Gift Certificate: Fill & Download for Free

Question: Are Chinese people xenophobic?Two years ago (2018), an American missionary John Allen Chau decided to set foot on the North Sentinel Island hoping to contact the indigenous people residing on the island. North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Archipelago in the Bay of Bengal administered by India.The American was immediately killed by the natives, the Sentinelese, who were armed with bows and arrows. Chau was believed to have paid fishermen to ferry him to North Sentinel Island, home to a 30,000-year-old native tribe. Sentinelese were known to conscientiously guard their isolation. The fishermen saw an arrow hit Chau. The Sentinelese then took him deeper into the island and disappeared.North Sentinel Island is about 20 sq miles and is off-limit to visitors. Starting in the 1960s, anthropologists – protected by armed guards – succeeded first in exchanging gifts, then conducting field visits with the Sentinelese tribe, but abandoned their efforts around 25 years ago. In 2006, two Indian fishermen who moored their boat to sleep were killed when the vessel broke loose and drifted on to the shore. The tribe fired a volley of arrows at a helicopter sent to retrieve the men’s bodies.An anthropologist who had led efforts to contact the tribe, recalled his first contact with the tribe. “The tribes people were on the beach, watching the boat come to the island,” he said. “They did not come face to face with us, but rather hid in the forest, watching us. After some time, we came upon a large area of forest cleared for a camp. There were 18 small huts, with little fires burning in front of each, fenced off with sticks.”Anthropologists believe the people on Andaman Islands descended from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. North Sentinel is among a shrinking handful of Andaman Islands home to people who still have had very little contact with the outside world.At the Western side of South Andaman and Middle Andaman Islands, a less xenophobic indigenous tribe, the Jarawa people, live. The Jarawas have largely shunned interaction with outsiders, and many particulars of their society, culture and traditions are poorly understood. Since the 1990s, contacts between Jarawa tribe and outsiders grew increasingly frequent. By the 2000s, some Jarawas had become regular visitors at settlements, where they trade, interact with tourists, get medical aid, and even send their children to school.However, in 2015, a Jarawa man was accused of killing a lighter-skinned baby born to an unmarried Jarawa woman and apparently an outsider. A tribal leader said that if the baby’s body were handed over to investigators, “the world will start shaking, and we will all die.” The police did not arrest the Jarawa man for the crime.Xenophobia in BritainIn Britain, for example, racism and xenophobia can be traced back at least to the Victorian era.During the Victorian years, a series of groups arrived in significant numbers to Britain, above all the predominantly Catholic Irish, the Germans and, from the 1880s, Jews fleeing persecution in the Russian Pale of Settlement. In fact, the period from 1830 to 1918 witnessed some of the most viciously xenophobic acts in modern British history.At the start of the 19th century, Catholics could barely practice their religion, as Britain remained stuck in the anti-Catholic mindset since the English Reformation of the 16th-century, when King Henry VIII wanted to annul his marriage and get another wife by cutting ties with the Pope. In the 1800s, Catholics could not hold posts in schools or universities controlled by the established church, while Catholic priests could not wear their clothes outside their places of worship. Full emancipation and equality would not arrive until the end of the 19th century for the Catholics.The arrival of 800,000 or so Catholic Irish who came to Britain at the time of the potato famine of the 1840s, further exacerbated animosity towards the Catholics. For the first time since the Reformation of the 16th century, Catholics found themselves living in England and Scotland in significant numbers at a time when Protestantism remained important in the lives of most Britons. Despite the gradual emancipation of Catholics during the 19th century, the media was hostile towards the newly-arrived poor Irish immigrants. In Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, for example, fighting between Catholic and Protestant young men became part of everyday life. At the same time, as anti-Catholicism declined during the course of the 19th century in England, periodical publications began, under influence of Darwinism, racialising the Irish, which meant depicting them as apes in contrast with the English.In the late 19th century, tens of thousands of Jews fled Russia and settled at the East End of London. Alarmed by their numbers, a campaign orchestrated from Parliament emerged against them, leading to the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act. Britain's first racist political grouping of the 20th century also emerged in these years in the form of the British Brothers League.'Petty Coat Lane Londres' by Charles Chusseau-Flaviens, ca. 1900-1919. The photo is of Jewish people on Petticoat Lane, London, and shows Yiddish being used (Courtesy of George Eastman Museum, gift of Kodak Pathé).The German immigrants in Britain had their fair share of racism too at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Over the next four years British xenophobia reached a height not seen since the Middle Ages, which resulted in internment, property confiscation and mass rioting, culminating in deportation of German immigrants. With Britons of German descent facing daily ethnic cleansing during WWI, even the British monarchy got into the act trying to disassociate themselves from anything German. They changed the name of their royal house from the German "Saxe-Coburg and Gotha" to the English "Windsor" (from Windsor Castle) because of anti-German sentiment prevailing at the time in Britain.Xenophobia in AmericaAnd in America, there is no shortage of examples of xenophobia. In particular, the Chinese bore the biggest brunt.Significant of Chinese particularly from Guangdong province of China immigrated to California during the Gold Rush of 1848–1855. It continued with subsequent large labor projects, such as