I grew up in the dark days of South Africa. During that time, everyone was required to carry an ID booklet. In it was everything from one’s marriage certificate to one’s driver’s license: But most importantly, was one’s ID number, the last two digits of which was one’s race. At the back of the book there was even a key: 00 to 13 if I remember correctly. 00 white, 01 colored, 05 Bantu (Native Black People) etc. Now we all know what this system was called don’t we? So let’s forget the race thing shall we.
I think that suggestions that Taiwan is racist are overdone.
If by racist, you mean a preoccupation with issues of race or nationality… then, yes, Taiwan is certainly this. Can’t really blame them - they have China breathing down their necks and have only been governing themselves for a comparatively short time.
And yes… the genetic superiority stories get floated around - but why? Does anyone seriously question the fact that the West, with its broadly free-market liberalist philosophies, has created the highest standards of living ever seen… so much so that developing countries try as hard as their own predispositions will allow to “ape” (no pun intended) the West. I guess the genetic superiority stories are a way of making people feel better for not having developed so far economically. (And, even if the Chinese are further evolved than the West - its still too short a time span to know wether or not it was a “successful” evolutionary step.)
Taiwan is simply not a very cosmopolitan place - because noone really wants to come here. Given the choice of Taiwan, China, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore… or wherever… how often will Taiwan top that list.
Yeah… I am sure taiwan has its racist twits (but I agree with the prvious post that says China is much, much worse). Nevertheless, I think a lot of the time, what many people may perceive as racism is just curiosity… a slightly naive and mildly annoying curiosity, yes… but not harmful and not meant in a mean-spirited way.
I spotted this item in an old issue of Economist:
“The city of San Diego, in California, banned any use of the word ‘minority’ in its official documents and discussions, saying it implied inferiority. Whites are now a minority in California.”
I read in a Q&A forum conducted by a university genetics professor that if you took DNA samples of, say, 5 blacks, 5 caucasians, 5 East Asians, and 5 Arabs - and then mixed those samples up - you wouldn’t be able to regroup the samples according to the 4 ‘races’ involved in the test. Not only that, but the DNA of, say, one black guy might be more similar to that of the Asian or the caucasian than to another black guy in the sample.
That’s the key phrase there.
The last comment was spot on.
The differences within races and the similarities between them, sre such that the categories themselves become scientifically meaningless.
Why was the ‘science’ of races ‘discovered’ in the first place? Why does this persist to be a poular belief? The answer is obvious. The ‘science’ came about to ‘proove’ what was neede to be prooved for social reasons.
Bri
I think you are getting a bit sidetracked. I don’t think we are talking about racism on a genetic level; rather, the kind that manifests itself in the “We are Chinese/French/Texans/Blacks…etc. and we are superior to you.” Or “Our ways are too sophisticated for you to understand.” Or “Nothing you could possibly say matters since our culture is so distinct that everything must be processed our way.”
Absolutely right. What’s interesting is that I’m not even sure what being Chinese means. It’s not like being Canadian, American, or Singaporean, where the passport says it all. I guess being Chinese isn’t based on nationality, because you can be from Singapore, Brunei, North Dakota or China and still be Chinese. It isn’t racial, because everybody born in China is Chinese, but there are many distinct racial groups within China, from the aborigines, to the Manchu and the Mongolians. A couple of months ago, there was even something in the papers about a DNA study that showed “native” Taiwanese Benshengren as not being of Han descent, which was apparently a bit of a shocker. It isn’t cultural, because celebrity athletes like Michael Chang and Michelle Kwan are as American as you can get, yet people here always give them a lot of attention for “being Chinese”. I don’t know about you guys, but I would feel weird rooting for an athlete because he was white.
So if “being Chinese” isn’t dependent on race, culture, or nationality, than what exactly is it? And is the racial pride that we see - particularly in China now - as potentially dangerous as white pride? Since being Chinese and being white are, racially speaking, equally vague notions, doesn’t it seem silly to suppress pride in the one group and encourage it in the other?
