Mentioning The Unmentionable About The Chinese "Model Minority"

By Brenda Walker on October 17, 2007 at 1:00am

These days, much reporting about China has to do with how they are poisoning us with toxic products.

But for a long time, China's human exports have been considered to be beyond criticism.

Chinese immigrants are widely seen as a "model minority". Of course, unpleasant facts about Chinese (or any of our government-imported diverse cultures) don't advance the multicultural agenda of the elite MSM, so they get little attention. Instead we only hear cheerful achievement stories—as with Indians, another favored group. (See my VDARE.COM article "Dogs, Frogs and Dalits").

And in many ways the Chinese are indeed exemplary. As a group, they are hard working, academically accomplished and materially prosperous.

Indeed, their success shows how important culture is among immigrants. Asian youngsters can come knowing little English, but graduate from high school and go on to college. Forty-eight percent of Chinese living in America hold a bachelor's degree or better.

The campus of UC Berkeley now looks a lot like Chinatown due to the increased number of studious Asian immigrants to California: the New York Times called the campus "overwhelmingly Asian."[Little Asia on the Hill, by Timothy Egan, January 7, 2007]

At the other end of cultural scale for educational achievement areMexican immigrants—half of whom do not graduate from high school. Chinese students' success proves that Mexican failure is not the fault of American schools.

Furthermore, global IQ testing shows Chinese to be among the smartest people on earth.

So what's not to like about Chinese?

The unmentionable answer: Maybe…their culture?

Despite many areas of agreement, the meeting of China and the West is not a perfect fit by any means. As usual, diversity promises more than it delivers.

• One area of concern: the extreme level of corruption in China, recently called "astonishing" by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a recent report. [Corruption Threatens China's Future (PDF) Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2007]

The Carnegie report says corruption costs the China economy $86 billion annually—roughly 3 percent of GDP, more than their annual spending on education.  (Similar activities in America cost America a great deal of money, too—see here  for Patrick Cleburne's blog on a Chinese immigrant lawyer who was operating "a complicated and extensive visa fraud scheme" for Chinese clients.) Carnegie cites the aspect of Chinese corruption that affects Americans directly and has been widely reported recently: Global public health and safety could be endangered through China's production and export oftainted foodstuffs and counterfeit drugs.

Shoppers shouldn't forget that all those products marked "Made in China" are produced in a communist state that has a market economy only where it suits the rulers. The totalitarian aspects ofthought and behavioral control remain—only it's called "harmony".

• China's manufacturing boom is also exporting air-borne pollution. Its coal-fired power plants send soot particles across the Pacific to California and beyond, depositing measurable amounts of lead into water and soil. The pollution is worsening west coast storms, according to arecent study.

Environmentalism is apparently not a Chinese value.

• China is not kind to its own people either. The practice ofchild slavery continues to exploit and endanger underage workers in primitive factories, where workplace deaths of children are routine. In a recent case, thousands of children and adults were kidnapped to become forced labor at a brick factory. Outraged parents have had to search for their missing children.

"In order to achieve modernization, people will go to any ends to earn money, to advance their interests, leaving behind morality, humanity and even a little bit of compassion, let alone the law or regulations, which are poorly implemented," said Hu Jindou, a professor of economics at the University of Technology in Beijing.

"Everything is about the economy now, just like everything was about politics in the Mao era, and forced labor or child labor is far from an isolated phenomenon. It is rooted deeply in today's reality, a combination of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slavery." [ Fast-Growing China Says Little of Child Slavery's Role, By Howard W. French, New York Times, June 21, 2007]

• Arguably China's worst affront to human rights: its treatment of women and girls. Its One-Child policy, a massive social engineering project meant to prevent anotherfamine by curbing population growth, amounts to state-sanctioned infanticide. If a couple can only have one offspring, Chinese culture dictates that valued males are be kept and despised females would be aborted or killed at birth.

This program has eliminated tens of millions of girls. Had those babies turned out to be boys, they would have been allowed to live.

In 2001, the BBC reported on a Beijing woman who had rescued five infant girls out of trash containers. The babies had been thrown away alive by parents who were disappointed that their newborn was not a boy.

In 2006, CBS' Sixty Minutes reported on the social implications of the One-Child policy. With more than a billion people, China has too many men. According to the latest census, an average of 120 boys are born for every 100 girls, the greatest imbalance in the world.  As correspondent Lesley Stahl reported, the root of the problem is a traditional preference for sons: in China, as in other Asian countries, it is sons, not daughters, who usually take care of their parents in old age. [China: Too Many Men CBS Sixty Minutes April 13, 2006]

As a result, number crunchers forecast a near future in which 15 percent of Chinese males will be bachelors.

Another eye-opening number: "As many as 40 million men will be permanent bachelors" within 15 years, according to the Chinese government. Other researchers believe that demographic trend—known as "bare branches"—has "played a role in aggravating societal instability, violent crime and gang formation."['Bare Branches' and Danger in Asia, By Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer, Washington Post, July 4, 2004]

Perversely, the scarcity of females adds to their value in a financial sense. Reflecting the much-touted Chinese gift for entrepreneurship, the kidnapping and sale of women as brides has blossomed. In the countryside, arranged marriages are still common. Women are essentially bought by the groom's family, and consequently are often treated as property.  Certainly Chinese women are not feeling the love, as measured by the high suicide rate: according to the BBC's Christopher Allen, a Chinese woman kills herself every four minutes and ten times that number attempt suicide every year.

