I am Tang Di, a history buff. Welcome everyone [attention] I, let's talk about the past and the present, and discuss the general trend of the world. Gentleman I, just to learn and make friends!
In 1832, when Darwin arrived in South America on the cruiser "Berger", Hegel, Beethoven, and Napoleon all died in this year. An era of great romanticism in thought, art, and politics is over. Darwin, a graduate of seminary, had come to work as a missionary, but his 1859 book On the Origin of Species dealt a fatal blow to God and God's beloved. The world was not created by God, nor was man created by Adam and Eve, and the process of creation is actually a universal evolution, starting with simple cells and progressing step by step to plants, animals, and finally to man.
The evolutionary process ranges from simple to complex, from low to high, and the mechanism of evolution is naturally selected, survival of the fittest.
1. The shamelessness of social Darwinism
In this context, the social Darwinist theory of racial evolution, which gives history a naturalistic natural process and a racist racial subject, also has a new meaning to the stagnant image of the Chinese Empire.
And this new meaning is mainly the meaning of colonialism and imperialist ideology. Saeed applied Foucault's discursive theory to the Critique of Orientalism, focusing on the "complicity" relationship between knowledge, imagination and power in Orientalism.
As Sayyid "sees Orientalism as a way for the West to control, rebuild, and reign in the East," says in the Introduction to Orientalism:
"I find the conception of discourse described by Michel Foucault in his Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punishment useful for us to confirm the identity of Orientalism. I mean, we can't understand well this discipline of vast system without examining Orientalism as a discourse, through which European culture approached—and even created an Eastern—in a political, sociological, military, ideological, scientific, and imaginative way. ”
In the image of the stagnation and decline of the Chinese Empire constructed by Darwinism in Western society in the 19th century, the highly ideological "conspiracy" relationship between knowledge and power can also be found. Shaping the image of the stagnant Chinese Empire was part of the expansion of Western colonialist imperialism in the East.
While Europeans are building a system of world expansion, they are also building a system of worldview concepts, which are both descriptive and normative. There is a certain "conspiracy" relationship between the modern world system dominated by colonialism, imperialism, and the modern worldview system dominated by progressive narratives.
When the Dutch and The British established the "world economic system" in the real world, the French and Germans established the "world civilization system" in the conceptual world, and Professor Hegel constructed his sun myth, the Empire of the Sun Never Setting operated by the British Navy was nearly completed.
When the British Expeditionary Force arrived on the Indus in 1838, they proudly declared that in the 2,000 years after Alexander, the flag of no civilized nation had flown here. Capitalist expansion has moved from the era of mercantilism to the era of imperialism, and the most closed and powerful Eastern empire has also allowed the artillery on the Queen's ironclad to burst open a gap.
As the Opium War drew to an end, the Treaty of Nanjing was signed at the Jinghai Temple in Nanjing, and St. George's Hall in Hyde Park in London was hosting an "Exhibition of Chinese Cultural Relics."
As long as evolution is replaced by progress, all the bad deeds of imperialist expansion are rationalized.
The progressive enthusiasm of the Enlightenment, coupled with the cruelty of Darwinism's evolution, became social Darwinism. The West's absolute belief in material progress in the late 19th century was expressed through the theory of social evolution. Spencer, the representative figure, understood the progress of civilization as the evolution of an ambiguous, uncoordinated homogeneous body to a clear, cohesive heterogeneous, which "manifests itself not only in the progress of every nation, but also in the progress of all civilizations."
He uses natural selection to explain the evolutionary mechanism of civilization, "survival of the fittest", whether individuals, peoples or nations, in the cruel competition of survival, choose to develop or perish.
There are strengths and weaknesses in individual abilities, and there are also advantages and disadvantages for nationalities. Human history has always eliminated inferior nations and individuals in the painful ways of war, slavery, tyranny, poverty, etc., expanded the excellent types, and completed the evolution of species.
From this point of view, the excellent Western civilization created by the superior Europa nation and the final elimination and replacement of the inferior Eastern nation and its stagnant and backward civilization are not only an inevitable process, but also just.
2. China under racist discourse
In the year of the Opium War, the German Carl Auguste Meyer described in his book Naples and the Neapolitans that he visited the "Chinese Academy" in Naples run by priests to train Chinese missionaries.
There are 6 Chinese students there:
We were ushered into another room where several Chinese appeared, dressed in priestly robes... They received us very warmly, introduced us to their studies and lives, and spent a long time talking to us. Their faces were yellow, but not very yellow, their hair was bright and black, covering their foreheads straight, their foreheads were narrow, strange little eyes, half-open and half-closed, but flexible...
