East Asians continue to be considered white

[Ricardolindo]

As this article https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opin...were-white-until-white-men-called-them-yellow explains, East Asians, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, were considered white until the end of the 18th century. From then, their resistance to assimilating to Western culture led to them being considered yellow. Is there a way for East Asians to continue to be considered white during the 19th century and later?

 

[I Saw A Red Sky]

You gotta stop posting single links to random articles or AH.com threads and taking them as gospel.

 

[Warthog]

Visiting Japanese businessmen (explicitly businessmen) were classified as white under apartheid law.

People making up racial distinctions will always do so in ways that suit their interests and prejudices. There is no rationality.

 

[Charles EP M.]

People making up racial distinctions will always do so in ways that suit their interests and prejudices. There is no rationality.

That does answer the question: if you can find a reason it'd suit racists to happen, it happens. "The monarchies of the white races stand united against the Scandinavian hordes [scandinavian now including Russians and Germans]"

 

[Warthog]

That does answer the question: if you can find a reason it'd suit racists to happen, it happens. "The monarchies of the white races stand united against the Scandinavian hordes [scandinavian now including Russians and Germans]"

Gathara parodies this quite nicely with his designation of Sub-Scandinavian Europe

 

[Jackson Lennock]

Modern racist ideas didn't seem to take a firm hold with respect to the societies of Asia until the Nineteenth Century. Prior to industrialization and the HUGE technological and social-organization gap it generated, there wasn't any kind of tangible thing to point to to say "oh yeah we're totally superior racially."

If more countries in East and Southeast Asia industrialize and keep pace with Europe, Nineteenth Century racial ideas could likewise play out differently. If Adam Laxman's 1792 Ezo Expedition had gone slightly differently, Japan might allow the Russians to trade in Ezo and Nagasaki. Alternatively, Raffles wanted to seize Deshima in 1810 ... that might have spooked the Shogunate enough into some pretty hefty reforms.

The Philippine Rebellion in the 1820s succeeding and producing a western-style Christian Democratic Republic (or constitutional monarchy) is another possible option for an Asian country which could keep technological pace with the West.

Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand seem like other prospects for industrialization/modernization. Thailand already sort of did so OTL. The Nguyen dynasty sent folks to the West after the First Opium War too.




... imagine a semi-industrialized Japan waging a far eastern campaign during the Crimean War. What fun!

 

[Hendryk]

I believe it was Louis Lecomte, a Jesuit who went to the Qing court in the late 17th century, who mentions at some point that a Frenchwoman successfully impersonated a Chinese visitor at Versailles, simply by dressing in "oriental" dress and speaking gibberish. She was only confounded when people who had actually been to China called the hoax. So even otherwise well-educated European elites of the time mentally pictured East Asians as fellow white people.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

The world in 1860. Japan opened up a bit a half century early, and the Philippines became independent from Spain a century early. Japan grabbed up a lot of Russia's lands in the Crimean War. While impressive on a map, it really just amounts to seizing a few isolated settlements from Russia.

 

[JesterBL]

I believe it was Louis Lecomte, a Jesuit who went to the Qing court in the late 17th century, who mentions at some point that a Frenchwoman successfully impersonated a Chinese visitor at Versailles, simply by dressing in "oriental" dress and speaking gibberish. She was only confounded when people who had actually been to China called the hoax. So even otherwise well-educated European elites of the time mentally pictured East Asians as fellow white people.

The counterpoint here would be the ginger biopirates in China who also got by in China by just claiming to be from Yunnan. People just didn't have much of a conception of the world that far afield a lot of the time, I don't think that really proves that East Asians were thought of as 'white'.

 

[JesterBL]

The concept of 'whiteness' in the European historical imagination had its antecedents in the concept of Christendom, and East Asians were always outside of it (even if they were, dependent on the fashion of the time, viewed as closer to it than were Muslims or Hindus who were also non-white and non-Christian).

 

[Hendryk]

The counterpoint here would be the ginger biopirates in China who also got by in China by just claiming to be from Yunnan. People just didn't have much of a conception of the world that far afield a lot of the time, I don't think that really proves that East Asians were thought of as 'white'.

That's different, people looking visibly different from the Han have been around in China for a very long time. That some of them may have looked a little bit more exotic than others was neither here nor there. An Lushan was the most famous ethnic Turk at the Tang court but he was hardly the only one.

 

[Roger II]

That does answer the question: if you can find a reason it'd suit racists to happen, it happens. "The monarchies of the white races stand united against the Scandinavian hordes [scandinavian now including Russians and Germans]"

Racists have always been fine with "exceptions" or not actually applying racist logic to minorities of one (e.g. east asians in a context where the only east asians anyone meets are occasional diplomats), what they care about is maintaining the social hierarchies they benefit from and in the US whether or not a group is black or indigenous. If you had de minimis Chinese immigration for whatever reason (say, a more prosperous late Qing state removing incentives to emigrate), there would likely be little incentive for racists to take a serious interest in Chinese people). In general though, I think discussing race pre-early-modern-colonialism gets rather messy just because did that concept really get used the same way *universally*?