Chinese use sex selection techniques in the United States, even though they can have as many children as they want. What they don't want is girls. Chinese immigrants in New York City can find a gender-selection clinic right in Manhattan's Chinatown, where Dr. Robert M. Nyein started offering the Ericsson sperm-separation technique as part of his gynecological practice about four years ago. Nearly all the Chinese immigrants who come to him, said Dr. Nyein, want boys. [Clinics' Pitch to Indian Emigres: It's a Boy, by Susan Sachs, New York Times, August 15th, 2001

At least the practice of foot-binding little girls' feet to cripple themhas died out for good. Hopefully.

• For all the vaunted Chinese intellect, superstition is rampant. From feng shui to astrology and lucky numbers, the denial of reason can be shocking.

I once worked for a well-educated Chinese immigrant woman. When an important paper was temporarily misplaced in the office, she was alarmed that a ghost had taken it. She wasn't kidding, though it took me a while to figure out that she was serious.

"Dragon bones"—actually dinosaur fossils—are still widely used in Chinese medicine. The BBC recently reported that one local collector had ground up 8,000 kg of dinosaur fossils to sell as traditional medicine.

In a similar way, Chinese are literally eating up endangered specieswith extra zeal because rare and tasty creatures may soon become unavailable entirely due to extinction.

• As I detailed in "Diversity Is … Cruelty to Animals," many Chinese cultural practices in slaughtering livestock for food are particularly objectionable to Westerners. Chinese believe that meat tastes better if the animal has suffered pain while being killed. So creatures are cruelly slaughtered.

However, the reason remains unclear why Chinese fur farmers skin dogs and cats alive. China has become a major exporter of fur in the last few years. The unnamed fur trim on a garment in an American store may be from some Fido unlucky enough to born in the PRC. (Warning: The photos shown here are disturbing.)

Of course, many Chinese in the U.S. have left behind their ancestral home's culturally sanctioned cruelty, corruption and misogyny. But others have not. This shows up in places like San Francisco where the demands of Chinatown to keep its brutal and dirty animal slaughter have won against American standards.

• Chinese ties of race and culture remain unassimilably strong.

And now that the People's Republic is on a winning streak, a number of immigrants have decided to return to what they regard as their true home.

"It all comes down to one issue: the sense of belonging in America", said Marlon Hom, chair of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. Until the 1940s, he noted, Chinese immigrants often returned home because American society rejected them and denied them citizenship: "In the past, it was discrimination from the white society; today, it's ethno-centrism among some Chinese immigrants". [Emigres Feel China's Pull, By Vanessa Hua, San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 2006

When author Frank Wu was interviewed on the old C-SPAN show Booknotes about his book Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, he earnestly complained about the stereotype that he was seen as a foreigner—"not a real American"—and someone who would "eventually leave". Then the subject of his immigrant parents came up…

WU: "My parents did something that—that surprised me. I had no idea this would happen. It sort of fits a stereotype, I suppose. My parents moved to Taiwan about a year-and-a-half ago. My father worked for his entire life at Ford, and he had a great opportunity to do some consulting in Taiwan. And he's, you know, the proverbial, you know, big fish in a small pond. So they went back to check it out." [Booknotes Transcript March 31, 2002]

(Of course, the "stereotype" that most Asians are not home-grown Americans is actually true; seven out of 10 Chinese counted in the 2000 U.S. Census were foreign born. When European-descended Americans assume that Wu is an immigrant, they are being statistically well informed. If he wants Asians to be seen as full-tilt Americans, then he should lobby for an immigration moratorium to create the social atmosphere he apparently desires. A few generations of Asian-Americans with no new immigrants should do the trick.)

• We should never forget that China is a likely future enemy and is recognized as such by the Pentagon.

In 2002 a top Chinese general threatened to lob a nuke on Los Angeles, something even the Soviets never did.

The brutal truth: In a future conflict, the loyalty of Chinese immigrants would be questionable. Many no doubt feel allegiance to America. But modern multiculturalism promotes the idea that ethnic identity comes first. We no longer insist upon loyalty from immigrants. Accordingly, there is little reason to expect it.

In 2001, when Red China imprisoned the crew of an American surveillance plane, many Chinese residents of the San Francisco Bay Area took the side of the PRC against the US: Many Chinese Americans Say U.S. Appears Arrogant. The crew of 23 was held for 11 days after their EP-3 aircraft made an emergency landing on Hainan Island after a mid-air collision with a Chinese jet.

With the power of Red China on the rise, questions about national allegiance are sure to increase. And rightly so. Lou Dobbs reported in March that the Chi Mak spy case had revealed that there are 3000 Chinese front companies here to steal American military and industrial secrets. Chi Mak was a naturalized U.S. citizen who was accused of spying for the PRC as part of his job as an engineer."Prosecutors say the 66-year-old Mak was acting out of loyalty to his Chinese homeland and had plans to retire there," the show reported. He was later convicted, and severalfamily members pleaded guilty to espionage charges.

Not all dangers to national security caused by immigration come from Muslims.

A recent example of Chinese racial nationalism: the formation of aChinese ethnic political party in British Columbia earlier this year. The "Nation Alliance Party" was organized because Chinese immigrants said they wanted representation for their interests, which they felt were not adequately addressed by existing Canadian parties. Can we expect a similar organization in America—or is the current level of ethnic pandering enough?

Among America's gaggle of squabbling nationalities, Chinese are becoming noisier. Despite the great financial and academic success of Chinese in America, ethno-groups like Chinese for Affirmative Action (for Chinese) are still active, pimping for issues like Chinese-language versions of ballots and government publications.

My conclusion: Americans are sick of having the maladies of the human race foisted upon us and called "diversity". And we have a right to be.

If Chinese immigrants desire unquestioned acceptance in this country, then they should advocate an end to immigration—the obvious solution to many social problems.

Then we could all be Americans together. Assuming that's what everyone wants.

Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org andImmigrationsHumanCost.org. She admires Mexico for its marvelous tequila, and that's about all.