Mon Jan 27 Introductions and Interactions

In class: Community agreement

Wed Jan 29 Racist or Not? Transnational Debates

• WATCH: Qiaobi Laundry Detergent Commercial, 2016. (Google Drive link)
• WATCH: Coloria detergent Ad, 2007, Italy. Youtube.
• READ: Li Anshan. "Chinese ignorance of race should not be confused with racism," Chinese Social Sciences Today, 2016. (Online)
• READ: Scott and Sijake. 2016. "Response to “Ignorance of race not equivalent to racism” by Li Anshan," From China to Africa Blog, 2016. (Online)
• READ: Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong, “One Bad Advert Doesn’t Make 1.4. Billion Chinese Racist.” South China Morning Post, 2016. (Google drive link)
• READ: Castillo, Roberto. "Of washing powder, Afrophobia and racism in China," The Conversation blog, 2016. (Online)

Week 1 Key terms
In class: Sign up for discussion facilitation and film discussant roles
In class: Share Discussion faciltation guidelines
In class: Share Film Discussant guidelines

Good overall reference books:

Bulag, Uradyn E. The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Carrico, Kevin. 2017. The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today [very polemical]

Cornell, Stephen and Douglas Hartmann. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 2007.

Frank Dikötter - 1997 The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical ...

ed. Frank Dikötter. The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, , 75–91.London: Hurst & Company. [article by Sautman, Chow: Imagining Boundaries of Blood: Zhang Binglin and the Invention of the Han race in Modern China,]

Dorow, Sara. Transnational Adoption: A Cultural Economy of Race, Gender, and Kinship SARA K. DOROW, NYU Press, 2006

Mark Elliott, The Manchu Way 

Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945  (Keisha Brown uses in her China-AfAmer course)

Kelley, Robin. Freedom Dreams (Keisha Brown uses in her China-AfAmer course)

Rotem Kowner, Walter Demel. Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, 2013. [alot on Japan and Korea, Cheng has an article in]

MD Johnson. Race and racism in the Chinas: Chinese racial attitudes toward Africans and African-Americans - 2007 [First monograph from the perspective of African American in post-Mao China]

Bruce Larkin, China and Africa 1949-1970 

Andrea Louie: How Chinese Are You? Adopted Chinese Youth and their Families Negotiate Identity and Culture, NYU press, 2015 [Dorow's focuses more on race?]

Mapping Global Racisms series. Palgrave

There is no systematic coverage of the racialisation of the planet. This series is the first attempt to present a comprehensive mapping of global racisms, providing a way in which to understand global racialisation and acknowledge the multiple generations of different racial logics across regimes and regions. Unique in its intellectual agenda and innovative in producing a new empirically-based theoretical framework for understanding this glocalised phenomenon, Mapping Global Racisms considers racism in many underexplored regions such as Russia, Arab racisms in North African and Middle Eastern contexts, and racism in Pacific contries such as Japan, Hawaii, Fiji and Samoa.

Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black

Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism: The making of the black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. [assign Kelley foreword; classic text for thinking about racial capitalism]

Vessup, Aaron. Black in China. [Prof from Chicago goes to China]

Debates on Contemporary Events

Franck Billé, Sören Urbansky (eds.)- Yellow perils- China Narratives in the Contemporary World, Honolulu - University of Hawai’i Press, 2018.

Binney, Carola. "Beyond the Pale. Ideas About Racial Hierarchies are not Outdated­ Anathema Here But Unquestioned Belief." Spectator, Aug. 17, 2017. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/beyond-the-pale-17-august-2017

Carrico and Gries essay 2015 in Nation and Nationalisms roundtable: Race and taboo [harangue about Chinese denials of racism while pointing fingers at westerners; MIT 2006 controversy]

Coleman, Robin Means. All Around the World Same Song: Blackness, Racism, and Popular Culture in China. Journal of Media Sociology, 2009. (in pdfs) [touts autoethnography and brings reader along on tourism trips; introduces issue of Blackness, and very self-reflexive]

Dai Na Mei summarizes arguments about race in China, 2016. [Taiwan-based writer, in Chinese, responding to Qiaobi detergent ad debates]

Economist. "Who is Chinese? The Upper Han." Nov. 16, 2016. [China lays claim to the whole diaspora; eg, kidnapped overseas Chinese] [https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han

Fiskesjö, Magnus. "Chinese Racism: Main Features." Ms. in process. To be made available.

-Fiskesjö, Magnus. "The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond 'the West and the Rest'." Education About Asia 22.1 (2017). https://www.asianstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/the-legacy-of-the-chinese-empires-beyond-the-west-and-the-rest.pdf

Huang, Frankie. "A Complicated History of Han Chinese Anti-Blackness." Zora, July 31, 2020. https://zora.medium.com/a-complicated-history-of-han-chinese-anti-blackness-9866eb75e477 [US Chinese immigrants: be model minority so can't be ally]

Leibold, James. "China's Minority Report: When Racial Harmony Means Homogenization." Foreign Affairs, March 23, 2016. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2016-03-23/chinas-minority-report

**Link, Perry. "Seeing the CCP Clearly," New York Review of Books, Jan 2021. [ Highly respected scholar of Chinese politics addresses debates between Chinese dissidents who are Trump supporters vs Trump critics, the figure of the "White Left" (Baizuo), and westerners' myopia about the CCP's authoritarian power in China].

-New Yorker article on internet beauty apps like meitu: inc beauty=paler

On Being Black in China. The Atlantic, 2013. [guy from the US comments on major discrimination as English teacher starting 2003, had been there since 1990, students want different, white teacher=paying so much money, don't want to look at him] https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/07/on-being-black-in-china/277878/

Vanita Reddy and Anantha Sudhakar “Introduction: Feminist and Queer: Afro-Asian Formations”

Robeson Taj Frazier, Lin Zhang, Ethnic identity and racial contestation in cyberspace: Deconstructing the Chineseness of Lou Jing, May 19, 2014.

Celina Romany, “Critical Race Theory in Global Context” in Crossroads, Directions, And A New Critical Race Theory by Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, Angela P. Harris (on law)

Sheridan, Derek. Racist or Not? [addresses Qiaobi detergent debates]

X Yuan - japansociology.com [brief stub in Chinglish, from state pov, claims ethnic groups live apart and poverty due to geography, denies 'race' as translation for 'ethnicity']

… “-“Racial” Discrimination in China: A Brief Overview through the Experiences of Chinese Han People …“Race” as an English word has totally different meaning in China, another Chinese word “民族” [1](National Minority) is usually used to describe different ethnic groups instead …

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Online

Responses to the Qiaobi Ad

           Part 1: https://youtu.be/hOXDUBDajFA

           Part 2: https://youtu.be/3QoEkeOVkEU

LodossWarz responds to Qiaobi Commercial, U.S. (2017)

A Multimillion dollar industry in racist videos about Black Africans

BBC viral video exposing a Chinese man making racist videos of Malawian children (2020)

"Racist videos about Africans fuel a multimillion dollar industry Chinese industry". rest of world blog, 2022.

"BBC Africa Eye expose: Chinese man extradited to Malawi over racist videos," BBC News, July 2022.

--On the 2018 new year show Africa skit

This one begins with the crucial point that we shouldn't view this simply thru a lens of US race relations:
http://supchina.com/2018/02/16/cctv-spring-festival-gala-a-truly-shameless-africa-skit-blackface/
And this on commentary from the new organization Black Lives China:
http://supchina.com/2018/02/20/black-lives-china-comments-on-africa-sketch-in-cctv-gala/

As a link? Af American contemp pop in China?

-Hiphop fever: (K. Brown syllabus) Michael Eric Dyson: The Globalization of Rap (NPR interview)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1395476

                        Jeffrey Hays, Hip Hop and Rap in China

http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat7/sub41/item1627.html

                        Brendan O’kane, “[Help], [Help], [Help], the police!” (blog response to NYT

                                    piece on Chinese hip-hop)

http://bokane.org/2009/01/26/help-help-help-the-police/

                        Jamila Trindle, “Made in China: Hip-Hop Moves East”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17204661

                        Jimmy Wang, “Now Hip-Hop, Too, Is Made in China”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/arts/music/24hiphop.html?scp=1&sq=hip-hop%20shanghai&st=cse&_r=0

Obamao- Chris Anderson, “Sino the Times: The ObaMao T-shirt”

http://travel.cnn.com/explorations/shop/obamao-tshirt-658266

                        Sarah Anne Hughes, “‘Obama Fried Chicken’ Restaurant Spotted in Beijing; KFC

                                    Considering Legal Action”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/post/obama-fried-chicken-restaurant-spotted-in-beijing/2011/10/03/gIQAUwIEIL_blog.html

                        David Ng, “'Obamao' Artwork Tests Limits of Free Speech in China”

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/11/obamao-artwork-tests-limits-of-free-speech-in-china.html

NBA in China

Samuel Chi, “China’s NBA Love Affair”

http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/chinas-nba-love-affair/

                        Clifford Coonan, “NBA Grows in China”

http://variety.com/2013/tv/news/nba-grows-in-china-1200498569/

                         Ben Sin, “N.B.A. Looks to Asia for Next Growth Spurt”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/business/international/nba-looks-to-asia-for-next-growth-spurt.html

                        May Zhou, “NBA Does a Slam-Dunk in China”

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2014-04/04/content_17409032.htm

Mon Feb 3 Racial Capitalism, (Trans)nationalism, and Global Modernities

• READ: Kelley, Robin D.G. Foreword in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Univ of N. Carolina Press, 2000. (20 pp). (ereserve).
• READ: Dirlik, Arif. 2008. Race Talk, Race, and Contemporary Racism, PMLA 123(5). (14 pp). (ereserve).

Wed Feb 5 Race, Translating, Transracializing

• READ: Liu, Lydia. Preface, in Translingual practice: Literature, national culture, and translated modernity--China, 1900-1937. (5 pp) (ereserve).
• READ: Alim, Samy H. "Who's Afraid of the Transracial Subject? Raciolinguistics and the Political Project of Transracialization," Alim, Rickford and Ball, eds. Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes our Ideas about Race, Oxford Univ Press, 2016. (16 pp) (ereserve)
• Sheridan, Derek. "種族 / zhongzu / race," unpublished manuscript, 2021. (ereserve) (19 pp).

Baker, Lee D. 2010. Anthropology and the racial politics of culture. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.

Alastair Bonnett (1998) Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21:6, 1029-1055, DOI: 10.1080/01419879808565651
This article provides a critical history of the conflation of European and white identities. It commences with an overview of pre-modern white identities in China and the Middle East. The production of a racialized European white identity is then examined. The obsessional, exclusionary character of European racial whiteness is related to the gradual marginalization of non-European white identities. Drawing primarily on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century commentaries, it is also argued that the excessive idealization of whiteness characteristic of its modern European form engenders an unstable and contradictory identity: in societies structured upon class, ethnic and gender hierarchies the‘burden of whiteness’ cannot be equally apportioned. The article concludes with some observations on the challenge historical geographical studies of white identities present to contemporary anti-racists.

Brodkin, Karen. 2000. Global capitalism: What’s race got to do with it? American Ethnologist 27.2 (1 May): 237–256.

Feuchtwang, Stephan. "The Chinese Race-Nation." Anthropology Today 9.1 (1993), 14-15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783337?seq=1

Global China as Method.

Hill, Jane. 2008. Whiteness in everyday language (cited by Sheridan in his Tanzania piece)

Kelley, Robin D.G. Foreword in Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Univ of N. Carolina Press, 2000. (20 pp).

Liu, Lydia. Preface, in Translingual practice: Literature, national culture, and translated modernity--China, 1900-1937. (5 pp)

Olaloku-Teriba, Annie. "Afro-pessimism and the Unlogic of Anti-Blackness," critique of afro-pessimism and exceptionalisms/reductionisms of notion of global anti-blackness (eg., Wilderson's 2016 lecture, entitled ‘Irreconcilable Anti-Blackness).

Frederic Pain (白威廉). A semiotic approach to ‘ethnicity’. An example from Taiwanese ‘Chineseness’, Asian Ethnicity. Pages 528-549 | Received 01 Apr 2018, Accepted 23 Apr 2018, Published online: 05 Jun 2018.

Sheridan, Derek. 2016. Racist or Not Racist": the Better Question is Whether Racism is Being (Re)-Produced or Deconstructed in China, Derek Sheridan Blog. [addresses Qiaobi debates, def. of racism, structural racism, responds to Castillo and to Sautman and Yan]

Krystal A. Smalls. Race, SIGNS, and the Body: Towards a Theory of Racial Semiotics. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race Edited by H. Samy Alim, Angela Reyes, and Paul V. Kroskrity (ordered for Reed lib) 

Youtube:

Robin Kelley, "Revisiting Black Marxism in the Wake of Black Lives Matter," Speak Out Now, 2016.

Robin Kelley Talk. "What is Racial Capitalism and Why does it Matter?" Seattle, WA 2017

"Robin Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation", University of Toronto, 2017.

Robin Kelley on BLM protests on Democracy Now, spring 2020.

Arif Dirlik, "Crisis and Criticism: the Predicament of Global Modernity," India China Institute, 2014. [addresses Xi Jinping's "China Dream"]

Transracializations in the PRC

Being Black and Mixed Race in China. ViceAsia, 2022

Chronology: Moments in Chinese Historiography

WATCH: Weekend Film: Wolf Warrior II, Wu Jing, dir., 2017, 120 min (Stream via Moodle) **Content Notes: Depictions of graphic military and terrorist violence, glorification of guns and hand to hand combat.

Mon Feb 10 Racism as Universal? Racism as Historical?

