On the Stupidity of Anti-Chinese Racism
And how it could get us all killed
Note: This post details racial and sexual harassment.
Last week, New Zealanders brutally harassed Chinese-New Zealand bakery owner Cathy Fan through her cake order forms. Fan is the founder of Fankery, a mochi cake and cookie pop-up that recently opened its first brick and mortar store. I don’t know her personally, but I bought one of her cakes for my friend’s birthday and it was very good. Fan also has a good grasp of Dirt Media founder Daisy Alioto’s idea that in the age of the smartphone “every company is a media company.” She built upward of 20,000 Instagram followers by filming her life as a baker and turning that footage into short films. She’s exactly the kind of entrepreneur New Zealand claims to love, but because she’s Chinese, the country’s trying to drive her out.
In the messages, which Fan posted on Fankery’s Instagram grid, people told her she needs an OnlyFans, that they were “looking to taste her pussy,” and specifically referenced that they wanted to taste her “CCP pussy.” They’re nauseating messages that I don’t like re-typing, but they’re instructive because they’re a trifecta of sexual, racial, and political harassment. My friend, who photographed Fan’s brick and mortar store’s opening for Radio New Zealand, told me that RNZ had to turn off comments under the article about her because they were so racist. Fan is experiencing the force of a problem that’s been building like an underwater tsunami for a while now: anti-Chinese racism in New Zealand.
I’m writing specifically about anti-Chinese racism because I think it reveals a colonial delusion that could get us all killed. If I were to say that all racism is wrong, that it’s superstructurally a way to create an exploitable labor class and is interpersonally a major character flaw, I wouldn’t be saying anything new. What I’m proposing is slightly different: that New Zealanders’ unhinged sense of superiority towards Chinese people, reflected in how they treated Fan and in other recent racist assaults, indicates we might be stupid enough to let the West use us as a forward operating base in the war it wants to wage on China. This poses an existential threat to Aotearoa. The West would spend our lives as casually as it does Ukranians’ in a war it’s similarly going to lose. We have to do everything we can to prevent them from pulling us into their death pact, and given the history of anti-Chinese racism in New Zealand, I don’t think that will be easy.
Anti-Asian discrimination is as old as the New Zealand settler project itself. Per an excellent essay by Smith K. Stead in the socialist magazine 1of200, it began in the 1850s when Edward Wakefield, one of the architects of the colonial project, tried to import Chinese laborers to undercut European ones’ wages. The European laborers, in classic white fashion, mobilized against the Chinese workers instead of their white bosses and did their best to stop Chinese immigration. When the settler project discovered gold in the country’s South Island in 1860, about 4,200 Chinese miners fleeing the collapsing Qing dynasty settled there over the next 20 years. The white settler-class loathed them. They described them in the 1885 Tuapeka Times as “almond eyed, leprosy tainted filthy Chinamen,” and in 1881, the New Zealand government passed a poll tax to try to keep them from entering the country. New Zealand’s poll tax imitated similar laws in California and Australia, and was the first of a series of immigration measures that included literacy tests and pension denials to keep Chinese people out of New Zealand.
The New Zealand government encouraged anti-Chinese racism but the people acted it out. In her book Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), author Lucy Mackintosh tells the story of Chinese New Zealander Chan Ah Chee, who brought high-quality gardening techniques to Aotearoa in the late 1800s. He set up a successful market garden in the Auckland Domain park and turned it into a thriving business. The British Governor of New Zealand, George Gray, hated Chinese people, and he empowered other racists to lay the groundwork for the government to deny Ah Chee’s land lease in 1920. They replaced his gardens with the Auckland Rugby League Association’s stadium and Ah Chee returned to China shortly after, as one of the most prominent examples of Chinese New Zealanders who did everything they could and still came up against the iron wall of racism.
