Racism in China () arises from Chinese history, nationalism, sinicization, and other factors. Racism in the People's Republic of China has been documented in numerous situations such as the Xinjiang conflict, the ongoing internment and state persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, the 2010 Tibetan language protest (a protest against the sinicization of Tibet), the 2020 Inner Mongolia protests (a protest against the sinicization of Inner Mongolia), discrimination against Africans in particular and discrimination against Black people in general.
Demographic background
China is a largely homogeneous society; over 90% of its population is Han Chinese.
History Ethnic taxonomies were an aspect of Qing dynasty governance since the 1600s. Prejudice against darker skin in China was historically based upon class and related associations with the poverty of laborers working under the sun.
Scientific racist notions of East Asian people belonging to a single "yellow race" were first posited by European naturalists in the 1700s and later introduced to China. Intellectuals of the late Qing dynasty initially embraced social Darwinist racial taxonomies due to admiration of Western science, and as a defense mechanism in response to European colonialism. These intellectuals also accepted a view categorizing Chinese as "yellow," in part due to favorable connotations of "yellow" in Chinese culture. Major Qing-era reformers Yan Fu and Kang Youwei articulated views of Black people as "unintelligent" and Kang advocated for sterilizing Black people to prevent their procreation.
People's Republic of China
Racist incidents continue to occur in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and they have become a contentious topic because Chinese state sources either deny or downplay its existence. Scholars have noted that the Chinese state's propaganda largely portrays racism as a Western phenomenon, which has contributed to a lack of acknowledgment of the existence of racism in Chinese society. In August 2018, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reported that PRC law does not properly define "racial discrimination" and it also lacks an anti-racial discrimination law in line with the Paris Principles.
Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has utilized Peking Man as an instrument of its racial nationalist discourse.
In November 2012, in contradiction to the Chinese Communist Party's rhetoric about equality among China's 56 recognized ethnic groups, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping released his model of the Chinese Dream, which has been criticized as Han-centric.
In May 2012, the Chinese government launched a 100-day crackdown on illegal foreigners in Beijing, due to Beijing residents' concerns of foreign nationals due to recent crimes. China Central Television (CCTV) host Yang Rui said, controversially, that "foreign trash" should be cleaned out of the capital. A 2016 Gallup International poll had roughly 30% of Chinese respondents and 53% of Hong Kong respondents agreeing that some races were superior to others.
Anti-Chinese sentiment Among some Chinese dissidents and critics of the Chinese government have used of pejorative slurs (such as shina or locust), or displaying hatred towards the Chinese language, people, and culture.
In Hong Kong Although Hong Kong's sovereignty was returned to China in 1997, only a small minority of its inhabitants consider themselves to be exclusively Chinese. According to a 2014 survey from the University of Hong Kong, 42.3% of respondents identified themselves as "Hong Kong citizens", versus only 17.8% who identified themselves as "Chinese citizens", and 39.3% gave themselves a mixed identity (a Hong Kong Chinese or a Hong Konger who was living in China). By 2019, almost no Hong Kong youth identified as Chinese.
The number of mainland Chinese who visit the region has surged since the handover (it reached 28 million in 2011) and many locals believe that it is the cause of their housing and job difficulties. In addition to resentment which is caused by political oppression, negative perceptions have grown through the circulation of online posts which contain descriptions of mainlander misbehaviour, as well as discriminatory discourse in major Hong Kong newspapers. In 2013, polls from the University of Hong Kong suggested that 32 to 35.6 per cent of locals had "negative" feelings for mainland Chinese people. However, a 2019 survey of Hong Kong residents has suggested that there are also some who attribute positive stereotypes to visitors from the mainland.
In 2012, a group of Hong Kong residents published a newspaper advertisement which depicted mainland visitors and immigrants as locusts, an ethnic slur targeting mainland Chinese people. Strong anti-mainland xenophobia has also been documented amidst the 2019 protests, with reported instances of protesters attacking Mandarin-speakers and mainland-linked businesses.
During protest against mainlanders and parallel traders, local demonstrators chanted the pejorative term Cheena. In October 2015, an HKGolden netizen remade the South Korean song "Gangnam Style", with lyrics calling mainland Chinese "locusts" and "Cheena people", titled "Disgusting Cheena Style" ().
Inside Hong Kong university campuses, mainland Chinese students are often referred to as "Cheena dogs" and "yellow thugs" by local students. Hong Kong journalist Audrey Li noted the xenophobic undertone of the widespread right-wing nativism movement, in which the immigrant population and tourists are used as scapegoats for social inequality and institutional failure.
