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Aug. 8, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
47:48
John Derbyshire: "China, America, and the Chinese in America" (2014)
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Our first speaker, John Derbyshire, is a novelist, a pop math author, a reviewer, an opinion journalist, a bon vivant, raconteur, probably best known for his columns at PackyMag as well as Videre and for his Radio Derb podcasts.
For many years, John Derbyshire wrote for National Review until he was ousted for excessive truth-telling on the subject of blacks.
Mr. Derbyshire was born and reared in England, and he came to the United States to live permanently in 1991.
He'll be speaking today about China and the Chinese in America and America, and I would like to mention some of the qualifications he has for speaking on this subject.
He first became interested in China in 1968 when he worked in a Liverpool pub as a bartender in what was then Chinatown.
And since that time, he's had a lifelong interest in China, and altogether he spent a total of about two and a half years working and traveling in China, or Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, where he actually, in China, I believe he was, he taught English literature.
Mr. Derbyshire continues to write and speak on China, a country which will only loom more important and larger in world affairs and certainly through immigration in our affairs as well.
So please welcome the incomparable John Derbyshire.
Thank you very much for that, Jared.
And I must say it's an honor to be the first batter-up here today.
I just have to go for a bass hit, right, Jared?
Okay, all right.
Okay. As Jared said, he's asked me to talk about China, a subject about which I have some small expertise, and to make it on topic for the American Renaissance Conference.
The title of the talk is China, America, and the Chinese in America.
Part one, China.
Big country in the Far East.
Who knew?
Currently trading under the name People's Republic of China, and there are the stats, with the American numbers in blue alongside.
An interesting thing to note there is...
That our two countries are very close to the same size.
We're just a tad bigger than they are, 3.8 million square miles.
Numerically dominant ethnic is the Han Chinese at 92%.
I'll return to that later.
So that's China.
But this is American Renaissance, and what we talk about here is race and ethnicity.
So let's look at a slightly different map.
There's the People's Republic of China inside the big black border, and that's an ethnic map.
I've taken it from Herman's historical atlas of China, which is a little classic of historical cartography, first compiled by a scholar called Herman, of course, back in the 1930s, but never out of print since then and much updated.
But this is an ethnic map of China showing the major ethnicities as of the mid-20th century, but these things don't change much.
The main change here has been big inflows of Chinese settlers into these ethnically non-Chinese areas.
If you look at this, the takeaway here is that only about half of the territory of the People's Republic, the black border, only about half of it has a base About a quarter,
around here, is Tibetan and related peoples.
And incidentally, that's Greater Tibet.
That's much bigger than the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region that you see on Chinese maps.
About a quarter is Tibetan.
About a sixth up here is various Central Asian peoples, mostly of the Turkic language families.
The one you've probably heard of is the Uyghurs.
They're actually the dominant minority there, but there are others.
And this region here, about a tenth of the land area of the People's Republic is Inner Mongolia, separate from Outer Mongolia, which is an independent country, for interesting historical reasons I have no time to go into.
Population densities are relevant here.
For Tibetans in Tibet, population density is very low, about eight per square mile, which is about the average for Australia.
Uyghurs in East Turkestan, and I'm just ignoring the Chinese settlers here, I'm just talking about the base ethnic.
They're about 20 to the square mile.
Mongolians in Inner Mongolia, about 15 to the square mile.
If you want a yardstick here, the United States runs about 80, 83, 84 to the square mile overall.
An average American suburb, which most of you are probably familiar with, is usually about 1200 to the square mile.
Metropolitan China, the part of China that is based Chinese in ethne, is about 600 to the square mile, which is a lot.
That's overall, 600 to the square mile.
And what we get from that is that China is and always has been living on the Malthusian edge.
There's the last Chinese dynasty, the Ming dynasty, which ended in the middle 17th century.
And you can see that metropolitan China is basically just China of the Ming Dynasty, plus Manchuria up here, again, for historical reasons.
