One cannot see clearly when one pulls at the corners of one’s eyes.
I know. As a child and as an adult, I’ve seen many people pull their eyes back and call me “slant-eye.” As evidenced by recent events, such blurry vision is not absent from international relations, even the Olympics.
The Spanish basketball teams-both men and women-pulled their eyes back in a racist promotional photo they posed for prior to the Beijing Olympics. It was an obvious taunt aimed at the Chinese Olympians, or perhaps at Chinese in general. Such commentaries often lack nuance.
If one based one’s understanding of China on media coverage, one might be confused by the Spanish teams’ schoolyard tactics. After all, China is supposed to be the next great threat to everything. How can Spain be so foolhardy as to taunt, using H. Ross Perot’s term, the Great Sucking Sound of the world economy?
During these Olympics, the specter of “Asiatic hordes” was invoked during the opening ceremonies, when American commentators intimated that 2008 Chinese men banging on traditional drums was “intimidating.”
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With each pronouncement, China seems more and more like Cold War Russia…even as Russia seems more and more like Cold War Russia.
Of course, it is largely about race.
When China kept a downed U.S. spy plane for days before returning it to the United States, right-wing radio called for boycotting Chinese American restaurants, some even suggesting that internment of Chinese Americans might be advisable.
In Russia’s current war, it has invaded Georgia, killed thousands of people, and seized U.S. Army Humvees. Yet, no media here talk about boycotting Russian American businesses or throwing Russian Americans in internment camps.
Hanging over China’s Bird’s Nest stadium is the shadow of a burgeoning economic superpower. Some Americans believe that China is the main cause of U.S. unemployment. According to this logic, though, America is held hostage by China, who owns a substantial portion of America’s foreign debt.
China might end up owning America.
Meanwhile, the actual Chinese people are so powerless that over a half a million Chinese die each year as a result of pollution. This pollution, interestingly, is largely caused by the dense clusters of American and Western manufacturing plants in China pumping poisons into the air and water.
In this sense, the Chinese are just slaves to a new Communist Capitalism organized and enforced by a ruthless Chinese government.
Rise up, Chinese people! Rise up and fight this government that sends America poisoned toothpaste and wires to a genocidal Sudanese government in billions of dollars of oil money. Rise up! But don’t ask for a raise because that would increase the price of flat-screen TVs.
The friends of American big business want to exploit cheap Chinese labor, while rallying the American people against those job-stealing Chinese workers.
But the racial animosity drummed up by economic populists will pale in comparison to the paranoia kicked up if the next U.S. president decides to make China a military threat. President Bush dressed up China as the great enemy in 2001 before the terror attacks of September 11, and the desire to invade Iraq necessitated changing his tone toward the Middle Kingdom.
John McCain has for decades salivated over the possibilities of new wars. North Korea, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, Syria, Russia, Nicaragua and other nations have all been on John McCain’s “hit list” of rogue states. McCain called for starting wars with North Korea, Iraq and Libya as early as 1999. In the 1990s, McCain wanted to deploy U.S. military forces to Kosovo and off the coast of North Korea. Today, he taunts the Iranians by singing “bomb, bomb Iran” and joking that exported U.S. cigarettes might be used to kill the Iranians.
What happens if McCain sets his bellicose eyes on China?
Americans seem to be naturally inclined to fear China. In the 1950s, the likes of red-baiter Joe McCarthy caused Chinese Americans to turn each other in for being “Communists.” In the 1980s, Chinese Detroiter Vincent Chin was killed by two white men angry over Japan’s economic rise.
Today, some see “the Chinese” with capital letters. They are a foreboding monolith ready to overwhelm the West. Nevertheless, the Chinese are also targets for racist taunts-to be demeaned shamelessly in such varied arenas as the Olympics to Rolling Stone magazine.
Who are the Chinese? The Chinese are a billion people, each one different. They are complex and contradictory. But we cannot underestimate the degree to which politicians and the media might simplify “the Chinese” to serve corporate capitalism and populist political campaigns. Our nation’s vision is blurred when its eyes are pulled back.
Irwin Tang is the author of Gook: John McCain’s Racism and Why It Matters and the new history Asian Texans: Our Histories and Our Lives.
“In Russia’s current war, it has invaded Georgia, killed thousands of people, and seized U.S. Army Humvees.”
Please cite the source for this statement. I believe the only number of casualties to reach into the thousands was in S. Ossetias capital and that was caused by the Georgians.
I think people in general just fears the unknown. If Chinese people continue to be secretive and closed, people tend to fear for the worst. Every Chinese have the obligation to open up and be friendly and spread the truth about being Chinese. Being in America, we know so much about Westerners, the kind, the cruel, and the ugly. The people in China, thinks that Americans are warmongers. From an outside perspective and from recent events, we can’t blame them. However, the Chinese people always seems to have a good feeling about American people who travel to China. Once communications begin, the fear will subside.
