all this stuff somewhere along the scale of "everyone will love you"
Mostly true. Much of China is an incredibly friendly place. Perhaps less so in the largest cities, although even there it varies. Beijing is much like New York -- people are friendly, but blunt. Not a lot of eye contact. Foreigners don't elict that much response, because there's so many tourists and expats. Shanghai is more like Los Angeles -- lot of glitz and wealth juxtaposed with gritty urban jungle poverty. People tend to be friendly and more circumspect in their choice of words, but it can often come off as a bit fake. Guangzhou....I don't really know of a good analog. Vegas, maybe? Can be incredibly tacky and over-the-top, but also a hell of a lot of fun. It's also freakin' massive and clogged with industry.
In smaller towns, where foreigners (read: anyone who doesn't look East Asian) are going to be much rarer, you'd be an instant celebrity, which leads to...
to "China is the most racist place to white people ever"
Also true, but not always in a bad way. It has to do with limited information and scale. Let me put it this way. There are 55 official "ethnic minorities" in China, making up about 105 million people. That is still
less than 9% of the population. And many of those minorities don't look markedly different from the Han ethnic phenotype. And the largest minorities are concentrated in their own provinces and districts. This means that outside of the major cities or the minority regions, it's quite possible for your average Chinese citizen to go their whole life without ever meeting anyone who isn't Han Chinese. It's a level of ethnic homogeneity that we can't even fathom in the West, especially in a multiethnic stew like the US.
All they know of white people, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, Arabs, Indians, etc. is what they see on TV or have read in books. You're only slightly more real to them than a fucking
unicorn. So when a living, breathing
laowai (foreigner, lit. "honored/old outsider") shows up in the village, there's going to be more than a few misconceptions. Doubly so if you have any physical traits that are really outside their norm, like blonde/red hair, blue eyes, freckles, etc. Expect stares. In a really rural area, they may even poke you or touch your hair just to confirm that you're real. In my travels, everyone seemed to assume that:
A. I was German or Russian, because I had a thick beard. All Germans and Russians have beards. Americans don't. I sat back and laughed my ass off on the Great Wall while two guards debated back and forth as to whether I was German or Russian. Didn't help them that I speak a bit of both. Their "logic" would have been incredibly offensive anywhere else, such things as "He's German! Look, his face looks like he's had a good night sleep. You know Russians always look tired!" "No, no, no...he has a dark beard! The Germans don't believe in breeding with other races."
B. I was American because my jeans had pockets in the front. Europeans wear jeans with pockets in the back.
C. I was asked what kind of gun I have at home. Because all Americans own guns. Also, how many people I knew that had been killed in gunfights. Because we have them every day. (To be fair, there are lethal shootings ever day in the US, but hey....we're a big country too.)
D. I was told how much they love Houston and want to visit there some day, and had I met Yao Ming? (The proper response was, "Dude...Houston is a cesspit, pray he gets traded. And no, we have 300 million people. I haven't had the chance to meet him.")
E. You may pick up a fond nickname like "Lao Bai" (literally, "Old White"; also, a bit of a pun on
laowai) or "Mei Hu" (literally, "Beautiful Beard"; here,
mei is a shorthand for
Meiguo, "beautiful country", which is the Chinese rendering of 'America'. So the intended meaning was "American Beard".) I knew an African-American expat in Beijing whose boss called her "Hei nǚ", which literally means "black woman".
So yeah, there's a lot of unintended (and often comical) racism, but rarely does it have the sort of malicious intent that we associate with racism in the West. It's mostly from just a sheer lack of exposure and misguided enthusiasm to greet this strange visitor from Beyond the Middle Kingdom (which in pre-modern Chinese thought, meant you were literally from beyond the edge of the world, and so must be a ghost, a demon or a barbarian). Old habits die hard.
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Topic: Chen Guangcheng (Read 7503 times)