Foreign devils under the fist?
As tensions rise between Beijingers and expats, Chinese xenophobia comes
into focus
“What are they saying about us?”
a diner is overheard wondering as he looks over at a group of Western tourists.
“Foreigners never say anything good about China,” grumbles one companion.
Outside a lively barbecue
restaurant in central Beijing, their conversation turns to a current propaganda
campaign, invoking the so-called Beijing Spirit – “Patriotism, Innovation,
Virtue, Inclusiveness.” Here, the platitudes are invoked approvingly,
particularly the latter. Beijingers, they agree, are quite friendly.
Lately, there is a growing
undercurrent of wariness directed at foreigners in China, typified by a
government campaign in Beijing that urges people to report foreigners for the
“Three Illegals” illegal entry, overstayed visas, and working without a permit.
Or there’s the CCTV presenter
Yang Rui, who showed support for the crackdown with a bizarre online outburst
in which he cursed mysterious foreign “snake heads,” who dupe innocent local
women into bed, while really acting as secret GPS-wielding spies.
Then came the recent news that a
US tourist, Howard Thomas Mills, had been stabbed to death in Qianmen, near
Tiananmen Square. Weeks earlier, an American was knifed in the same area (in
the buttocks, to be exact) by a man apparently seeking to bring attention to
himself. The incident recalled the shocking 2008 murder of Todd Bachman, an
American tourist, at the 13th century Drum Tower just hours after the opening
Olympic Games ceremony, who was stabbed by a man who appeared distraught and
may have had some unspecified grudge against society. It seems in China, if you
have a grievance it pays to stab a foreigner: people will notice.
Whatever their reasons, these
events challenge perceptions of a city famous for being safe, secure and full
of smiles. “Beijing Welcomes You,” the capital told its Olympics tourists, and
it still does – but for how long?
The immediate cause of the
current frosting in relations seems to be a pair of videos depicting foreigners
behaving badly towards Chinese, which surfaced in May. Although a link between
the footage, which provoked fury and debate, and the ensuing police campaign
has been formally denied, officers in conversation have openly acknowledged
otherwise.
Long-term Beijing resident, and
co-founder of the human resources website Zhaopin.com, Stephen Chiu, agrees
that recent crackdowns on visa regulations are unsettling. They “are constant
reminders that you are a stranger in a strange land and always will be,” he
said. “For many of my long-term foreign friends, it's things like this that
push them over the limit… There have been far too many farewells this summer.”
May’s viral video depicting
locals beating up a sexually aggressive Briton under the title “Foreigner,
We’re Going to Beat You Out of China,” provoked an outpouring of online venom
that startled complacent expats. Even normally friendly Chinese seemed to
reconsider their country’s hospitality to outsiders.
Wiser hands recalled another
long, hot summer – back in 1999, after Nato forces bombed the Chinese Embassy
in Belgrade, killing three. The US said it was a tragic accident; conspiracy
theorists insisted otherwise (later European reports confirmed the building had
indeed been deliberately targeted for rebroadcasting Yugoslav army
transmissions). The officially condoned reaction saw the largest anti-foreign
demonstrations in China since the May Fourth Movement of 1919; Chengdu’s US
Embassy was partially burned and tens of thousands massed in Beijing’s embassy
district; Americans found themselves accosted by strangers and even shunned by
Chinese friends.
Journalist Paul Mooney was
returning home in a taxi when he saw the lines of buses disgorging protesting
students in Chaoyang district. “I walked to the US Embassy and got surrounded
by 20-30 people. I thought, as a journalist, I would be viewed as neutral,”
Mooney recalls. “But people were grabbing and poking me in the chest… a cop had
to come and help me out of the crowd.” A mob formed around several Western
embassies, throwing bottles and tiles. “I even saw a cop throwing rocks… I had
to tell people I was Irish,” says Mooney, who walked home to “cries of “Fuck
you” in English… it was really quite a nasty mood.”
Large-scale protests are
extremely rare in Beijing but the government explicitly allowed the ’99 rallies.
Historian Robert Bickers, an expert on Sino-British relations and author of
“The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire,” says these
incidents receive a disproportionate response, partly because they “create a
safe space in which people can get angry” – especially if that rage is usually
suppressed by the state.
Writing in Danwei, academic David
Moser recalls meeting a Deng Xiaoping impersonator at a banquet on the evening
of the 2001 collision between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet over
Hainan. After being mildly “scolded” by “Deng,” Moser watched the ersatz leader
whip up the crowd with slogans like “We will stand up to American hegemony! We
will never give up!” Fired up by the plane incident, Moser reckoned “this
pseudo-Deng was bringing out very genuine cathartic feelings in this audience,
enabling them to vent their frustration and outrage through a proxy spokesman
who had more symbolic power than the current leadership did.”
The ruling Chinese Communist
Party has taken action for years to boost nationalism. “After 1989, the
government thought China was insufficiently patriotic,” Bickers says. “Since
1991, ‘patriotic education’ in China has seen children learning about the
horrors of foreign imperialism… creating a sense that any criticism of China is
from those who do not wish to see China strong.’
