Race

Abstract

This chapter looks at how, when and why racial theories became so widespread in China. After the Qing empire’s devastating defeat against Japan in 1895, leading reformers like Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei turned away from the Confucian classics to seek enlightenment abroad, hoping to find the keys to wealth and power on the distant shores of Europe instead. They discovered the notion of “race,” and used new evolutionary theories from Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to present a universe red in tooth and claw in which “yellows” competed with “whites” in a deadly struggle for survival. After the fall of the empire in 1911, prominent politicians and writers continued to measure, classify and rank people according to their supposed biological features, all in the name of science. Racial thinking remains popular to this day, as serologists, geneticists and anthropometrists continue to interpret human variation around the world in terms of “race.” But most of all, racial theories are used to represent the various peoples living inside the People’s Republic of China, from Tibetans to Uighurs, as the minor components of one organically unified 'nationality.'