Their faces are oval and flattened, their noses are flat and short, and their faces appear to be angular on the sides. They always laughed like children, their teeth full of teeth when they laughed, their movements stiff and heavy, just in line with their short, rounded figures... You can even put these little Chinese people on the ground and roll them into a round bucket to carry away.
They took out a map of the Celestial Dynasty and showed it to us... There is also an interesting small porcelain tower, which is said to be a model of a tower in Nanjing. They gleefully explained to us... One of them also read us a few passages of the Old Testament translated into Chinese, and the pronunciation was very strange... The other opened his mouth wide and, in the most savage tone, sang us a Chinese song.
Movement, sound, and physical appearance can all be said to be barbaric, and barbarism is a cultural characteristic and a natural feature.
Under the racist ideology of the 19th century in the West, the hierarchical difference between civilization and barbarism can ultimately be reduced to natural, physiological, and racial differences.
Certain inferior peoples must be barbaric, and they can never reach the level of civilization physically and psychologically. The white race is the best and the most civilized, followed by the yellow race, and then the black race, and the racial differences cause the difference between civilization and civilization and barbarism.
Gobino once said that the yellow race could not have fully evolved to the level of civilization, they:
"There is no imagination at all, only satisfied with the natural needs of animals such as food and clothing, simple in mind, grasping for some ridiculous idea, and stubborn... They lack vitality and lack spiritual curiosity."
Chinese civilization may be the highest of the yellow people's civilization forms, not because Chinese are higher than other yellow people, but because in ancient history, the caucasians or Aryans once spread the flame of civilization to China.
3. Promote racism in the name of science
Racists express ideological content in a scientific way.
The differences in civilizations are determined by the differences in the physical characteristics or ethnic characteristics of different races of human beings; racial differences and ranks are determined by the level of intelligence; and the level of intelligence of different races is determined by the size of the brain.
The larger the brain, the higher the intelligence.
19th-century racist ethnographers believed that different ethnic groups had different brain sizes, and the American ethnographer Morton collected the skulls of various people and analyzed brain volume.
The conclusion is that the Caucasian race has the largest brain volume, with an average of 87 cubic inches, the Mongolian race is centered, with an average of 83 cubic inches, the Average American race is 82 inches, the Malay race averages 81 cubic inches, and the Ethiopian race (i.e., black people) average 78 cubic inches.
From this, it is concluded that:
The white race was the smartest, the black race was the stupidest, and the yellow race was in the middle, which was completely consistent with the prevailing view of racial hierarchy at the time. Specious science provides the basis for racially discriminatory ideologies.
Yellow people are intellectually inferior, and can even be said to be "congenital idiots", in 1886, the British physician Dowyn published his research on congenital idiotic disease, he gave the disease a racially insulting name:
"Mongolism" or "Mongolianidiocy" (Mongolianidiocy), because the physiognomy of this disease is similar to that of the Mongolian race: short head, flattened posterior head, wrinkled inner corners of the eyes, obliquely hanging upwards of the cleft, wide distance between the eyes, low nose bridge.
It is said that this disease is the result of racial degradation, the degeneration of caucasia into yellow people, the degradation of individual intelligence "repeats" racial degradation.
"Barbaric" is a magic word, full of generality and arbitrariness, and is used flexibly and widely in the discourse of the Other in Western modernity, barbaric institutions, barbaric customs, barbaric beliefs and even barbaric languages, and all the barbaric characteristics are finally implemented in the "barbarians".
Chinese are barbarian or semi-barbaric Orientals, and the unique natural environment, ethnic conditions, autocratic regimes, harsh punishments, superstitions and customs of the East have shaped their barbaric "human race" characteristics, and even can be said to be "species" characteristics.
In 1894, the London Neurology Society in the United Kingdom published a study on the brain volume of Chinese, published in the journal "Nature" and "Zi Linxi" that year, this scientific research analyzed the brain capacity of 8 cases of Chinese, and boldly and absurdly concluded that the Chinese brain is closer to chimpanzees than normal humans!
4. Humans and humanoids
This radicalization continued into the 1920s and 1930s, when In 1931 Kruschenko compiled the infamous the bizarre theories of skull surveying and neuropathology into a book, The Mongols Among Us, which always compared non-Caucasians to apes.
From a racist point of view, the difference between China and the West is no longer the difference between human civilization and barbarism, but has been extremeized as the difference between humans and "humanoid" animals.