I know this is a hugely sensitive topic, and I hope I haven’t offended anyone, but I would love to hear others’ opinions. 
Being that I have exeperienced racism first hand, I go back to the preivous posts about the children being taught it. A great movie that was ahead of it’s time was South Pacific… in it there is a song; “You’ve got to be taught”. I really hits home about racism and how everyone has some form of it. That is why I am coming to teach in Taiwan. I want to learn the culture and hopefully not change all peoples minds about me but, just some. so when I leave they will think, " Gee, not all backs like rap,or talk slang. Then they wiil think of me not as color but, as just a person. Wishful thinking I guess.
quote:
Originally posted by Gloveman: Wishful thinking I guess.
For the most part, but you have to start somewhere.
Because of an old friend of mine, at least a couple of Taiwanese children now know that some black people can read! He overheard them giggling about seeing him read on the bus and surprised them even more by saying, “And some of them can speak Chinese, too!”
Good luck!
Thanks Sere,
I used to get that here in US when I was growing up. Whenit came thime for me to read I would here the giggles but, they stopped because I was able to read better than they could. I met a man From SA while I was in Thailand. I changed his whole view about blacks in the little time that we spoke. He took me aside and was very frank about how he did’nt really like “my people” but, now that he met me and saw that is just like everyone else he will never think that way again. I don’t maybe it was the beer talking but, believed him. Don’t worry I am not out this crusade to change people’s mind about how they feel about a particular race. Just to get them to think first about the person is a jerk, not that all these people are jerks. End of sermon.
quote:
Originally posted by : Just curious about your thinking here ... why don't native people deserve a capital letter just like Han Chinese / Manchu (whatever kind of Chinese that is) and Mongolians? Are they not a distinct group of people you are referring to? If so, seems odd not to at least treat them like other ethnic groups you pigeonhole ...
When I was working as an editor at the Government Information Office in Taipei, we capitalized Aborigines/Aboriginal. Personally I would not do so - instead I would refer to the person’s tribe more often, rather than lumping them altogether as aborigines.
Steven Crook
KEEPING UP WITH THE WAR GOD
http://www.romanization.com/books/crook/index.html
I’m ethnically Manchurian with a bit of Spanish on my Mum’s side. I grew up in the Philippines, where kids who are ethnically Chinese are treated with the same stereotypical “Chinaman” B.S. that was often seen in Hollywood films. “Flied lice, anyone?” I have never been to China and consider myself Filipino but even in college, students are either:
- Surprised that I speak Filipino as fluently as they do;
- Wonder why I didn’t get that 4.0 in Statistics101; or
- Think that I must have amazing business acumen.
Yes, stereotypes, racial profiling or whatever you call it does exist, but sometimes it is there because of what society and the media conveys to these impressionable young people.
As for the “astounding skill” of most Orientals with numbers, I think it has more to do with the focus of their educational background than anything else. Japanese and Korean children spend more hours in school per academic year than, lets say, American children, and most schools focus on math and science rather than the arts, but even that is slowly changing.
Some unfortunate, culturally short-sighted Taiwanese may still think that the Chinese are more superior than Caucasians, but then there are also Caucasians, Hispanics, Africans, who think that the Chinese are nothing but a bunch of loud-mouthed assholes. And until we learn to stop generalizing and learn to appreciate each other’s similarities and differences, heads will continue to butt.
Well just for a change, I’d like to comment on a couple of experiences / observations when I’d say Chinese were apparently (or in truth) better than whites. Before I go on though, I need to comment that I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan that Hitler would have been proud of (in physical appearance that is).
Take the maths example which has already been raised. I don’t know about general statistics, but certainly from my observation as a school teacher in HK (not teaching maths mind you) the levels of maths being taught was at least a year more advanced than it was from my days at high school (in New Zealand incidentally, which a contributor above cited as one of the 4 best countries for maths in the world??? Hard to believe? I hope everyone else isn’t even worse!). I personally speculate that a reason for asian students’ average higher scores in maths has its routes in language … in Chinese, you don’t have to teach a kid that 20 is two groups of ten … it’s stated right there in the word. However, an English speaking kid has to be taught certain basic concepts that are intuitive to speakers of Chinese. I also recall reading that the difference disappears in migrants to USA after 2 generations … which supports my theory, because that’s about when you would usually see the loss of the original language. It’s also one on the nose for proponents of “evolutionary” or “genetic” superiority.