Paleoanthropology, I think we probably all know the story here.
Out of Africa, 60,000, 70,000 years ago, the first wave went down through Southeast Asia.
To Australia, with some offshoots into Southeast Asia.
The second wave took a northern route up through Asia and settled in Siberia, Eastern Siberia and the Far East.
With the result that, genetically, the Han Chinese look like this, according to National Geographic.
About 72% Northeast Asian and the other 28% Southeast Asian.
That's not really paleo-anthropological so much as historical.
Most of the contribution there has been historical.
North China has always been the theater of dynastic conflict, and these huge episodes of dynastic conflict and civil war always sent floods of refugees into the South, where they intermarried with Southeast Asians.
Chinese history, I think we're pretty familiar with this.
Urban life since 1700 BC.
The Chinese tell you 5,000 years of history.
Well, that's a stretch.
5,000 years of history plus archaeology plus a bit of mythology.
The first Chinese person we know, the first person we know whose name we know and was probably Chinese and probably existed was the founder of the Shang Dynasty who lived around 1700 BC.
The dynastic cycle, what Stephen Jay Gould in a different context called punctuated equilibrium, periods of stasis when a dynasty was fairly stable, punctuated by episodes of great chaos and disorder.
Non-Chinese figures in Chinese history, it hasn't all been Han Chinese.
Here's one, An Lushan, who raised the An Lushan Rebellion in the middle of the 8th century.
And who was not ethnically Chinese?
The An Lushan Rebellion, by the way, Stephen Pinker in his book, in his recent book about the decline of violence, says this, it was the worst atrocity of all time.
It resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire's population, a sixth of the world's population at that time.
So this was a tremendous catastrophe, which nobody in the West ever heard of.
And An Lushan...
If you take his name and walk it back through the known algorithm of phonetic change across the centuries, in the middle 8th century it would have been pronounced Roxanne.
And if you remember your ancient history, you know that Alexander the Great married a Sogdian lady whose name was Roxanna, just the female form of that.
And they were Indo-European.
It's actually cognate with the Latin word for light.
Constitutional stasis is my favorite quote from Demetrius Bolger, the first English language historian of China back in the 1880s.
And I should say that in spite of being named Demetrius, he was in fact white.
It's the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese history that the people and their institutions have remained practically unchanged from a very early period.
Constitutional stasis.
So these episodes of stasis here all looked rather like one another.
There was some creeping technological progress, but not much in the way of constitutional progress.
Compare, for example, England.
When I was at school in the 1950s in England, 1950s, 1960s, there was a subject you could take for general certificate of education exams called British Constitution.
And the standard text was English Constitutional History by Taswell Langmead.
A very daunting book for a 15-year-old schoolboy.
It's more than 800 pages.
And it takes you through all the constitutional development of England and then Britain in the up-to-date versions.
With all these wonderful things that we evolved through in our Constitution.
And I like to point out that if you had to write a book called Chinese Constitutional History, you could not fill 800 pages.
You couldn't fill 8 pages.
There hasn't been any.
There's our friend Chuck Linnaeus with his typology of the major races.
East Asia...
Sorry, I'm losing my grip here with this.
East Asians, severe, haughty, desirous, by which he meant acquisitive, ruled by opinion.
If you want to get a handle on the national character of a people, the best way to do it is to study their idioms and catchphrases and proverbs.
And for this purpose, a very good book is this, the ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs.
Which gives you the proverbs in both English and Chinese.
And if you leaf through it, you'll notice an enormous number of proverbs and idioms relating to conformity.
Here we are.
One cannot change the minds of the many.
One has to conform with the group.
And this is just a selection.
There are dozens more that I didn't have room for on a PowerPoint slide.
The rock that stands out from the river bank will get washed away by the water.
The tallest tree in the forest is the first one to be cut down, and so on and so on.
Very strong emphasis on conformity.
Why? Well, we now know, and if you don't know, please buy Nicholas Wade's forthcoming book, which is out next week, and which Jared reviewed for American Renaissance, and I reviewed for vide.com.
