This article is reproduced from: History Study Society
Author | Luo Xin (Professor, Department of History, Peking University)
The history we are familiar with contains a large number of myths and pseudo-histories, some of which will be debunked, eliminated and replaced, and some of which will make the doubters helpless due to the lack of historical materials and the lack of evidence. We should not only have the courage to debunk myths and create new knowledge, but also maintain vigilance and distance in the face of new and old myths that are temporarily difficult to shake.
Ensuring that historical knowledge is correct and accurate, and that it is not abused or misused, is a matter of human mental health and mental development, and this is the duty of historians. In his new book, The Rebel Who Did Nothing, scholar Luo Xin demonstrated to us a healthy attitude toward interpreting history.
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When I was young, on a winter night when I was rushing to write my doctoral dissertation, I listened to Zhu Zheqin's "Yellow Child" in FM97.4, and the sense of loneliness and hopelessness of the empty depression just matched the desperate situation that I could not write but had to write. "On the streets of white people, there are many blue eyes. ...... In the yellow man's family, there are many black eyes. The lyrics compare the blue eyes of white people with the black eyes of yellow people, and pour out the loss of the East in front of the West. The song sings, "At that time, at that time, I didn't know I was a yellow child."
Like Zhu Zheqin when Singing, when I listened to the song, I already knew that I was a "yellow person". In the song "Descendants of the Dragon", which is sung all over China, there is a sentence that "black eyes, black hair, yellow skin, and will always be the descendant of the dragon." We are taught to recognize and identify with our yellow nature, to recognize that our skin is yellow, even though our skin is not yellow at all to the naked eye, unless we have a special disease.
Over the years, just as Zhou Botong tried to forget the Nine Yin True Scriptures, we gradually removed one lump after another of educational paste from our minds. Many concepts under the logic of racial thinking are no longer popular, we know that racial classification is pseudoscience, and we understand that the differences in human physical characteristics are actually adaptive changes that have occurred in different environments on the earth for tens of thousands of years.
It is difficult to find labels for East Asia in Western academic writings and public media, such as "Mongolian race" and "yellow race". Unfortunately, these labels and the racial thinking they represent have not yet become obsolete in areas such as China, which have been victims of racial thinking for more than two hundred years. Even in the archaeological reports published in China in recent years, it is still easy to read special chapters on skeletal analysis, which often have ethnographic data and speculations, especially the ethnic analysis of ancient human bones in the frontier, such as how many belong to the Europa race, how many belong to the Mongol race, and so on. And so on, there is a meticulous classification of the skeletons of ancient ethnic groups, completely disregarding that the fundamental attributes of ancient ethnic groups are actually political units rather than blood collections. There is no doubt that reflection and criticism of racial thinking remain a blank spot in our common sense education.
In that sense, we now have a good textbook for reflecting on racial thinking, and that's Chimeck's new book, Becoming Yellow: A Brief History of Race Thinking. This book focuses on reproducing the conceptual historical changes in the description and understanding of East Asian people in Western societies, examining the origin of the concept of "yellow people", the stereotyping of the "yellow Mongol race" in the western scientific community in the theory of racial classification, and the intellectual process of how this doctrine spread to the East and was widely accepted by Eastern societies.
It is not difficult to understand that the original meaning of "yellow race" refers to the race with yellow skin. However, a surprising finding of Chimack's book is that the classification of the skin color of East Asians as yellow is not the result of empirical observations, but a new invention of modern science.
In the travel reports of various Westerners before the mid-18th century, the description of the skin color of East Asians (mainly Chinese and Japanese) was mostly white, slightly dark white, olive, etc., and it was rarely believed that East Asians were very different from Europeans in terms of skin color. Observers, including travelers, merchants, and missionaries, noticed that there were considerable differences in the physical characteristics of people in different parts of East Asia, such as the darker skin color of southerners and northerners in China, but this difference was the same as the difference between European countries, only in shades. This is the record of empirical observations. The indians who were often classified as "yellow-skinned" by Western observers at that time were precisely the Indians who were included in the category of "white people" in the 19th century.
Color is not only an objective description of physical phenomena, but also carries the values and emotions assigned by various cultural traditions. In general terms (and of course only in the direction of Chimeco's point of view), in the Western tradition white represents holiness, purity, wisdom and nobility, black symbolizes evil, filth, death and barbarism, and yellow means uncleanness, vulgarity, morbidity and terror.
