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Nationalism Ruined My Chinese Friendships

As it turns out, Mingjun came from a military family — a fact I was unaware of. In the past few years, some of her family members had been dispatched to Xinjiang to help maintain the region’s security. “Many people had died,” she said, referring to the Han Chinese victims of the 2009 Urumqi riots as well as subsequent attacks in 2014. She said the police patrolled the streets 24/7, and anyone with a slightly higher nose than a typical Han Chinese would be stopped for inspection.

“Isn’t that targeting the entire ethnicity?” I retorted.

“Mei ban fa!” She exclaimed. There’s just no other way.

“But see, that’s exactly why the West has been critical,” I said. “They come from a human rights perspective, and these innocent people have been deprived of their basic human rights. They’re humans, too, you know.”

“Yes, they’re humans, but what about the bigger population beyond the region? What about people of the entire country? Who’s accounting for their security?” At this point, Mingjun had become very agitated. To ease the tension, others around the table started agreeing with whatever she said in order to calm her down.

The first time they ganged up on me was over the issue of U.S. deployment of THAAD in South Korea. China reacted strongly, seeing it as a threat to its national security. To put pressure on South Korea, the Chinese government orchestrated a series of boycotts against Korean businesses in China, including retail giant Lotte. Some Lotte stores were reportedly ransacked by nationalistic Chinese citizens. In our WeChat group, I expressed frustration with this tactic, calling it 土豪外交 (tǔháo wàijiāo) — “new-money diplomacy.”

One person responded immediately. “You Americans aren’t any better!” he said. “How long has the world endured America’s hegemony?” My response to that was, just because America did similar things doesn’t make it right. Lots of countries have corrupt leaders. Just because countries A, B, and C all have them doesn’t make the problem go away. He saw my point.

The second person, whom I’ll call Tang, thought I was gulled by media reports. According to him, there really weren’t that many boycotts. To prove his point, he contacted a travel agent while we were talking, asking her if recent trips to Korea had been cancelled. She said no. “See? Rumors can be easily dismissed. It’s the media that hypes things up,” Tang said. He also thought the nationalistic behaviors were among the few and didn’t represent the majority.

I responded by saying that one travel agency could hardly represent the whole picture, and that many media reports were indeed based on facts. Whether the boycotts were overwhelming or not, I said, the behavior should still be called into question.

As for the level of nationalism, many others weighed in. Some believed it was overwhelming, an act of group instinct that is often evident among the Chinese. One person pointed out that under China’s current education and propaganda systems, nationalism was inevitable.

On August 4, 2018, during a soccer game between Shanghai Shenhua and Changchun Yatai in China’s top league, a fight broke out between two players. Demba Ba, a French-born Senegalese player who signed a lease with Shanghai Shenhua three years earlier, accused Zhāng Lì 张力, a Chinese player from the opposing team, of hurling racist insults at him. According to Ba, Zhang kept shouting “You black!” at him, which spurred his immediate reaction. The dispute was handed over to the Chinese Football Association, and Zhang was punished for “disturbing regular orders of the game.” No word of racism was mentioned in the verdict.

In our WeChat group, discussions broke out over the issue of racism. Tang led the discussion. He said the West had a history of racism against blacks, but the Chinese simply weren’t racist.

I gaped. Just six months earlier, an Africa skit during the Chinese New Year Gala on CCTV had featured blackface and equated Africans with monkeys. A few years back, a laundry detergent commercial had featured a black man who was fed the detergent and pushed into a washing machine by a Chinese woman. When he came out, he was a light-skinned Asian. I brought up these two examples to support my counterargument.

“Fine,” Tang replied with a face palm. “Maybe there are racist Chinese, but I’m not one of them.”

“The point is not to judge,” I continued, “but to reflect on our cultural psyche and see how we can do better.”

For a moment, no one said anything, and I dropped my phone to carry on with my life, leaving WeChat on mute. Then Tang came back. “Black soccer players have been paid very well in China. For many Chinese, we just find their looks interesting, that’s all…And maybe this had nothing to do with racism at all. Maybe it was a cover for a foul.”

During that disputed game, before Ba and Zhang went after each other, Ba was fighting for the ball with another Chinese player on the opposing team, and the latter fell to the ground after the two collided in the air. That was when Zhang came to his teammate’s defense, allegedly calling Ba “You black.” Tang was referring to the collision before the conflict broke out.

Several others agreed with Tang. “The blacks in the league have a history of doing that,” one person said. “They commit nasty fouls.”

On October 1, as China celebrated the 70th anniversary of the PRC, my WeChat moments were filled with patriotic sentiment. Many of my classmates posted pictures from the awe-inspiring military parade on Tiananmen Square. “The Republic has walked past 70 tremendous years, and we’ve come a long way. Proud of you, my dear motherland!” one person remarked. While the parade was being aired on state-owned television, our WeChat group was also filled with festive messages. Everyone weighed in on the spectacle: the uniforms, the weaponry, the female soldiers, President Xi’s speech his makeup…

Amid this chatter, one person in our group commented on a recent experience on Twitter. Despite the social media platform being blocked in China, she often climbs the great firewall with the help of a VPN. On Twitter, she said she had been fed outrageous messages by Chinese dissidents living overseas. On this special occasion, she said, they were ready to make trouble, their attacks on China fiercer than ever.