Nicholas Wade's new book, Hammers Home the Point, that...
Evolutionary change has been, to quote Nicholas precisely, recent, copious, and regional.
And we may be looking at a consequence of it in the conformism of the Chinese.
Ron Unz wrote a very good piece about this for American Conservative.
It might be due to the fact, the conformist tendencies might be due to the fact that for the past 2,000 years, the Chinese government has eliminated its more rebellious subjects.
A suggestion that would surely be regarded as totally obvious and innocuous everywhere in the world, except in the West of the past half century or so.
Which has gone slightly nuts about this issue.
Okay, that's part one, China.
Part two, America.
Big country in the Western Hemisphere.
Excuse me.
I'm sure we all know that.
I feel a bit like Dr. Johnson when he compiled his great dictionary of the English language.
He came to the point where he had to define the word dog.
Does anybody know how Dr. Johnson defines dog in his dictionary?
A familiar quadruped.
So this is a familiar country.
Dominant ethnic, non-Hispanic white, 66%, and as we all know, declining.
A brief ethnic history of the USA.
The 1790 census showed about 18% non-white.
That's in the United States as then constituted.
The territory that today forms the 48 contiguous states was about 62% white.
So look on the bright side here.
Over the past 200 odd years, the territory of the 48 contiguous states has got a little bit whiter.
And the 1950 census showed, to a fair approximation, 90% white, 10% black, and trace elements other.
Continuing the ethnic history of our country, the post-World War II Cultural Revolution spread cosmopolitanism, moral universalism, and expressive individualism from WASP and Jewish elites to the general population.
Reader's Digest favored immigration restriction until 1953.
That's when they published their last immigration restrictionist article.
And then came the 1965 Act.
Just why this cultural revolution occurred is a very interesting question.
And there was very good debate on the point in the pages of vdare.com three or four years ago.
Between Kevin MacDonald, who some of you may be familiar with, who thinks that it was the influence of immigrant Jewish elites changing the culture, and Eric Kaufman of London School of Economics,
who thinks that it was inherent in the Protestant elites more or less from the beginning, and who traces the changes back into 18th, 19th century Protestantism.
The executive summary of that debate is Kevin MacDonald says it was murder and Eric Kaufman says it was suicide.
And I urge you to read the debate for yourself.
It's a very good, very instructive debate.
Make up your own mind.
But Kaufman does say this in his book, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America.
Dominant ethnic groups like the Romanians of Romania or the Persians of Iran generally do not feel compelled by political and economic rationality to recognize minority group desires.
Instead, nation-building, assimilation, or ethnic hegemony has been the typical response, not only elsewhere, but also in America.
Here's American constitutionalism compared, like the English, America has been under a single evolving constitution since the beginning of its existence.
And I just contrast that here with a couple of other countries.
Here's France, since her revolution.
You see the changes they've gone through constitutionally.
And this was not, well, hardly any of these were really evolutionary.
were much more revolutionary.
China, since her revolution in 1911,
China had two republican constitutions and four constitutions under the communists.
It's 1949, they've had four constitutions.
None of which has actually meant anything, of course.
If you read the Chinese constitution, it's online, you can read it.
Oh, it guarantees freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and so on.
Of course, none of it means a thing.
So there are very different attitudes between Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and constitutionalism elsewhere.
Okay. Part three, the Chinese in America.
And this comes prefaced with a little editorial matter, if you'll excuse me.
I'm taking a point of view in the rest of this.
Talking about the Chinese in America.
And the point of view I'm taking is what I call salt in the stew multiculturalism.
You know how you salt your stew.
A little bit of salt improves the flavor.
Dump a whole box of salt in there and you're going to destroy the stew.
This point of view takes these things for granted.
A stable nation with a healthy culture needs a single ethne in confident, unapologetic supermajority.
By which I think I mean 90 to 95 percent.
You can argue about that.