• READ: Dikotter, Frank. Preface to new edition and Ch. 1 "Race as Culture: Historical Background," The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. [revised and expanded 2015] (23 pp). (ereserve)
• READ: Dirlik, Arif. "Review Article: The Discourse of Race in Modern China," China Information Vol 7(4), 1993 (with Dikotter response). (ereserve)

Wed Feb 12

• READ: Cheng, Yinghong. "Ch. 5 Racism and Its Agents in China." Discourses of Race and Rising China. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. (ereserve, bookstore).
  • Reading Guide: SKIM p. 242-251, FOCUS Social Darwinism p. 252-259, SKIM p. 259-266, FOCUS Han Clothing and Huanghan discourse p. 266-277, SKIM 277-280, FOCUS White Left p. 280-292

Berry, Chris. 1992. "Race" (民 族): Chinese Film and the Politics of Nationalism. Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 45-58 (14 pages)

Dikötter, Frank. "Forging National Unity: Ideas of Race in China." Global Dialogue (Online); Nicosia Vol. 12, Iss. 2,  (Summer 2010): 1-11.

Dikotter, Frank. Racial discourse in China: continuities and permutations in Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, Volume 3m edited by John Hutchinson, Anthony D. Smith

East Asian Savage - Untouched Orientalism and Imperial Anthropology: Introduction to the Special Issue - Anthropology and East Asia

Lin Yuhan. "Is China Really Ready for Black Stories?" Sixth Tone, May 29, 2021.

Springer, Alyeiha. Anti-Black Racism in China: Through the Eyes of Aaron A. Vessup and Lou Jing, 2020. [undergrad thesis]
This thesis examines and analyzes anti-black racism in China through two different cases. Aaron A. Vessup, a professor from Chicago, moves to China to continue his teaching career. He is exposed to racism and microagressions, which he writes about in his book Black in China. Lou Jing, a half African American, half Shanghainese girl, rises to fame when she is a contestant on the Shanghai's version of American Idol, Let's Go! Oriental Angel. Lou Jing is met with criticisms about her race, which opens a debate about whether or not she is Chinese. Along with introducing and analyzing the stories of these two people, this thesis will examine the history of colorism in China, the treatment of African Americans in China, and racism in Chinese media in order to open a discussion about anti-black racism in China and its different forms. This thesis discovers that anti-black racism in China is a product of the history of colorism in China. This history has led to many Chinese people thinking that those who are black are inferior to them. This thesis will question these notions of inferiority and attempt to come up with solutions and change for this racism.

Refusing to Inherit “China”: The Troubled Histories and Continuities of an Anthropological Object

Colorism (term coined by Alice Walker 1982, a focus on skin color/lightness as a marker of status/hierarchy within an identity group).

G Burgess-Smith. Circuits of race: Consumption of colorism in Nivea's “Natural Fairness” campaign, 2018 - commons.emich.edu
The purpose of this study is to analyze Nivea's 2017 “Natural Fairness” campaign in order to understand how colorism is consumed through public relations. As a skincare line … mainstream news and media sites in China and overseas covered the story …

China's Quest for Fair Skin. Sixth Tone Blog. 2020.
[argues its more about class than race, harkens back to ancient china and femin. beauty, dodges any suggestion it might have to do with racism]

Comparison of Local Colorism Between America and China from the Perspective of Cultural Nationalism [Chinese lang, substitutes 'colorism' for 'racism', touts as good for Han natlism??]

杨璐僖， 赖春梅 - 外语教育与翻译发展创新研究 (第八卷), 2019 - cpfd.cnki.com.cn
Under respective social background, local colorism both in America and in China reflects cultural nationalism. With the beginning of a brief summary of local colorim and cultural nationalism, this essay studies the comparison of local colorism between America and China from the perspective of cultural nationalism, and the cultural causes of the differences. Currently, national culture and cultural confidence are more  than independent for the further development of all nations in the world. And the revival of local colorism is in a position to foster the development of national culture and cultural confidence.

M Jha. The global beauty industry: Colorism, racism, and the national body. 2015
[Chapter on Chinese femininity and beauty econ] Moving between the US, India, and China, Jha provides an intersectional analysis that illumi- nates how class, caste, colorism, and nationalism structure how beauty is defined at the local, national, and global level. Beauty …

Y Mingyang. Skin-Lightening Products in China. japansociology.com.
multinational cosmetic companies contribute much to the colorism in contemporary China.

E Yeung. White and beautiful: an examination of skin whitening practices and female empowerment in China. 2015 - academiccommons.columbia.edu
The ability to purchase these products provides women the illusion of privilege, agency, and social mobility (Saraswati, 2010).This article examines the role of colorism in contemporary China and the perception of privilege that cosmetic whitening products generate for Chinese …

China and Whiteness:

Aldina Camenisch and Brigitte Suter (2020): Diverse Encounters: European Migrants’ Contact Zones in China. Contemporary European Emigration, L. Akeson and B. Suter (eds.). London: Routledge: 138-156.
With China’s global economic and political ascendance, a growing and diversifying group of foreigners make Chinese cities their home. Employing the notion of contact zones and critically contesting simplified notions of privileged and segregated ‘expats’, this chapter explores how varying structural and individual conditions foreground the ways in which European migrants experience their presence in China and forge relationship with Chinese individuals. We investigate how interviewees’ everyday life in China primarily unfolds through their workplace, their housing arrangements and neighbourhoods, and the educational institutions where their children are schooled, and we capture and discuss the diverse social relations forged therein. These range from hierarchically uneven to equal yet multi-layered social relationships with Chinese nationals, and they result in varying experiences of Chinese environments. As such, our findings challenge common postcolonial assumptions on power relations between white foreigners and their local contacts and draw attention to the increasing complexity of such encounters.

Julian M. Groves, Paul O’Connor, Whiteness out of place: White parents’ encounters with local Chinese schooling in post-colonial Hong Kong Sociological Review, 2019.
We identify a missing narrative about the place of whiteness in post-colonial Hong Kong. Using an anthropological framework developed by Mary Douglas, we show how white migrants who try to integrate their children into local Cantonese medium of instruction schools are challenged by recurring obstacles that highlight their whiteness and signal them as ‘matter out of place’ by transgressing colonial assumptions about whiteness in the territory. In adopting this framework, we reorient the current focus of whiteness studies away from examining the strategies and performances employed by white migrants in the production of whiteness to the regulation of whiteness by the social order. By identifying the absence of an appropriate narrative for these parents in the local education system, we highlight not just the continuity of colonial constructs of whiteness, but also the constraints upon those who try to escape them

Keevak, Micheal. The Chinese were white – until white men called them yellow. This Week in Asia. 2019. invention of the so-called Yellow Peril in 1895, brought into worldwide circulation by an illustration made after a drawing by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and designed as a call to arms for European nations to protect themselves from the potential onslaught of East Asian military aggression, social degradation, and emigration to the West.

Pauline Leonard (2008) Migrating identities: gender, whiteness and Britishness in post-colonial Hong Kong, Gender, Place & Culture, 15:1, 45-60, DOI: 10.1080/09663690701817519

Nayak, Anoop. Critical Whiteness Studies Sociology Compass 1/2 (2007): 737–755,      
[argues Whiteness is hot, but too parochial, needs to be int'l]

Shanshan Lan's ChinaWhite project [group of researchers, Phd Candidates led by Lan]
With the rise of China’s economy, more and more westerners are moving to China for business and job opportunities. One consequence of this reverse migration is the transformation of whiteness from a majority identity in western countries to a minority identity in China. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being white in China’s thriving market economy and consumer culture? How is whiteness racialized in relation to blackness and other immigrant identities in various social domains and in different regions in China? How are multiple versions of whiteness negotiated and performed through daily life interactions between white migrants and Chinese in various social and personal settings?

Yang Liu & Fred Dervin (2020) Racial marker, transnational capital, and the Occidental Other: white Americans’ experiences of whiteness on the Chinese mainland, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2020.1763785
This study focuses on the underexplored white Americans’ experiences of whiteness in such predominantly non-white contexts as the Chinese mainland, juxtaposing transnational white migration, postcolonial imaginations, and notions of Otherness. Thirty-two white Americans living in mainland China were interviewed between 2015 and 2016, and their narratives were analysed under the guidance of grounded theory. The results revealed that the white Americans in this study experienced the curious and admiring Chinese gaze as a whiteness-centred Othering, which visually consumed them as objects and transformed them into commodities with the qualities desired by many Chinese locals. In this context, these Americans experienced whiteness as a racialisation process in which they adopted various strategies to negotiate their white Otherness in mainland China at the intersection of geography, gender, class, nationality and occupation. Subject to the dominant Chinese gaze, the interviewed Americans felt prey to Occidentalism that displaced, dislocated, and even excluded them as the privileged yet marginalised Occidental Other on the Chinese mainland.

OT Zhou. Communicating 'race'in a digitized gay China Queer Sites in Global Contexts: Technologies, Spaces …, 2020
[re: white gay men expats in urban China]

Race, Gender and White People Saving "Africa" and "Africans"
(Precedents for Wolf Warrior 2)

• Rogue, 2020 (Megan Fox)
• Machine Gun Preacher, 2011
• Blood Diamond, 2006 (Leonardo diCaprio)
• Tears of the Sun, 2003 (Bruce Willis)
• The Air Up There, 1994 (Kevin Bacon)
• Rambo: First Blood, 1982 (Sylvestor Stallone)

Increasingly Militaristic Chinese Feature Films
(a milieu for Wolf Warrior 2)

• The Taking of Tiger Mountain (智取威虎山; 2014)
• Wolf Warrior (战狼; 2015)
• Operation Mekong (湄公河行動; 2016)
• Sky Hunter (空天猎; 2017)

"Experience China": 1 minute short video aired in New York Times Square prior to China President Hu Jintao's visit, 2011 (mentioned by Cheng).

• Sina.com Introduction to the film, 2011
  "The video is part of the public diplomacy campaign by the Chinese government ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's U.S. state visit. The video will be shown at Times Square 15 times every hour from 6 am to 2 am next day, totaling 20 hours and 300 times a day. It will last till Feb. 14 with a total of 8,400 times of show time. Meanwhile, CNN also plans to run the video from Jan. 17 to Feb. 13."
• China Daily Intro to the film, 2011
• Discussion of the film, with silent video taken of the video on times square, 2011
• Two versions of the film with music, Youtube

Transracializations in the PRC

Being Black and Mixed Race in China. ViceAsia, 2022

Wolf Warrior, the Phenom

• Wolf Warrior II: The Rise of China and Gender/Sexuality Politics MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of "Wolf Warrior II: The Rise of China and Gender/Sexual Politics," a compilation of short essays on the film Wolf Warrior II edited by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel. The essays are online at: http://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/liu-rofel/.
• Sheridan, Derek. 2017. Wolf Warrior Two: An African Playground for Manly Battles
• Wolf Warrior diplomacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy
  
• China's Wolf Warrior 2 in War-Ravage Africa Gives the White Savior Complex a Whole New Meaning. QZ.com.
• Connolly, Peter. Chinese Evacuations and Power Project part 2: a Movie Genre is Born. The Strategist, 2018. [Discusses WW2 final scene with the Chinese passport].
• Under Xi, What is China's Image of the "Real Man"? CNN Style, 2019.
• Commentary from Chinese social media (curated by Annie Jiang)

Transnational Backlash: Conservative Responses to "Left" Ideas

• "Will American Ideas Tear France Apart? Some of its Leaders Think So," New York Times, Feb. 10, 2021.

Chronology: Moments in European and American Visions of "China"

Mon Feb 17 Western Liberalism and Racialization: Becoming Labor, Becoming Yellow

• READ: Lowe, Lisa, "The intimacies of four continents," in Haunted by empire: geographies of intimacy in North American history, pp. 191-212, Duke, 2006. (17 pp). (ereserve).
• READ: Keevak, Michael. "Introduction," (24 pp) and Ch. 3 "19th Century Anthropology and the Measurement of "Mongolian" Skin Color," (20 pp) Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. (ereserve, bookstore, book reserve). 

Wed Feb 19 Late Imperial China: Becoming a Nation, Becoming Chinese

• READ: Leibold, James. OPTIONAL: Introduction (pp 1-12 ONLY); and "Ch. 1 From Race to Nation: the Bounding of the Chinese Geo-Body," Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese. Palgrave, 2007. (30 pp) (ereserve, bookstore).
• READ: Chung, Yuehtsen Juliette. "Better Science and Better Race? Social Darwinism and Chinese Eugenics," Isis, 2014, 105:793– 802. (ereserve). (10 pp).

DUE: Commentary Two, Sunday, Feb 23, midnight, posted to your Moodle Blog forum.
Discuss and analyze relevant histories of social differentiation in Chinese regions. What is "China"? "Chineseness"? "Yellowness"? "Whiteness"? For whom?

DUE: Comments on Commentaries, Monday, Feb 24, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle Blog forum.

Keisha Blain “For the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World."

Blue, Gregory. Gobineau on China.

Chung, Yuehtsen Juliette. Struggle For National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in a Transnational Context, 1896-1945. London: Routledge, 2002.

Dikotter, Frank. Ch. 6 on Eugenics

Fiskesjö, M. 1999. On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China. Inner Asia 1(2): 139–68. (19 pp).

MS Gallicchio -The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945. 2000.

Hostetler, Laura. Qing colonial enterprise : ethnography and cartography in early modern China. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2001.

