In the future, I am sure a more enlightened generation will be appalled about the extent of institutional and casual racism routinely used by the White community to refer to people of Chinese ethnicity and ancestry. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that anti-Chinese racism is one of the ‘great’ and ‘unopposed’ racisms that arose with the Western (imperialist) intrusion into Asia and which is still in operation as it suits the ‘Cold War’ anti-Socialist strategy of the US. This American approach suggests that the Chinese might as well be hated for their ‘race’ as they are disliked for their choice of ‘political’ ideology! In the mind of the average White American and European – even if the Chinese people were not Socialist – there would still be the thorny issue of their assumed ‘racial’ inferiority. In other words, the anti-Chinese racism would continue regardless of the political ideology practiced.
One clear example of this Eurocentric racism is the concept of so-called ‘Tiger Parenting’ – which is nothing short than a Western attempt at ‘normalising’ and ‘fetishizing’ a form of primitive child abuse prevalent within feudalistic Chinese culture. As modern China is a Socialist country, women and children are equal to men with this equality protected and guaranteed in law. The patriarchal abuse of women (which led to wives having to be brutal to their children) in an attempt to satisfy a sadistic streak existing in the character of their husbands (and other male relatives) is now outlawed in China (and has been since 1949), and is in no way part of the progressive and enlightened Socialist education system! The only place that so called ‘Tiger Parenting’ occurs is within the Chinese diasporic communities that are ‘untouched’ by the 1949 Socialist Revolution in China, and which have evolved from a feudalistic version of Chinese hierarchical culture, directly into a Western ‘capitalist’ society (premised upon selfish-individualism, greed and status, etc).
It is only in this setting, (through this transition into modernity) that this mode of cultural abuse could be preserved, sustained and transmitted. Nowhere else on earth would the West allow an ethnic tradition of extreme psychological and physical child abuse to continue if it was not in the service of predatory capitalism! ‘Tiger Parenting’ is often an excuse used by Chinese parents who apply a level of psychological and physical discipline to a child that would normally be interpreted as ‘child abuse’, and in violation of ‘civil rights’ and ‘human rights’! Parents are believed to do this for the ‘benefit’ of their children who supposedly feel ‘compelled’ and ‘motivated’ by this cruelty to pass exams with ‘high’ marks, enter prestigious universities and eventually acquire elitist professional posts and high-earning occupations, etc. Furthermore, in this Western perception of a Chinese cultural practice, the mother and child are both referred to as reassembling an ‘animal’ and behaving toward one another in ‘animalistic’ ways!
How extraordinary that such a description and a practice should be eulogised within Western racism that reduces other human beings to the status of animals and their behaviour to that of how an adult animal disciplines its off-spring! This type of overt racism is tolerated because the behaviour it attempts to describe is witnessed only in the pursuance of capitalist greed! Just as capitalism is not allowed to be questioned – the concept (and practice) of so-called ‘Tiger Parenting’ is allowed to continue unopposed! More to the point, one last injustice concerns the fact that the average Westerner believes that ‘Tiger Parenting’ is a true and correct interpretation of how people live in modern China – and that this ‘brutality’ in China proves just how much more ‘civilised’ the West must be! This is all part of the imagined world of racialised narratives designed to maintain Eurocentric dominance!
THE SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 