In a 2015 study, mainland students in Hong Kong who initially had a more positive view of the city than of their own mainland hometowns reported that their attempts at connecting with the locals were difficult due to experiences of hostility.
In Hong Kong, some people consider hate speech and discrimination toward mainland Chinese morally justified by a superiority complex influenced by Hong Kong's economic and cultural prominence during the Cold War, and nostalgia toward British rule. Some protesters choose to express their frustrations on ordinary mainlanders instead of the Chinese government. With rising tribalism and nationalism in Hong Kong and China, xenophobia between Hong Kongers and mainlanders is reinforced and reciprocated.
Anti-Japanese sentiment
Anti-Japanese sentiment primarily stems from Japanese war crimes which were committed during the Second Sino-Japanese War. History-textbook revisionism in Japan and the denial (or the whitewashing) of events such as the Nanjing Massacre by the Uyoku dantai has continued to inflame anti-Japanese feeling in China. Anti-Japanese sentiment has been encouraged through the CCP's Patriotic Education Campaign. According to a BBC News report, anti-Japanese demonstrations received tacit approval from Chinese authorities, however, the Chinese ambassador to Japan Wang Yi said that the Chinese government does not condone such protests.
Anti-Muslim sentiment
Recent studies contend that in contemporary China, some Han Chinese have attempted to legitimize and fuel anti-Muslim beliefs and biases by exploiting historical conflicts between the Han Chinese and Muslims, like the Northwest Hui Rebellion. Scholars and researchers have also argued that Western Islamophobia and the "war on terror" have contributed to the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim sentiments and practices in China. Recent studies have shown that Chinese news media coverage of Muslims and Islam is generally negative, in which portrayals of Muslims as dangerous and prone to terrorism, or as recipients of disproportionate aid from the government was common. Studies have also revealed that Chinese cyberspace contains much anti-Muslim rhetoric and that non-Muslim Chinese hold negative views towards Muslims and Islam. Discrimination against Muslims and sinicization of mosques have been reported.
Xinjiang conflict and persecution of the Uyghurs
The Chinese government and individual Han Chinese citizens have been accused of discrimination against and ethnic hatred towards the Uyghur minority. This was a reported cause of the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, which occurred largely along racial lines. Several Western media sources called them "race riots". According to The Atlantic in 2009, there was an unofficial Chinese policy of denying passports to Uyghurs until they reached retirement age, especially if they intended to leave the country for the pilgrimage to Mecca.
According to academic David Tobin, since 2012, "Chinese education about Uyghurs tends to frame Uyghur identities as racialised, culturally external existential threats to be defeated by state violence or teaching them to be Chinese." Since 2014, the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of the general secretaryship of Xi Jinping has pursued a policy which has led to the imprisonment of more than one million Muslims (the majority of them are Uyghurs) in secretive detention camps without any legal process. Critics of the policy have described it as the sinicization of Xinjiang and they have also called it an ethnocide or a cultural genocide, and many activists, NGOs, human rights organizations, government officials, and the U.S. government have called it a genocide. The Chinese government did not acknowledge the existence of these internment camps until 2018 and when it finally acknowledged their existence, it called them "vocational education and training centers" rather than internment camps. In 2019, the name of these camps was officially changed to "vocational training centers". From 2018 to 2019, despite the Chinese government's claim that most of the detainees had been released, the camps tripled in size.
There are widespread reports of forced abortion, contraception, and sterilization both inside and outside the re-education camps. NPR reports that a 37-year-old pregnant woman from the Xinjiang region said that she attempted to give up her Chinese citizenship to live in Kazakhstan but was told by the Chinese government that she needed to come back to China to complete the process. She alleges that officials seized the passports of her and her two children before coercing her into receiving an abortion to prevent her brother from being detained in an internment camp. Zumrat Dwut, a Uyghur woman, claimed that she was forcibly sterilized by tubal ligation during her time in a camp before her husband was able to get her out through requests to Pakistani diplomats. The Xinjiang regional government denies that she was forcibly sterilized. The Associated Press reports that there is a "widespread and systematic" practice of forcing Uyghur women to take birth control medication in the Xinjiang region, and many women have stated that they have been forced to receive contraceptive implants. The Heritage Foundation reported that officials forced Uyghur women to take unknown drugs and to drink some kind of white liquid that caused them to lose consciousness and sometimes causes them to cease menstruation altogether.
Beginning in 2018, over one million Chinese government workers began forcibly living in the homes of Uyghur families to monitor and assess resistance to assimilation, and to watch for frowned-upon religious or cultural practices.