Junliang Huang. The Unsettled Rhetoric of Colour: Race in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Travels across China in the 1920s, Pages 1188-1206 | Published online: 05 Aug 2019

his essay is the first study from a racial perspective of Travels in China (1925), the travelogue by the renowned Taisho Japanese short-story writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. The essay draws attention to the colourized body in a multiracial environment under semicolonialism and discusses how Akutagawa’s travelogue demonstrates the destruction of racial identities, including the conceptual white. Unlike other studies of Travels in China, which usually discuss Akutagawa’s trip as a whole, I divide his route into four zones – each corresponding to a chapter in the travelogue – and analyze them individually (with the understanding that none of the four zones should be considered isolated, homogeneous spaces). Tracking his route from Shanghai to the lower and middle Yangtze River, then to the northern part of the continent, and even back to Japan, we see how he, as well as those around him, ceaselessly examines his own skin colour in response to the power struggles across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. With ample evidence from a detailed reading of the text, this essay demonstrates the vagueness, fluidity, and instability of racial categories. For the traveller Akutagawa, in his experiences of everyday semicolonialism, race functions as a cognitive mechanism through which he absorbs and processes the social significance of each skin colour. In this way, skin colour becomes an open-ended concept (or a living metaphor) for Akutagawa rather than an inherited essence, the meaning and signification of which change depending on the different social contexts that he encounters.

Jenco and Chappell. Overlapping Histories, Co-produced Concepts: Imperialism in Chinese Eyes. Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2020 ['empire' as global coproduction; good overview of New Qing History and its Chinese critics]

Leibold 2012

Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke Univ Press, 2015.

Miles, Steven B. Chinese Diasporas: A Social History of Global Migration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xi, 266 pp. ISBN: 9781107179929

Rossabi, Morris. "Introduction," Morris Rossabi, Ed. ,China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its Neigbors, 10-14th Centuries, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Sasaki, Motoe. Excludable Aliens vs. One National People: The U.S. Chinese Exclusion Policy and the Racialization of Chinese in the United States and China, The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012) [rare look at racialization in both China and US]

Pearl Sherrod. Black Internationalist Feminism and Afro Asian Politics during the 1930s”

S Shih. Race and Revolution: Blackness in China's Long Twentieth Century, PMLA, 2013 - MLA (in pdf folder) [short, just 7 pages, and focuses on the translation of a novel in late 1950s, gives nice overview of history of].

- The History Of Sino-Black Relations 
NüVoices’s Cindy Gao talks to Keisha Brown, a fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, about the history of Sino-Black relations and the changing perception of race and identity in China.
LISTEN

-Brown interview with SUP China
https://supchina.com/2019/02/01/sino-black-relations-and-identity-politics-keisha-brown/

Chronology: Moments in Chinese Historiography

Mon Feb 24 The Chinese Nation-State and the Politics of Personhood: Becoming Han

• READ: Alonso, Ana-Maria. The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity," Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 23:379-405, 1994. (22 pp) (ereserve). Reading Guide: FOCUS on pp. 379-392, SKIM rest.
• Chen, Zhihong. "Climate's Moral Economy: Geography, Race, and the Han in Early Republican China. Mullaney et al, eds., Critical Han Studies: the History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority. Berkeley: UCalif Press, 2012. (ereserve)
• Teng, Emma. "On Not Looking Chinese: Does 'Mixed Race' Decenter the Han from Chineseness?" Mullaney et al, eds., Critical Han Studies: the History, Representation, and Identity of China's Majority. Berkeley: UCalif Press, 2012. (ereserve)

Wed Feb 26 Minoritizing Others in the Chinese Nation-State

• READ: Mullaney, Thomas. Ch. 1 "Identity Crisis in Postimperial China," Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. (23 pp) (ereserve).
• READ: Uradyn Bulag, “Minority Nationalities as Frankenstein’s Monsters? Reshaping “the Chinese Nation” and China’s Quest to Become a ‘Normal Country’”. The China Journal. 2021. 86:, 46-67.(ereserve).

Anagnost, Ann. National Past-times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Berry, Chris. 1992. "Race" (民 族): Chinese Film and the Politics of Nationalism. Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 45-5.

Bille, Franck. Cooking the Mongols/Feeding the Han: Dietary and Ethnic Intersections in Inner Mongolia. Inner Asia, 2009 [good for Hanness and complexity, argues against fetishizing ethnic diff].

Chung, Yuehtsen Juliette. Struggle For National Survival: Chinese Eugenics in a Transnational Context, 1896-1945. London: Routledge, 2016.

Duara Linear history and nation-state chapter, much on race, social darwinism, how taken up by Chinese intellectuals as 'national character'

Liebold, James. 2012. "Searching for Han: Early 20th Century Narratives of Chinese Origins and Development," in Thomas Mullaney et al, eds., Critical Han Studies. UC Press. pp 210-233. (23 pgs)

Leibold. Ch. 4 From the Yellow Emperor to Peking Man: The Nationalists and the Construction of Zhonghua Minzu. [Han article of his is better, more accessible]

Liu, Lydia. Ch. 9 Rethinking Culture and National Essence [Guo Cui], in Translingual practice: Literature, national culture, and translated modernity--China, 1900-1937 [says wenhua did not take on ethnog sense till 20th; as product of imperialisms]

Racism in the Service of Civil Rights: DuBois in Germany, China, and Japan, 1936-37

Lewis, David Levering. Black Renaissance; New York Vol. 4, Iss. 1,  (Spring 2002): 8.

Du Bois sailed from Yokahoma on the Tatsuta Maru, a Japanese liner that, he took vicarious pride in noting, "start{ed} on the dot" on the afternoon of December 17. He pronounced himself overwhelmed. Never in his life had he received "such a series of attention and evidences of welcome as in Japan," Du Bois informed his readers. This was all the more astonishing "because he had no official status." His reception was in no sense "a personal tribute," he hastened to emphasize, but an unoffical means by which official Japan intended to speak through him to twelve million Americans in whom "she recognized a common brotherhood, a common suffering and a common destiny." Overwhelmed he may have been, but not blinded. Du Bois was perturbed by the conformity of Japanese culture. Shintoism transformed into a modern ethic of emperor-worship yielded impressive results in terms of order, solidarity, and activism, yet he readily discerned the underlying inhospitality to criticism, to deviant ideas, to alien practices. State Shinto hampered "freedom of spirit and expression," he conceded. Yet, all things have their price. Whatever its serious flaws of conformity and militarism, Japan was for Du Bois that rarest of phenomena in the white imperium, "above all a country of colored people run by colored people for colored people." For the first time in his life, he had lived in a country that white people did not control "directly or indirectly," he cheered. "The Japanese run Japan, and that even English and Americans recognize and act accordingly."

Chinese Diaspora Internet Publics

• World Huaren Federation (formerly Huaren.org, cited by Teng. Founded in 1998).
  Their mission:
  "To ensure that Huaren are treated with dignity wherever they are, by promoting the well-beings of all peoples, and by cultivating in Huaren and non-Huaren the spirit of living together as communities of equal citizens."
  Guobin Yang (2003, 482): From 12–15 May 1998, riots and violence [aimed at ethnic Chinese] broke out in Jakarta, Indonesia... Such violence had happened before, most tragically in the ethnocide of 1965, but had received little attention among the world-wide ethnic Chinese population. This time around things were different. It started with a Mr Joe Tan in New Zealand, who ‘felt ashamed for doing nothing and got a bit sick of the indifferent attitude of most people’ (The Straits Times, 20 August 1998). Together with Tan Tse, a Chinese Canadian research engineer, Edward Liu, a San Francisco-based attorney, and W.W. Looi, an ethnic Chinese-Malaysian working for Oracle Corporation in California, he set up the World Huaren Federation (www.huaren.org), a web-site that directly invoked the idea of a cultural China to stage transnational protest against the ethnic violence in Indonesia (Arnold, 1998)
• Aihwa Ong (2003) CYBERPUBLICS AND DIASPORA POLITICS AMONG
  TRANSNATIONAL CHINESE, Interventions, 5:1, 82-100, DOI: 10.1080/13698032000049815
  [Ong is an eminent Chinese-Malaysian-American anthropologist who argues here that an early version of Huaren.org had problematic influence on events affecting Chinese in Indonesia in the late 1990s.]
• Suryadinata, Leo. “BLURRING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN HUAQIAO AND HUAREN: China’s Changing Policy towards the Chinese Overseas.” Southeast Asian Affairs, 2017, 101–14. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26492596.
• Yang Guobin. (2003) The Internet and the rise of a transnational Chinese cultural sphere
  By Guobin Yang. [analysing the same set of events in Indonesia as Ong does above].

Podcasts

• "EP1-中国民族政治（上）：五十六个民族是怎么来的？China's Minzu Politics--What are the 56 Minzu?" Ximalaya.com, 2019.
• The History Of Sino-Black Relations 
  NüVoices’s Cindy Gao talks to Keisha Brown, a fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, about the history of Sino-Black relations and the changing perception of race and identity in China. LISTEN
• Keisha Brown interview with SUP China, "Sino-Black Relations and Identity Politics," 2019.
  
  

Chronology: The Maoist Years in China

Mon Mar 3 Racialization and Class Struggle under Mao: the early PRC

• READ: Leibold. Ch. 5 "The Han Man's Burden: The Communists and the Construction of Zhonghua Minzu," Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese. Palgrave, 2007. (26 pp) (ereserve, bookstore, book reserve).
  • Reading Guide: focus on 148-154; SKIM: pp 155-160 (up to Zhonghua minzu and prob of Zhongzu); Focus on 160-167; SKIM: 168-170 (up to mid page); Focus on p. 170-172 (start with paragraph: 'in the second part of A Concise History...); SKIM: 172 (Narrative convergence)-173; Focus on 174-175
• READ: Russo, Alessandro. "Class Struggle," Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi. ANU Press, 2019 (8 pp). (ereserve).
• READ: Yi Xiaocuo. "Blood Lineage (xuetong)," Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere, eds., Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi. ANU Press, 2019 (6 pp). (ereserve).
  

Wed Mar Maoism and Black Internationalism

• READ: Mao Zedong, Statement Supporting the American Negroes In Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, Peking Review, 1963. (online).
• READ:  DuBois, W.E.B. "The Vast Miracle of China," National Guardian, June 1959. (ereserve) (1 page) **Content notes: a couple uses of the n-word, as part of his critique.
• READ: Brown, Keisha. Blackness in Exile:: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Role in the Formation of Representations of Blackness as Conceptualized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Phylon, 2016. (ereserve).
• READ: Kelley, Robin D.G. & Betsy Esch. [pp. 6-20 only] "Black like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution," Souls: Critical Journal of Black Politics & Culture, 1:4, 6-41. (ereserve).

DUE: Commentary Three, Sunday, Mar 9, midnight, posted to your Moodle Blog forum.
Consider the relationships between nationalisms and racialized/ethnic politics. Define some terms! What is a "nation" vs. a "state"? "race" vs. "ethnicity" vs. "class"?

DUE: Comments on Commentaries, Monday, Mar 10, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle Blog forum.

Uradyn E. Bulag 2012. ‘Seeing Like a Minority: Political Tourism and Ethnic Narrative in Early Socialist China’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 41, 4, 133–158.

Dikotter, Epilogue on CCP, a few pages

DuBois, W.E.B. “Our Visit to China.” China Pictorial. 20 March 1959. (2 pp). (I have pdf)

Taj Frazier, In Black radical image,The East is Black chapter 4

Gao, Y. (2013). W. E. B. AND SHIRLEY GRAHAM DU BOIS IN MAOIST CHINA. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 10(1), 59-85. doi:10.1017/S1742058X13000040
Using previously untranslated Chinese sources, this article adds dimension and insight into the visits of W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois to the People's Republic of China in 1959 and 1963. After discussing Du Bois's earlier writings and visit to China in 1936, the article reveals the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) awareness of Du Bois's favorable commentary on the nation during the 1950s. Using articles from the People's Daily (Renmin ribao) and other Chinese sources, I argue that the CCP and the Du Boises gained mutual benefit from the visit outside of the “arranged reality” of such political tourism. The CCP gained increased legitimacy among African nations as a nation of color. Du Bois widened his famous dictum about the importance of the color line in the twentieth century to include Asians. In a preface to a 1959 Chinese translation of the Souls of Black Folk (published to commemorate his visit), Du Bois amended his argument about the color line to emphasize the international struggle of the working classes. In addition to discussion on W. E. B. Du Bois's writings about China following the 1959 visit, I focus on Shirley Graham Du Bois's interactions with the Chinese, their knowledge of her scholarship about Paul Robeson, the celebrated Black American singer, actor, and communist, and her politically sympathetic actions toward China. After the death of her husband, Graham Du Bois sustained involvement with China throughout the Cultural Revolution until her death in 1977 and interment in the Babaoshan Cemetery for Revolutionary Heroes in Beijing. Her burial fixed an appropriate identity with China. While her husband's grave site was in Ghana, an unfriendly military government controlled that nation and the United States was no longer her home country. China became her permanent home.

Hundle, Anneeth Kaur. On Blue Economies: Afro-Asianism, Imperial Entanglements, Geopolitics, American Anthropologist, 2022.

Matthew Johnson, “From Peace to Panthers: PRC Engagement with African-American Transnational Networks, 1949-1979”

Link, Perry. "Seeing the CCP Clearly," New York Review of Books, Jan 2021. [ Highly respected scholar of Chinese politics addresses debates between Chinese dissidents who are Trump supporters vs Trump critics, the figure of the "White Left" (Baizuo), and westerners' myopia about the CCP's authoritarian power in China].

Liu Kang, “Maoism: Revolutionary Globalism for the Third World Revisted”

Mao Zedong. US Imperialism is a Paper Tiger, 1956.

Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations.

Seio Nakajima (2015) The Paradox of Class Labeling in the Mao Era: Bio-Power, Racism, and the Question of Violence, Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies, 4:1,3-20.

