BEIJING — Chinese state media squeezed as much propaganda value as it could out of the chaotic events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where on Aug. 11 a group of white nationalists marched in support of a “Unite the Right” rally, triggering violent clashes between the white nationalists and counter-protesters. One person was killed when a pro-right activist smashed his car into a crowd of protesters.
Government-run television in China was sure to broadcast video of the violence, though it almost never shows its viewers any such domestic turmoil. In a commentary defending China’s own record on civil liberties, the People’s Daily, a Communist Party newspaper, said the events in Charlottesville exposed that “hate and terror are on the rise in America, and such problems are expected to increase,” and therefore “America is not a human rights paradise, nor the world’s moral leader.”
This is standard fare in the Chinese press, which tries to highlight such tumult in other countries to paint the Celestial Empire as tranquil and orderly by comparison. But the Chinese are not immune to derogatory views of other peoples, both at home and abroad. The consequence is damaged relations with both its neighbors and domestic ethnic minorities.
Almost simultaneous with Charlottesville, for instance, China managed to offend many Indians with an inappropriate video — from Xinhua, the country’s official news agency. The two Asian giants were at the time embroiled in a dispute over a contested border area in the Himalayas, where troops from both sides glared at each other in a tense standoff. Xinhua released a video purporting to outline India’s “sins” in the conflict that featured a Chinese man dressed in a turban and fake beard and speaking in a silly Indian accent. The apparent attempt at humorous propaganda did not go down well in India. The Hindustan Times, a popular daily in India, complained it had “racist overtones that mocked and parodied Indians,” while one commentator with the Indian Express, another major Indian newspaper, said the video “crossed every line of decency” and lamented that Indians had to endure “blatant racial profiling from its noisy and nosy neighbor.”
The Chinese media has employed such demeaning characterizations in other foreign policy conflicts. Last year, when the Philippines challenged China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea at The Hague, Xinhua published a cartoon that depicted the Filipino leader as a barefoot primitive and the U.S. as an especially big-nosed Uncle Sam. Another cartoon passed around on social media showed China slapping the Philippines and deriding it as a “banana seller.”
Domestically, too, the Chinese have severely strained relations with their major minority groups, especially Tibetans and Uighurs, a Muslim Central Asian people who live mainly in the country’s far West. Discriminatory policies have suppressed these groups’ religion and culture. According to an August report in the Chinese press, a county government in the province of Qinghai removed loudspeakers from hundreds of mosques to prevent the “noise pollution” of the regular calls to prayer.
Economically, members of these minority communities often feel they don’t have equal access to jobs, education and other opportunities. The subsequent fomenting resentment has occasionally boiled over into protests and violence, such as in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in 2008 and Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, in 2009. Uighur groups have even been blamed for acts of terror. In 2013, three Uighurs plowed an SUV through a crowd in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing, killing themselves and two pedestrians.
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Gray Tuttle, a professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University, sees these policies on minorities as “an expression of deep-seated ethnic prejudices and racism at the core of contemporary Chinese society.” These sentiments, Tuttle explains, are rooted in late-19 th century ideas of Chinese nationalism, and were reinforced by the new Communist government in the 1950s, which began categorizing minority groups and propagating negative views of them. If the discrimination continues, Tuttle adds, it “will undermine Beijing’s efforts to foster a ‘harmonious society’ and present China as a model to the rest of the world.”
Chinese don’t hold positive views of other Asian countries, either. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey discovered that only 14 percent and 26 percent of respondents in China held favorable opinions of Japan and India, respectively. (In the case of Japan, many Chinese still resent the Japanese invasion of the country before and during World War II and the atrocities they committed, most notoriously the Nanjing Massacre. Hostility is further fueled by persistent anti-Japanese propaganda in the Chinese press.) A controversial detergent ad aired in China last year, which showed a black man being “washed” into a light-skinned Chinese man, only reinforced the perception abroad that Chinese are prone to racism.
However, Barry Sautman, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, warns against jumping to simplistic conclusions about Chinese attitudes toward race. He proffers that their negativity toward other peoples may be based more in their perceptions that they are poorer or, as in the case of Uighurs, potentially threatening, than in overt racism. Prejudices toward certain foreigners as shown in the Xinhua India video, he argues, are an import from the West. “It is a big leap to say that people in China in general have a discriminatory attitude,” Sautman says. Modern Chinese “have been exposed to various stereotypes that are expressed in the Western world and have absorbed them.”
Some statistics back him up. A 2008 survey conducted by the University of Maryland showed that Chinese are among the most supportive of equal treatment of all races and ethnicities.
Whatever the source, the prejudicial views expressed by Chinese are not helping them win friends and expand the country’s influence abroad. Indian media was quick to respond to the mocking Xinhua clip. One animated video features a maniacal, animated Xi Jinping, the president of China, reaching fits of frustration over his failure to stir a laughing Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister.
“It is possible that there could be a long-term effect,” on China’s foreign relations, says Sautman. “A lot of it depends on what the leadership in China does about such stereotypes.”
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