My second example is just a personal anecdote from my (western) New Year’s eve 2 years ago, spent in a cool little jazz club in Tianjin. I was there with a Chinese professor and his friends; all elderly, educated, refined, and terribly nice people. There was live music, dancing (real dancing, not jumping up and down), and everyone was having a good time. At 11.30pm a bunch of drunken westerners turned up. They insisted on dragging out the karaoke machine, shouting loudly, singing terribly, and they stank of booze. I did my best to ignore them, although on one occasion a woman staggered up to me and slurred something about me being Swedish and not understanding. I just stared at her and tried to pretend that she was right. I was thoroughly ashamed. OK, they weren’t even from my country, but they were white, and I was the only other white face in the place. They reinforced every cliche of the drunken, loud, and uncultured foreigner. All I could do was turn to the people I was with, and insist that “wo gen ta men bu yi yang!”. Anyway, the point of this whole story is that the Chinese in that place were far superior in their behaviour to those disgusting white louts.
Well, of course I’ve experienced and witnessed racism from Chinese against other races, and some pretty shocking examples too, but I just thought I’d be a devil’s advocate here, and put something down on the other side of the scales. Anyway, I think it’s more fun (and less likely to get you in trouble) to bash your own race and praise someone else’s.
I found this on a legal site on the internet: A civil right is an enforceable right or privilege, which if interfered with by another gives rise to an action for injury. Examples of civil rights are freedom of speech, press, religion, peaceable assembly, the right to have protection in the court system, the right to equality in public places, the right to be free of search or seizures without probable cause, and freedom from involuntary servitude. So-called discrimination occurs when the civil rights of an individual are denied or interfered with because of their membership in a particular group or class.
I was wondering if anyone thinks that Taiwan’s treatment of foreigners in any way violates commonly accepted “civil rights” practices?
[quote=“Hartzell”]I found this on a legal site on the internet: A civil right is an enforceable right or privilege, which if interfered with by another gives rise to an action for injury. Examples of civil rights are freedom of speech, press, religion, peaceable assembly, the right to have protection in the court system, the right to equality in public places, the right to be free of search or seizures without probable cause, and freedom from involuntary servitude. So-called discrimination occurs when the civil rights of an individual are denied or interfered with because of their membership in a particular group or class.
I was wondering if anyone thinks that Taiwan’s treatment of foreigners in any way violates commonly accepted “civil rights” practices?[/quote]
One question I have is whether these rights should extend to non-citizens? I think one of the arguments put forth by the US government with respect to protests against the detainment of suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters at the US Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba is that they are not US citizens and, thus, not afforded the same Constitutional protections.
Should nations grant the same rights to non-citizens as they do to citizens? Certainly, if a person becomes a Taiwan citizen, then he or she should be given the same rights as all other Taiwan citizens regardless of race. But, should I be given equal treatment under the law in all circumstances if I live in Taiwan under a foreign passport? Should I be given equal treatment in certain circumstances, but not all?
According to science, no race is “superior” to any other. Nor can we say that people are superior to dogs or rats. We just occupy different ecological niches. If people tried to live like dogs, for example (and some of us try!), we wouldn’t be nearly as good at it. Dogs are designed for their niche (eating human leftovers), people are for ours (very adaptable). Similarly, the different races are each perfectly suited to the different environments they come in. Whenever this stops being true, the racial configuration will change, like it or not.