Youtube Videos:

• Mao Zedong announces the establishment of the PRC (Oct. 1, 1949)
• Mao Zedong announces the establishment of the PRC (Oct 1, 1949, longer version)
• Mao Zedong 1956 speech
• 1958 CIA film on Maoist China
• W.E.B. Dubois talk on socialism, 1960, lauding China, [in which he mentions Tibet 29:45.]

Podcasts

• The History Of Sino-Black Relations 
  NüVoices’s Cindy Gao talks to Keisha Brown, a fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, about the history of Sino-Black relations and the changing perception of race and identity in China. LISTEN
• Keisha Brown interview with SUP China, "Sino-Black Relations and Identity Politics," 2019.

Bandung Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, 1955
First Meeting of African and Asian states, many newly independent.

• Bandung Conference (Wikipedia)
  In 2005, on the 50th anniversary of the original conference, leaders from Asian and African countries met in Jakarta and Bandung to launch the New Asian–African Strategic Partnership (NAASP). They pledged to promote political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the two continents.
• The Asian-African (Bandung) Conference: Fact and Fiction, Blackpast.org, 2017
• Digital Archive of speeches and texts of the Bandung Conference, Wilson Center
• Nopper, Tamara. "The Illusion of Afro-Asian Solidarity? Situating the 1955 Bandung Conference," Black Perspectives, 2015.
  She cites American novelist Richard Wright, who attended as an observer from where he lived in Paris:
  

  “A stream of realizations claimed my mind: these people were ex-colonial subjects, people whom the white West called ‘colored’ peoples…Almost all of the nations mentioned had been, in some form or other, under the domination of Western Europe: some had been subjected to for a few decades and others had been ruled for three hundred and fifty years…The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world!”

  But she concludes: Overall, then, Bandung may be an event that was largely a gathering of good intentions on the surface and a developing albeit highly fractured pan-Asian nationalism. Asian nations controlled the planning and the proceedings and dominated in both numbers and importance. Africa was hardly present. And the African American presence was limited to observers and journalists.

Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

• Mao Biography (Wikipedia)
• Leaders and Role Models (Mao Zedong) [online resource at U Washington)
• Full text translation of Mao's famous Talks at the Yenan forum on art and literature, where he lays out his views on the role of mass media in the revolution.
• Marxist.org Mao Zedong reference archive
  Full-text online translations of much of Mao's collected works.
• Buckley, Chris. 2013. "Milder Accounts of Hardship as Mao's Birthday Approaches," New York Times.

Maoist Campaigns

• List of Estimated Deaths in Manmade Disasters
  Matthew White's Online Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. Scroll down to bottom for detailed list of estimates of deaths during the Maoist campaigns.
• Landsberger Propaganda Posters: 1958 "8 point charter for Agriculture"
  Mao's 8 points for reforms in agricultural methods and technologies.
• Landsberger Propaganda Posters: 1958 "Eliminate the 4 Pests"
• Landsberger Propaganda Posters: The Great Leap Forward
  Utopian visions of a socialist future quickly achieved.
• Landsberger Propaganda Posters: The Cultural Revolution (1966-)
  The peak period for the production of propaganda posters in the PRC.
• Landsberger Propaganda Posters: Monsters and Demons (1966-)
• China News Digest's Virtual Cultural Revolution Museum
• Steve Landsberger's Site on Maoist propaganda posters
• Morning Sun
  An amazing multimedia online archive and commentary on Cultural Revolution era life and culture. Accompanies the film of the same name. Produced by Long Bow, inc.
• Rent Collection Courtyard Overview
  Extension notes, background and images on the clay diorama from Morning Sun.
  
• Rent Collection Courtyard re-staged (Venice) [Award-winning expat Chinese artist Cao Guoqiang (b. 1957) recreates the Rent Collection Courtyard diorama in Venice. Later in NYC].

Chronology: Tibet and "Reform and Opening Up" in the Post-Mao PRC

WATCH Film: The Battle for Tibet, Frontline, Feb 2025, Gesbeen Mohammed, dir. 54 min (Stream Online PBS, see also added features, podcast, etc) **Content Notes: brief footage of a self-immolation protest and a person's burned body

Mon Mar 10 Tourism, Gender, and the Commodification of Tibetanness

• READ: Tenzin Jinba. "Introduction," Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, In the Land of the Eastern Queendom: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border. Seattle. University of Washington press, 2014. (ereserve, book reserve). (72 pp).

Wed Mar 12 Tibetan Protest and Crackdown (2008-2010s)

• Dhundup Gyalpo. 2012. "Making Sense of Tibetan Self-Immolation," Phayul.com. (originally published in Asian Times). (online) **Content Notes: mention and discussion of suicide and self-immolation by fire.
• Makley, Charlene. The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies. Cultural Anthropology Journal, May 2015. (ereserve) (28 pp). **Content Notes: mention of suicide, suicide bombers, one non-graphic image and some description of a burned body and self-immolation events.

Debates about China's "Minorities"

Anagnost, Ann. National Past-times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Bulag, Uradyn E. (pages 12-14). Section: "Rectification of Names: The Final Solution", "Twentieth‐Century China: Ethnic Assimilation and Intergroup Violence." Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. (2.5 pp).

Bulag, Uradyn. "Ch. 3 Naturalizing National Unity: Political Romance and the Chinese Nation," The Mongols at China's Edge. Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

Blum, Susan. "Desire for Difference: Cognitive Prototypes of Ethnic Identity,' and "China's Minorities Through Han Eyes: a Preliminary Sketch," in Portraits of Primitives. Rowan and Littlefield, 2001. (50 pp.)

Diamond, Norma. "Ethnicity and the State: The Hua Miao of Southwest China," Ethnicity and the State, New York: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1993

Dreyer, June. China's Forty Millions: Minority Nationalities and National Integration in the People's Republic of China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Fei Xiaotong. "Ethnic Identification in China," in Toward a People's Anthropology, Beijing: New World Press, 1981. (17 pp). (ereserve)

Gladney, Dru. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the PRC Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 199.

Harrell, Stevan. Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China.

Honig, Emily. Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992.

Herberer, Thomas. China and Its National Minorities: Autonomy or Assimilation? Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989.

Agnieszka Janiak-Lüthi. The Han: China's Diverse Majority. University of Washington Press, 2015

Leibold, J. 2013. Ethnic Policy in China. Honolulu: East West Centre.

Litzinger, Ralph A. Other Chinas: The Yao and the Politics of National Belonging. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

Mueggler, Erik. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in SW China. Berkeley: Univ. of CA press, 2001.

Mackhann, Charles. "The Naxi and the Nationalities Question," in Harrell, Stevan, ed., Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1995.

Makley, Charlene. The Violence of Liberation. UCalif. Press, 2007.

Makley, Charlene. The Battle for Fortune. UCornell Press, 2018.

Mullaney, Thomas. 2011. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. UC Press.

Mullaney, Thomas. "Counting to Fifty-Six," Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. (13 pp).

Mullaney, Thomas. 2012. "Introduction," in Thomas Mullaney (Editor), James Patrick Leibold (Editor), Stéphane Gros (Editor), Eric Armand Vanden Bussche (Editor), Critical Han Studies. UC Press.

PRC State Council. White Paper: "National Minorities Policy and Its Practice in China". (Available on-line) http://www.china.org.cn/e-white/4/index.htm

 Safran, William (Ed.). Nationalism and Ethnoregional Identities in China. London: Frank Cass, 1998.

Sautmann, Barry. 1997. “Myths of Descent: Racial Nationalism and Ethnic Minorities in the People’s Republic of China.” In The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Frank Dikötter, 75–91.London: Hurst & Company. (17 pp).

Thierry, Francois. "Empire and Minority in China," Gerard Chaliand, Ed., Minority Peoples in the Age of Nation-States. London: Pluto Press, 1989.

White paper 2009:China's Ethnic Policy http://www.china.org.cn/government/whitepaper/node_7078073.htm

**- Berry, Chris. 1992. "Race" (民 族): Chinese Film and the Politics of Nationalism. Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 45-58 (14 pages) [will be good follow-up to previous readings on rise of 'minzu'; he translates it as 'race', a kind of essentialized ethnicity] [pair w/either Horse Thief or Sacrificed Youth, latter by a woman, highlights Han-minority relat.]

-A new perspective in guiding ethnic relations in the twenty-first century:'De-politicization'of ethnicity in China

R Ma - Asian Ethnicity, 2007 - Taylor & Francis

… For instance, during the late Qing dynasty when the western and Japanese invasions became a fatal threat to China's independence and culture, racism among the Han elites became very strong. The European Nationalism Movement: 'Politicizing' Ethnicity …

-Yeh, Emily. paper on passing in Tibet

- Ureltu’s Ewenki narratives and the crisis of minority cultures in China

--Bille, Franck. Cooking the Mongols/Feeding the Han: Dietary and Ethnic Intersections in Inner Mongolia. Inner Asia, 2009 [good for Hanness and complexity, argues against fetishizing ethnic diff]

-Bulag, Uradyn. 2010. Alter/Native Mongolian Identity: From Nationality to Ethnic Group. [book chapter; my pdf is corrupted; good for ethnicty/nation theory, postMao shift to fetishizing minority ethnicity, good overview for Inner Mongolia; might be really good paired with Franck's piece above]

--Wallenböck, Ute. 2019. “The Cultural and Educational Dimension of the ‘New Silk Road’: The Re-invention of Mongolness at the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies, 11, pp. 31–59. [pair with Bille and Bulag to update to BRI era?]

https://doi.org/10.2478/vjeas-2019-0002 [shows deployment of state/museumized Mongol ethnicity to harness to BRI/silk road initiatives in Henan county]

- Huiling Guo & Sarah Tynen (2015) Social distance, ethnicity, and

religion in Northwest China: a survey of inter- and intra-group attitudes among Han,

Hui, and Tibetan students, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 56:6, 679-712, DOI:

10.1080/15387216.2016.1160253 [sociolog/econ stats approach to measuring 'social distance' from simplistic surveys in Tib and Hui regions of Gansu and Ningxia]

Tibet and China Scholars' Statements on the 2008 Unrest

• China Beat Blog Coverage
  • "A Reader on Tibet" (April 3, 2009)
  • Selected coverage
• Andrew Fischer, "Hardlines Help No one" (The Guardian, April 2008)
• Elliot Sperling, "Tibet as 'Hell on Earth'," (Far Eastern Economic Review, March 2009
• Pico Iyer, "'a Hell on Earth," (New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009).
• Geramie Barme, "Torching the Relay," (China Beat blog, May 2008).
• James Miles, "James Miles on Media Coverage in Tibet," (China Beat blog, March 2008)
• Robbie Barnett
  • "Seven Questions: What Tibetans Want," (Foreign Policy, March 2008)
  • "2 Realities of Tibet," (New York Times, March 2008)
  • "In Case You Missed it: Tibet Special, part 4", (China Beat Blog, October 2008)
  • 2009. The Tibet Protests of Spring, 2008: Conflict between the Nation and the State, China Perspectives 3.
• Don Lopez, "How to Think about Tibet," (Open Democracy Blog, March 2008)
• Pankaj Mishra, "At War with the Utopia of Modernity," (The Guardian, March 2008).
• Jeff Wasserstrom, "China's Olympic Delusion," (The Nation, March 2008)
• John Powers, "Chinese Perspective on Tibet," (Youtube interview, ~Aug. 2008)
• Jamyang Norbu, "Barefoot Experts," (JN responds to Tibet experts' views on the unrest in his Blog Shadow Tibet, June 2008, see comments section as well)
• Makley, Charlene. (2009). "Ballooning Unrest: Tibet, State Violence and the Incredible Lightness of Knowledge," in China in 2008: a Year of Great Significance, Kate Merkel-Hess, Kenneth L. Pommeranz, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, ed.s, Routledge. (e-reserve).
• Sautman, Barry. 2008. "Protests in Tibet and Separatism: The Olympics and beyond." China Left Review Volume 1. http://chinaleftreview.org/index.php?id=28
• Yeh, Emily. Tibet and the problem of radical reductionism. Antipode 41, October 2009.

Debates over the nature of self-immolation protests among Tibetans

• Barnett, Robert. 2012. "Political Self-Immolation in Tibet: Causes and Influences", Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, no. 25, Décembre, pp. 41-64.

• Benn, James. Multiple Meanings of Buddhist Self-Immolation in China — A Historical Perspective. Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, no. 25, Décembre 2012, pp. 203-212.

• ---------------. Burning for the Buddha: Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhism. Studies in East Asian Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

• Biggs, Michael. 2012. "Self-Immolation in Context, 1963-2012", Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, no. 25, Décembre, pp. 143-150.

• ------------------. 2005. "Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations, 1963-2002," Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  Buffetrille, Katia. 2012. "Self-Immolation in Tibet: Some Reflections on an Unfolding History," Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, no. 25, Décembre, pp. 1-17.

• Cabezon, Jose. 2013.  "On the Ethics of the Tibetan Self-Immolations". Religion Dispatches (June 16).

• Cultural Anthropology. 2012. Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet, Carole McGranahan and Ralph Litzinger, ed.s [most Tibet scholars, including Tsering Shakya, Makley, Yeh, Woeser, weigh in in brief online essays].
  
  
• Dechen Pemba. 2012. Mourning Online, Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet, Carole McGranahan and Ralph Litzinger, ed.s. [discussion of Tibetan online commentary]
  • Alternative translation of Sangdhor poem, "Mourning" (by Charlene Makley and Abho)

• Dhundup Gyalpo. 2012. "Making Sense of Tibetan Self-Immolation," Asian Times Online.
  
