The most offensive racist TV spot ever, or just stupidity on the part of Chinese people?

Someone I knew married a mail order bride from China. This was about fifteen years ago. They took a trip to Cleveland, his home town, and he warned her about "hei ren" (black people) in the city. Pretty horrible huh? What's even more insightful is that she, being recently from China and having no clue of race relations here, responded with "What's wrong with black people? Aren't many of them super successful like Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson?"

It was refreshing to hear that. To have a view not stained by the baggage (and what the media presents to us); but the world doesn't work that way.

 

The washer does not work. Dude should have come out Mexican.

 

One may find fellow men that will use political incorrectness, in the absence of malice, to get something out of it at the expense of their fellow men.

One may find fellow men that view other fellow men as inferior and inadequate (insert x or y reason), and act accordingly. It doesn't matter what is said. In fact, excessive political correctness maybe just as offensive as political incorrectness.

IMO, its what's behind the words that matter, not the words themselves.

 

Oh man, the liberals and academics in the USA would have a field day with you, you silly Mexican!

 

To be clear, I'm not a big a fan of China, being born in Taiwan and still having substantial links to Taiwan.

In terms of racial or national superiority, that's natural, and isn't specific to Chinese or China. Heck, America started two wars in the past decade to show how awesome an American led New World Order would be. That didn't turn out too well. Most Taiwanese people think mainland Chinese are dirt. They think of mainland Chinese as how many Americans think of Mexicans, or of how Mexicans think of Guatemalans, or how Costa Ricans think of Mexicans. As an aside, it's hilarious when friends of my dad ask him "Oh, who's that mainlander guy in the room?" And he responds "Oh, he's OK. He's cool." And then the friend goes "Oh, cool."

As far the Yuan Dynasty, umm, those were the Mongols. They kicked ass and conquered the Chinese before conquering everyone else up to Europe. They only reason they eventually "failed" was because there weren't enough of them, and over time, they got absorbed into the local populations. They sort of reverse Borg'd themselves.

But seriously, you should talk to Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Nigerians, Persians, etc, and ask them what they thought about their European colonial oppressors after getting to really know them. I don't think I've heard the word "cocksucker" being used so much. One interesting thing about living in Los Angeles is that you get a good perspective from non-America non-Western points of view.

Sure, the commercial is edgy, and inherently racist (as someone else said, why wouldn't a Chinese girl prefer a Chinese man?); but it doesn't carry the heavy burden of the Chinese systematically militarily conquering other nations, sucking out their resources, enslaving, poisoning, categorizing and dividing the local populations, and referring to the locals as "darkies".

 

In colonial Mexico there were some stories about Spanish folks testing their swords by slicing American Indian babies in half. AFAIK, things were pretty bad for non-pure Spanish folks in Mexico around the mid 1500s and so on.

I've also seen the Chinese/Taiwanese sentiment in the past. My wife's boss at some company was a relatively young and very nice Taiwanese girl. Who's boyfriend turned out to be Chinese. I can't tell you how much her parents opposed their marriage.

 

The Dutch didn't seem too bad. My Sri Lankan coworker felt that the Dutch were more into business than subjugating people. He hates the British though. When we were in London, he like "WTF" in the museums and said everything on display was looted by the British during the colonial era. He also pointed out to me that the British "poisoned" the Chinese with opium: "What kind of people would do something like that!" The British never landed in Taiwan, so that wasn't even my beef.

The opinion of the Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese by Taiwanese seems neutral or even positive. Chinese (mainland) to this day cannot stand the fact that many Taiwanese look favorably at Japan, even though Taiwan was subjugated by Japan as a colony for two generations. But the fact is, the Taiwanese experience with the Japanese was very different from that of Chinese (mainland China). My grandmother recounted me that the Japanese were very strict and severe, but also fair, un-corruptible, and clean. The Japanese also did quite a bit to integrate Taiwan into Japan proper. Their method of colonization was a lot less like that of the British in Sri Lanka (or wherever) where the natives were simply thought of as "darkies". The Japanese wanted to make the Taiwanese into Japanese, particularly in the latter half of the colonization period. Taiwanese were educated in Japanese schools and conscripted into the Japanese military. I believe Taiwan even had local representatives in the Japanese central government.

The Chinese of course suffered immensely at the hands of the Japanese in WWII. So just a completely different experience. It's still not uncommon today for Chinese to accuse pro independence Taiwanese like my parents or grandparents of being Japanese sympathizers or being half-Japanese. Haha. I know my family has more Dutch (and aboriginal) blood than Japanese blood, but my grandparents did speak Japanese! They were forced to. Ultimately I think what made Taiwanese overlook the harshness of the Japanese was with the influx of the Chinese nationalists / Kuomintang into Taiwan after Chairman Mao kicked Chiang Kai-shek's ass.

Initially, Taiwanese (who still identified as Chinese) welcomed the Chinese (mainlanders) as saviors. No more Japanese, yay! But soon found out that these mainlanders were unclean, undisciplined, brought all sorts of diseases via lice and mice. The Taiwanese also found very quickly that these Chinese mainlanders were super corrupt and that Chiang Kai-shek was really no more than a gangster / mafioso (the dude made himself a six star generalissimo, so go figure). The 228 incident or massacre where the KMT suppressed government protests by local Taiwanese by killing elites and continued with indiscriminate killing of randoms didn't help either. It doesn't matter if 200 or 40,000 people were killed or what the real figures were. Taiwan was put under martial law which was finally lifted in 1986, almost forty years later.

What does this have anything do to what we are talking about? Every other nation, every other peoples in the world wants to control or at least influence another nation; but most of the time, the people in control are too stupid to understand why they can't get their way. Look at China. China wants to fold Taiwan back into the mainland, but they have absolutely no clue why the Taiwanese hate them. There's no desire to find common ground with the Taiwanese, to understand how the Taiwanese experience is different; and when things get difficult, China resorts to using tactics like calling Taiwanese who don't want anything to do with them half-breed Japanese. Everything China has done has only strengthened a independent Taiwanese identity.

USA is not too different. I'm shocked (not really, because Presidents typically pick friends or high-roller donors) that our state departments have been stocked with "experts" who are completely clueless about the nations, cultures, and peoples that we deal with. I wasn't against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I found it frightening that we didn't have real experts who understood how those nations worked, how the people thought, or this entire Sunni / Shiite mess, which has evidently been around for over fifteen hundred years. If we did, we could have been more prepared and things might have gone much more smoothly during the occupation phase.