Revisiting age-old racial anxieties
- From: pluto <pluto@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:35:10 +0800
Revisiting age-old racial anxieties
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/marilyn-lake/2008/02/24/1203788146230.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Marilyn Lake
February 25, 2008
Advertisement
A shift in power from developed to developing countries is an opportunity for
Australia to work with China to tackle shared environmental challenges, writes
Marilyn Lake.
RECENT reports of China's ascension as a world economic power sound new
warnings, but call up age-old anxieties. Contemporary commentators write of a
fundamental shift in power from the developed to the developing world, from the
United States to China and India. More than 100 years ago, writers described a
similar transformation in racial terms, as they noted a shift in "world forces"
whereby global leadership would pass from the "White Man" to the "Black" and
"Yellow" races, from Anglo-Saxons to "Chinamen" and "Hindoos". Then, as now,
white men's countries spoke of the need to replace free trade with protectionism
and enforce border controls to restrict freedom of movement.
Alarmists in the late 19th century, such as the leading naval authority Alfred
Mahan, who wrote the classic text The Influence of Sea Power on History,
encouraged talk of a coming war between the East and West. The Japanese bombing
of Pearl Harbour and Darwin seemed to prove their predictions well founded, but
some analysts worried that the very representation of changing world forces as
an inevitable contest for world supremacy would become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. They also worried about casting changing world forces as a race war.
Would the white man's proprietorial claims to four of the five continents of the
world provoke an alliance between Asian powers that would see the eclipse of
Western civilisation?
In 1893, Charles Pearson, a former professor in history at King's College and a
Victorian Liberal politician, encouraged white men's proprietorial claims, when
he noticed the enormous population of China ? already more than 400 million
people ? and their potential industrial and commercial might. In his influential
National Life and Character: A Forecast, Pearson set out his twin prophecies ?
on the decline of the "White Man" and the rise of the "Black" and "Yellow" races
? that challenged white complacency and imperial triumphalism. The Anglo-Saxon
Review of Reviews called him a traitor to his race.
Future United States president Theodore Roosevelt, who reviewed the book at
length, told Pearson of the "great effect" on "all our men here in Washington".
The London Athenaeum noted that Pearson, living in the South Pacific in close
proximity to Asia, saw the world from a new perspective: "The reader can indeed
discern that Mr Pearson's point of view is not London or Paris, but Melbourne ?
what he seems to see most clearly is the growth of Chinese power."
Pearson had asked his fellow white men to imagine the unimaginable: a
post-colonial world in which the peoples of China, Malaysia and India were
"teeming with life, developed by industrial enterprise, fairly well administered
by native governments, and owning the better part of the carrying trade of the
world".
The day would come, he famously warned, in words that would resonate around the
world, when the "Black" and "Yellow" races from independent states would be
invited to international conferences and welcomed as allies in the civilised
world, when they would "monopolise the trade of their own regions and
circumscribe the industry of Europeans".
In such a world, Pearson reflected gloomily, the white man would be humiliated:
elbowed, hustled and thrust aside by races he always thought of as born only to
serve his needs. Still, Pearson the liberal historian thought these changes
inevitable. The manly path was to face the future with courage and stoicism. But
not many were prepared to acquiesce in such fatalism. Certainly not the
ebullient Theodore Roosevelt, who saw Pearson's predictions as a call to arms,
urging his country on an imperial course of overseas expansion. He set a
personal example of racial vigour by leading a team of Rough Riders into the war
against Spain in Cuba.
Pearson's prophecy set alarm bells ringing around the globe. In the new
parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Prime Minister Edmund Barton held
Pearson's book aloft as he spoke in support of the White Australia policy. "The
day will come", he quoted, when the "Black" and "Yellow" races would become
powers in the world. Australia, he said, must take action to defend itself
against unwanted intrusions and expel those, such as Pacific Islanders, who
would undermine racial homogeneity and the Australian standard of living.
Evolutionary conceit cast Aborigines as a dying race, "an evanescent race", in
Pearson's words, who would inevitably disappear. The White Australia policy
signalled a retreat from the world, a determination to defend the standard of
living in isolation, protected by tariff walls and a racially discriminatory
immigration policy. As one overseas commentator observed, the new Commonwealth
of Australia had become a "hermit democracy".
One hundred years on, as China takes its place as the leading economic power of
the 21st century, Pearson's forecast seems prescient indeed, but China's booming
economy now brings utterly unforeseen consequences and poses new threats of a
quite different kind. As scientists issue ever more dire warnings about the pace
of global warming and its disastrous effects, especially in Australia, they also
note the contribution of developing countries, such as China and India, to this
rapidly worsening scenario.
The day will come, warn the experts, when life as we know it will no longer be
possible. As Ross Garnaut, professor of economics at the ANU, stated bluntly:
"The show will be over." What is to be done? Retreat into denial, defensiveness
and nationalist isolation is no longer an option. Who better to work with the
new economic superpower of the world than our Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister?
Kevin Rudd, who served as a diplomat in Beijing, has said he wants to "engage
China" for Australia's benefit, especially as China will soon be our largest
trading partner.
The time has surely come when Australia must take a lead in working with the
countries of our region to achieve international agreement on the deep
greenhouse emissions cuts now deemed necessary.
Marilyn Lake is professor of history at La Trobe University and co-author with
Henry Reynolds of Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the
Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne University Publishing), which will be
launched by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser on Friday.
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