When East Asia, represented by China, was considered to be a civilized society like the West, Western travelers saw that the skin color of the Orientals was white and not yellow at all. However, with the development of the industrial revolution in Western Europe, the ancient Oriental society became more and more backward, stagnant and declining, and the skin color of the Oriental people slowly lost the qualification to be described as white.
Are Asians really "yellow-skinned"?
Chimack investigates this shift, noticing a growing number of observers saying that East Asian skin tones are nearly white but not white. Brown, olive, off-white, lead, etc., in short, not white anymore. However, almost no one has yet described the skin color of East Asians as pure yellow, because yellow is indeed not a skin color that can be observed empirically with the naked eye in East Asia. After the white was monopolized by Europeans, it seems that it is difficult to agree on how to describe East Asians for a long time and on a fairly wide scale. The solution to this problem will not last until Eurocentrism continues to grow, beyond empirical observation, and dominated by modern taxonomy, anthropology, and evolution, that the historical leap from white to yellow in East Asian skin color was finally realized.
Racial classification, which began in the mid-18th century, marked the replacement of classical empirical descriptions by racial thinking in modern natural sciences, and the scientific classification of human beings in natural systems. The first important scholar in the history of human taxonomy was the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), who, in his 1735 book Natural Systems, divided human beings into four species, of which Europa Caucasian, American Indian Red, and African Black were all terms that were then widely familiar to Western society, and only Asian skin color he used an ambiguous Latin word fuscus, which can usually be understood as dark or brown. In the 1740 German translation, the word was translated into German gelblich ("yellowish").
Chimack believes that this is an important step in the asian race's skin color from a variety of alternative colors to eventually "yellow". And the more important step was taken by Linnaeus himself. When he published the tenth edition of the book in 1758-1759, he changed the color of the Asians from fuscus to luridus, and the word can be translated as yellow, light yellow, sallow, pale, dead color, and so on. Chiméko emphasizes that Linnaeus is not simply looking for a suitable transition between the white and black poles, he is actually looking for a word that implies pathology and unhealthiness to refer to Asians, because Linnaeus has said that the luridus color of plants means sadness and suspiciousness.
In the late 18th century, the landmark development of the so-called Scientific Racism came from the anthropologist Johann F. Blumenbach (1752-1840). The German scientist, known as the father of physical anthropology, was not satisfied with the practice of Linnaeus and others to distinguish races by continents and skin color, and instead used the method of physical characteristics, especially skull morphology analysis, to divide humans into five groups, named the Caucasian race, the Ethiopian race, the American race, the Malay race and the Mongolian race.
The words Caucasian and races, the words he invented, have incredible vitality, and even today, when racial thinking is being abandoned, they still stubbornly appear frequently in various scientific and popular scripts. Although Blumenbach considered the classification of skin color to be imprecise and confusing, and that he himself focused only on skull analysis, he combined the popular classification of skin color with his skull classification, resulting in five major human classifications of the white Caucasian race, the black Ethiopian race, the red American race, the black brown Malay race, and the yellow Mongol race. In Chimeko's view, it is precisely because the Mongolian name is widely accepted by scholars that the yellow color associated with this race has stabilized and flourished, becoming the ultimate winner of all alternative colors. Since then, the East Asian race has had the dual label of Mongolian physique and yellow skin.
1795 was an important year for scientific ethnologies, when Blumenbach coined new concepts such as the Mongol race and the Caucasian race, and in the decades that followed, the attribute of East Asians was generally accepted as a conclusive conclusion, although there was still some debate about how to better describe the skin color of the Orientals. Why did Blumenbach use Mongolia to name the East Asian race? This is not a random and convenient choice, nor is it because the Mongol skull is the most typical and representative (which is said to be the reason for naming caucasians after caucasians), but because the Mongols are the most frightening Orientals in history, a name that evokes the West's historical memory of Attila, Genghis Khan, and Timur. Blumenbach repeatedly pointed out the difference between Mongolia and Tatars, and he gave the name Tatars to the Turks, arguing that Central Asians, including Tatars, as well as middle Eastern, South Asian, and North Africans, belonged to the Caucasian race like Europeans, and the Mongol race referred specifically to East Asians.