the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad. During the early stages of the gold rush, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were tolerated by white people, if not well received. However, as gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity toward the Chinese and other foreigners increased, with Chinese being discriminated the most.After being forcibly driven from mining by a mixture of state legislators and other miners, the immigrant Chinese began to settle in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low-wage labor, such as restaurant and laundry work. With the post-Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by people like labor leader Denis Kearney and his Workingman's Party as well as by California Governor John Bigler. Both openly blamed Chinese "coolies" for the depressed wage levels. Public opinion and law in California began to demonize Chinese workers and immigrants in any role.While many of these legislative efforts were quickly overturned by the State Supreme Court, many more anti-Chinese laws continued to be passed in both California and nationally. For example, in 1858, the California Legislature passed a law that made it illegal for any person "of the Chinese or Mongolian races" to enter the state; however, this law was struck down by an unpublished opinion of the State Supreme Court in 1862.As time passed with more Chinese immigrants arriving in California, violence would often break out in cities such as Los Angeles. A strike which was broken by the replacement of all workers with over 200 Chinese men at the Beaver Falls Cutlery Company in Pennsylvania was mentioned at the Pennsylvania General Assembly and Congress. "In some measure it contributed to the eventual passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act."By 1878 Congress felt compelled to try ban immigration from China in legislation that was later vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The media at the time also added fuel to the anti-Chinese fire by publishing articles stoking anti-Chinese feelings. For example, the title of the August 27, 1873 San Francisco Chronicle article read, "The Chinese Invasion! They Are Coming, 900,000 Strong".In 1879 however, California adopted a new Constitution, which explicitly authorized the state government to determine which individuals were allowed to reside in the state, and banned the Chinese from employment by corporations and state, county or municipal governments.By 1882, the federal government was finally convinced to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all immigration from China for a period of 10 years. After the act was passed, most Chinese workers were faced with a dilemma: stay in the United States alone or go back to China to reunite with their families. Although widespread dislike for the Chinese persisted well after the law itself was passed, of note is that some capitalists and entrepreneurs resisted their exclusion because they accepted lower wages. They were essentially exploiting Chinese labour knowing that the Chinese in US at the time would have very little legal recourse.The Act was renewed for ten years by the 1892 Geary Act. When the act was extended in 1902, it required "each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, he or she faced deportation." No such requirements were imposed on other immigrants.In a legal case U.S. vs Ju Toy (1905), the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that the port inspectors and the Secretary of Commerce had final authority on who could be admitted. Ju Toy was barred from coming back home despite the fact that the district court found him to be an American citizen. The Supreme Court determined that refusing entry at a port does not require due process and is legally equivalent to refusing entry at a land crossing.The Chinese Exclusion Act was finally repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act, during a time when China had become an ally of the U.S. against Japan in World War II as the US needed to embody an image of fairness and justice. The Magnuson Act permitted Chinese nationals already residing in the country to become naturalized citizens and stop hiding from the threat of deportation. While the Magnuson Act overturned the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act, it only allowed a national quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year.Despite the fact that the exclusion act was repealed in 1943, the law in California prohibiting non-whites from marrying whites was not struck down until 1948, in which the California Supreme Court ruled the ban of interracial marriage within the state unconstitutional. Other states had such laws until 1967, when the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that anti-miscegenation laws across the nation are unconstitutional.We are all humansSo, coming back to answer the question, "Are Chinese people xenophobic?", I have brought up examples of xenophobia experienced in the 3 places - Andaman Islands, Britain and America.Like what some writers have pointed out, throughout the history of mankind, xenophobia has generally been the rule. Only in the last century that things started to change somewhat. One writer noted, “We've started to see humanity show a little more, well, humanity when it comes to prejudices and in-group preference.”Hence, moving forward, we ask, "What can we do about it?". The answer lies with the future generations. Through education in school and parents passing the right moral values to their children, perhaps our future generations can learn to be less racist and less xenophobic. I look forward to the day when the whole Earth is simply just 1 big country like what how the movie Star Trek depicted the world in the future, with the borders of all countries dismantled. Having a national passport to travel will be a thing in the past.I’ll stop here by quoting an except of the lyrics from the song "Imagine", written by John Lennon:…Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the people living life in peaceYou may say that I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one…Ref:Pride and prejudice: The Victorian roots of a very British ambivalenceChinese Exclusion Act - WikipediaAmerican killed by isolated tribe on North Sentinel Island in AndamansSentinelese Tribe That Killed American Has a History of Guarding Its IsolationJarawas (Andaman Islands) - Wikipedia