  
• Makley, Charlene. 2015. The Sociopolitical Lives of Dead Bodies: Tibetan Self-Immolation Protest as Mass Media. Cultural Anthropology Journal, May 2015. (Online)
  
  
• Robin, Francoise. 2012. Fire, Flames and Ashes. How Tibetan Poets Talk about Self-Immolations without Talking about Them, Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines, no. 25, Décembre, pp. 123-131.

• Wang Lixiong. 2012. Last-words analysis – Why Tibetans Self-immolate?

• Woeser. 2012. "The Testimonies Left By Tibetan Self-Immolators," translated in High Peaks Pure Earth blog, originally posted September 12.

Tibetan femininities

• Miss Tibet Beauty Pageant (Dharamsala, India)

Masculinity, Disenchantment and the Negotiation of Modernity among Tibetans

• Therang Buengu. 2009. "A Tibetanness that is on the Cutting Edge of Cool," (blog post) in Like Gold that Fears no Fire: New Writing from Tibet. ICT. (ereserve)
•  Yudrug playlist, High Peaks Pure Earth, 2013-14.
• Tibetan language Waterfall of Youth (Wikipedia)
• Waterfall of Youth (pop/rap tribute to Dongrup Gyal by Tibetan group Yudrug, 2011, Amdo gcan tsa, Qinghai, PRC)
• High Peaks Pure Earth page on Yudrug's Waterfall of Youth (notes revival of interest in DG in Amdo)
• Waterfall of Youth (pop/rap tribute to Dongrup Gyal by Dickyi Tsering, 2015, PRC).
• Waterfall of Youth (poem recited by woman in Lhasa dialect, 2013)
• Dondrup Gyal poem recited on stage, (PRC, 2011; poem mentioned by Tsering Shakya)
• Dondrup gyal poem recited on stage (diaspora, 2010, Lhasa dialect) Include links to Nongnu and Yudruk milam (from Amdo, Green Dragon)
• New generation Hip Hop among Tibetans in Amdo (High Peaks Pure Earth, 2010)

Video: Wang Yifan, "Zhongguo Baba (China Daddy)", rap music video by a Penn State University alumnus from the PRC, 2018. Translated lyrics by Annie Jiang.

Mon Mar 17 Racialization in Xi Jinping's Transnational China

• READ: Xi Jinping. [Focus on pp 3-7, the 14 principles] Section III: The Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and the Basic Policy, in Xi Jinping's report at 19th CPC National Congress, 2017. (7 pp) (ereserve).
• READ: Cheng, Yinghong. "Ch. 2 Two Blacks and One Yellow: Race in Pop Music," (60 pp). Discourses of Race and Rising China. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. (ereserve, bookstore, book reserve).
  • Reading guide:  Focus on: pp. 27-37; pp. 48-62; p. 67-77; p. 81-83; pp. 87-95

Wed Mar 19 Han Racial Nationalisms Online (2010s-)

• READ: Zhang, C. Right-wing populism with Chinese characteristics? Identity, otherness, and global imaginaries in debating world politics online. European Journal of International Relations, 2019. (ereserve)
• READ: Ying Miao. "Privilege and Prejudice: Han Victimhood and Legitimizing Islamophobia in China," The China Quarterly Volume 260 , December 2024 , pp. 948 - 969. (ereserve).
  
  

SPRING BREAK MAR 22-30

DUE: Commentary Four, Sunday, Mar 30, midnight, posted to your Moodle Blog forum.
Discuss post-Mao forms of racialization, bring in other relevant contemporary events, begin to consider a final paper topic.

DUE: Comments on Commentaries, Monday, Mar 31, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle Blog forum.

Barmé, Geremie. “To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic: China’s Avant-Garde Nationalists.” In Chinese Nationalism. Edited by Jonathan Unger, 183–208. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.
Carrico: Barmé’s study broke new ground by talking openly about the increasingly xenophobic nationalism in China in the 1990s, employing aseries of unforgettable examples ranging from television series to academic journals. Barmé argues that economic success andintellectual restrictions in the post-Tiananmen era produced a cocky ultra-nationalist narcissism; between the concerns of the past and goals for the future, an unreflective nationalism serves as the glue holding everything together in the present.

Berry, Chris. 1992. "Race" (民 族): Chinese Film and the Politics of Nationalism. Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 45-58

Carrico, Kevin. The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017. [very polemical]

Cheng, Yinghong. "From Campus Racism to Cyber Racism: Discourse of Race and Chinese Nationalism.” China Quarterly 207 (2011), 561-579.

Cheng Yinghong. “Constructing a Racialized Identity in Post-Mao China” Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne,eds.China’s Transitions from Communism—New Perspectives (Routledge2015). 162-187

Cheng, Yinghong. JAS 2018: “Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?” Genetics, Anthropology, and the Politics of Racial Nationalism in China Yinghong Cheng

Kai-wing Chow. “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture: Imagining the Hanzu Identity in Modern China”

Chun, Allen. “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Culture as Ethnicity as Identity.” Boundary 2 23.2 (1996): 111–138.

Chun A (2017) Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. (cited by Tu et al) [anthro Chicago, now in Taiwan, focus is on non-PRC, intro is not clear re: goals, writes obscurely and focuses on culture/ethnicity; nothing re: race]
Carrico: Chun deconstructs static, homogenizing, and naturalizing constructions of “Chineseness.” Examining the construction and deployment of “Chineseness” in political, academic, and popular contexts, Chun notes the ease and appeal of such identity constructions which bind people “through webs of power and meaning” (p. 125). Chun’s work highlights and challenges the politics of identity and the idea of “Chinese culture” that are central to debates about nationalism in China today.

Huang, Kun. "'Anti-Blackness' in Chinese Racial-Nationalism: Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology." Translated by Roy Chan and Shui-yin Sharon Yam. positions politics, June 29, 2020. http://positionspolitics.org/kun-huang-anti-blackness-in-chinese-racial-nationalism-sex-gender-reproduction-and-metaphors-of-pathology/ [addresses intermarriage debates in China]

Friedman, Edward. “Raising Sheep on Wolf Milk: The Politics and Dangers of Misremembering the Past in China.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9.2–3 (June–September 2008): 389–409.
Carrico: Friedman’s article examines the post-Mao emphasis on national humiliation and redemption as a means of covering over the state crimes of the Maoist era. He argues that the focus on Chinese victimization at the hands of external others, while at the same time overlooking the enormous human and psychological tolls of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, transforms xenophobia into “patriotism,” resulting in an unstable worldview based on rage and a misdirected search for revenge.

LEIBOLD,JAMES. 2011.“Filling in the Nation: The Spatial Trajectory of Prehistoric Archaeology in Twentieth-Century China. ”http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/profiles/ss/leibold/History_ch11_0311_Leibold.pdf

Mullaney, T. (2012). Critical Han Studies—Introduction and Prolegomenon. In T. Mullaney (Eds.), Critical Han Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

SAUTMAN,BARRY. 1997. “Myths of Descent: Racial Nationalism and Ethnic Minorities inthe People’s Republic of China.”In The Construction of Racial Identities in Chinaand Japan: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Frank Dikötter, 75–91.London: Hurst & Company.

Sautman, Barry. 2001. “Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism in China”, The Journal of Asian Studies.
Carrico: This article examines the politics of archaeology and paleoanthropology in China, with a particular focus on their inculcation of racial nationalism. The author examines (i) the official use of Peking Man as a symbol of the longevity of the Chinese people and (ii) the rejection of the “out of Africa” hypothesis as a construction of Chinese uniqueness. Sautman highlights how such seemingly ancient constructions promote political solidarity and stability today.

Sigrid Schmalzer. 2008. The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China.

Xi Jinping thought

• Xuexi Qiangguo app (Study and strengthen the nation' or 'Study the powerful nation') (Wikipedia)
• Xi Jinping Thought Explained: A New Ideology for a New Era (NYT, 2018).
• John Garrick and Yan Chang Bennett. “Xi Jinping Thought”: Realisation of the Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation? China Perspectives, 2018 [I have pdf].
• Creating the Cult of Xi Jinping. Cornell International Affairs Review, 2016.
• In Xi We Trust: How Propaganda Might be Working in the New Era. Marco Polo Economic REview, 2018.
• Cai Xia. The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China's Future," Foreign Affairs, Sept 2022 (by a CCP insider).

Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream (curated by Annie Jiang)

• “What Does Xi Jinping's China Dream Mean?” BBC News, June 6, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22726375. 
  Aspiring for China to become a major world power, Xi Jinping formed and started to popularize the propaganda slogan “Chinese Dream” in 2013 to construct and mobilize Chinese nationalism based on a rejuvenation of the nation from the early modern colonial trauma. Some scholars argue that Xi is not specific about how to put the dream into practice, or Chinese Dream seems merely a party propaganda tool to amass a unifying force. Besides, Chinese Dream does not include certain narratives that contradict or undermine the CCP authority. Therefore, while Chinese Dream sounds like an appealing revival of Zhonghua minzu, Chinese people cannot dream of anything frowned upon by the CCP, such as rule of law and universal values.

• “Xi Jinping and the 'Chinese Dream.'” DW News, May 7, 2018. https://www.dw.com/en/xi-jinping-and-the-chinese-dream/a-43685630. 
  Since Xi took power of the PRC in 2012, China's state and party leaders have promised the Chinese people the return to the grandeur of past dynasties. By doing so, Xi has attempted to tap into the historical consciousness of the Chinese.Today's Chinese see themselves as the heirs of a millennium-old civilization that was the world leader in culture, science, technology and administration right up to the 16th century. In this ideal conception, China — the "Middle Kingdom," as it is still called in Chinese today — was at the center of the world, surrounded by barbarians, who were willing to pay tribute to the luminosity of Chinese civilization. The “One Hundred Years of Humiliation” was a disruption of the Chinese civilization and mobilized Chinese people with politicized culturalist nationalism to restore the splendor of Chineseness.

• “Background: Connotations of Chinese Dream.” China Daily, March 5, 2014. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014npcandcppcc/2014-03/05/content_17324203.htm. 
  Xi stressed that the Chinese Dream means the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It embodies achieving prosperity for the country, renewal of the nation and happiness for the citizens. Only when the country is doing well, can the nation and people do well. Xi also emphasized that the Chinese Dream in essence means the dream of the people. The Chinese Dream is to let people enjoy better education, more stable employment, higher incomes, a greater degree of social security, better medical and health care, improved housing conditions and a better environment. It is to let our children grow up well, have satisfactory jobs and live better lives. The speech is equipped with a highly politicized culturist rhetoric that veils racialized nationalism in the contemporary PRC under Xi, which “forming a “cohesive force” (ningjuli 凝聚力), a political agenda of the post-Mao CCP regime with the purpose of maintaining a façade of national unity” according to Cheng (Cheng, 2019: p. 21).
  

• CGTN. “China’s Dream is Everyone’s Dream.” YouTube, October 1, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MTyg3xXvcQ,
  CGTN, the international English-language news broadcast derived from CCTV, released this video of Chinese Dream in 2020. The video includes interviews with Chinese people of different professions in different geographic locations, both within and outside China, about their thoughts on Chinese Dream and connection to their personal hopes for life. The breadth of interviewed

Xi Jinping Posters

• Xi Jinping (Landsberger propaganda posters)
• Xi Jinping billboards (Google image search)
• The Chinese Dream billboards and posters (Google image search)

Gangtai and Patriotic Pop Songs

• Youtube Playlist: Gangtai , playlist: gangtai and other patriotic pop songs
• "This is China," Sichuan group's English-language rap song for CCP Youth League, 2016.
• Zhongguo Baba (China Papa), Penn State Chinese student's patriotic freestyle rap (mentioned by Cheng), 2018. Lyrics translated by Annie Jiang.
• "Make Americans call us daddy’: Nationalist Chinese rap provokes Penn State CSSA response," The China Project, 2018.

Chinese State-Sponsored Netizens and Increasing Internet Controls

• 50 Cent Party (Wikipedia)
• How China's 50-cent Party Trolls by Distraction, The Atlantic, 2017.
• Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. 2017. “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument.” American Political Science Review, 111, 3, Pp. 484-501. Publisher's Version Copy at https://tinyurl.com/ybdarq39
• China's Internet Trolls go Global, Council on Foreign Affairs, 2021.
• The Foreigners in China's Disinformation Drive, BBC, 2021 (especially re: Xinjiang)
• China’s Internet Censors Try a New Trick: Revealing Users’ Locations, New York Times, 2022.

Watch Film: Tazara Stories (Monson, dir.) (Stream via Moodle)

Mon Mar 31 Rethinking Race under Xi Jinping's "Belt and Road Initiative"

• READ: Oliveira, Gustavo de L.T., Galen Murton, Alessandro Rippa, Tyler Harlan, and  Yang Yang. "China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from the ground," Political Geography Volume 82, October 2020. (ereserve). (3 pp).
• READ: White Paper: 2013. Foreword, Sections IV, V, VI, Conclusion. China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation. (online).
• READ: Huynh, T. Tu and Yoon Jung Park. "Reflections on the Role of Race in China-Africa Relations." New Directions in Africa–China Studies; edited by Chris Alden and Daniel Large. Routledge, 2019. (ereserve).
  
  Handout: Final Paper Guidelines, Template and Criteria

Wed Apr 2 China-Africa Relations and The Semiotics of Blackness in Tanzania

• READ: Sheridan, Derek. (2022). The semiotics of Heiren (黑人): race, everyday language, and discursive complicities in a Chinese migrant community. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 49( 13), 3308–3326. (ereserve). (18 pp).
• READ: Monson, Jamie. Remembering Work on the Tazara Railway in Africa and China, 1965-2011: When "New Men", African Studies Review , APRIL 2013, Vol. 56, No. 1 (APRIL 2013), pp. 45-64 (ereserve). (19 pp) 

Belt and Road and race/ethnicity

Wanjing Chen. Railroaded Bodies: Situating Lao/Chinese Construction Workers in the Financial Instabilities of BRI [arguing against simplistic sinophobic responses to Chinese workers abroad]

Green C (2014) Outbound China and the global South: New entrepreneurial immigrants in the eastern Caribbean. IDEAZ Journal (Special Issue: From Unipolar to Multipolar: The Remaking of Global Hegemony) 10–12(2012–2014): 24–44.

