The pervasiveness of racialized ways of thinking is underlined by Frank Dikötter, who chronicles countless examples, adding:

It would be wrong to assume that these clichés have been gathered… simply by sieving printed material through a filter that retains racial utterances. A dredger would be needed to gather up all the racial clichés, stereotypes and images which abounded in China [as well as the West] between the wars. These clichés were the most salient feature of a racial discourse that was pervasive and highly influential; moreover it was rarely challenged. They were adopted and perpetuated by large sections of the intelligentsia. [772]

While this racism was clearly a product of imperial China ’s worsening predicament, an expression of a crisis of identity and a desire for affirmation and certainty, it was also a function of the cultural racism that had been such a strong feature of the Celestial Kingdom over a period of almost three millennia. The rigour of the racial hierarchies that now became endemic bore a striking resemblance to the cultural hierarchy of the Confucian social order — an illustration of the complex interplay between cultural and racial forms of superiority in Chinese society.

This racialized thinking heavily influenced the nationalists, led by Sun Yat-sen, who overthrew the Qing dynasty in the 1911 Revolution. Sun saw the Chinese as a single race and believed in the inevitable confrontation of the yellow and white races:

Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Because the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution… among the contemporary races that could be called superior, there are only the yellow and white races. China belongs to the yellow races. [773]

Elsewhere he wrote: ‘The greatest force is common blood. The Chinese belong to the yellow race because they come from the bloodstock of the yellow race. The blood of ancestors is transmitted by heredity down through the race, making blood kinship a powerful force.’ [774] Initially, he dismissed the Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchus and others as numerically insignificant: he was a Han nationalist who saw the Chinese exclusively in terms of the Han, and therefore as a nation-race. But after the Revolution he was confronted with the reality of inheriting a Qing China in which, though their numbers might have been small, the ethnic minorities occupied over half the territory of China. If China was defined only in terms of the Han, then the government would be confronted with the prospect of ethnic rebellion and demands for independence — which, in the event, is what happened. In the face of this, Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist government backtracked and redefined China in terms of one race and five nationalities, namely the Han, Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Hui: in other words, China was recognized as a multinational state, though still composed of one race, all sharing the same Chinese origins. Chiang Kai-shek continued with the general lines of this approach, but took a strongly assimilationist line, suppressing the ethnic minorities in the belief that they should be forced to adopt Han customs and practices as speedily as possible. [775]

The 1949 Revolution heralded a major shift in policy. The racist discourse which had been rife since the late nineteenth century was now officially abolished and Han nationalism firmly discouraged. China was described as a unitary multi-ethnic state, although the government, after briefly offering ethnic minorities (described as nationalities) the right of self-determination, rapidly withdrew this offer. [776] Instead they encouraged ethnic minorities to apply for official recognition of their ethnic identity status, with fifty-six eventually being accepted (including the Han). They were extremely diverse in nature: some had a very powerful sense of ethnic identity, combined with separatist aspirations (the Uighurs and Tibetans), some had a strong and continuing sense of ethnic identity but no separatist ambitions (for example, the Yi), [777] some had an extremely weak sense of ethnic identity (such as the Miao, Zhuang and the Manchus), [778] while others, hangovers from a distant past before their more or less total assimilation by the Han, barely existed except as a bureaucratic entry (for example, the Bai and the Tujia). [779] This last category, in fact, encapsulates mainstream Chinese history, with the slow but remorseless process of Hanification. Those ethnic minorities with the strongest identity were granted a measure of autonomy with the establishment of five autonomous regions (known as the Inner Mongolian, Xinjiang Uighur, Guangxi Zhuang, Ningxia Hui and Tibet Autonomous Regions), enjoying limited powers of their own, including the right of the minority to appoint the chief minister; it was never intended, however, as a means by which ethnic minorities could exercise some form of autonomous rule. [780] There are three ethnic groups that, over the last century, have sustained strong separatist movements, namely, the Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs in Xingjiang province. The Tibetans enjoyed considerable autonomy until the Chinese occupation in 1951, while Xinjiang, which means ‘new territory’, saw brief independence as East Turkestan, or Uighurstan, in 1933. Each enjoys the status of an autonomous region, though in practice that autonomy is attenuated. In the Mongolian Autonomous Region there are four times as many Han as Mongols, thereby rendering the latter relatively impotent: indeed, the homelands of China’s old conquerors, the Mongols and the Manchus, are both now overwhelmingly Han. In the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Han are still outnumbered by Tibetans, while in Xingjiang, which is China’s leading producer of oil and gas, they now account for at least 40 per cent and perhaps more than half, compared with 6 per cent in a 1950s census. [781] Each of these regions thus has been subject to the classic and oft-repeated process of Han settlement, which has changed, and is continuing slowly but surely to change, their ethnic balance. Not surprisingly, relations between the Han and the Tibetans, and the Han and Uighurs, who are mainly Muslims and speak a Turkic language, remain suspicious and distant. [782]

By curbing Han chauvinism, eschewing the claim that the Han represent the core of China and granting the ethnic minorities full legal equality, [783] the Communist government has avoided the worst assimilationist excesses of the Nationalist period. Under Mao, the language of race was replaced by that of class. However, the underlying attitudes of the Han have remained little changed. There is an ingrained prejudice amongst great swathes of the Han Chinese, including the highly educated, towards the ethnic minorities. According to Stevan Harrell, a writer on China ’s ethnic minorities, there is ‘an innate, almost visceral Han sense of superiority’. [784] He quotes the example of a Han official who had worked on a government forestry project in the middle of a Yi area and who, despite living there for twenty years, had never tried Yi food on the grounds that it was dirty and would make him sick. Far from the ethnic minorities being seen as equals, they are regarded as inferior because they are less modern. There is an underlying belief that they have to be raised up to the level of the Han, whose culture is considered as a model for the minorities to follow and emulate. [785] Their cultures are recognized at a superficial level, for example in terms of traditional dress and dance, but not treated as the equal of the Han in more substantive matters. In essence, this is not so different from the kind of Confucian ethnically infused cultural hubris that informed the imperial era. Although racialized ways of thought became less explicit after the 1949 Revolution, they never disappeared, remaining an integral, if subterranean, part of the Chinese common sense; and, since the beginning of the reform period, they have been on the rise in both popular culture and official circles. [786]