On the other hand, I think it is entirely legitimate to entertain subjective value judgments about which races or species we prefer. For instance, when I look out at examples of culture and civilization from the different countries of the world–Grecian urns and the Parthenon, voodoo shrines and the slums of Port-au-Prince, Hello Kitty and the concrete-slab apartment blocks of Taiwan–I do feel certain irrational attractions or revulsions. I wonder how much of this is because of my own background (the way I love MY country and MY mother, even though they’re similar to other people’s), and how much to aesthetic or moral stirrings that are the same across different cultures. In any case, God and evolution don’t care about any of this, for them it’s biology and baby-producing all the way down.
This explains much of Taiwan’s attitude towards foreigners and foreign culture. It’s not based on reason per se, it’s political. They use ethnicity as a way to defend their resources. (So whoever said race / ethnicity doesn’t matter is wrong–it’s what’s keeping whites from getting Taiwan citizenship, to name just one example.) In the West we’ve stopped doing this at the national level, so Taiwanese have access to our societies. Of course this is not “fair,” nor is it intended to be.
The solution, I think, is to encourage rifts in the supposedly homogenous societies of China, Taiwan, Japan, etc. On closer inspection each of these is divided into competing ethnicities, whose distrust of one another may be greater than their suspicion of us. The moment we can make them think of their “Chinese” or “Taiwanese” or “Japanese” identity as less important than some lesser one, then we can get our feet through the door of the resulting, self-consciously multicultural society. That’s how they got into ours, after all.
the source of most racial epithets is there is some form of history behind it IE the word n$#er comes from slavey, ch#nk comes from racism towards chinese immigrants in the late 19th century, etc etc…there is no history of racism and the such commited on a mass scale by chinese people towards white people unless you want to count mongol colonization back in the day (although they are altaic not han chinese keep in mind) or the numerous slavic mail-order brides… I honestly think most white people that complain about “racism” are basically closet racists…I havent witnessed any racism in taiwan, although I have defintaly witnessed plenty of stupid western ass kissing by taiwanese people the whole english teaching hussle/scam that exists is based on the idea that western languages are more useful or whatever, even though the majority of these kids at the buxibans never actually use these skills. If they didnt have some bullshit romantic association with western skills half of the people on this damn forum wouldnt have ever come to taiwan in the first place
I will admit, there is racism towards black people in many asian countries…my commentary pertains to white people complaining about experiencing “racism”…when I compare the qualifications of many chinese teachers in the US to english teachers in taiwan it is friggin hilarious…almost all the chinese teachers at my uni are bilingual as well as graduates of top-knotch institutions (fudan, etc)…how many yale/harvard etc graduates that speak fluent chinese live in taiwan. I am sure there are some, but its definately a minority
No kidding. The US has the best universities in the world. That’s why so many Taiwanese would love to get an MBA or other degree in the states. Taiwan’s educational system, by comparison, sucks. Moreover, I think you’re comparing apples and oranges – teaching in US universities v. Taiwan cram schools, bushibans, etc.
It’s also a matter of supply and demand. No one wants to learn Chinese in the US, so the jobs are few and competition among teachers necesitates an ivy league degree. English, on the other hand, everyone wants to learn in Taiwan, so jobs are abundant and qualifications are lesser. Is that surprising?
Oh by the way, Fudan, top-notch institution. 
I believe you are confused on this point. The persons held in Guantanamo Bay are “nonresident enemy aliens,” and as such there is no guarantee of Constitutional rights for them. There is a good discussion of this in the US Supreme Court case of JOHNSON v. EISENTRAGER, 339 U.S. 763 (1950), see laws.findlaw.com/us/339/763.html
Human rights in general, and civil rights in particular, are not restricted to citizens. Taiwan law is supposedly based on German law, but under German law foreigners have Constitutional rights. In Taiwan, there is no consensus among the government bureaucrats as to whether foreigners have Constitutional rights or not . . . . . hence, such basic things as freedom of speech and assembly are always being restricted.
In the USA, the earliest ruling affirming that foreigners physically present within the territorial jurisdiction have Constitutional rights was in the Supreme Court case of YICK WO v. HOPKINS, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), see laws.findlaw.com/us/118/356.html