Quick Take | Why do whingeing white expats think anti-Chinese racism is OK?

Everyone is a little bit racist. After all it’s nice to feel superior to others at the end of a hard day at work – office politics; the irritation of the commute … you can let out all your frustrations by grumbling to a sympathetic friend about an entire ethnic group. Who hasn’t done that? I have. I mean, honestly, who doesn’t make a bit of a generalisation every so often about people just on the basis of their race? Who can honestly say they haven’t maybe kicked and punched a few foreigners or maybe even stabbed them? And who hasn’t committed a little bit of genocide once or twice? I know I have.

Expatriates are terrible whingers, aren’t they? Moaning away. They never realise they’re offending people. When I was in the Beijing office, my Australian friend Shane used to grumble about China to our head of IT, a lanky Beijinger called Zhang. “If you hate it so much, why don’t you go back to ‘Australia’?” Zhang would say, doing air quotes with his fingers for the word Australia. This gave Shane a chance to make everyone laugh by pointing out that Australia is a real country and doesn’t need air quotes, but Zhang was right: no one likes hearing their own country being criticised. Is that really racist, or is it just normal annoyingness?

Nobody has a monopoly on racism

Westerners think it’s fine to make remarks about the Chinese in a way they certainly wouldn’t about other ethnic groups. The logic seems to be that China is a political state and not an ethnic group – but that isn’t the way many Chinese see it. And for Americans, the confusion is compounded by the fact that their ethnically Chinese friends (known as “Asians” in the US) are often far ruder about mainland Chinese than anyone else, not realising that to the average whitey from Whitesville, Oklahoma, they’re all just Chinese guys.

Hearing this sort of anti-Chinese talk from a Chinese person, the white guys then think it’s OK to be just as critical. It isn’t. The rapper C-Murder once sang a song called Down 4 My Niggaz, which has a chorus of people singing “My niggaz” at the end of each line. It’s lovely. The point is, it’s only OK for Mr Murder to do this because he is black. Many black people don’t like his offensive language, but his vocabulary is a matter of personal choice and is therefore just about acceptable. It would not, however, have been acceptable for the Bee Gees, who are white, to sing the same song. (I’m not saying the Bee Gees would have wanted to, and anyway I can’t think of a song by the Bee Gees where a racist chant would fit.)

Most Western expats instinctively know that it is not OK to make racist remarks about black people, but they’re a lot less sensitive when it comes to Chinese people. They think that as long as you don’t use words like “Chinaman” or “Chinky”, you’re not racist. But who under the age of 90 would use those words anyway? The real problem is crass generalisations.

India bemused by ‘racist’ Chinese video

Listen when expats talk about China and its problems. These guys could fix anything, to hear them talk. Social unrest in rural China? Bring on the white guy. Ethnic trouble in Tibet? We need that white guy. Rule of law? The aggression of China’s Pacific fleet? Undervalued Renminbi? Too much spitting? There’s nothing the average white guy can’t solve.