52 China The EconomistMarch 14th 2020
C
hina’s leadershave pulled off a remarkable feat. They have
joined the long list of governments humbled by a populist re-
volt over immigration—though there are hardly any immigrants
in China, and political opposition is banned. The revolt’s cause is
also a surprise: a consultation exercise by the justice ministry, in-
viting comments on a proposal to make it slightly easier for rich or
highly skilled foreigners to become permanent residents. This ex-
pands a scheme begun in 2004. On March 7th, after days of online
fury, officials took the proposal back for revisions. Soon after-
wards censors moved to shut down the debate. By then a related
hashtag on Weibo, a Twitter-like service, had been viewed more
than 5bn times. A dismaying number of comments betrayed racial
and sexual panic, with men vowing to defend Chinese women
from immigrants, notably from Africa. Several young women
vowed to leap from the Great Wall rather than marry a foreigner.
Some anger is understandable. Foreign permanent residents
may have as many children as they wish, and bring them up and
educate them in any city in China. Bossy family-planning and resi-
dency rules deny Chinese citizens such freedom. Some indigna-
tion reflects a trend seen in other countries: a distrust of techno-
crats who defend migration as an economic necessity. Wang
Huiyao heads a think-tank, the Centre for China and Globalisation,
which promoted the permanent-residency scheme. For his pains
he has been vilified online as a traitor. Mr Wang calls some sugges-
tions helpful, such as requests for clarification of which phdsub-
jects earn a green card. Defending the scheme, he says: “China has
been a giant exporter of talent for the 40 years of reform and open-
ing. Why can’t China now seek to import some global talents?”
Some online panic is more difficult to understand. China is
hardly poised to become an immigrant melting-pot. In 2016 it is-
sued just 1,576 permanent-residency permits. In the same year
America granted permanent residency to over 1m foreigners—
roughly equivalent to China’s entire foreign-born population. Un-
like American green cards, China’s residence permits are not con-
sidered a pathway to citizenship. William Rosoff is an American
corporate lawyer turned academic. He teaches law at Tsinghua and
other universities in Beijing, and secured permanent residency in- Chinese colleagues see his status as a tribute to their home-
land, not a new identity, he says. “My Chinese friends and students
are all really pleased, not because it makes me Chinese but because
it shows that I love China, otherwise why would I want it?”
Yet questions of identity have stoked the most online outrage
in recent days. China must not become multicultural, social-me-
dia users wrote. Accused of taking foreign nationality, a film ac-
tress, Ning Jing, assured fans that she had never swayed “for even
half a second” and remained a “child of the Flame Emperor and the
Yellow Emperor”. That slogan, claiming descent from two mytho-
logical founders of China, is telling, for it draws on claims of Chi-
nese racial purity peddled by nationalists for well over a century.
More than 90% of modern Chinese hail from the Han national-
ity. Han chauvinism helped topple the last imperial dynasty, the
Qing, whose emperors were called impure outsiders on account of
their Manchurian origins. With the Qing safely gone, nationalists
reversed course and claimed the nations making up their new re-
public—Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Muslim Hui and Tibetan—as
branches of one Chinese bloodline. Twentieth-century national-
ists embraced Western racial theories and asserted the superiority
of “yellow” and “white” races over the “brown” and “black”. In
Communist times, state-backed scientists have sought proof,
whether genetic or archaeological, that China’s ethnic groups
share a common origin. President Xi Jinping calls China’s recorded
history unique for its continuous transmission over 3,000 years by
yellow-skinned, black-haired “descendants of the dragon”.
In much of the West arguments about racial superiority are ta-
boo, and should be, thanks to shared guilt about the horrors of
slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust and segregation. That taboo is
weaker in China, where schools drum into students that their
country is a victim of racist, imperialist bullying, and a benefactor
to the developing world. As one netizen wrote during this immi-
gration row, when the Chinese express dislike of Africans that can-
not be racism, because “China never oppressed black people.”Blood, soil and flags: a combustible mix
Though China is ageing fast and its working-age population is
shrinking, the country does little to help immigrants who have
neither a small fortune to invest nor a spare phdin nuclear phys-
ics, and so may not seek a green card. Joseph Matanda, a 43-year-
old from Zimbabwe, came to China in 2008 to teach English. Three
years later he married Run Qi, a 36-year-old computer-network en-
gineer from the northern province of Inner Mongolia. Mr Matanda
lives in China on a spouse’s visa that does not allow him to work.
He helps bring up his eight-year-old son and new baby, both of
whom have Chinese passports. When ordinary Chinese shrink
from him on the bus or in a lift, he engages with them in cheerful
Mandarin. “I carry myself in such a way that people don’t look
down on me,” he says. He dreams that his sons will grow up to be
bilingual bridges between high-tech China and developing Africa:
“The world is becoming smaller. I want them to be constructive.”
Still, neighbours do not consider their sons Chinese, sighs Ms
Run. “In their eyes, they will always be ‘of mixed blood’.” She has
learned to tolerate hearing casual assertions that mixed-race chil-
dren are clever and good-looking. She cannot abide the usual fol-
low-up, namely: “It’s good that they are not too black.” The family
recently moved to Changping, a bustling outer suburb of Beijing,
filled with migrants from other Chinese regions. It should be a fine
place to start a new life. But this bicultural couple plan to move to a
country where both are allowed to work. Online nationalists may
cheer their departure, but it will be China’s loss. 7Chaguan When nationalism bites back
A proposal to help a few skilled foreigners settle in China triggers a furore