Jiang Zemin proclaimed that
“Forgetting the humiliation of modern Chinese history means betraying your
country.” September 18, which officially marks the Japanese invasion of
Manchuria in 1931, was named National Humiliation Day and popular dictionaries
and atlases of “national humiliation” exist today.
“Add together a 20-year history
of state-sponsored nationalism, growing supposed economic supremacy, [China’s]
slowly developing projections of itself abroad and the suspicions that
engenders, and it easily spills into xenophobia,” Bickers concludes. Chiu
thinks “unsound biases” among Chinese are “indisputable” but reckons “it is
easier to deal with, because people here tell you what they think to your face,
so at least you know.”
While this kind of honesty mostly
involves being told that your nose is unusually large, flash-points can provoke
unexpected anger. A Nigerian in Guangzhou who died while in police custody
sparked protests from the local African community. Getting mad at the police is
common-enough among China’s Han population, but the Africans taking it up did
not go down well with local internet users, some of whom used racial epithets
to condemn both the protest and the presence of Nigerian immigrants in the
city.
Of course the vitriol is often
amplified on the Web. David Wertime, an editor at Tea Leaf Nation, a website
that analyses Chinese social media, said that while online “people proffer
memorable or outlandish comments in order to be heard, or noticed, above the fray.”
Still, virtually every foreigner has a personal yarn that demonstrates
occasional, undisguised racial animosity. The most common involve a minor
traffic incident that quickly escalates, authorities are called and the
foreigner ends up having to agree to some kind of financial compensation.
I recently went to a police
station in central Beijing after some friends got into a scrape involving a
woman and a drunken foreigner. “I want 10,000 yuan. Why not? I'm not cheap,”
seethed “Beibei,” who was wearing an obviously pricey outfit of a green shirt
and hotpants. “I'm worth it.”
Earlier in the night, Beibei had
been accosted by an Australian in a nightclub, which led to the scuffle. Two
hours later, feeling wronged, Beibei was demanding revenge: in cash. And she
had the bruises to prove it – although they were from an earlier fight that
week with her American banker fiancé. Why not just use the courts, I asked. “My
family knows all of them,” she replied. “I'd love to.”
Her friends rolled their
eyeballs. She didn't need the money, they confided, but that much was obvious.
On Sunday morning, five hours after the incident, Beibei and the Australian had
reached an agreement: he would apologize and pay her 5,000 yuan she would drop
all further claims. It wasn't cheap – but it was certainly worth it.
Whether it’s a shakedown over a
nightclub dispute or a business deal that suddenly leaves the foreign partner
high and dry (or worse, facing corruption charges), stories like these show a
legal framework in which being non-Chinese is a distinct disadvantage. You can
usually chalk this up to the typical tensions that expats might face in any
foreign culture ‑ unless there’s been an incident in the news.
When anti-foreign feelings
spikes, however, as it has the last two months, a question arises. “Are we
seeing people's true sentiments?” wonders Wertime. “It's the question, broadly,
of whether online speech, at a given time, is representative.”
The same question could also be
applied to “foreignness.” News of the stabbing in Qianmen – as well as most
incidents involving non-Chinese – was initially reported as having happened to
a “foreigner,” a term that sounds provocative to Western ears. In fact, the
word is “quite another matter in China,” says Bickers, where it can be used
loosely to describe rivals from the next town, someone from another province or
those who are considered to have lost their Chinese identity.
This is what happened to
“collaborators” or “deracinated” Christian Chinese during the ill-fated 1896
Boxer Rebellion. Then, the Qing court offered quasi-support to the
superstitious young anti-foreign fighters. This is “why people killed each
other with such glee” during the period, Bickers explains.
Today, the Boxers are considered
“patriotic fighters” in the official media, where, lately, even the most
innocuous anti-foreigner story – such as a New Zealander pushing a child into a
swimming pool – gets coverage. But is this juicy coverage of the small and
large misdeeds of outsiders part of a larger campaign? “It’s possible,” says
Wertime, noting that one notorious English-language newspaper editor has
directed his reporters to actively seek out stories about expats misbehaving.
“When videos or images go viral,
it puts pressure on mainstream sources to treat them as mainstream news,”
argues Wertime. “This can have a democratising effect and increase transparency
and media oversight; it can also lead to the explosion of stories that are
probably not all that inherently consequential,” but which may have “real-world
effects.”
Journalist Mooney is disturbed by
what’s going on. Having lived in China since 1994, the award-winning reporter
is pessimistic about future attitudes towards foreigners. “You’d think there’d
be more integration but I don’t see that,” he said. “Every week, I meet Western
NGOs or foreigners who are making contributions to China, helping to improve
education, health care, and other areas. But we rarely see any of this reported
in the Chinese media.
“Maybe if more of these things
were reported, then Chinese would not have the paranoid feeling that the West
is out to hold China back.”
Robert Foyle Hunwick
Business & Investment Opportunities
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