China plays the race card…with Barack Obama(!?)

Don’t go there.

That’s the advice the Chinese government should have taken from their Western PR consultants on the decision to bring up race a few days before President Barack Obama makes his first visit to China.

Yesterday, it was reported that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, stated that Barack Obama should be sympathetic to Beijing’s opposition to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan autonomy because “He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement.” The implication is that Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves was equivalent to Mao’s “liberation” of Tibetan “serfs.”

This is bad on many levels. For one, Beijing is trying to  cast its mistreatment of the Tibetan people through coatings of moral relativism and inapt historical analogies. Chinese racism against Tibetans has been documented by ICT in its report, “Jampa: the Story of Racism in Tibet.”

Second, what message does this analogy send to Tibetans? African-Americans had to wait a full century to effectively enjoy the emancipation they were legally granted by Lincoln (and problems remain today). Should Tibetans expect 50 more years of “Jim Crow with Chinese characteristics?”

Third, China risks attention being drawn to its own issues of discrimination against people of African descent. One recalls the story, in the effort to clean up Beijing before the 2008 Olympics, where authorities ordered bars not to serve black people.

Fourth, and perhaps most striking, is that the Chinese authorities would see it as advantageous or even conducive to positive atmospherics to bring up  such a loaded issue in the context of the President’s visit. Barack Obama went to great lengths in the 2008 campaign, and in governing since, to  bring all Americans together. His meta-message, proven by his victory, was that race shouldn’t matter. And now the Chinese, who aspire to be  savvy and gracious hosts, have decided that race should matter in U.S.-China relations?

As Financial Times reporter Gideon Rachman put it in his blog:

“The spin ahead of Obama’s China visit has been that the two countries now have a relationship that is deep and broad enough to cope with minor disputes. If you want to put that new sense of partnership to the test, a good way to start is to construct a sentence containing the words ‘black president’, ‘Dalai Lama’ and ‘slavery.’”

Let’s see if Beijing’s public relations consultants can help get Qin Gang’s foot out of their collective mouth.

Photo Caption: The 1963 propaganda film Serf portrays the main character, Jampa, as dark, enslaved, dirty and uneducated prior to the “liberation of Tibet” by China. (See ICT’s report: “Jampa: the Story of Racism in Tibet.”)

One Response to “China plays the race card…with Barack Obama(!?)”

1. Michael L. Weiss says:

   Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 4:40 pm

   I don’t agree with this post.
   The author should not cast his personal preference into this issue.