Kuehn J, Louie K and Pomfret DM (2013) Diasporic Chineseness After the Rise of China: Communities and Cultural Production. Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press.

Lai W and Tan C-B (2010) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill.

Lee, Fiona. "Han Chinese Racism and Malaysian Contexts: Cosmopolitan Racial Formations in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 20.2 (2019), 220-237.

Amrita Malhi. Race, Debt and Sovereignty – The ‘China Factor’ in Malaysia’s GE14. Pages 717-728 | Published online: 23 Nov 2018

Rippa et al, special issue of journal on political geographies of BRI [ nothing on race ]

Roche, Gerald. 2020. Telling the China story in Australia: Why we need racial literacy - The China Story Blog. (in pdf folder).

Kanji Sato. Formation of La Raza and the Anti‐Chinese Movement in Mexico, 07 January 2008

Tjon Sie Fat PB (2009) Chinese New Migrants in Suriname: The Inevitability of Ethnic Performing. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Wallenböck, Ute. 2019. “The Cultural and Educational Dimension of the ‘New Silk Road’: The Re-invention of Mongolness at the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies, 11, pp. 31–59.

• https://doi.org/10.2478/vjeas-2019-0002 [shows deployment of state/museumized Mongol ethnicity to harness to BRI/silk road initiatives in Henan county, PRC, 2019]

Sophie Loy-Wilson - 2017. Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China. [spent time growing up in Australian embassy in Beijing; talks of White Australia policies, yellow peril fears].

Xinman Li, Ying Luo, Shuhui Lai, Taotao Long. Acculturative Stories of International Students from Belt and Road Countries in China [don't address difference/race except lang/culture]

Zhang, Chenchen. "Racism and the Belt and Road in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala: What a Controversial Skit Tells Us About Racial and Geopolitical Narratives in China." The Diplomat, February 23, 2018.

Chinese attitudes toward Africans

Jean-Pierre Cabestan. China’s response to the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis: Enhancing Africa’s soft security under Sino-US competition.

Castillo, Roberto. “Race” and “racism” in contemporary Africa-China relations research: approaches, controversies and reflections." Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Pages 310-336 | Published online: 17 Sep 2020 [draws on Monson and Lan, argues for 'triangulation' and going beyond EuroAmerican notions of race]

Cheng Yinghong. Discovering China in Africa: Race and the Chinese Perception of Africa and Black Peoples Y Cheng - Discourses of Race and Rising China, 2019 - Springer.

Johanna Hood. Distancing Disease in the Un-black Han Chinese Politic: Othering Difference in China’s HIV/AIDS Media. Modern China 2013 39: 280 originally published online 26 March 2013

MD Johnson. Race and racism in the Chinas: Chinese racial attitudes toward Africans and African-Americans - 2007.

Madrid-Morales, D., & Gorfinkel, L. (2018). Narratives of contemporary Africa on China Global Television Network’s documentary series Faces of Africa. Journal of Asian and African Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021909618762499

Pfafman et al. 2015. The Politics of Racism: Constructions of African Immigrants in China on ChinaSMACK [simplistic ahistorical analysis of comments translated on Chinasmack; by communications scholars who don't have Chinese; ChinaSmack is sensationalist tabloid; racist comments section]

Simon Shen (a1) A constructed (un)reality on China's re-entry into Africa: the Chinese online community perception of Africa (2006–2008), International Journal of Sociology . Volume 46, 2016 - Issue 2: Migration in the Global South

Zhang, Chenchen. "Racism and the Belt and Road in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala: What a Controversial Skit Tells Us About Racial and Geopolitical Narratives in China." The Diplomat, February 23, 2018. https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/racism-and-the-belt-and-road-in-cctvs-spring-festival-gala/

Chinese in Africa

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale [online] ISSN 2385-3042 Vol. 52 – Giugno 2016 [print] ISSN 1125-3789 Chinese Volunteering in Africa: Drivers, Issues and Future Prospects.

Antonella Ceccagno, Sofia Graziani, Giese K (2015) Adaptation and learning among Chinese actors in Africa. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 44(1): 3–8.

Jiang Chang & Hailong Ren. How native cultural values influence African journalists’ perceptions of China: in-depth interviews with journalists of Baganda descent in Uganda.

Dittgen, Romain and Anthony Ross."Yellow, Red and Black- Fantasies about China and 'the Chinese' in Contemporary South Africa" (co-authored with Ross Anthony) in- Franck Billé, Sören Urbansky (eds.)- Yellow perils- China Narratives in the Contemporary World, Honolulu - University of Hawai’i Press, 2018, pp. 108-141.

Huynh, Tu and Park, Yoon Jung. intro to special journal issue [nicely frames in increased in-and out-migration to/from China] ‘‘Chineseness’’ through unexplored lenses: Identity-making in China–Africa engagements in the 21st century. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 2018, Vol. 27(1) 3–8.

Huynh, Tu and Park. Introduction: Chinese in Africa. African and Asian Studies 9 (2010) 207-212 [good overview of variety of articles, incl Sautman and yan on Zambia; argue diversity of experience, relies on historical relat btw PRC and African countries; evidence of previous friendship giving way to more negative perceptions with more influx]

Huynh, Park and Chen. Faces of China: New Chinese Migrants in South Africa, 1980s to Present. African and Asian Studies 9 (2010) 286-306

Johan Lagerkvist. Chinese eyes on Africa: Authoritarian flexibility versus democratic governance. Journal of Contemporary African Studies. Vol. 27, No. 2, April 2009, 119!134 [early overview, takes PRC pov on not imposing dev models on others]

Bruce Larkin, China and Africa 1949-1970.

Goretti L. Nassanga & Sabiti Makara. Chinese J. of Communication Perceptions of Chinese presence in Africa as reflected in the African media: case study of Uganda.

Sautman, Barry. Racialization as Agency in Zambia-China Relations [his indvistic, western notion of agency=intentioned action to make change; argues in end that Zambians racializing "the chinese" has distracted their attn from far greater 'forces' of foreign (meaning westerners?) and domestic]

Sautman and Yan. 2020. Article on Chinese migrants, whether they 'self-segregate' [see China Africa podcast about this article; S and Y's methods are capitalist, treat Chinese as individuals, neglect almost completely larger structural issues of PRC dev agendas; see article version of this below]

Sautman and Yan. 2009. African Perspectives on China–Africa Links. [usual polemic against overly simplistic takes by westerners]
Scholars and the international media often allude to a putative “African view” of Africa–China links, constructed from anecdotal evidence. Using random sample and university-based surveys, we elaborate the first empirically based study of what Africans think of their relationships with China. We reach three conclusions. First, African views are not nearly as negative as Western media make out, but are variegated and complex. Second, the survey results are at variance with the dominant Western media representation that only African ruling elites are positive about these links. Third, we find that the dominant variation in African perspectives is by country, compared with variations such as age, education and gender. The differences among countries in attitudes towards China are primarily a function of the extent to which national politicians have elected to raise the “Chinese problem” and, secondarily, the extent of Western media influence in African states.

Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz, ‘‘Performing ‘China in Africa’ for the West: Chinese migrant discourses in Angola’’ in Tu and Park, eds., ‘‘Chineseness’’ through unexplored lenses: Identity-making in China–Africa engagements in the 21st century. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 2018, Vol. 27(1) 3–8 [recent anthro Phd Berkeley; focus on everyday identity-making]

The Newsletter 81 Autumn 2018 on African Studies in China (Brown has piece): China Connections
Cheryl M. Schmitz (also author in Huynh et al) The ‘China Connections’ pages are compiled by guest editors from the Asia Research Center at Fudan University and the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai. The contributions for this issue - African Studies in China - were guest edited by Cheryl M. Schmitz from NYU Shanghai. 

Special Issue of Asian Ethnicity, Vol 1, 2019:

Introduction

Chinese in Africa: ‘Chineseness’ and the complexities of identities
Obert Hodzi
Pages: 1-7 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1539826 Original Articles

Nationalism, overseas Chinese state and the construction of ‘Chineseness’ among Chinese migrant entrepreneurs in Ghana
Jinpu Wang & Ning Zhan
Pages: 8-29 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1547875

Understanding Chinese immigrants in Africa from the perspective of national identity
Zhihang Wang
Pages: 30-39 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1543542

Chinese and ‘self-segregation’ in Africa
Hairong Yan, Sautman Barry & Yao Lu
Pages: 40-66 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1511370

Gauging the dispositions between indigenes, Chinese and other immigrant traders in Ghana:  towards a more inclusive society
Kwaku Opoku Dankwah & Padmore Adusei Amoah
Pages: 67-84 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1490173

Chinese migrants and the politics of everyday life in Zimbabwe
Simbarashe Gukurume
Pages: 85-102 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1490174

Rational or irrational? Understanding the uptake of ‘made-in-China’ products
Mark Kwaku Mensah Obeng
Pages: 103-127 | DOI: 10.1080/14631369.2018.1548266

Darwin's Nightmare (on Tanzania's Lake Victoria), 2004.

Africans in Yiwu (ordered for lib, co-filmed by Chinese and AFricans) (Jim couldn't find)

Teboho Edkins’ Days of Cannibalism (in Lesotho, ordered for lib, still in film festivals)

• South China Morning Post on Days of Cannibalism Documentary: "Takes Unflinching Look at Chinese" 

China Africa film cooperation

Chalay Thay Saath [Pakistani film with Chinese romantic lead, man from Canada! a love song for BRI, timed for big PRC project there, race/gender stereotypes] (ordered for lib.)

• SupChina review of Chalay Thay Saath

CCTV BRI documentary (multiple episodes)

CNA (Singapore) documentary The New Silk Road (5 seasons; very pro-PRC, reporter just goes to business parks and PRC museum sites)

New Year Gala blackface skits

A Multimillion dollar industry in racist videos about Black Africans

BBC viral video exposing a Chinese man making racist videos of Malawian children (2020)

"Racist videos about Africans fuel a multimillion dollar industry Chinese industry". rest of world blog, 2022.

"BBC Africa Eye expose: Chinese man extradited to Malawi over racist videos," BBC News, July 2022.

Supchina Post, 2021

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala (春晚 chūnwǎn) comes in for withering criticism nearly every year for poor taste, sexism, and other issues. This year was no different: 

Perpetual misfiring on Africa and blackface

Five minutes into the gala, a group of Chinese actors adorned in blackface makeup and stereotypical African tribal garments appeared on the stage, dancing joyfully in a segment that also featured flamenco performers, belly dancers, and women dressed like Cleopatra in ancient Egypt.

• In 2018, the Spring Festival Gala was accused of racism for featuring a comedy sketch that included a well-known Chinese actress wearing blackface and a padded outfit, accompanied by a black performer in a monkey costume.
• Black Livity China, a Beijing-based organization, whose mission is to “document and demystify African and Afro-diasporic experiences both in China and in relation to China,” wrote on Twitter that it was “extremely disappointing” to see the gala once again using offensive caricatures. 

Watch Film: Guangzhou Dream Factory, Christiane Badgley, dir., 2017, 66 min
(Stream via Moodle)

Mon Apr 7 Becoming Africans, Becoming Black in China

• READ: Bodomo, Adams. (2020) Historical and contemporary perspectives
  on inequalities and well-being of Africans in China, Asian Ethnicity, 21:4, 526-541. (12 pp) (ereserve)
• READ: Lan, Shanshan. "Introduction,"  and "Ch. 1 South China as the New Promised Land for African Migrants, "Ch. 4 Chinese State Regulation of Undcoumented Africans in Guangzhou," Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging. Routledge, 2017. (~38 pp). (ereserve, bookstore). Reading Guide: READ Introduction and Ch. 4; SKIM Ch 1, but focus on pp 24 bottom-30, pp. 35-42.

Wed Apr 9 Living as Africans in China: Race/Kinship, Gender/Sexuality

• READ: Lan, Shanshan. "Ch 6 "Between Guangzhou and Lagos: Business and Family Strategies of Chinese/Nigerian Couples," Mapping the New African Diaspora in China: Race and the Cultural Politics of Belonging. Routledge, 2017. (23 pp). (ereserve, bookstore).

Afrolit4China. Blog post on rise of African literature in Chinese translation, written for Chinese audiences, 2021.

Guangzhi Huang. Policing Blacks in Guangzhou: How Public Security Constructs Africans as Sanfei, July 19, 2018.

Johanna Hood. Distancing Disease in the Un-black Han Chinese Politic: Othering Difference in China’s HIV/AIDS Media. Modern China 2013 39: 280 originally published online 26 March 2013

MD Johnson. Race and racism in the Chinas: Chinese racial attitudes toward Africans and African-Americans - 2007

Lan, Shanshan. The Shifting Meanings of Race in China: A Case Study of the African Diaspora Communities in Guangzhou December 2016 City & Society 28(3):298–318.

On Being Black in China. The Atlantic, 2013.

Pfafman et al. 2015. The Politics of Racism: Constructions of African Immigrants in China on ChinaSMACK [simplistic ahistorical analysis of comments translated on Chinasmack; by communications scholars who don't have Chinese; ChinaSmack is sensationalist tabloid; racist comments section]

Pieke FN (2011) Immigrant China. Modern China 38(1): 40–77.

