Red Racisms: Racism in Communist and Post-Communist Contexts

Amongst contemporary China studies, it seems to me, there is a big gap when it comes to studies of racism in China. Not quite sure why this is? Anyway, this relatively new book – Ian Law’s Red Racism – is interesting and, though China is just one component among many communist regimes, it is instructive in terms of how to think about the origins of racism, its development and practise in contemporary Chinese society. China, like most other Marxist-Leninist regimes, effectively claimed to have ended racism by the mere fact of its triumph. Since then, 1949 in China’s case obviously, it’s been an official programme of straightforward denial that there is any racism either towards outsiders or ethnic minorities within the country (taking the country to mean what Beijing thinks it means and so including Tibet here).

There are a lot of issues regarding treatment of minorities in other Communist countries that will sound familiar to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the PRC – the language of “modernising” minorities and bringing “development” to them, ending “primitivism” and “feudal practises” as well as that particularly hoary old chestnut that rings down from the British Empire to Lhasa today – bringing “civilisation”. The Chinese communist lexicon is almost identical to the wider Communist lexicon globally. What all this adds up to of curse is racism, structural racism and oppression. It doesn’t help that many of the long-lasting Round Eye Gang of sympathisers – the useful idiots – have perpetuated the myths of the Chinese state on race by claiming that China was racism free or that the relentless push to urbanism in China disregards any minority’s intrinsic or traditional links with land. So many issues and many raised in this book.

It is to be hoped that someone may take on this subject in more depth and concentrate on China….

Racism in the Soviet Union and in other Communist contexts has frequently been denied and ignored. This is the first book to provide an analysis of racism and racialization in Communist and post-Communist contexts. It opens up debates about both the relationship between racism and communism and the racial logics at work, how they have come into being and how they have changed in the contemporary world. This is a major advancement in our understanding of processes of global racialization and this book includes new analysis and evidence on the battle to challenge the racist underground in the Russian Federation, the postwar experiences of the Roma in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, new Afro-Cuban movements and on Tibetan struggles against Chinese domination.

Ian Law is Professor of Racism and Ethnicity Studies in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds and founding Director of the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, UK. His major books include Ethnicity and Education in England and Europe (with S. Swann), Racism and Ethnicity, Racism, Postcolonialism and Europe (edited with Huggan), Institutional Racism in Higher Education (edited with Turney and Phillips), Race in the News, Racism, Ethnicity and Social Policy, Local Government and Thatcherism (with Butcher, Leach and Mullard) and The Local Politics of Race (with Ben-Tovim, Gabriel, and Stredder).