The most fundamental cause of barbarism is mental retardation, and western claims about inferior yellow people's mental inferiority have become an ideological "common sense" in the 19th century and have been influential in the early 20th century.
In 1910, Levi Bryuer published the famous Intellectual Function in Lower Societies, which compared the thinking of "white adult civilized people" with the thinking of "primitive people" or "barbarians", "underdeveloped peoples", and "inferior peoples" of colored peoples.
It is said that his motivation for writing this book came from Sima Qian's "Records of History", and he found that the logic of thinking in it was simply incredible, a primitive, barbaric, and illogical thinking.
In Lévi Bryuer's view, Chinese is no different from Indians, Amerindians, black Africans, Australians and natives of the South Pacific islands, and has a "simple illogical mind", which, despite its encyclopedic scholarship, is full of chaotic, rigid, and empty concepts, and is a shocking example of the stagnation of the human mind.
The Western "discovery" or "invention" of the barbarism of Chinese ethnographic characteristics at the level of elitist theory and popular opinion was completed by the late 19th century and continued until the beginning of the 20th century. The barbaric Chinese is not only the "alternative" under the racial and social order of the Western Caucasian center, but also the threatening "alternative".
5. The "Yellow Peril" under Racist Discourse
The absolutely different other itself poses a threat to the subject. The "Yellow Peril" theory, which appeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, has obvious racist overtones.
"In the minds of ordinary people, the Yellow Peril brings a vague panic, and people shudder at the thought of China's huge population and the millions that have poured into other countries. Europeans live in small cities and small countries and are particularly sensitive to large populations. For them, Asia is so populous that Europe simply cannot cope without a technological lead.
They use the term 'Mongol nomadic tribes' (horde) to disparage the flooded population in China, which first appeared in European languages to refer to the barbarians surging out of the hinterland of Central Asia, who are half-human, half-beast monsters, who do not know where to come, do not know where to go, and everywhere they go, they are frightening..."
Kernan would like to say that the "yellow peril" panic of Westerners is neither economic nor military, but a kind of "psychological" panic about the huge foreign population.
This panic may not be a real or possible threat at all, but its repulsive, alien presence makes Westerners feel nervous and miserable.
The "Yellow Peril" is the most dangerous situation in the Western racist imagination of barbarism against civilization. In terms of racial and cultural psychology, the "Yellow Peril" is more of a cultural imagination of the masochistic nature of Western racists. The sheer size of the dissident population itself creates psychological stress and panic among Westerners.
If they are not aggressive, unmoving, insensitive, then at best they are disgusted and disgusted, and there is such a despicable race in the world that it is growing; if one day such a large population suddenly becomes bloodthirsty and belligerent, armed to the teeth, disgust or disgust will turn into fear and hatred.
That will be the darkest hour of the world, the end of the world as christians imagine. As far as socio-political and economic factors are concerned, it is a panic about the population and labor force of the Chinese.
Even the extreme racist Gobino acknowledges this, and the threat of the "Yellow Peril" is a social threat:
"Even if the Yankees are far from their homeland and isolated, they will become the object of fear in other countries, because people do not know how to deal with the Chinese yankees' diligence, practicality, tenacity, and most importantly, their unparalleled cheap labor. This is the specific reason why China has terrified the world. ”
Extreme racist ideas eventually deduce the imagination of "barbaric Chinese" into the concept of "yellow peril", and the "yellow peril" panic has many complex causes, including political, economic, military, historical, cultural, and psychological, the most important of which is racist ideas.
The ideology of racist imperialism itself is full of exclusion and aggression, which imagines exotic and gives foreign characteristics, and often carries the exclusion and aggression of assumption.
In fact, China, which was in decline and chaos at the end of the 19th century, could not threaten any Western country.
In analyzing the significance of the "Yellow Peril", Robert Truss pointed out:
"Anyway, something about the 'Yellow Peril?' Ideas constantly intrude into the imagination of Europeans. The 'Yellow Peril' is a series of panics, as if true or false, if there is none. Its threat to the Western economy lies in the influx of cheap labor; the threat to Western philosophy and the Christian church lies in the spread of Buddhism, and the direct threat to Western power on a larger scale is reflected in the fact that China is working with other countries to fight for political and economic freedom, and of course, the worst panic is a nightmare in which the yellow race floods the world like a flood and eventually dominates the world. ”
Describing this "discourse lineage" can reveal the extremely narrow, arrogant, and even cruel side of the Westerner's self and the imagination of others, and may also reveal the underlying racist imperialist cultural logic in the Western concept of modernity.
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