In the past, the Chinese were insultingly referred to as the yellow peril, an alien breed whose weird ways might corrupt Western civilisation and even bring it to its knees. Today the Chinese are looked on as a green peril, an over-productive people whose use of coal and other filthy fossil fuels might pollute Western society and put the whole world on the fast track to irreversible disaster.
The language has changed dramatically in the past 100 years, but there are striking similarities between how some people viewed the Chinese in the early 20th century and howsome people view them in the early 21stcentury.
The idea of the Chinese as people who – or their ideas or products – might cause harm to the Western world seems to have remained constant over the decades. In the climate change debate, China is always depicted as being peculiarly dirty. Its monumental economic growth over the past 30 years is rarely discussed in terms of its vast benefits to humanity but is instead denounced for its destructive impact on nature.
So we rarely hear the good news about China’s industrial leap forward. For example, the fact that, where China had 193 cities in 1978, it now has a remarkable 655; or that where life expectancy in China was a paltry 36.5 years when the People’s Republic was established in 1949, it is now 73.4 years.
In 1949, China had a population of 542million and only 117,000 students in higher education; today it has a population of 1.3billion and 20.2 million students in higher education – a figure close to the entire population of Australia.
Yet what are we most frequently told about China’s industrialisation? That it is dangerous, both for the people of China and for everyone else across the world.
An environmentalist writer in Britain says the upshot of China’s “economic miracle” has been “dust, waste and dirty water”. Other Western greens tell us that China’s use of coal is turning the country into a “rapidly advancing dystopia where rivers run black”.
Even worse, China’s growth might end up killing us all. We are frequently told that China is the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and, in the words of one green observer, is putting the world on “the fast track to irreversible disaster”. Many environmentalists claim that the UN climate summit at Copenhagen in December is our “last chance to save the planet” and therefore we must get China to agree to sign up.
This view of China as a peculiarly threatening nation has eerie echoes of the past. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the movement of Chinese workers and goods to the US and other Western nations gave rise to fears of a polluting effect. In his book Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Robert L.Gee says Chinese immigrants were seen as “racial, social and physical pollutants” who might provoke the “demise of Western civilisation”.
This view of the Chinese was revealing, says Lee: “Pollutants are anomalies in the symbolic structure of society, things that are out of place and create a sense of disorder.” Today, in the lingo of environmentalism, the Chinese are seen as the harbingers of climatic disorder.
According to the academic Monica Chui, the China-bashing dime-store novels of the late 19th century yellow peril era were also packed with images of the Chinese as “filth, pollutants and toxins”.
In her book Fit to be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles 1879-1939, Natalia Molina describes how some American public health officials depicted the Chinese as “carriers of diseases and pollutants”, giving rise to a perception of Chinese people as “a literal as well as metaphorical threat to the health of the body politic”.
One concern of the Yellow Peril era was that if Chinese people bred with white people, or even intoxicated them with their strange habits, then the intelligence levels of Western society would be lowered as a result.
This idea was rehabilitated during the great Chinese toy scare of 2007. When it was revealed that some Chinese toys had high levels of lead in them (though not high enough to cause serious harm to children), there were fears in the US that if American kids chewed on the toys for too long, it might harm their IQ levels (some experts believe that exposure to lead can damage children’s intellectual development). Here, the old idea about strange items from the East damaging the intellectual resources of the West is given a new lease of life through the environmentalist outlook.
This is not to argue that contemporary environmentalists are racists. There are vast differences between labelling a people as pollutants and discussing their behaviour as polluting. However, the persistence of the pollutant label in relation to China reveals much about the fin-de-siecle outlook that underpins contemporary climate fears.
If we were to take a more humane view, then we would realise that Chinese growth has been vastly and historically beneficial both to the hundreds of millions of people who have been lifted out of absolute poverty, and to those Western societies that were bankrolled in recent years by Chinese credit.
bron: www.theaustralian.news.com.au
[Billionaire Liberal National Party donor Clive Palmer says Australia's foreign investment rules are unfairly weighted against China. Picture Annette Dew]
