Please note: this is in traditional fisking format. Stan Grant in normal font, Gyro’s responses in italics.
Grant: To understand China you need to understand whiteness, yet it’s missing from the conversation
In some ways, Xi’s China may represent the end of whiteness. Except that the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness.
It is not possible to understand China without understanding race and racism. Specifically, without understanding whiteness.
Gyro: Grant does not define his racist term ‘whiteness’ here. He’s actually being racist from first principles of logic as he’s assigning some undefined adverse value to all people possessing an immutable characteristic they were born with. In this case, skin tone. Grants therefore fails the Martin Luther King Test in the first sentence. Hilarious, as Grant’s starting at rock bottom and immediately calls in the mining equipment.
Yet far too often the conversation around the rise of this new superpower is in predominantly geo-political terms, about authoritarianism versus democracy, about human rights — or whether we will go to war.
But race sits at the heart of it all.
Remarkable claim. Let’s see Grant’s remarkable proof of his definitionally racist thesis.
We were reminded this week when China described the AUKUS agreement — between Australia, the UK and the US – as a race-based military bloc of white countries.
So Grant’s saying that the entire multicultural push of the last 2 generations in Australia has utterly failed and that all multiracial Australians, Americans and Britons are actually … white? Where’s the proof?
China’s Ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, says that’s how it appears to people in other countries. What he means are non-white countries.
But that’s not what he actually said.
A history of humiliation
The Chinese Communist Party has a deep racial consciousness.
Utterly wrong. The CCP is deeply racist, as China has been for millennia. Only been obvious for 3,000 years, and Stan….. totally missed it. Mainland Chinese culture is that of the Celestial Kingdom, half-way between Earth and Heaven. Within this perceptual milieu no-one but a Chinese is human at all. The CCP has co-opted this as all Chinese Imperial elites do, there is absolutely nothing new about Han ethnic racial supremacy. Grant is ignorant of this.
It is there in the reminder to its people never to forget the hundred years of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers — of white powers.
Qing China was ‘humiliated’ by:
- The Civil Wars of the first half of the 17th century.
- The White Lotus Society Revolt of 1796-1804.
- The muslim revolt of 1798
- The Miao rebellions of 1798 onwards.
- The immense and terrible civil war we call the Taiping Rebellion.
So just how did the the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace (Chinese Taipings), Japan (ethnically Japanese), Imperial Russia (multiethnic), British Empire (multiethnic), German Empire (German & Prussian), French Empire (multiethnic), Vietnamese Empire (Vietnamese). Grant’s statement is that everyone who is not European is actually European including the Chinese. This is laughable. Just how did the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) stabilising relations with Tsarist Russia humiliate the Qing?
Grant’s astounding ignorance might be improved if he’s capable of reading, which is doubtful as he a propagandist for the ABC. He might start with Spence’s 1996 ‘God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xuiquan’, and Wilson’s 1868 ‘The Ever Victorious Army: A history of the Chinese Campaign under Lt-COL Gordon and of the Suppression of the Tai-Ping Rebellion’.
Yes, that humiliation was at the hands of the Japanese, too, but the Japanese themselves cannot be separated from the project of whiteness.
Grant: It’s all whitey’s fault and if the Japanese did it then the Japanese are white. No, no they are not, unless ‘white’ means ‘human’. Grant is literally an idiot to say this.
In his book, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, scholar Michael Keevak traces how the Chinese stopped being white.
He says in early interaction between Europeans and Asians, the Chinese were actually described as white.
No reference, interesting! And what did that term mean in that specific historical context? Grant is an ignarus homo indeed.
This was before racialised thinking was popularised in the 18th century.
It was then that scientists started to divide the world up into groupings of colour. Colour denoted civilisation. At the top were white Europeans, at the bottom black people and all others, graded on a sliding scale.
Keevak says Asians — including the Chinese and Japanese — began to “darken”.
They lost their whiteness, he says, “when it became clear they would remain unwilling to participate in European systems of trade, religion and international relations”.
Grant does provide a reference, so there is no need to think that he has not lifted this out of context. He’s also entirely ignoring the millennia-deep Chinese ethnic dislike of all foreigners based on skin colour.
The fall of the Qing Empire in the 19th century hastened a racial reckoning for the Chinese.
