Ethnic slurs, Bo Yang, The Ugly Chinaman and national character

What the heck is a “Pajeet”? Han Feizi must have seen the term half a dozen times on Twitter before figuring out that it was an ethnic slur directed at Indians. You know you’re getting old when you’re no longer on the cutting edge of racial slurs. Denizens of Twitter (now X) who follow international politics will likely have seen the term bandied about by creepy crawly accounts engaged in ethnic flame wars.

Some Indians have been caught off-guard by the new pejorative. For most of living memory, Indians were the subject of small-ball racism like Apu in the Simpsons and Mujibur and Sirajul on David Letterman.

While many Indians have been the victims of post 9-11 anti-Muslim collateral damage, the new slur is disconcertingly targeted toward Hindus. Somewhat mysteriously, malicious anti-brown prejudice has suddenly become all the rage on social media.

Just yesterday, ethnic Indians basked in the international sun while:

• serving as British prime minister, first minister of Scotland and taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland;
• running for US president; and
• gracing the CEO chairs of major multinational corporations (Google, Microsoft, IBM, Pepsi among many).

And now we’re dealing with a “Pajeet” situation. Drilling down, we can find immediate causes – backlash against sudden prominence, Hindu nationalism in India, a recent surge in Indian migrants to the Anglo world, the China-India border conflict and millions of newly online Indians raucously trolling on social media.

On many levels, this slur means Indians have arrived. Reactions of Indians to this new prejudice seem to run the gamut from being aghast at the sudden vitriol, resigned fatalism at the suffering Indians must endure and, creepily, a headlong dive into a Freudian muck of self-hate, telling all who will listen that Indians deserve all the contempt and more.   

This piece will not focus on Indians and their Pajeet situation, about which Han Feizi has little expertise. It will be about the “Chinaman” situation, which has dogged the Chinese for 150 years.

Pajeets should consider themselves lucky; internet etymology suggests the slur is less than a decade old, originating from the dark recesses of 4Chan before spreading like wildfire through the cesspool of Twitter.

As a slur, a “Pajeet” and a “Chinaman” are pretty much the same creature – a quasi-human living in squalor, benighted by despotism, unscrupulous in character, out of step with the modern world and ineffectual in all endeavors. Despite these faults, both Pajeets and Chinamen are prone to irrational pride and boastfulness, risible in their pretensions and self-delusion.

Chinese intellectual Bo Yang in 1992 published his most famous book, The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis in Chinese Culture, a self-flagellating collection of essays on the bleak state of the Chinese people. While covering themes similar to those of Lu Xun, China’s revered modernist writer, Bo Yang’s critique of Chinese culture is less penetrating metaphor and more scatological screed.

The idea was to shock the Chinese consciousness – unlike the case with Lu Xun, who just beat around the bush. Contemporaneous Chinese reactions to Bo Yang were either vitriolic defensiveness – which of course proved his point – or eureka recognition that he was absolutely right (and often both at the same time, which proved him even more right).        

”The Chinese people continue to grow increasingly base and despicable,” Bo Yang wrote, “How can a nation whose morality has degenerated to this level ever regain its self-respect?”

Han Feizi and all Gen-X Chinamen have crowd-shoving, queue-jumping and public quarreling skills that, although they may have atrophied since we were in our prime, would have matched those of the most uncouth Pajeet. We paid bribes, hustled each other in business, came to fisticuffs in the streets and behaved boorishly at drunken banquets. How could Bo Yang have been wrong?

Let us start here: “Chinese people’s inability to co-operate and their predilection for bickering among themselves are deep-rooted, harmful traits.” Yes there was much bickering, back stabbing and unnecessary politics. But, by god, did bickering uncooperative Chinamen move heaven and earth! If that’s what Chinamen can accomplish by bickering and failing to cooperate, then let’s have a lot more of it!  

The Ugly Chinaman has not aged well. The essays ring hollow on a 2024 rereading. It’s not just that refined 2024 China is unrecognizable from the chaos of the 1990s and the degeneracy of the 2000s; rather, it’s that the transformation was quotidian and boring. Economic growth gradually flipped China’s mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance.   

The Chinese did not undergo a national soul searching, prodding individuals to cultivate taste and discernment, as Bo Yang insisted they must:

The only way to improve the situation of the Ugly Chinaman is for each of us to cultivate our own personal taste and judgment. If we’re poor actors, we can at least enjoy going to plays. Those who don’t understand what’s happening on stage can enjoy the music, lights, costumes and scenery, while those who do understand can appreciate drama as an art form. The ability to make such distinctions is a great achievement in itself. I have my freedom and rights, whether the government gives them to me or not.

While it resonated in the 1990s, Bo Yang’s prescription for China’s salvation is cringeworthy in 2024. Such naked infection by the Westoid mind-virus. So sentimental. So embarrassing. If anything, China’s transformation from a hive of misbehaving Ugly Chinamen to its current genteel order – where street crime is nonexistent, great service is expected and self-driving EVs follow all the traffic rules – was ushered in by the firm hand of government, a possibility that Bo Yang deemed impossible.

Bo Yang was a fragile narcissist, deflecting his personal ressentiment onto contrived inadequacies of his brethren, writing:  

Narrow-mindedness and a lack of altruism can produce an unbalanced personality which constantly wavers between two extremes: a chronic feeling of inferiority, and extreme arrogance. In his inferiority, a Chinese person is a slave; in his arrogance, he is a tyrant.

The above lamentation is such a cliché. Han Feizi has heard versions of it used to describe Indians, Germans, Nigerians, American Southerners, investment bankers and Koreans. It is so unoriginal that the unbalanced personality surely belongs to Bo Yang himself.

If Bo Yang had been born in the 1990s, he would have avoided many historical indignities. In fact, his youth would have coincided with China’s epic rise. In all likelihood, a young 2024 Bo Yang would be an insufferable nationalist, proclaiming “the supreme greatness of the Han Chinese people,” and boasting endlessly that Chinese traditional culture should be promulgated throughout the world.” In contrast, if Lu Xun had been born in the 1990s, he would probably have felt no particular need to either celebrate or denounce the Chinese people, becoming a fine young doctor and not a save-the-nation writer.

Proponents of China’s Industrial Party would classify Bo Yang as an exemplar of the Sentimental Party – ineffectual crybabies always whinging about nebulous inadequacies of the Chinese nation for which the solution is always a “change in mentality” that they are, of course, powerless to usher in.

In the 1990s, Sentimental Party members waxed idiotic about how China’s putrid public latrines represented this or that deficiency in the Chinese character. Shanghai mayor Zhu Rongji ordered city officials to personally clean subpar public toilets, and the loos have remained clean ever since.  

Sentimental Party members spent a decade under President Hu Jintao devising market based non-solutions to China’s endemic corruption. President Xi Jinping prosecuted 2.3 million officials, imprisoning thousands and executing dozens. Corruption has been significantly reduced.   

Pajeets have their own Bo Yangs whose armchair sociology reveals at least as much about their own tortured psychology as about India’s maladies. Pajeets also have Tagore and the Bhagavad Gita just as Chinamen have Lu Xun and Confucius. Not being an India expert, Han Feizi will refrain from pushing the parallels further. The way “Chinaman” lost its resonance may or may not be replicable with “Pajeet” – every slur is different. Unlike China and “Chinaman,” India grew into its new slur and will just as likely grow out of it.   

In the meantime, in the spirit of decreased tensions on the China-India border, Pajeets and Chinamen can take a moment to stroke our chins, whip out the amateur sociology and discuss the deranged train wrecks known as “Wypipos.”