The physical anthropology founded by Brumenbach immediately made ethnographic studies the entirety of the discipline, and quickly pushed scientific racialism to the extreme. The red, black, and yellow races between whites and blacks are like transitions between night and day, between civilization and barbarism, between perfection and wickedness. The physical differences between races are not only physiological differences, but also reflect the differences between morality and intelligence.
The anatomically confirmed large brain volume of the Caucasian race determined that caucasians were intellectually superior to other races, and that light skin tone and high brow bones were also causally linked to their highest moral level; the pale yellow complexion and epicanthal folds characteristic of the Mongol race were directly related to the cunning, dark, rigidity and rigidity of their nature; and the dark skin, low brow bones, and thick lips of the Ethiopian race showed that they were still close to apes.
Since the moral and intellectual differences of man depend on physiological differences, the differences not only between human races, but also between subspecies of various races, will also point to differences in blood, for example, the Germans are much superior to other white people, and the greatest threat to the purity and nobility of white people is the Jews and Gypsies among the whites. This further pushes scientific racialism down a more absurd and evil path of no return.
Jew
Every culture and society has its own tradition of racial thinking, but only the Western scientific ethnology carries the aura of science and enters the non-Western world as part of the modern Western knowledge system. Chimico examined the process of the acceptance of the yellow Mongol ethnographic concept in China and Japan, and found that Chinese more active in accepting this concept, because yellow has little negative significance in Chinese culture (the word "yellow" with erotic meanings was later transformed from Western yellow journalism), the tradition of proper names such as the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow River, and the noble status of yellow, making it difficult for Chinese to accept the yellow racial classification. All that needs to be removed is the value of white and yellow that Westerners attach to white and yellow. In the Japanese tradition, yellow does not have such a positive use case, so the acceptance process is more tortuous.
Chiméco also found that the first Chinese to embrace this idea and actively promote it were intellectuals who had the opportunity to receive education or understand the West. As for Japan's rise, China's anti-Western social actions such as the Boxer Rebellion, one of the Western reactions was the emergence of the "yellow peril" theory. Although the Yellow Peril theory is aimed at modern China and Japan, the historical basis is the Mongol Expedition of the 13th century, completely ignoring that China was a victim of The Mongol conquest in history, and Japan almost suffered Mongol conquest. The combination of the two labels of Mongolian and yellow races can promote the popularity of the "yellow peril theory".
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Since Richard Leverdin published his article in 1972 on the distribution of human genetic diversity in populations, the traditional taxonomy of dividing humans into different groups and subgroups under the label of "race" has begun to lose its biological basis. Researchers believe that human genetic diversity exists mainly between individuals, that differences between regions and ethnic groups are relatively irrelevant, and that it is impossible to draw a scientifically based dividing line between races and races, between ethnic groups and ethnic groups. Recent research on the relationship between genes and race, genes and ethnic groups shows that the current situation of modern human genetic diversity was formed by human beings after they left Africa about 100,000 years ago, and only accelerated to 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, and is the result of the long and repeated exchange of human genes between individuals and groups, this process is "reticulate evolution", and the so-called race is a later "socio-cultural construction" （socio-cultural construct）。 The essence of this "socio-cultural construction" is political.
Regrettably, however, these understandings are still far from common sense in Chinese society, even among intellectuals, even among scholars of history, nationality, and ethnicity. In fact, what we often hear about is the "black eyes, black hair, yellow skin" racial identity of "Descendants of the Dragon". Just as the song repeatedly sings "There is a river in the far east" and "there is a river in the far east", the singers and singers who are obviously in East Asia use the word "far away" to describe the land under their feet, indicating that they not only accept the Western concept of race, but also take the initiative to measure and describe East Asia with the West as the central point.
However, the concepts and words of the Mongolian race, the yellow race, and the yellow skin have basically disappeared in today's Mainstream Western media and in Western scientific treatises. This is not only due to the so-called "political correctness", but also mainly out of "intellectual correctness", because modern science has long been reborn and abandoned racial thinking.
It is in this sense that I think Chimiko's "Becoming a Yellow Race" has a high scientific value for Chinese intellectuals. Only by deeply understanding the historical development process of racial thinking can we know how absurd and dangerous racial concepts and racial classification knowledge are.
This article is selected from
The Rebel Who Does Nothing: Criticism, Doubt and Imagination, Publisher: Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore | The Republic