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I'm just gonna put this out there -- I've seen enough to be concerned -- recently had a conversation with a liberal-leaning, highly educated white journo, who said it's 'obvious' that China's Uighur policy is 'much worse' than Jim Crow was. https://twitter.com/MWaynesWorld/status/1327255433304793088
This journo was incredulous at the idea that this could be interpreted as minimizing. I will say this guy wasn't particularly defensive of America's history or present -- yet the overriding need or instinct to conceive of China as 'obviously worse' acts imo as a baseline.
This should really be considered more -- what really is "China" in the American mind (esp white liberal)? It seems to represent a kind of assumed inferiority, second-tier status, which helps us set up a relational understanding of ourselves (esp but not just whites) as the apex.
As time goes on I think I understand this need better, because America is a pretty destitute place in an absolute, non-relational sense -- just relative to the human spirit. We don't need some other benchmark to perceive this. What we do need is a reason to doubt it.
And I think China serves this purpose quite credibly. The journo was pushing a theory that China is basically at the same stage America was ~110 years ago, and that it was therefore justifiably hated. His concession was America 110 years ago was *almost* as bad.
I'm no longer convinced that this Sinophobic racism is a mere reaction to the 'challenge' of China's rise. I think it's been there all along, for centuries, a belief in a second-place race, admirable yet subordinated. By definition, then, its qualities uplift Western self-regard.
Thus the American white liberal who concedes that America is as bad as everyone has been saying it is, nevertheless can fall back on the comfort that another great civilization is still 110 years behind us, esp in terms of moral and social development.
The idea is that as bad as we are, we are still living in the future, the cutting edge of human development, for better or worse. That China is simply following in our footsteps, and making an even bigger mess of the journey than we had.
This, I think, isn't just the theory of one guy, but the shape of a very deep structural understanding of the world that white people have had about not just China, the 'Orient' but all foreign 'Others' as traversing the same path as the West has, but further behind.
This might be a product of Western universalism, that human development is along some narrow path and that it's a race to get to the terminal end. That literally is the driving vision behind America -- some now say Fukuyamaism is dead, but I don't think it's gone.
It would be interesting to hear discussions about what the alternative to Fukuyamaism is. Is the end-state idea dead, or is it the form of the end-state that was wrong (after all Marxism also predicts an end-of-history state)? Are there a few forms of end-state? Endless forms?
But don't take the bait that Fukuyamaism is dead. It's not, even though most won't defend the idea anymore. It still forms imo the basic uni-dimensional understanding that the West has of itself.