Small minority populations add flavor.
The supermajority is maintained by strict controls on settlement and a strong assimilationist ethic.
This is the outlook expressed in the 1924 Immigration Act.
Other points of view are of course tenable, and I'll be glad to discuss them with anybody who has them offline.
I just note that if you take these three hollow bullet points here, this one, this one, and this one, You pretty much have modern Japan, with one rather glaring exception.
Yes, it's a stable nation with a healthy culture and a single ethnie in supermajority.
Yes, small minority populations are tolerated and add a bit of flavor.
And yes, they maintain the supermajority by strict controls on settlement.
The main difference is that Japan does not have an assimilationist ethic.
They don't want us to assimilate.
I believe Jared could discourse on this, perhaps.
I believe in Japanese it's possible to form expressions like fifth-generation immigrant.
But otherwise, it's a fair approximation to probably what most of us in this room would like a country to be, like our country to be.
Okay, the history.
Major inflows in the 19th century, and major is very relative there.
It was a few hundred and then a few thousand.
Rising resentment by native working men, the Chinese undercut them.
They worked for low wages.
They lived in camps of their own with communal cooking pots and sending all their money back home.
And they were not, at that point, the model minority.
If you asked a mid-19th century American about the Chinese, the first things that would come to his mind are gambling, which is the national vice of the Chinese.
Prostitution, because they were all single men.
They've got to find an outlet somewhere.
Opium and criminal gangs.
Much frowned upon, we tend to think of the 19th century American West as kind of a lawless place.
You know, if I say the 19th century American West, you think of guys playing poker in a saloon with loose women watching from the balconies.
But in fact, and of course, there was a lot of that.
But once women started to come in in big numbers, they soon put things in order.
And there was a very moralistic ethos, actually, in the old American West after the mining camps had settled down and the women had come in.
So all this was very much frowned upon.
Although opium, not as much as you'd think.
Opium has a very interesting history, which if you want to get to grips with Chinese history, you really need to know, and which has been much obfuscated by propaganda.
Opium was, in fact, quite a routine drug in 19th century Europe, 19th century England.
It was like aspirin.
It was sold over the counter without any controls in England until the Pharmacy Acts of the 1860s.
And I know this because the part of England that I come from, the East Midlands, was notorious for opium addiction.
It's very flat and very damp, so people get a lot of rheumatism.
Anybody over 40 was in more or less constant pain.
So they took opium.
You got it from the local pharmacy.
Two Pennyworth, please, and they gave it to you in a little paper twist.
So opium wasn't quite as disgraceful 150 years ago as it is today.
But opium dens were still a bit loose, I think, even in the Old West.
And all this led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which forbade entry of skilled and unskilled labourers and miners.
Punished ship captains, demanded passports for non-laborers, and barred Chinese from citizenship.
That was the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Act, I'm sorry.
Here's a guy who should have been excluded.
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist this one.
This is from Willard Espy's book, An Almanac of Words at Play.
Espy came from one of the Pacific coasts, I think came from Washington State, a little town in Washington State.
And he published this lovely book with one entry per every day of the year, full of puns and limericks and all kinds of wordplay.
And this is his entry for 31st of January.
On this day in 1902, my home county carried out its only formal capital sentence.
It hanged by the neck until dead one Lum Yu, a Chinese laborer, who, the preceding August, had...
For reasons unrecorded, shot and killed a certain Oscar Bloom.
The sheriff, a sociable man, invited favored citizens to the festivities.
And this ticket has survived, welcoming you to attend the execution of Lum U. And then Espy adds at the bottom, if you know where Lum U is interred, please tell me.
I'd like to raise money for a headstone.
It might bear this legend.
I, Lum, you, 1873 to 1902.
Why you no lummi?
Please remember that the Chinese Exclusion Act did not exclude all Chinese.
They only excluded certain categories of laborers who were in competition with American working men.
Here's a person it did not exclude.
Sung Mei Ling.
