- 7 weeks ago
The reality of discrimination by race, ethnicity and skin colour as it exists in Taiwan, with comparisons made to other ethnic Chinese communities.
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00:00In this Taiwan Insider video, I'm going to talk about racism, ethnic chauvinism and skin color discrimination as they exist in Taiwan and in Chinese society generally.
00:14Now, some of you may be asking what Chinese society has to do with Taiwan.
00:19When I say Chinese, what I'm talking about is nothing to do with citizenship.
00:25So it doesn't make any difference if Taiwan is independent or not.
00:30The insults and derogatory terms covered here apply just the same.
00:34They also apply to present-day Hong Kong, for example, just as much as they would have applied to Hong Kong under British colonial rule.
00:43So, what I'll be looking at here mostly is pan-Chinese racism used against non-Chinese.
00:51And most of what I'll cover here is essentially the same in any ethnically Chinese society.
00:57Da tong xiao yi.
00:59However, there are some regional differences and, of course, pronunciation of the insults covered here varies from place to place.
01:08And I'll cover some of that too.
01:10But there are so many racist and derogatory terms in Chinese that covering them all, including all the regional variations, would take many hours.
01:20So this is just a brief introduction.
01:22My motivation for making this video is mostly owed to seeing a video made by a well-known Swedish YouTuber living in Taiwan,
01:31in which he interviewed a black girl who asserted that there wasn't much racism in Taiwan,
01:37and that she hadn't heard any insults directed at her, with the implication that such insults would have come to her in English.
01:45This is an incredibly naive notion.
01:49A few days after that, I read a news report in which, as I remember, an African American picked a fight with a passenger on a bus,
01:59whom he had heard saying,
02:01nigger,
02:03the Mandarin word for that,
02:05taking it to be the English racist insult,
02:08nigger.
02:10Obviously, before anyone jumps to the conclusion that people are or are not insulting them,
02:16they need to understand something of the language of the country they are in.
02:20Because, generally speaking, people do not tailor their insults to other people's languages.
02:26I would say that, at an absolute minimum,
02:31you need to understand at least more than 60% of everything you hear on the streets,
02:36to make any judgement.
02:38And it's probably even more the case with insults,
02:41that most people are even less confident of using them in a foreign language,
02:46than they are of using regular conversational terms in a foreign language.
02:51If you are new to Taiwan, and don't understand a lot of what you hear,
02:56then obviously it's difficult to get a grasp on race prejudice here.
03:00But this may serve as a stopgap measure.
03:04I will also address the issue of skin colour discrimination in ethnic Chinese society,
03:10and particularly in Taiwan, as this is very closely related.
03:16If you feel depressed at the end of all this,
03:19bear in mind that things are much, much better than when I first came here in the mid-1980s.
03:25And I'll throw in a few examples to illustrate that.
03:29As a young, or at least younger guy, I travelled in several dozen countries,
03:35and worked in eight or nine of them.
03:37So I spent extended periods of time in those countries.
03:42I never came across a country, or a self-governing region, whatever,
03:47whose people were free of race and ethnic prejudice,
03:50and I don't believe such a place exists.
03:53Basically, where there are humans, there are humans being discriminated against
03:59on the basis of race, ethnicity, or skin colour.
04:02This is just human nature, even if it's not a very noble aspect of it.
04:08This video is part of the Taiwan Insider series,
04:12so it's primarily about discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or skin colour,
04:17as it exists in Taiwan.
04:20Although I do look at other closely related ethnically Chinese societies.
04:26It isn't about discrimination in Britain, or Brazil,
04:30or any other place not predominantly ethnically Chinese.
04:34Yes, I know race prejudice exists in all those places.
04:38If you're interested in finding out more about race prejudice in some other country,
04:43there are certain to be videos on the internet dealing with that subject.
04:48I'll first give you a taster of how things were in Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
04:55At that time, I worked part-time as an English language home tutor,
05:00and I advertised my services in various places.
05:04Several potential students inquiring about my race and availability
05:08wanted to be sure I wasn't black before hiring.
05:12One woman even expressed great relief when I'd assured her that I wasn't,
05:17and then she told me,
05:18Sorry to ask, but I have to be sure.
05:21I can't have my children being taught by a black man.
05:24Around the same time, early 1992,
05:28there was an explosion of anti-foreign sentiment in Taiwan,
05:32and a massive purge of undocumented foreign workers,
05:36which was just about all foreign workers at that time.
05:40A pedestrian subway right in the heart of Taipei, by the railway station,
05:44was dauged from end to end with the words,
05:47kill foreigners and kill black devils, painted in red paint in Chinese and in English.
05:55It remained that way for at least a week,
05:59which can be taken as a measure of the level of acceptance of xenophobia at that time.
06:05The so-called black devils in question were not blacks, but Southeast Asians.
06:11This insult applies to anyone darker than Chinese, as we'll see in a little while.
06:16Shortly after I moved to Hong Kong,
06:19I ran into three Sri Lankans I had met briefly in Taiwan some months before the purge.
06:25All were visibly bruised,
06:27and one claimed his eyesight had been permanently affected by the beatings
06:32he had received at the hands of immigration officers
06:35at the detention centre the three of them had been sent to before expulsion from Taiwan.
06:41I had no reason to disbelieve them and every reason to believe them.
06:47My girlfriend had recently begun work at the Singapore Airlines check-in desk at Taoyuan Airport,
06:53and she told me that many of the illegal aliens forcibly expelled from Taiwan
06:58also seemed to have been badly beaten not long before arriving at the airport.
