Why have (some) Chinese become racists?

First off, this title might deserve some clarification. 

To say that "the Chinese are racist" is surely an exaggeration and probably a moral judgment. I mean, there are some nice friendly Chinese people out there hoping to make friends with all other people -- well, alright, at least most other people. But the problem is hardly individual or statistical. The problem is, as Benedict Anderson said, one of imaginations among and between groups. And so we can at least rule out some obvious counter-arguments from the beginning:

Besides the statistical argument (the ones that begins with "not all..."), there's one I find compelling to a lot of people yet totally wrong, which might be coined "the silent majority" argument, and it goes roughly like this: the fact that many expressions you've received either from the Internet or from real life smells too racist does not automatically translate into "the society now is racist", because the loudest voice always belongs to some minority, while the majority always keeps silent. One further argument that strengthens the persuasive power is that all the racist things you've seen are mostly from the Internet, but people in real life generally behave differently due to social pressure. And so you should not take online racism too literally.

OK. These two arguments miss the whole point of social imagination, and probably anything social: it's not the actual percentage of racists in the population that counts (this hypothetical data, granted we can actually measuer it, will always be fluctuating); it's the vibe, the mood, the pathos that counts. That's exactly how social pressure works. Suppose a die-hard liberal lives among a village where everyone else is racist. He would find it much easier to just pretend to be racist. Really, how this liberal came to such position is itself quite questionable -- like that good old Josef K. in Kafka's novels?

There's another loophole in this thought experiment: how could everyone in the village be racist if everyone is of the same race? and how, if there exists more than one race, could the discriminated race(s) be racist if they are suffering from racism themselves?

To the first question mark, yes it can be the case, if the village lives in a racist country and gets racist propaganda from the state on a daily basis. To the second question mark, a similar yet easily understood (if not easily explained) scenario would be people suppressed throughout their lives in a patriachy/autocracy/caste system turn out in the end to be the firmest supporter of that system. Is it irrational? Maybe, but then how many of us are that rational?

It's no news to anyone living in a Chinese cyberspace that discrimination towards certain nations are the default attitude among ordinary Chinese: the Indians are so poor and nasty they don't even have clean toilets to shit on; the Japanese are sneaky little bastards who would more than anything like to see China suffer; the Koreans (excluding the socialist North Korea) are cultural thieves who know only stealing festivals and living under the protection of its evil master, the United States of America... 

And so if this post is shocking news to you, welcome to (cyber) China. In real life this is never the case, but in real life nothing is really the case of any narrative. Just because people won't say it to you in your face doesn't mean they don't secretly despise you behind your back, right?

In order to push the argument a little bit further, let's just say, without further clarification, that nowadays the Chinese society exhibits a strong sense of national pride to the point that it despises almost all other nations in the world. Whether that counts as racism is up to everyone's own judgment. My question is, how come?

This question stems from my reading of Anderson's Imagined Communities, in which he argued for a distinction between nationalism (or the healthy version of nationalism, i.e. patriotism) and racism. He described racism as not thinking in terms of "historical destinies" (as nationalism does) but "outside history"; not out of political love within the nation but out of hatred and fear for alien races; not for national liberation but for aristocratic power holding. This is just too clean a cut. The mental transformation is easy enough: from "Japan has hurt us" to "Japan is inherently evil" one need only accept an apriori metaphysics of essentialism; from "China not India is to be the new hegemony of this century" to "the race of India is inferior to that of China" one need only imagine an international society where Machiavellian struggles between nations happen all the time and the only rule is just the jungle rule. 

What might be more worth asking than "how different is nationalism from racism" is, then, what are the conditions for such mental transformation? 

According to Freud's Group Psychology, a group is indeed based on a specific kind of love (what Freud calls the "libidinal ties") both among the group members and towards the group leader; also according to Freud in the same book, such love can under certain circumstances easily turn into hate towards anyone who threatens the emotional ties that group members so cherish. So the Freudian answer would be just such threat or harm towards the libidinal ties. But what if no apparent threat is detectable? What if, such group emotion of nationalism is not an endogenous process but an exogenous one, just like the late 19th- early 20th century Chinese popular movemnts were not nationalism naturally grown historically but "pirating" from the West, and the new regime thus created were therefore much closer to what Anderson named "official nationalism" which served and still serves to maintain the new rulers' dominating position? What if the hatred is planted, a cheap but effective device meant to maintain the social solidarity, however ugly that might look? 

Even if such superficial yet-to-be racism in today's China hasn't damaged any other race on a large scacle (it surely has hurt individuals and groups, like several Japanese hurt even killed in China), and are very likely to keep it that way in the foreseeable future, to me the fact that the mass society is so easily manipulated emotionally is sad enough to ponder on.