I just found this blog and find it really interesting, complete, well writen… congratulations, keep up with the good work.

However, I don’t agree in part of your vision in this article.

I agree with you in lingüistic terms, when stating what’s “racist”, in one hand, and what’s just paranoia resulting in a ridiculous sense of what is politically correct, in the other. Maybe it’s just a result of me being Spanish, which makes our standards regarding this somewhat similar.

But after living in China for some years, I’ve seen so many situations that I consider blantly racist, that making things relative just doesn’t work.

Tell me wether these situations wouldn’t sound racist to you:

1. The amount of job offers posted to local magazines in English looking for an American English native speaker… “Only white”.

2. I have a couple black African friends who sometimes have to say they’re American so people respect them, if only just a bit more. One of them had a Chinese girlfriend for a while, before her family forced her to leave him, because he was black -and bad, therefore.

3. I come from Andalusia, and as many people comng from around the Mediterranean, am often mistaken here for an Uygur (I live in Chengdu). If I’m wearing make-up, nice clothes and high heels, I’m suddenly Russian, English or German and treated like a queen, even over Chinese people around; but when I go to Carrefour in jeans and dirty running shoes, oh my…

People give me bad looks; I sometimes overhear comments like “be careful, there comes a Xinjiangren”; when I try to stop a taxi, no driver stops for me or they make excuses not to take me… next second, they take some Chinese with no previous comments; in a restaurant after a trekking, there was even a man who came over to my table and spilt all my -Andalusian- friends’ beers all over it as he mumbled something on Xinjiangren, again… and one day I was hit in an accident while crossing the street, and the excuse of the driver was: “sorry, I didn’t know you were a foreigner, you look a little like Xinjiang people”.

…Doesn’t all this sound racist enough?

It seems that what happened in July or shall I say, “what is happening now” in Xinjiang, was predicted through out this thread.

Here are my two cents on this issue.

When I read through those comments, questions like how Han Chinese consider other minorities were mostly discussed. But how about the Uighur? Tibetan? Mongol? and other so called minorities? What do these people think about their Lau Da Ge? I think this should be equally discussed.

By the way, I notice that most comments were from Han people and Westerners. I only see one Uighur (or claims to be Uighur) posted a comment, which is pretty much ignored. So I feel that I might add some different ingredients to the discussion.

As an Uighur, I think I know what most Uighurs think of Han people. Infidel, Dirty, Greedy, and godless creatures(no kidding). They came and settle down and within a couple of years, they exterminate most of the wild animals(rabbits, hogs, foxes even fishes) around their villages. They don’t have any respect for the nature. They don’t even plant any trees or flowers in their back yards, etc etc.

You see Uighurs look down at Chinese too. I always wonder how can we live together in peace with so many prejudice and stereotyped concepts toward each other.

Bull. Neither Xu nor Vincent has provided any proof of their claims. No statistics, no studies, no research. While this conversation started off interesting, it quickly devolved into a case of phallus fencing. You’re just jumping on the bandwagon, hoping to get the last word in.

But in all this hub-bub, at the very least Vincent’s basic ‘LERN 2 READ N00B!’ argument has piqued my curiosity. I’m going to put a mental bookmark in this conversation and try to find if there are any anthropological or ethnographic studies on Xinjiang, both Chinese and non-Chinese. I’ll start with the UC library system (a bit of boosterism for my alma mater, for those that are curious. ;p)

Vincent, your skills in writing are in a much different vein- you arm yourself with a very, very large vocabulary and complex sentences (as I often do) to, essentially, beat a dead horse. While your positions are interesting, you do indeed seem to blow hot air and never, not once, extend any effort to prove yourself correct. The chance for you to say “I was right, see, read this, Na na na na na na” was presented to you on a platinum-lined platter, and what do you do? You sneer “And no, I’m not going to be your librarian lap dog and do the reading you SHOULD be doing to be an educated commentator on Xinjiang affairs.” If I’m not mistaken, he didn’t ask you to read it to him like some bedtime story, did he? He asked for you to present your “facts” and “evidence” that you’ve been “reading.” The only evidence you’ve clearly presented is that you’re reading “Untitled” in Notepad.

However, as this discussion is dead (presumably for only a few months, though it could be a year or more), Xu effectively appears to have done what you haven’t- provided something concrete. That would be that you, quite frankly, are talking out of your ass so well people should be selling tickets.

While my experience of racism is mostly positive eg deferential treatment, any foreigner that does not meet their stereotype is immediately considered inferior. This i submit to the the worst form of racism a dislike of people who ‘look’ chinese and speak english.