This was a dark night of the soul; it would tip China into a century of upheaval, revolution, and violence on an industrial scale.
And what was the fundamental driver of this? It was not the western powers at all, it was the revolt of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, that event called the Taiping Rebellion 1851-64: 20-30 million people died! It is most likely that Grant ignorantibus has never heard of it.
And it also brought China face-to-face with white power. The Qing Empire was humbled by Britain, a tiny island that now occupied Chinese territory.
Utter twaddle and totally wrong historically.
The distant voice whispering in Xi’s ear
Nineteenth-century writer Yan Fu was influenced by European liberal thinkers, such as John Stuart Mill and the father of economics Adam Smith, and saw China’s future emulating Western liberalism.
Why does this activist nitwit entirely ignore the greatest and bloodiest civil war in human history? The British SUPPORTED THE QING and helped them to defeat the Taiping!
Perhaps the most influential thinker of all, Liang Qichao, also looked to the Western idea of history as a march of progress — and progress meant modernisation.
Liang is known as the godfather of Chinese nationalism whose acolytes included the Chinese Communist revolutionary leader, Mao Zedong.
What about Sun Yat Sen? Yuan Shi Kai?
He coined the phrase “the sick man of Asia” to refer to China’s fallen state. He said they were awoken from a thousand-year-long dream.
As Liang embraced Western ideas, he also advocated for the unity of the “yellow race”. He used the term “minzu” to describe the people of the nation.
So Liang was a Chinese Nationalist within a cultural milieu of Han ethnic supremacism, and Grant ignorantibus believes this makes him a white European?
Seeds of resentment and ‘yellow peril’
World War I was another reckoning. At the Paris peace talks, China felt abandoned. German-occupied Chinese territory was not handed back to China but to Japan.
And the Japanese were not white Europeans, they were… Japanese.
The seeds of resentment were sown.
Actually they had been sown in 1895 after the Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. It is doubtful that Grant ignorantibus has ever heard of this war.
Historian Jerome Ch’en writes: “From 1842 to 1942, China had been treated by the West with distrust, ridicule, and disdain…”
Wrong. But mostly by Japan, and by the Chinese themselves in the Taiping Rebellion.
Liang Qichao — who had looked to the West — now turned sour. He was an official observer in Paris, but returned believing that following the West would lead China to catastrophe.
At the same time, the world was warning of the “yellow peril”.
Australia had its own whites-only policy, excluding non-white races from the country.
This was, of course, an ALP and progressive leftist policy, something Grant ignorantibus strangely refuses to mention.
Racial politics was also shaping China’s great foe, Japan.
The Japanese derided the Chinese as “yellow”. As Michael Keevak points out, Japan saw itself on par with Western powers.
Its imperialism mirrored the imperialism of white colonisers.
This is a lie, Japanese Imperialism mirrored Japanese Imperialism – ask the Koreans about a certain Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and the Japanese invasion of Korea 1592-1598. This fact alone demolishes Grants pitiful excuse for an argument.
Indeed, China was not colonised. It was never under colonial control. It did lose parts of its Empire to other Empires. Just as the French Empire was defeated and lost parts of its metropole to the German Empire in 1870. Just as China conquered Tibet and still holds parts of India. Does that make China ‘white’ too?
Under Grants idiotic illogic, everyone seems to be white. If everyone is white, no-one is.
In the West, the Japanese were still seen as “coloured people”, Keevak says, but “maybe not as yellow as the Chinese”.
For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal.
So according to Grant ignorantibus the other 4,000 years of Imperialism do not count – or were they too all ‘white’? Grant is genuinely pathetic here, the poor ignoramus has to ignore all the other Empires from the Akkadian Empire Sargon created c 2,334-2,279 BC through the Maya and Aztecs to the great Songhai Empire the sub-saharan Africans created in the 14th century to the vile Ottoman Empire which survived into the 20th century. Grant ignorantibus merely proves that he’s an pitifully clownish progressive clod, the depth of his intellect makes a carpark puddle look like the Challenger Deep..
China, like so many other non-white nations, has felt the sting of white imperialism.
China was and remains – an EMPIRE. Go ask a Tibetan, Inner Mongolian, Hakka, Uighar, etc etc etc. So under this clown’s thesis, the Chinese must be white!
