I wonder if anyone has seen signs of awareness or discussion in China, of the fact that China is really a settler-colonialist empire with its own “colonizers” in Xinjiang, Tibet and beyond.
I don’t think its possible that thinking people in China don’t realise there are direct and striking parallels to other empires and settler-colonialist projects in history.
But this is of course difficult to talk about in China, which is described by the government only as a victim and not an aggressor, just like Putin’s aggressor Russia does. In fact the whole Chinese mythology of peacefulness, which dominates in schools and in media, is a monstruous denial of the truth of China’s bloody history of conquest, inculcated in everyone like a gigantic taboo — along the lines of what Margaret Hillenbrand talks about in her book Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China.
I wrote before about how Westerners have been duped by this — many are susceptible because of they suffer from a self-centered West-and-the-rest syndrome.
But the main target of the ruse and cover-up of China’s imperial legacy is the Chinese people. Yet we also know they can’t fool all Chinese people all the time. So I am wondering if others have seen signs of counter-awareness — even in the recent totalitarian decade?
Magnus Fiskesjö < nf42@cornell.edu>