Who was educated in the USA, mostly in the South, in 1907-17, but graduated Wellesley College eventually.
She spoke perfect American English with a Georgia accent.
She married Chiang Kai-shek, the generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, commander-in-chief of the Chinese military in the later Republican period.
Scholars are still arguing about whether they actually performed the conjugal act or not.
It was a very political marriage.
I'm sure everybody knows who Chiang Kai-shek was.
Joe Stilwell, who was the American liaison with the Chinese forces in the 1940s when we were allies against the Japanese.
General Stilwell had a sharp tongue.
Used to call him General Cash My Check.
He was also once heard to remark, the trouble with our effort in China is the communists got the general and we got the issimo.
He was a piece of work, Joe Stilwell.
Vinegar Joe, they called him, yeah, Vinegar Joe.
This is...
Taishan County.
Now, this yellow blob here is Guangdong Province.
China is divided into provinces, like American states.
And the provinces are divided into counties, like American counties.
That's the basic organization.
Guangdong Province is in the south of China.
I think it's the most populous province, more than 100 million people.
If this was a nation, it would be up in the top dozen or so nations by population.
Guangdong Province.
Huge, very populous, very fertile.
Hong Kong hangs off the south of it.
So does Macau.
Excuse me.
And down there they speak Cantonese.
Well, sort of.
Cantonese is actually the language of Guangzhou, the capital, which we used to call Canton.
And some neighboring places like Foshan.
But out in the sticks in Guangdong province, they speak a lot of very weird dialects, which ordinary Cantonese people have trouble understanding.
It's a bit like New Guinea, you know, where you can't understand the people in the next village.
Really, it's like that in some places in Guangdong.
And Taishan, this one county in Taishan, in 1970, more than 60% of Chinese people in the USA had ancestors from that one county.
Pretty remarkable.
I've seen more up-to-date estimates, which I don't quite believe.
I saw one recently that said almost half of Chinese in the USA still today trace their ancestry back to Taishan.
The Taishanese people are a bit of a study, and I've had some dealings with them, about which perhaps the less said the better.
Their dialect is very interesting.
They have a very peculiar dialect.
It's hard for regular Cantonese to understand.
They have, for example, an unvoiced lateral fricative in their language.
If you don't know phonetics, a fricative is the sound you make by friction.
You force air through a narrow gap.
That's a fricative sound.
And a voiced sound is one where you use your vocal cords.
And you can either do that or not.
So, no vocal cords.
Vocal chords, you see.
Well, in English, the English L is a lateral fricative, but it's voiced.
You can feel your vocal chords vibrating.
Some languages have an unvoiced lateral fricative.
That's what it sounds like.
Welsh has it.
The Welsh double L is a Llan Drub, Llan Gothlin, Llan Frapwrth Gingit Cogerych, Wyn Cropwrth Llan Tazaliw, go, go, go.
Well, Toishanese also has an unvoiced lateral fricative.
The Toishanese word for small, for example, is shloi, shloi, whereas regular Cantonese would be sai, and Mandarin would be xiao.
So you see the difference in the dialects.
So if you're in Chinatown and you see two old biddies arguing over the vegetable stand in the street, and you're hearing that, Guarantee you they're from Toishan.
Here's what happened to the Exclusion Act.
What happened, of course, was World War II, when we were allied with China against the Japanese.
And so there was a lot of political pressure to relax the rules of exclusion.
The Magnussen Act repealed the 1882 Act.
And put the Chinese under the national origins quota of the 24 Immigration Act.
That didn't do them much good.
If you remember the 24 Act, the national origins quota was that in any given year, settlement from any given nation should not exceed 2% of that nation's representation in the 1890 census.
Well, the 1890 census, there were only a few thousand Chinese in the USA.
And 2% of a few thousand is a few dozen, so it didn't really do a lot of good.
And especially, it didn't cover the war brides that GIs were bringing back with them from China.
So they supplemented it with the Chinese War Brides Act of 1946, which exempted Chinese war brides from the 24 quotas.