“Why is that?” Tang responded. “Why are these yellow-skinned, Chinese-speaking, highly educated people so bent on demonizing their home country?”

Exclusive: 'A Piece of Meat' - How Muslim Men See White Women

A British girl was “passed around like a piece of meat” between Muslim men who abused and raped her between the ages of 12 and 14, a court heard earlier this month. Her problems began after she befriended a young Muslim man who, before long, was “forcing her to perform sex acts on other [and older] men,” and receiving money for it. When she resisted, he threatened her and her family with death and destruction. Speaking now as an adult, the woman explained how she eventually “lost count of how many men I was forced to have sex with” during two years of “hell” when she often considered suicide. Among other anecdotes, the court heard how the young “girl was raped on a dirty mattress above a takeaway and forced to perform [oral] sex acts in a churchyard,” and how one of her abusers “urinated on her in an act of humiliation” afterwards.

Although her experiences are akin to those of many British girls, that she was “passed around like a piece of meat” is a reminder of the experiences of another British woman known by the pseudonym of Kate Elysia. The Muslim men she encountered “made me believe I was nothing more than a slut, a white whore,” she said. “They treated me like a leper, apart from when they wanted sex. I was less than human to them, I was rubbish.”

What explains this ongoing exploitation of European women by Muslim men—which exists well beyond the UK and has become epidemic in Germany Sweden, and elsewhere? The answer begins by understanding that, although these sordid accounts are routinely dismissed as the activities of “criminals,” they are in fact reflective of nearly fourteen centuries of Muslim views on and treatment of European women.

For starters, Muslim men have long had an obsessive attraction for fair women of the European variety. This, as all things Islamic, traces back to their prophet, Muhammad. In order to entice his men to war on the Byzantines—who, as the Arabs’ nearest European neighbors represented “white” people—the prophet told them that they would be able to sexually enslave the “yellow” women (an apparent reference to their fair hair).

For over a millennium after Muhammad, jihadi leaders—Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Tatars et al—also coaxed their men to jihad on Europe by citing (and later sexually enslaving) its women. As one example, prior to their invasion into Spain, Tarek bin Ziyad, a jihadi hero, enticed the Muslims by saying, “You must have heard numerous accounts of this island, you must know how the Grecian maidens, as beautiful as houris … are awaiting your arrival, reclining on soft couches in the sumptuous palaces of crowned lords and princes.”

That the sexual enslavement of fair women was an aspect that always fueled the jihad is evident in other ways. Thus, for M.A. Khan, an author and former Muslim, it is “impossible to disconnect Islam from the Viking slave-trade, because the supply was absolutely meant for meeting [the] Islamic world’s unceasing demand for the prized white slaves” and for “white sex-slaves.”

Just as Muslim rapists see British and other European women as “pieces of meat,” “nothing more than sluts,” and “white whores,” so did Muslim luminaries always describe the nearest European women of Byzantium. Thus, for Abu Uthman al-Jahiz (b. 776), a prolific court scholar, the females of Constantinople were the “most shameless women in the whole world … [T]hey find sex more enjoyable” and “are prone to adultery.” Abd al-Jabbar (b. 935), another prominent scholar, claimed that “adultery is commonplace in the cities and markets of Byzantium”—so much so that even “the nuns from the convents went out to the fortresses to offer themselves to monks.”

But as the author of Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs, explains:

Our [Arab/Muslim] sources show not Byzantine women but writers’ images of these women, who served as symbols of the eternal female—constantly a potential threat, particularly due to blatant exaggerations of their sexual promiscuity. In our texts [Arab/Muslim], Byzantine women are strongly associated with sexual immorality . . . .While the one quality that our sources never deny is the beauty of Byzantine women, the image that they create in describing these women is anything but beautiful. Their depictions are, occasionally, excessive, virtually caricatures, overwhelmingly negative…The behavior of most women in Byzantium was a far cry from the depictions that appear in Arabic sources.

The continuity in Muslim “dealings” with European women is evident even in the otherwise arcane details. For example, the aforementioned Kate “was trafficked to the North African country of Morocco where she was prostituted and repeatedly raped.” She was kept in an apartment in Marrakesh, where another girl no more than 15 was also kept for sexual purposes. “I can’t remember how many times I’m raped that [first] night, or by who,” Kate recounts.

This mirrors history. By 1541, the Muslim Barbary State of “Algiers teemed with Christian captives,” from Europe that “it became a common saying that a Christian slave was scarce a fair barter for an onion.”

According to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 [alone] there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” of which Morocco—where Kate was abducted to in the modern era—was one. Women slaves—and not a few men and boys—were always sexually abused. With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”

It was the same elsewhere. (The number of Europeans enslaved by Muslims throughout history is closer to 15 million.) The slave markets of the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with European flesh that children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.” In Crimea—where some three million Slavs were enslaved by the Muslim Tatars—an eyewitness described how Christian men were castrated and savagely tortured (including by gouging their eyes out), whereas “The youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures.”

Such a long and unwavering history of sexually enslaving European women on the claim that, they are all “pieces of meat,” “nothing more than sluts,” and “white whores,” should place the ongoing sexual abuse of Western women in context—and offer a dim prognosis for the future.