Sawyer, Lena. Routings [article for comparison with China's experience: African diaspora and racialization in Sweden].

Special Issue: The Chinese Worker Goes Abroad, The Made in China Journal, Sept-Dec 2020.

Jessica Wilczak. ‘‘‘Clean, safe and orderly’: Migrants, race and city image in global Guangzhou’’ in Tu and Park, eds., ‘‘Chineseness’’ through unexplored lenses: Identity-making in China–Africa engagements in the 21st century. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 2018, Vol. 27(1) 3–8. [recent Phd geography, GOOD: shows how suzhi merges with race in urban renewal project to exclude]

Zhang, Chenchen. "Racism and the Belt and Road in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala: What a Controversial Skit Tells Us About Racial and Geopolitical Narratives in China." The Diplomat, February 23, 2018. https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/racism-and-the-belt-and-road-in-cctvs-spring-festival-gala/

Min Zhou, Shabnam Shenasi & Tao Xu. Chinese Attitudes toward African Migrants in Guangzhou, China. ), International Journal of Sociology ,Volume 46, 2016 - Issue 2: Migration in the Global South

Podcasts and Blogs on Blackness, Africans and African Americans in China

• BlackLivityChina: News Related to China's African Diaspora
• The China Global South Project (Formerly China Africa Project)
• Roberto Castillo Africans in China blog
• Black woman wins speech contest in Chinese (experiences in Taiwan)

Black Lives Matter and China, Summer 2020

• As Protests Engulf the United States, China Revels in the Unrest, NYT, June 2020.
• China Embraces BLM in America, Objects to BLM Discussion at Home, VOA, July 2020.
• How the killing of George Floyd exposed Hong Kong activists' uneasy relationship with Donald Trump, The Guardian, June 2020.
• How a skewed translation of ‘Black Lives Matter’ enabled racism on Chinese social media, Hong Kong Free Press, Aug. 2020.
• How Chinese People are Talking about Racism and Black Lives Matter
  Ang Li speaks to Isabelle Niu about how racism and Black Lives Matter dialogues are being discussed on the Chinese Internet in the latest episode of the Loud Slurp podcast.
  NüVoices
• How China’s Insensitivity Toward Black Representation in Hollywood Is Growing, Indie Wire, June 2020.
• Photo Essay: Chinese for Black Lives, China Digital Times, July 2020.

Backlash against Proposed Permanent Residency for Foreigners, Spring 2020

• Is the Coronavirus to Blame for Backlash Against Chinese Green Card Changes? The Beijinger, Mar 2020
• Netizens Outraged Over China's Proposed Permanent Residence Rules, Life China (PRC based), Mar 2020
• Proposed Residency Changes Spark Racist Backlash in China, Sixth Tone blog, Mar 2020
• Editorial | China needs to rethink permanent residency rules for foreigners, South China Morning Post, Mar 2020.

China White project
New research project directed by Shanshan Lan and hosted at the University of Amsterdam
With the rise of China’s economy, more and more westerners are moving to China for business and job opportunities. One consequence of this reverse migration is the transformation of whiteness from a majority identity in western countries to a minority identity in China. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being white in China’s thriving market economy and consumer culture? How is whiteness racialized in relation to blackness and other immigrant identities in various social domains and in different regions in China? How are multiple versions of whiteness negotiated and performed through daily life interactions between white migrants and Chinese in various social and personal settings?

Lou Jing (African American-Chinese singer)

Springer, Alyeiha. Anti-Black Racism in China: Through the Eyes of Aaron A. Vessup and Lou Jing, 2020. [undergrad thesis]
This thesis examines and analyzes anti-black racism in China through two different cases. Aaron A. Vessup, a professor from Chicago, moves to China to continue his teaching career. He is exposed to racism and microagressions, which he writes about in his book Black in China. Lou Jing, a half African American, half Shanghainese girl, rises to fame when she is a contestant on the Shanghai's version of American Idol, Let's Go! Oriental Angel. Lou Jing is met with criticisms about her race, which opens a debate about whether or not she is Chinese. Along with introducing and analyzing the stories of these two people, this thesis will examine the history of colorism in China, the treatment of African Americans in China, and racism in Chinese media in order to open a discussion about anti-black racism in China and its different forms. This thesis discovers that anti-black racism in China is a product of the history of colorism in China. This history has led to many Chinese people thinking that those who are black are inferior to them. This thesis will question these notions of inferiority and attempt to come up with solutions and change for this racism.

New Year Blackface skits

Mon Apr 14 Han-Uyghur Relations in China: Escalating Tensions and Surveillance (2010s)

• READ: Byler, Darren. Preface and Introduction and Ch. 2 Devaluation, Terror Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2022. (bookstore, ereserve).

Wed Apr 16 Racializing Security: The Rise of Internment Camps (2014-)

• READ: Joanne Smith Finley. pp. 1-20 ONLY: "Securitization, insecurity and conflict in contemporary Xinjiang: has PRC counter-terrorism evolved into state terror?," Central Asian Survey, 38:1, 1-26, (2019). (ereserve). (22 pp) **Content notes: descriptions of imprisonment, torture and abuse.
• READ: Gulbahar Haitiwaji. Chapters 1-3, 7-8, 11-12, 15-17, 23-25, Afterword. How I Survived a Chinese "Reeducation" Camp: A Uyghur Woman's Story. Seven Stories Press, 2022. (ereserve). **Content notes: descriptions of imprisonment, torture and abuse.
• READ: Salimjan, Guldana. "What China Scholars can do about the Xinjiang Crisis," University of Westminster Contemporary China Centre Blog, July, 2021. (online)

DUE: Commentary Five, Sunday Apr 20, midnight, posted to your Moodle Blog forum.
See Final Paper Guidelines! Propose a final paper topic (analyzing a contemporary event, controversy, performance, media product, or set of debates addressing race and transnational China, with reference to course materials (at least three-four texts from the syllabus) and credible background/context sources (at least three-four outside sources).

DUE: Comments on Commentaries, Monday, Apr 21, midnight, your blog partner's Moodle Blog forum.

Chinese State Sources

State Council White Paper. Foreword, Sections I, II, and VI. The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang, 2019.

China Tries to Counter Xinjiang Backlash With … a Musical? NYT, 2021.

Western and Diaspora Sources

Brophy, David. Good and Bad Muslims in Xinjiang, Made in China, 2019

Byler, Darren. Native Rhythms in the City: Embodied Refusal Among Uyghur Male Migrants. Central Asian Survey, 2017.

Byler, Darren. "The darkness only deepens’: A decade of stories of loss in Xinjiang," SupChina, 2020. [mentions the film] (7 pp).

Byler, Darren. Preventative Policing as Community Detention in Northwest China. Made in China Journal. Oct 2019.

Fiskesjö, Magnus. "Cultural Genocide is the New Genocide." Pen/Opp, May 5, 2020. https://www.penopp.org/articles/cultural-genocide-new-genocide

Fiskesjö, Magnus. Racism with Chinese Characteristics: How China’s imperial legacy underpins state racism and violence in Xinjiang.” China Channel, Los Angeles Review of Books, January 22, 2021.

Fiskesjö, Magnus. Forced Confessions as Identity Conversion in China’s Concentration Camps. Dans Monde chinois 2020/2 (N° 62), pages 28 à 43

Hasan H. Karrar. Resistance to state-orchestrated modernization in Xinjiang: The genesis of unrest in the multiethnic frontier. China InformationDec 12, 2017.

Kaltman, Blaine. "Ch. 1 Uighur Ethnic Enclaves," (14 pp) and "Ch. 3 Han-Uighur Relations," Under the Heel of the Dragon: Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014. (30 pp).

Leibold, James. (2020) Surveillance in China’s Xinjiang Region: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement, Journal of Contemporary China, 29:121, 46-60, 2020. (16 pp).

Roberts, Sean. Xinjiang and biopolitics. 2018.

Tobin, David. "A “Struggle of Life or Death”: Han and Uyghur Insecurities on China’s North-West Frontier," The China Quarterly, pp. 1–23, 2019. (20 pp).

Two special issues of Monde Chinois Nouvelle Asie related to the ongoing crisis in the Uyghur region, 2020. Although the issue titles are in French, both special issues mainly include articles in English.

• Les mécanismes de la répression en région ouïghoure
• Crise ouïghoure: Transformation et reconstruction des identités

Social Media

"Uyghurface" cosplay in New Zealand, March 2021 [Chinese Association in New Zealand town holds New Year gala, in which Chinese men dance dressed as "Uyghurs".]

Conversation with Dr. Magnus Fiskesjö: Impact of Chinese Racism.” Voice of East Turkistan. March 4, 2021.

Airbnb listings in China are littered with racist discrimination. Wired, 2019.
Dozens of listings on the Chinese version of Airbnb openly discriminate against Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other ethnic minorities by barring them from renting rooms. The revelation comes as Airbnb is making a high-profile push into the country.

Feature Films

China Tries to Counter Xinjiang Backlash With … a Musical? NYT, 2021.

Wings of Songs. [PRC-made musical on Xinjiang], 2021 (youtube, with subtitles)

Wings of Songs Trailer (Youtube), 2021

Other Documentaries

Xinjiang Documentation Project (Simon Fraser University) list of Xinjiang-related documentaries

They Came for Us at Night (Vice, 2019, 31 min)

Undercover China, Frontline, April 2020, 54 min **Content Notes: Footage of riots and terrorist attacks, testimonials of torture and abuse

Fighting Terrorism in Xinjiang, 2019 (CGTN, youtube)

暗流涌动——中国新疆反恐挑战 (A Turbulent Undercurrent: China's Anti-Terrorism War in Xinjiang), CCTV, 2021 (youtube)

CGTN's China Propaganda Film Debunked, 2021 (Uyghur activist Kamaltürk, son of Yalqun Rozi, who was chief editor of an official textbook series for Uyghur schools in Xinjiang, but who was disappeared in 2016 along with other Uyghur intellectuals, speaks out against a recent CGTN documentary about Xinjiang, in which his father is prominently portrayed as a 'terrorist').

Salimjan's call to action for China Scholars:

• Xinjiang Documentation Project, University of British Columbia (Salimjan director)
• Salimjan's Camp Album Project
• Chinese for Uyghurs Initiative

The Xinjiang Papers and China Cables (2017)

• Byler, Darren. A Xinjiang scholar’s close reading of the China Cables, SupChina, 2019. (8 pp).
• Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims. NYT. Nov 2019.
• Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps. NYT translation of document in Xinjiiang Papers, 2019.
• China Cables: an ICU Investigation. 2019 [international consortium of journalists investigating leaked documents from XJ]
• China Cables Expose China's Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm. 2019.
• Read the China Cables translations.

Testimonials

'Our souls are dead': how I survived a Chinese 're-education' camp for Uighurs," The Guardian, Jan 2021.

Chinese and Foreign Corporations and Xinjiang Racial Profiling Surveillance Tech

Rollet, Charles. "Western Academia Helps Build China’s Automated Racism." Codastory, August 6, 2019. https://codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/western-academia-china-automated-racism/

How China is Using AI to Profile a Minority. New York Times, 2019.

Reports of Eugenics Efforts in the Internment camps

Associated Press. "China Cuts Uighur Births with IUDs, Abortion, Sterilization." June 29, 2020. https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c

Mon Apr 21 Covid and Anti-Asian Racism

• Heinrich, Ari Larissa. 2020. Before coronavirus, China was falsely blamed for spreading smallpox. Racism played a role then, too. The Conversation blog. (online)
• READ: Hu, Jane. "The Panic over Chinese People Doesn't Come from the Coronavirus," Slate, Feb, 2020. (online)
• Chen, Xiaobei. Crises, Scapegoating, and Anti-Chinese Racism, special issue of Migration, Mobility, and Displacement, Analyzing and Resisting Anti-Asian Racism Vol. 7 No. 1 (2025). (14 pp). (ereserve)
• Min Yu, Roland Sintos Coloma, Wenyang Sun, Jungmin Kwon, "Dissecting Anti-Asian Racism Through a Historical and Transnational AsianCrit Lens," Sociological Inquiry, Special Issue on Transculturality of Anti-Asian Racism, Volume94, Issue2, May 2024 (15 pp). (ereserve)

Wed Apr 23 Whiteness and Covid in China

• Twine FW, Gallagher C (2008) The future of whiteness: a map of the 'third wave'. Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(1): 4–24. (ereserve)
• Lan, S., Sier, W., & Camenisch, A. (2022). Precarious whiteness in pandemic times in China. Asian Anthropology, 21(3), 161–170. (ereserve)
• Sier, W. (2022). Stuck in Wuhan? White mobility capital and the evacuation of mixed-status families after the Covid-19 outbreak. Asian Anthropology, 21(3), 171–183. (ereserve)

Pandemic Racisms

Emeka, Umeijei. #CHINAMUSTEXPLAIN:  A Critical Discourse Analysis of Stigmatisation of Africans in China," in Bao Hongwei and Daniel Mutibwa, eds., Entanglements and Ambivalences: africa and china encounters in media and culture. Routledge, 2025.

Jacob, Jabin. "To Tell China’s Story Well’: China’s International Messaging during the COVID-19 Pandemic," China Report 56, 3 (2020): 374–392. (14 pp).

Mason, Katherine. 2015. "H1N1 Is Not a Chinese Virus: the Racialization of People and Viruses in Post-SARS China," St Comp Int Dev (2015) 50:500–518.