And then, of course, the Immigration Act of 1965 blew everything up.
It did establish...
It's an odd thing, if you read the 1965 Act, It established theoretical quotas by hemisphere and nation, but with a lot of loopholes.
And most of the subsequent immigration came in through those loopholes, mostly to do with family reunification, for example, which is outside the quota system.
There are the numbers.
That's the 1890 number.
And here's the 2010 number.
You'll notice that the 1965 Act didn't do very much for the Chinese, simply because Chinese people in 1965 weren't allowed to leave China.
The Cultural Revolution started the following year, and China was in internal turmoil for a decade thereafter.
So most of the people coming in after the 1965 Act by 1970 were from Taiwan and Hong Kong, especially famine refugees from Hong Kong.
A big portion of them.
There was a dreadful famine in China in the late 50s, early 1960s.
Terrible famine.
And refugees from the famine flooded over the border into Hong Kong and immediately set about unearthing relatives in the United States that they could apply to for family reunification after 65. After we established relations with China in 1979 with mainland China,
Things opened up a lot.
So by 1990, when that was 10 years in the past, you see a really big increase in the numbers, and then more and more.
Now we're almost up to about 4 million, about 1.3%, 1.2%, 1.3% of the American population is Chinese.
Here's the story.
As I said, after the 65 Act, until we established relations, it was still the case that most were coming from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
And then increasing numbers from the mainland came in in the 1980s.
In the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, June 4, 1989, the first President Bush issued an executive order giving work permits to mainland Chinese.
American round eyes.
But a huge thing amongst the Chinese.
I personally know four people who settled in America because of that executive order.
They call it A11.
The Chinese people call it A11.
Huge thing for them.
And that's a common thing in immigration law.
Things that pass by the general American population with nobody noticing and nothing in the newspapers.
Are huge issues for some ethnic minority somewhere who are getting a big percentage out of it.
That's always the case with immigration laws and regulation.
1990s, family unification kicked in and you got major inflows of family members.
Employers got wise to the fact that they could hire Chinese computer programmers for a lot less than American computer programmers.
And a lot of illegals came in from China.
And Chinese postgraduates started showing up in US universities.
Not many undergraduates yet.
And then there were the night school wars, which I'll say something about in a moment.
And then up to the present, now we're getting undergraduates.
Elite colleges are applying quotas.
That's how many undergraduates we're getting.
And wealthy Chinese are buying US real estate.
I'm not sure why we allow that to happen as much as it does.
I had an argument about that with an English friend.
It's the same in Britain.
Buying up big swathes of central London.
Why do we let that happen?
I don't understand.
I guess somebody's making money out of it.
These were the night school wars in my hometown in Huntington.
If you're a Chinese immigrant, you send your kids to night school on Friday night to study some of the home country's culture.
All immigrants do this.
If you saw the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you remember she went to Greek school in the evenings and hated it, and the Chinese kids hate it too.
But these schools were all established in the 70s and 80s by immigrants from Taiwan, where they used the old style of writing Chinese characters.
And as mainland numbers began to rise, in the mainland they used a different style, they used simplified characters.
You've got little wars, and in my hometown, in Huntington, the whole system actually split in two, and now there are two night schools for Chinese kids, one using the old characters and one using the simplified characters.
Ron Unz again, showing us how elite colleges practice quotas, except for Caltech.
This dotted line here is the actual number of...
It says Asian, but it's mostly Chinese aged 18 to 21. And these colored lines trace the percentages of intake, undergraduate intake, for various colleges.
And the only one whose undergraduate intake tracks the actual number of available Chinese is Caltech.
Caltech is very meritocratic.
You pass an exam, you're in.
The others have an uncanny tendency to cluster around 16%, 15%, 16%, 17% of their intake.
All of them.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia.
Look at them.
They're all clustered there.
Isn't that strange?
So they're all applying quotas.
And we're seeing a little pushback against that in California.
