’, the Chinese began to describe themselves as yellow rather than white, in an effort to distinguish themselves from Europeans on the one hand and those of darker skin on the other. As China sought to resist the growing European threat, the world was seen in social-Darwinist terms of the survival of the fittest, with those of darker skin perceived as having failed and thereby being condemned to inevitable oblivion, and the yellow races, headed by the Chinese, being engaged in a desperate battle for survival against the dominant white race. [770] Yellow enjoyed a strongly positive connotation in the Chinese world, given its association with the Yellow River and the Yellow Emperor. In 1925 the poet Wen Yudio, who spent some time in the United States, wrote a poem entitled ‘I am Chinese’, which captures the swelling sense of racially inspired Chinese nationalism, heightened in this case by his experiences in the West: