this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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I have a friend from China who's a lib and he's probably one of the most racist people I know (specifically against Chinese people). Just the other day he said Chinese people have never invented anything and that good inventions can only come from the US or Europe. He also wants to look, sound, and dress like an Ivy-league country club dude. Dude regularly reminds me of a Chinese Uncle Ruckus. Is that kind of self-hating common or is it mostly because he's from a rich family?
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Uncle Roger
in parlance, he's called an uncle chan.
it's an interesting exercise to map racism and self hatred against class interests, particularly in the context of america and china's antagonistic relationship. mao's perenially applicable class analysis has changed somewhat over the years, but the gist remains the same: the big bourgeois landlords/compradors have morphed into corrupt officials and bureaucratic monopolists, the middle bourgeois are now real estate/insurance/finance goons or factory owners and right wing petty bourgeois have added techbros to their ranks.
in my experience, the big bourgeois are largely past this level of ingroup status signalling, they're too busy hustling their stolen capital out of china and race for them only matters insofar as who lets them stash their cash where. meanwhile, the middle bourgeois and the upper rungs of the petty bourgeois are likely most prone to this sort of behavior. they don't have enough cash or clout to feel like they're above the party, but they have a big enough amount of ill gotten goods/chips on their shoulder to make them feel like they might be arbitrarily targeted (or maybe they feel like they deserve more but for the intervention of the party), and so they channel that resentment into hating other chinese people.
less rich people also ape western affectations for a wider variety of reasons, but i will say that western media penetration into china is very deep and pervasive and that the 90s/chimerica years resulted in at least a generation of thought leaders and public intellectuals that are extremely ideologically compromised and it is unclear how fast their influence might be dissipated, if ever.