“In Russia’s current war, it has invaded Georgia, killed thousands of people, and seized U.S. Army Humvees.”
You should check your information and sources: who attacked and who responded to that attack.
Folks:
Both “Honest Reader” and Dan are correct about Georgia attacking South Ossetia first, and, probably, about the casualty numbers as well.
But, aside from the fact that 99% of the MSM are trumpeting the identical misinfo about who “started” the Caucasuss” inferno, minor now compared to Iraq and Afghanistan, Irwin Tang’s piece here is almost totally on the mark in re its central subject: American beliefs and American attitudes towards the Mainland.
The Rush Limbaughs and the Bill O’Reillys and the Ann Coulters and the Lou Dobbses would all be in full-throated “get-a-rope” cry mode at the drop of a Rovian hint that mere Olympics and Tibets and Darfurs are small-change compared to the megabucks windfalls of China-bashing, something long extant and ominously present on this very website and in these very kitetails of rant and ravings.
From Jim Erbes to Christian, and, yes, to our very own resident who claims to be “Chinese” but evinces all the latterday loyalties and subserviences of refugees fleeing their own land to the comforts, and privileges it would seem, of their benefactors who bombed and strafed and Agent-Orange’d their political-opposite compatriots.
Huang Fong, again, kindly and wise, seems to opt for making the case by benevolent openness.
After living and PRACTICING same for 89 years now, I, for one, as a “Chinese,” and “American” at that, demur.
I think it high time to realize that racists and warmongers, whether they merely “slant” their eyes by hand or send spycraft overhead and beat the drums of hatred and “chosenness” at home, AND abroad as in the sad and bloody cases of Iraq and Afghanistan today and God knows where else tomorrow — are NOT to be gainsaid by anything but vigilance AND the overt and published acknowledgment of their ill will, along with the equally open and published assertion, along with the full intention, of NOT conceding, but, rather, of standing our ground AND fighting back. In the media, in the courts, and, if need be, on the barricades.
Today’s “Chinese” in “America” are no longer, and have not been, for at least a century and more, mere “coolies” and laundrymen or butts of poetasters like Brett Harte or rabblerousers of the day like Dennis Kearny.
Well, at least one, Arthur Hu, appears to be the exception, in his vacuous and mindless if mathematical and academic way, embracing ALL the cant and contumely of the righteous Right, and enthusiastically at that.
I ask, one and all, were the PRC to send spy planes circling Catalina, and it was “downed,” would WE return the parts? Not without a mushroom cloud over Hainan Island. Or, better yet, Beijing.
Truth of the matter is that regardless of “secrecy,” the PRC today continue to foucs on DOMESTIC problems, would that Uncle Sam were doing the same rather than smart-bombing wedding parties and madrasas of children, whatever their race OR “religion.”
The western media attack a government attempting to hold down the Malthusian threat of overpopulation the while it attempts to feed same. Has China invaded anyone? Never mind the “intramural” claims and counterclaims of both Tibet and Taiwan, and the Vietnam border “incidents” are no worse, or better, than those border forays of Vietnam in Cambodia?
Point is, “western” “capitalist” industrial pillaging of the countryside and exploitation of cheap, and child?, labor as well, is every bit as culpable as the cadres who are complicit, just like our Congresspersons who are touchy-feely complicit with the Abramoffs and the Liebermans in their blindness to the WHOLE picture rather than just their provincial/tribal purview.
This is where I came in on this dunderhead converse. I said then, and I repeat now, “Chinese” “Americans” had best look to the “internment camps” of WWII as we continue to blunder our way into the 21st century.
And I hope fellow APA constituencies will NOT be as complaisant as we were back in the ’30s and ’40s, balkanized today and divided we fall.
Let the theoneocons know, let the Republic ring with the fact that, today, NO ONE can claim ignorance of the obvious facts of political life in these here still benighted states of amurrika, where political theater, The Drunkard, reigns, and someone like John McCain, forget that bit of fluff, sorry, ladies, Sarah whatsername, can actually stand a chance in the face of joblessness and hopelessness. Only spinning, and smoke and mirrors, AND the dregs of American lack of humanity can make that possible,
In this view, BOTH the PRC and Putin could well prove the agency for “change” in tomorrow’s “America.”
I pray only that it NOT be bloody.
And, guys, you especiall Jim Erbes, and you as well Christian, don’t bother to tell me to “go back where I came from.” San Jose is much too congested for my elitist “pinko” tastes.
Soneone, on-screen, tonight told Michael Moore to go to China if he is so disaffected with this nation.
Why China? Why not Russia? Or even Ahmadinejad’s Iran?
Frank Eng
P.S.: And when you come, please make certain you “Mirandize” me. Besides, you’re too late, with far too little. Incitation? You ought to know, you rabblerouser you.