The Far East in June, 2023

Straight from Wang Yi’s Beauty Parlor

VoA, July 5, 2023

My friends from China, Japan and Korea, when we go to America, they can’t tell us apart as Chinese, Japanese or Korean. We can go to Europe and it will be the same. No matter how yellow you color your hair or how long you keep trimming your nose, you can’t become a European, you can’t become an American, you can’t become a Westerner. We must know the place where our roots are.^*)”

我们中日韩的朋友们，我们到美国去，他们分不清中日韩。我们可能到欧洲去也是一样。不管你把头发染得再黄，鼻子修得再尖，也变不了欧美人，变不成西方人。我们要知道自己的根在什么地方。

Thus spoke Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, hosting a forum for Sino-Japanese-South Korean cooperation in Qingdao on Monday, July 3.

“Voice of America”, one of the stations that broke the news, refers to the quote as one “with racist undertones” (有种族主义色彩), and quotes from tweets that criticize Wang’s utterance. Most critics mentioned are Westerners, and none of them is Japanese or South Korean. That either suggests that the latter politely keep their thoughts to themselves, or that they don’t find Wang’s speech too extraordinary. In fact, “black hair” is often a topic in China (and maybe in Japan and Korea, too), and frequently, the Chinese are reminded that there was no need to envy people with yellow hair. A rather hysterical pop song to that end was “Chinese” (中国人) by Andy Lau (刘德华). There, too, the hair color was given political significance.  : “No matter where you come from and where you are going, the tears and pain is the same, yesterday’s troubles we will keep in our hearts, the same blood, the same race, there are still dreams in the future that we open up together. Undivisably we advance, with our heads raised, let the world know that we are all Chinese. (The song was conveniently published in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s handover to China.)

All the stuff about “yellow faces”, “black eyes” (黄色的脸 黑色的眼) and “species” or “race” (一样的血 一样的种) is really old stuff. It may well be racist, but it is so old that reporting it will look like a lie to people who have gotten used to it over the past quarter of the century, or longer.

What I find interesting however is that Wang Yi said this at all. It wasn’t part of his official speech, or it was left out when the Chinese foreign ministry published an account of it. So it was probably meant to be “family talk”. But it does reveal a deep-seated inferiority complex, and that kind of self-revelation shouldn’t happen to a top diplomat. Even if Wang was trying to arouse some kind of pan-Asian “patriotic feelings” among his audience, rather than believing his own talk, it was a gaffe, rather than good diplomatic handicraft.

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A few million statistics in between: the Communist Party of China has accepted its 98,041,000th member just recently.

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Qin Shihuang’s wig has been found on the bottom of the sea, conveniently placed next to the Philppines …

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… Xi Jinping is a dictator, but you can’t say that …

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… and neither China nor the Democratic Republic of the Congo are entirely happy with their mining-for-China-investment-for-the-DRC agreement, concluded in 2008.

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Twitter is mostly about events, but events are the result of processes that may be going on for years or decades. So to finish this review, here’s some economics.

Rebalancing China’s Factors of Production, and its Markets

Pekingnology, June 28, 2023
When a country’s factor conditions become unfavorable, an increase in factor allocation efficiency could potentially offset these adverse changes,former NDRC official, writes, according to a Pekingnology translation of a classroom speech, the content of which had been posted on WeChat on June 7. The speaker was Xu Lin (徐林), a former high-ranking NDRC official. According to the WeChat blogpost, Xu is also party secretary at the China Mergers & Acquisitions Association (全联并购公会). See “2. Decline in Labor Productivity Growth” there. Deteriorating relations with the US (not least its effect on technology transfer to China) and possibly growingly difficult international market access are also cited as problems. The reader also gets an idea of political demands on the one hand, and what is economically feasible on the other.

To safeguard moderate growth, even if not at a rate as originally “planned”, Xu recommends the household registration system be abaondoned “as soon as possible”, not least to make it easier to make the factors of labor and capital come together: “Nowadays, many graduates cannot register their permanent residence even after obtaining a job, which hinders their work-life.” Continued investment in innovation and an increased standard of opening up are also recommended. And not least, Xu believes that China’s market remains big and attractive enough to counter American alliance-building with “other countries to exclude China” – that would require a continued, sufficiently large American trade deficit with those allied countries. One of the aces Xu sees in China’s hands would be its biotechnology industry.
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Note

^*) Update: Last sentence of translation added July 6.
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Tags: Africa, China, diplomacy, foreign investment, foreign trade, Japan, Liu Dehua, Shandong, South Korea, technology, Xi Jinping