07:04So, things are much better in Taiwan right now,
07:08and foreign nationals of every creed and colour are apparently much more welcome.
07:14But bear in mind that these things can easily change very quickly.
07:18Taiwan's history of ethnic tolerance is a very sure one.
07:22OK, so let's take a look at some of the popular racist insults.
07:28So, let's look first at the term Heigwe.
07:33This is a very common insult used towards darker-skinned people,
07:37and this is what the man on the bus mentioned earlier would have said
07:40if he really did want to insult that African-American.
07:44If you follow the news, you may have seen a BBC report in early 2022,
07:50which covered a Chinese national in Malawi making demeaning videos of black Africans,
07:57including one in which a group of kids sang,
08:00I am a black devil and I have a lower IQ.
08:03This particular video resulted in the Chinese communists condemning it,
08:08and the guy who made it eventually being deported.
08:11But in fact, making demeaning videos for blacks in Africa is big business for Chinese entrepreneurs.
08:19The man who made the above-mentioned video claimed he was only promoting Chinese culture,
08:25and in a sense he was, at least promoting one unhealthy aspect of it.
08:32Soon after that BBC documentary, on orders from Beijing,
08:37social media platforms such as WeChat and TikTok blocked users
08:42from searching video accounts containing the term Africa.
08:47But prior to that, to illustrate how popular such videos are,
08:51one Chinese national who went by the name African Mr. Hello,
08:56had 10 million followers across various Chinese social media platforms.
09:02When interviewed by an overseas media outlet, he even gave the opinion that,
09:08this is not China, but Africa.
09:13Africans are inherently savage, barbaric, you know?
09:17They only have profit in their eyes.
09:21Actually, the Chinese government crackdown on insulting videos of Africans was more than a little disingenuous,
09:28because the Chinese government is not above making racist videos itself when it suits its purpose.
09:34As when Indian border troops prevented China from building a road through Bhutanese territory,
09:41thereby violating a previous agreement made in 1998 not to alter the territorial status quo.
09:47You can get a more genuine feel for the general Chinese sentiment towards blacks
09:53from items of popular Chinese culture, such as this TV commercial.
10:02Wow!
10:03Anyway, although the above-mentioned BBC documentary brought Chinese racism against blacks to international attention,
10:12it has to be pointed out that the term Heigwe does not refer only to African blacks,
10:18but to all people with a skin colour darker than the average Chinese.
10:24That includes even Southeast Asians, and over the years I've heard Thais, to name just one group,
10:30being called Heigwe, by Taiwan Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, Singapore and Malaysian Chinese, and PRC citizens too.
10:39Some people in Taiwan may remember the popular toothpaste brand, Dali, was once called Darky.
10:49The one-letter name change which I heard was undertaken with great reluctance and objections,
10:55came about because of American diplomatic pressure.
10:58It came to the attention of the American Institute in Taiwan only because it had an English name.
11:06In the case of Heigwe-you, or Black Devil Oil, which can be found in Chinese medicine shops all across Singapore,
11:14there is no English name, so the brand has always been able to sell happily under a racist name,
11:21with no objections from interfering foreigners.
11:24It features, or at least used to feature, an image of the Singaporean Chinese concept of a Black Devil.
11:32Although in theory the Malay population of Singapore, who are almost universally regarded as lazy by the Chinese majority,
11:40are also Black Devils. As far as I can tell, the term Black Devil in Singapore is generally reserved for the city-state's ethnic Indian population,
11:52who are almost universally regarded as dirty and unhygienic by the Chinese majority.
11:59On a side note, it should perhaps be mentioned that the term Chinese Singaporean is an English construct
12:06intended to facilitate smooth relations with Singapore's non-Chinese population.
12:12In Chinese, the term is Singapore Chinese.
12:17This may seem like a minor difference, but in fact is very significant.
12:22It means that the city-state's Chinese population see themselves principally as Chinese,
12:30not essentially any different from Taiwan Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, Shanghai Chinese.
12:37These are all just locations from the Chinese viewpoint.
12:43Here's a typically racist quip made several decades ago by Chu-Bui Kiang,
12:49a former Singapore MP, in a parliamentary speech.
12:53One evening, I drove to Little India, and it was pitch dark.
12:58Not because there was no light, but because there were too many Indians around.
13:04His racist witticism about Indian skin colour didn't result in any objections from other members of parliament.
13:12In the 1990s, while Singapore was still led by Li Guangyu, himself a racist and a bigot of worldwide repute,
13:21openly racist comments were still acceptable at every level of Singapore society.
13:27Today, they wouldn't be, but only if they were public comments made in English, in a place like parliament.
13:34On the street, speaking Chinese, people make such racist comments about the city-state's Hei Gui population every day.
13:46OK, now let's get to the use of the term Hei Gui in Taiwan.
13:50As you can see from this news report, the insult is still very much alive and well,
13:55and was used here to taunt a basketball player in a university basketball association match.
14:03So it's still an insult that easily slips from the lips of young Taiwanese.
14:08However, the good news is that this resulted in the association banning the offending players from further tournaments,
14:15and eventually an apology was forthcoming.
14:18That's something which certainly wouldn't have happened 30 years ago.
14:23So there has been some progress in this respect.
14:27Well, this video has only covered one racist term,
14:32so obviously another couple at least will be needed to fully introduce the fundamentals
14:37of discrimination based on race, ethnic group and skin colour in Taiwan,
14:42and in ethnically Chinese society in general.
14:45See you again soon.
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