Organized vigilante violence towards Chinese New Zealanders also escalated between the 1880s and the 1950s. Per historian Jacqueline Leckie, whites formed organizations called the Asiatic Immigration Restriction League, the Anti-Asiatic League, and the White Race League in the early 20th-century. This racism was fueled by fear of white settlers losing money. The White Race League, founded in Wellington in 1907, demanded that “the white race should only trade with the white race,” choosing to cannibalize other working people instead of the white bosses exploiting all of them.
Those white workers coordinated with each other across international borders. In 1913, the New Zealand Waterside Workers’ Union passed a resolution refusing to work the cargo on vessels landing “Hindus” and Chinese.” In 1923, an American Ku Klux Klan member named B. Hutson toured New Zealand and formed KKK branches in Auckland and Wellington. Unlike the American KKK, which was motivated primarily by hatred of Black people, a 1923 copy of the Auckland Star reveals that “the Chinese and Indians are… the two races to which the [New Zealand] Klan has the most objection.” Even after the New Zealand government formally abandoned some of its immigration restrictions in the 1940s, Leckie uncovered secret memos circulated within the Department of External Affairs in 1951 that stated that New Zealand was “to remain a country of European development” and that immigration was to be “discouraged from Asia.”
Thanks to the efforts of a New Zealander named Rewi Alley, whose story Stead tells in their piece on the subject, tensions diminished between New Zealand and China after World War II. New Zealand liberalized its immigration policy and pursued more trade with the now-communist Chinese government. Fast-forward to today, and China is now New Zealand’s largest trading partner. Last year, New Zealand exported $20 billion in goods to China, which accounts for 20% of our total exports and amounts to more than double that of our exports to America, our next largest trading partner. We’d be fucked if China stopped buying our stuff, yet our white supremacist government continues to let the U.S. military send up satellites from Mahia, dock western war ships in Wellington, and encourages our media to cook up xenophobic lies about “Chinese interference” to manufacture consent for war against the country.
Racist harassment of bakery owners, attacks on Chinese students on Auckland buses, and the rising number of hate crimes against Asian New Zealanders are all results of the same drive: the capitalist West’s desire to use us as cannon fodder as it dies like a cornered animal and lashes out with a world war. We don’t have to share the West’s fate. New Zealand media, staffed by racists and cowards, is going to ratchet up anti-Chinese rhetoric in the coming years to try and manufacture consent for war. This will encourage more racism and more attacks on Asian New Zealanders. We need to push back with everything we have, for reasons both altruistic and self-interested. We don’t need to die for the capitalist West. We can be Aotearoa, rather than “New Zealand,” and survive the coming global realignment. To do so, we have to militarily decouple from the U.S. and England. If history and current capitalist military defeats are any guide, the next century will be Chinese as surely as the sun sets in the west. Other people can wage a suicidal war if they want, but I’d rather learn Mandarin and live.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest on Tuesday, June 24 at 8:45pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. Per the club’s co-director, Tom, “Tarkovsky said [Diary of a Country Priest] was his favorite film, Scorsese listed it as one of the ten greatest ever made, and Hong Sang-soo said it was the film that inspired him to become a filmmaker.” You can buy tickets here.
My friends have also recommended going to see Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan at Q Theatre, running from June 25 to July 5. They’re running a midweek special where you can get $25 tickets if you go on a Wednesday or a Thursday. You can buy tickets here.
Recommended Reading
I particularly liked this essay by Benjamin Kunkel about why everyone should try reading Marx’s Capital, an easier read than anti-communists would have you believe, as it explains better than anything else “the hidden logic of the most evident feature of our social world, namely that everything is for sale.”
I liked this essay by Miriam Gordis on migraines and their history. Miriam’s one of the best writers I regularly read, and I look forward to her essays hitting my inbox.
I liked this essay by P.E. Moskowitz about how private ownership of the Internet is turning us conservative, in which they write “We are our built environments, because the brain of a dog kept in a cage is different than the brain of a dog in a field and the brain of a human being inundated with algorithmic conservatism for one-third of their waking life is different than someone’s whose isn’t.”
I liked this essay by Roro, PhD about how white noise drove them insane. They got some really good writing out of it.