Ouassini, A., Amini, M., & Ouassini, N. (2021). #ChinaMustexplain: Global Tweets, COVID-19, and Anti-Black Racism in China. The Review of Black Political Economy, 49(1), 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034644621992687 (Original work published 2022)

China and Whiteness

China White project
New research project directed by Shanshan Lan and hosted at the University of Amsterdam
With the rise of China’s economy, more and more westerners are moving to China for business and job opportunities. One consequence of this reverse migration is the transformation of whiteness from a majority identity in western countries to a minority identity in China. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being white in China’s thriving market economy and consumer culture? How is whiteness racialized in relation to blackness and other immigrant identities in various social domains and in different regions in China? How are multiple versions of whiteness negotiated and performed through daily life interactions between white migrants and Chinese in various social and personal settings?

Ma, K. (2022). Transnational white masculinity on Chinese social media: Western male vloggers’ self-representations during the covid-19 pandemic. Asian Anthropology, 21(3), 211–223.

Sier, W. (2022). Stuck in Wuhan? White mobility capital and the evacuation of mixed-status families after the Covid-19 outbreak. Asian Anthropology, 21(3), 171–183.

Kefala, C. (2024). Beyond Barbie: Representations of whiteness in China’s digital advertising. Global Media and China, 0(0).

Lan, S. (2021). The foreign bully, the guest and the low-income knowledge worker: performing multiple versions of whiteness in China. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(15), 3544–3560.

Sier, W. (2022). Breaking all moulds? Racialized romance between white/yang women and Chinese men. Identities, 30(6), 861–879.

Litman, R. (2022). “Neutral” vs. “pure” accents: the racialization of Filipino and EuroAmerican teachers in China’s online education industry during the covid-19 pandemic. Asian Anthropology, 21(3), 224–237.

Camenisch, A. (2022). Middling whiteness: The shifting positionalities of Europeans in China. Ethnicities, 22(1), 128-145.

• Stop AAPI Hate organization video 2023 (Youtube)
• Stop AAPI, reports of uptick of assaults on elderly Asian Americans over COVID (Youtube)
• Black/Asian solidarity march in NYC, March 2021 (Youtube)
• Rev Barber speech in Atlanta in support of Asian community, (Youtube) March 2021
• Are we Allies? Asian American-Black american dialogues (Youtube) Jan 2021
• Nigeria's Channels News: (2:27-8:12, also look at comments section), April 2020.

Coping with Anti-Asian Racist Violence

• Stop AAPI Hate
  Stop AAPI Hate was founded when community leaders from AAPI Equity Alliance, Chinese for Affirmative Action, and the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University recognized the need to document the rise of COVID-19-related anti-Asian racism in the early stages of the global pandemic. The three organizations joined forces to launch stopaapihate.org on March 19, 2020, providing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders a way to share their experiences with hate and discrimination without divulging personal information or engaging with law enforcement. 
• Tang, Terry. "Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are still targets of hatred 5 years after pandemic surge," AP, March 28, 2025.
• Jack-Davies, Anita. "Coronavirus: The Yellow Peril Revisited" The Conversation blog. August 2020.
• Gwen D’Arcangelis. The Revival of the Yellow Peril: Culture and Scapegoating During COVID-19. National Center for Institutional Diversity, Michigan, Jan 2020.
• Park, Kyeyoung. "Anti-Asian Racism's Deep Roots in the United States," Sapiens, May 2021.
• Porter, Natalie. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Uchicago Press, 2019.
• Russell Jeung, Manjusha P. Kulkarni and Cynthia Choi. Trump’s racist comments are fueling hate crimes against Asian Americans. Time for state leaders to step in. LA Times, April 1 2020. 
• Strong, Myron. Fear, Race and the Yellow Peril. Everyday Sociology blog. [NBC reports over 650 racist attacks in US April 2020]

• The roots of anti-Asian Racism in the US. GWenglish blog (scroll down). March 2021. abbreviated version of Alexa Alice Joubin's article. For footnotes, please refer to the published version of her peer-reviewed article in Global Social Security Review via the link above. 
• Treating Yellow Peril: Coronavirus Racism Resources, Google doc, 2020
• Asian American Feminist Antibodies: Care in the Time of Coronavirus, eds. Salon Bhaman, Rachel Kuo, Matilda Sabal, Vivian Shaw, and Tiffany Diane Tso. 2020.
  “With the COVID-19 pandemic neither behind us or solely ahead of us, this zine offers a way to make meaning of the coronavirus crisis through long-standing practices of care that come out of Asian American histories and politics. We bring together first-hand accounts and analyses from our communities, including health and service workers and caregivers on the frontlines, students, people living with chronic illness, journalists, and organizers. Together, this collection of stories, essays, and artwork shows how we experience, resist, and grapple with a viral outbreak that has been racialized as Asian, is spoken of in the language of contagion and invasion, and reveals the places where our collective social safety net is particularly threadbare.”
• Why Some Chinese Deny the Existence of Anti-Asian Hate. Sixth Tone, 2021.
  On Chinese-language social media, users, many of them first-generation immigrants from China, continue to deny that Asians are being targeted. Even when presented with evidence, like reports from Stop AAPI Hate that keep track of the mounting number of attacks, they argue the Atlanta shooting was not racially motivated because not all the victims were Asian. Others blame the victims, taking the gunman at his word and attributing his violence to a “sex addiction,” implying that the victims died because of their connection to massage parlors. This goes beyond what happened in Atlanta. According to one widespread rumor on Chinese-language social media, a 75-year-old Chinese woman who was assaulted in San Francisco’s Chinatown was supposedly guilty of selling free food from charity organizations.

• Olander, Eric. "Unprecedented Rupture in China Africa Relations," The China Africa Blog, April 2020.
• Williamson and Wang. ‘We Need Help’: Coronavirus Fuels Racism Against Black Americans in China," New York Times, June 2020.
• Leng and Cheng. "Equal treatment of foreigners reiterated," Global Times, April 2020.
• China-Africa relations face an ‘unprecedented rupture’. SUPChina overview of media coverage of Chinese treatment of Africans in Guangzhou, april 2020.
• Africans in Guangzhou face special scrutiny amid Coronavirus fueled xenophobia. SupChina April 2020.
• Anti-Black Cyber-Racism in China. China-Africa Project Blog, Sept 2020 (pov of Han women).
• As Coronavirus Fades in China, Nationalism and Xenophobia Flare. NYT, April 2020.
• African Ambassadors in China complain to Government over Discrimination. Reuters, April 2020.
• African Ambassadors in Beijing Protest Letter about Treatment of Africans during Pandemic. Spring 2020.
• Unprecedented dressing down of Chinese ambassador to Nigeria by Nigerian minister over Nigerians' treatment in Guangzhou, Twitter, spring 2020.
• No Racism Behind Coronavirus Protections China Assures African. March 2020.
• Guangzhou Says it Treats Foreigners Equally. South China Morning Post, April, 2020.
• And then, reciprocally...
• Chinese in Kenya Face Stigmatization and Discrimination due to Covid-19. China-Africa Project blog. (Chinese tourists yelled at in Kenya). March 2020.
• Xenophobia Surges in S. Africa under Covid. Bloomberg. Dec. 2020.
• Xenowatch: Monitors covid-related xenophobic incidents in S. Africa, has map of reports

Mon Apr 28 Race and National Pasts/Futures 

• READ: Hioe, Brian. "Chinese Nationalism," [Rise of the Qiao Collective] New Bloom Magazine, June 2020. (online)
• Cheng, Yinghong. "Ch. 6 The "Red DNA": How Discourse of Race and Class Integrate" Discourses of Race and Rising China. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. (ereserve, bookstore).(8 pp)
• Kun Huang. "Chinese Diaspora Activism in the Age of Sinophobia and Anti-Asian Racism", issue 6: in the wake of the atlanta shooting: Non/Citizens' Perspectives on Anti-Asian Racism and Sinophobia, Positions Politics, June 2021. (online).

Wed Apr 30 Paper Workshop and peer review:  Post one question to Moodle about your paper by Tuesday Apr 29, midnight

Come prepared to discuss your paper. Have ready some preliminary writing, an annotated outline to share with a classmate (something more than your proposal). Prepare some questions you would like to pose to the class: clarifying questions about theory, definitions of key terms (even basics like how to define race/racialization), relevant histories or sources.

Indigenous Futurisms

Cultural Anthropology, Special Issue on Indigenous Media Futures, Volume 33, Issue 2

 Openings and Retrospectives

Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction

William Lempert

Untidy Times: Alexis Wright, Extinction, and the Politics of Apprehension

Daniel Fisher

Digital Sutures: Experimental Stop-Motion Animation as Future Horizon of Indigenous Cinema

Kristin L. Dowell

Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present

William Lempert

Arcticnoise and Broadcasting Futures: Geronimo Inutiq Remixes the Igloolik Isuma Archive

Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn Smith, and Tarah Hogue

The Road Forward

Faye Ginsburg

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Dillon, Grace, ed. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. University of Arizona Press, 2012.

Dillon, Grace and Pedro Neves Marques. Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms. e-flux Journal, 2021.

Lempert, William. Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film, Visual Anthropology Review 30, 2014.

Liu Cixin and his films

• Liu Cixin (Wikipedia)
• Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds. The New Yorker, 2019. [Note his expressed opinion on Xinjiang]
• New Three-Body Problem movie gets acclaimed director of Monkey King: Hero is Back. South China Morning Post, June 2020.
• Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem faces scepticism from China’s sci-fi fans. SCMP, 2020.
• Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments. The Guardian, 2020.
• The Wandering Earth trailer, 2019.
• The Three-Body Problem trailer, 2016 (Chinese 3D film postponed)

Chinese diasporic nationalist journal Qiao: 
Their self-description:

• We aim to challenge rising U.S. aggression towards the People’s Republic of China and to equip the U.S. anti-war movement with the tools and analysis to better combat the stoking of a New Cold War conflict with China.

• We seek to be a bridge between the U.S. left and China’s rich Marxist, anti-imperialist political work and thought in order to foster critical consideration of the role of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics.

• We aim to disrupt Western misinformation and propaganda and to affirm the basic humanity, subjectivity, and political agency of Chinese people. We believe misinformation, chauvinism, and false equivalencies have weakened the U.S. left’s ability to understand aggression on China in the larger context of Western political, military, and economic imperialism in the Global South. We aim to confront the internalization of U.S. propaganda amongst the U.S. left by critically and realistically examining China’s role in the world struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

• We work to provide a lens into China’s role in supporting an emerging bloc of independent Global South nations mutually threatened by Western economic, military, and political violence. We are committed to the principles of socialist internationalism and strive towards solidarity and mutual exchange between China in its socialist path and the liberation movements of all Global South and colonized peoples.

• Qiao Collective is an all-volunteer group made possible by the volunteer work of our members. We are comprised of ethnic Chinese people living across multiple countries. The majority of our members are diaspora Chinese people living in the West. We are a diverse group, including ethnic Chinese people from Southeast Asia, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Qiao Collective's Sept 2020 "Report" on Xinjiang
Critical China Scholars' Response to the Qiao Collective Report on Xinjiang, Oct 2020
Qiao Collective response to Critical China Scholars and the Nation Journal, Jan 2021
**Link, Perry. "Seeing the CCP Clearly," New York Review of Books, Jan 2021. [ Highly respected scholar of Chinese politics addresses debates between Chinese dissidents who are Trump supporters vs Trump critics, the figure of the "White Left" (Baizuo), and westerners' myopia about the CCP's authoritarian power in China].

The Lausan Collective (rival HK-based group against which Qiao was formed)
Their self-description:

• Through writing, translating, and organizing, we build transnational left solidarity and struggle for ways of life beyond the dictates of capital and the state. To that end, we hold multiple imperialisms to account. Trapped in the inter-imperial rivalry between the US and PRC, we see Hong Kong as an apt site from which to critique nationalism, neoliberal extraction, and the nation-state form, both here and elsewhere. Because our work is international in scope, we believe a radical imagination of Hong Kong’s future must center cross-border solidarity based on class struggle, migrant justice, anti-racism, and feminism.
  
  傘 (“san”) is the character for umbrella, referencing our ongoing critical engagement with Hong Kong’s social movements. 流傘 is also a homophone of 流散 (decentralized/diaspora), referencing our dispersal across the world. Lausan is a collective of writers, translators, artists, and organizers. We have no founders, only members. We are 100% independent and volunteer-run.

Imagining the World Otherwise

• Five Maps that Will Change How you See the World (see especially the pacific-centered world map, or the cartograms showing relative population: demonstrates rising role of Asia)

Asian Futurisms

• Xin Wang Podcast: Recorded after the publication of e-flux journal issue 81 in April 2017, Xin Wang reads and discusses her text “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other” with Stephen Squibb.
• Contemporary Chinese art and techno-orientalism with Xin Wang. SUPChina, 2019.
• Aimee Bahng. Book: Migrant futures: on speculative fiction and futuries (chapter on "cruel optimism" in Asia, on Singapore).
  • Podcast: Imagine Otherwise: Aimee Bahng on Speculating from the Undercommons, Ideas on Fire, 2018.
    How might speculative fiction help educators teach gender and ethnic studies to their students? What would it mean to reimagine the Pacific in an anticapitalist, anticolonial, and decolonial way? What kind of world could we have if we thought beyond the normative story?  
• Asian Futurisms and Speculative Fictions. Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art exhibition. 2020.
• Dawn Chan. Asia Futurism. Art Forum, 2016.
• New Asian Futurisms. Asian Art Initiative exhibition, 2019.
• Edmond Chang. Musings on Asian Futurism. April 2020.
• Yellowface. Mickey Ren's interactive game on being Asian in America (mentioned by Edmond Chang).

DUE: 10-12 page Final Paper (double-spaced, 1 in margin, 12 pt font), due Wednesday, May 14, midnight. Upload to Moodle.