California Asians have been voting against...
Affirmative action.
There was a move recently in the state legislature to bring back affirmative action.
And California Asians raised a huge protest about it.
So they're getting wise to that.
Oh, there's Leo I-Ting.
This says Ha-Fo.
Ha-Fo is the Chinese transcription of Harvard.
Ha-Fo, Leo I-Ting.
Harvard Girl.
This was a best-selling book in China.
In the early 2000s.
It was by a couple of Chinese people who trained their child from infancy, from birth.
They decided she was going to go to Harvard.
And they brought her up so that she would go to Harvard.
And she did.
And she's now working for Goldman Sachs or somebody.
It was a huge bestseller in China at the time.
But the interesting thing is, look at the reader ratings.
This is from a Chinese site, somewhat like Amazon.com.
A sort of Chinese equivalent of Amazon where readers rate it.
And look at this, as of 2014, it's not that popular.
A lot of pushback against it.
And in fact, there was, at the time, it generated a whole genre of similar books.
You know, Harvard Girl, Princeton Boy, you know, Yale, I don't know.
No offense, Jared.
And it also generated a bit of pushback in China.
The one I liked was a book that came out, I think, 2002 by a Chinese who was skeptical about the whole thing.
and the title of the book was translated from the Chinese, I'm mediocre, and I'm fine with it.
Chinese readers have pushed back against this, and you see that most of them are just giving it three stars, and the number giving it only one star is more than the number giving it five stars.
And if you actually read the reader comments, a lot of them are very Amran, a lot of very Amran-ish comments from Chinese readers.
On the Chinese side, you know, the old Chinese complaint, why are we worshipping foreign things?
Why aren't we building up our own elite universities?
And some, even taking our point of view, saying, why do Americans let this happen?
Why don't they reserve their elite university places for their own people?
They don't understand this.
And I don't either.
National security issues.
This started much earlier than people now remember.
This chap, his name was Qian.
He came into the States in the 30s and went to MIT, moved on to Caltech.
He was one of the founders of JPL, Jet Propulsion Lab, which sends all those cute little satellites out to the remote planets.
And in the McCarthy scares in the early 50s, he was put under house arrest.
He was under house arrest for, I don't know, three or four years.
And when they lifted it, he was so disgusted, he just decamped back to China with all his expertise and founded the Chinese ballistic missile program.
At the time, I've never been able to convince myself that he really was dirty.
You know, in intelligence slang, when they say somebody's dirty, that means he's up to no good.
I've never been able to convince myself.
I think he may have had a hard deal.
Of course, the ethnic lobbies and the politically correct victimological people all want to tell you that he was horribly persecuted and unjustly persecuted and so on.
They might, in this case, be right.
You know, Orwell said that some things are true even though the party says they are true.
And, I don't know, I think he might have had a raw deal.
This guy, not so much, Wenho Lee.
Remember him from the late 90s?
He was arrested on umpty-ump charges of espionage.
He'd been meeting in Peking hotel rooms with Chinese security people and not telling his employers who were the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab.
And I actually discussed him.
The point man here is Bill Gertz, who writes for the Washington Times, and he's on top of all the Chinese espionage issues.
And I asked Bill Gertz at the time, in 2000, when he'd just done his plea bargain, And Bill Gertz said, yeah, everybody in the intelligence community thinks he's dirty.
That's good enough for me.
But recently they've concentrated on cyber espionage.
There's not so much overt espionage.
Now they have guys sitting at computers in China stealing our...
Military and industrial secrets over the internet.
They figured out how to do it.
But there's still a lot of it about, and in fact, American Renaissance ran an interesting column just last week about this.
Issues number two, politics with Chinese characteristics.
I'm sorry, but the Chinese just have not got the hang of open, fair, democratic politics.
Anywhere, you've got to be suspicious, anywhere you see a Chinese...
Or even a Chinese-American person.
It's not universally true, of course, but it's got to raise a little flag somewhere.
