China and the West have a long history of exchanges, in 100 AD, the Great Qin merchants traveled to China, Sun Quan also chatted with Western merchants during the Three Kingdoms, and a large number of missionaries visited China in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties........ Before the mid-18th century, Western travelers reported that China had always been a "people with white skin", recording the skin color of Chinese as dark white, olive, etc., and rarely thought that there was any big difference between Chinese skin color and Europeans, let alone that Chinese were "yellow skin".
After the 19th century, however, the definition of Chinese skin color changed dramatically, when Europeans generally considered Chinese to be "yellow", and eventually Chinese generally considered themselves yellow.
The difference between yellow and white is very large, and ordinary people can recognize it at a glance, let alone experts and scholars. So why would Westerners define Chinese skin tone as "yellow" instead of "white"? In fact, all this is related to Eurocentrism and white supremacy!
From the mid-18th century onwards, Europe redefined chinese skin color
After the Industrial Revolution, Europe stood out from the world map and began to define the world race by their standards.
In the mid-18th century, the Swedish biologist Linnaeus (pictured below), in his book Natural Systems, divided humans into four species, of which Europa Caucasian, American Indian Red, and African Black, but Asian skin color He used an ambiguous Latin word fuscus to illustrate, the word can be understood as dark or brown. In German translations of the time, the word was translated as gelblich in German, meaning yellowish. After some years, Linnaeus changed fuscus to luridus, a word that has a neutral meaning of yellow, pale yellow, sallow yellow, pale, etc.
In the late 18th century, the Caucasian supremacist, the German Blumenbach, known as the "father of physical anthropology", has been studying the human skull, dividing humans into five species, namely caucasian, Ethiopian, American, Malay and Mongolian; later, he combined skull research with skin color classification to re-divide humans into five species, namely white Caucasian race, black Ethiopian race, red American race, black brown Malay race and (East Asian) yellow Mongolian race, which is" The first appearance of the concept of the "yellow Mongol race".
Since the Mongol Empire was widely known in Europe and left a lot of frightening impressions on Europe, "Mongol" and "yellow" were associated, defeating other alternative colors and becoming the official skin color of east Asian races, including Chinese.
Chinese is more white, why is it defined as a yellow person
Among the European population, only the Nordics have an overall whiter skin color, the europeans in other regions do not Chinese whiter, and the southern regions are even darker than Chinese. So why are Europeans classified as "white" Chinese classified as "yellow"?
After the 18th century, with the rise of Europe, they began to consciously or unconsciously keep better words to themselves when describing humans on all continents of the world, so the ethnography of dividing human beings into "white, black, red and yellow" was born in Europe.
In traditional Western culture, white represents holiness, purity, wisdom and nobility, black symbolizes evil, filth, death and barbarism, and yellow represents uncleanness, greed, vulgarity, morbidity and terror. Thus, Europeans are classified as caucasians, Africans are classified as black, and East Asian Chinese, which are civilizational between Europe and Africa, are assigned yellow. At the end of the day, yellow people are not biological, but politically and culturally.
When China is strong, the Chinese in the eyes of Western travelers is "white skin", but when Europe begins the industrial revolution and China becomes more and more backward, China is not qualified to be white-skinned. Regarding China in the eyes of Europe at that time, take literary works as an example: in the sequel to Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Robinson came to China and felt that Chinese "ignorant and dirty", "and not well organized", and knowledge and science and technology were "quite backward"; in the subsequent "Globetrotting", a Chinese image of "fraud, poverty, depravity, ignorance and stubbornness" was shown to Europe.
The definition of "yellow people" derives from white supremacists
The ancient Western travelers recorded China as a "white-skinned people," and the reason why European scholars in the 18th century overturned this conclusion by defining East Asians, including Chinese, as "yellow people" is in fact related to two white supremacists.
The modern American scholar Chimack pointed out that Linnaeus took a key step, that is, to change the color of Asians from fuscus to luridus, "Linnaeus is not simply looking for a suitable transition color between white and black, he is actually looking for a word that implies pathology and unhealthiness to represent Asians, because Linnaeus once said that the appearance of luridus colors by plants means sadness and suspiciousness." So the world-renowned Swedish biologist Linnaeus actually has an ugly soul.
If Linnaeus was only suggestive and had not spoken directly, then Brumenbach (below) gave a clear definition and created a completely new concept of the "yellow Mongol race". In the decades that followed, although there was some debate in Europe about how to describe the skin color of the East Asian race, it was established that the "Mongol race" represented East Asians.
In 1873, due to the political need to weaken China and divide China, the Russian politician Bakunin took the lead in proposing the "Yellow Peril Theory", using the Xiongnu and Mongolia as the historical basis to directly publicize That China as a "great danger from the East", and elevated Russia's aggression against China to a "white war against the yellow race", hoping to gain the support of public opinion in European countries. After that, the "yellow peril theory" became popular in Europe and the United States, and Chinese "yellow people" became the common impression of European and American society.
"Yellow people" are originally a contemptuous name, why are they accepted by Chinese?
Defining Chinese as "yellow people" would have been outright racial discrimination, or a derogatory term, but it is strange why Chinese in modern times have accepted it?
First of all, in traditional Chinese culture, the yellow color not only does not have the meaning of lowliness, but symbolizes nobility, such as the ancient emperor who could only use the yellow color, the Yellow Emperor who "had the rui of Tude, so the yellow emperor", we pride ourselves on the yellow descendants of Yan Huang, the mother river of China - the Yellow River and so on. On the contrary, although white has many positive meanings, it has more negative meanings, such as "white ding", "white clothes", "white body", "white busy", "white tiger" in the autumn of the main Xiao killing, "white things" wearing filial piety clothes, "white face" adulterous males in opera faces, and so on. Therefore, from the perspective of traditional culture, Chinese are more accepting of the "yellow people" argument.
Secondly, the invasion of China by Europe and the United States, the Chinese nation is in the autumn of survival, and when generation after generation of benevolent people are looking for a way to save the country, some people use the "yellow race" as a tool, hoping to unite Chinese to compete with the West. In the final analysis, due to the background of the era of confrontation between China and the West, Chinese accepted and strengthened the "yellow race" argument.
Due to the misclassification of Brumenbach's race, serious unscientificism, and strong racist thinking, it is rare to see the labels of East Asians in formal occasions in Europe and the United States today - "Mongolian race" and "yellow race", but in China, which has been plagued by racial thinking labels for more than 200 years, the "yellow race" statement can often be seen, and the "black eyes, black hair, yellow skin, forever and ever the descendants of the dragon" in "The Descendants of the Dragon" are sung endlessly.