And here are some examples.
Charlie Tree, shoveling money to the Clinton campaign.
Same thing here.
This is Hillary Clinton's 2006-2007 effort.
Sorry, 2007-2008 effort to get the Democratic nomination, and she had to return a ton of money.
And just this last month, the Leland Yee case in San Francisco.
He's a California state senator.
And he's on racketeering charges.
Toyshanese, by the way.
He comes from Toyshan.
Charlie Tree's from Taiwan.
There's Norman Shue's from Shanghai.
But this is a Toyshanese.
Niche synthesization.
That's the International Math Olympiad, the US team.
Ignore this guy who's just a guide, but there are seven members of the team and five of them have Chinese names.
That's five out of seven, which is 71.42857%, which is about 60 times their representation in the population.
So there's some niche synthesization going on there.
And there's the arrow of hostility.
Because of our peculiar history, and also because of 60 years of relentless indoctrination, Americans tend to think that the arrow of racial hostility goes from the more capable, more successful race to the less capable,
less successful race.
That is not generally true in human affairs.
Usually, the more capable, more successful.
Have an attitude to the less capable, less successful, of somewhere between pity and contempt.
The real hostility goes upwards from the less capable to the more capable.
My favorite here is Slobodan Milosevic talking about the Croats and Slovenes.
If we don't know how to work well or do business, at least we know how to fight well.
That's the less capable speaking to the more capable.
Finally, just some book recommendations.
I'm the China book guy.
Literary editors, the people who run the book pages of magazines and newspapers when they had book pages, they have a Rolodex of names and a book comes in and they think, I'll make a good review.
What's it about?
It's about baseball.
I'll send it to the baseball guy.
Well, I was the China guy for newspapers and magazines from the early 1980s on.
I'd read a million books about China and not only read them, I got paid for reading them, which is pretty good.
Here are just three or four from the last couple of years that I thought I'd recommend to you.
This one by Jonathan Fenby, who, by the way, wrote a very good biography of Chiang Kai-shek.
This one by an Australian journalist, Richard McGregor, very good insight into the Communist Party.
This is a strange book, but I recommend it to your attention just for its strangeness.
And this one, Chinese Girl in the Ghetto by Ying Ma.
Ma is her surname.
She's flipped it round, which is very annoying, I think.
And she went from urban China to the Oakland Ghetto.
Her people in America were poor and grew up in the ghetto.
Gives a frank account.
And I wish I'd underlined frank, because it really is frank.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see Ying show up at an American Renaissance conference.
That's my presentation.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you.
We have time for one question because we've gone over a bit.
There is a microphone, I believe, at the back there.
And one question, please.
Oh, you're on the last slide.
Can I ask it from here?
OK. From the motion.
Mr. Schircher, what role would they play in the future?
For example, when parents are in the dispatcher?
I'm sorry.
What role would Chinese America play in the future of race action since that?
Like Jared said, I described her in grad school, and one of my, a girl I met there was friends with her, there's a relationship, there's a Chinese from Malaysia, and by all appearances, she is a model minority.
She's been in school, she has a typical record, but she identifies first and foremost as Chinese.
What role would Chinese play in the future of American race relations in terms of white, because they're not like black students, they don't.
Sure. The answer to every question about immigration and assimilation and ethnic minorities, the answer to every question is the one that the late great Enoch Powell used to give.
Numbers are of the essence.
Depends how many we have.
If there were no more Chinese immigration from here on, if it stayed at 1.2%, I think there would be a good chance of...
Total assimilation.
They assimilate very well.
Of course, unfortunately, that's not likely to happen, and I think we're going to end up with a technocratic elite.
There won't be as much of an issue in forums like this as the European Jewish elite was in the early 20th century, because they're just not that verbal.
It's more spatial, technological expertise.
But they'll happily...
And I think fairly quietly colonize some of the upper areas of technical and perhaps business life.
Probably not too disturbing, but as I said, it's a question of numbers.
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