By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
The moral landscape of America’s self-understanding is
often reduced to a few easily recognizable landmarks: slavery and abolition,
Jim Crow and the civil-rights movement, World War II and the Holocaust. Every
dictator we confront gets compared to Hitler, and nearly every domestic
controversy gets squeezed into a familiar historical mold. (The Trump
administration’s child-separation fiasco at the boarder may have been terrible,
but it wasn’t Treblinka.)
This is an old lament, of course. And other than doing a
better job at teaching history, I’m not sure how we should go about fixing the
problem. What’s more interesting to me are the cases where we decide not to use
this moral shorthand.
Not long ago, North Korea, a police state, killed
hundreds of thousands of its own people. But generations of people who were
raised to believe that “never again” was the abiding lesson of the Holocaust in
effect said, “Well, maybe one more time.” We didn’t have the appetite to fight
a war.
Or consider the fact that Jim Crow is alive and well —
and living in China.
America’s Jim Crow system of second-class citizenship is
rightly remembered as our version of apartheid: a racist raft of laws designed
to dehumanize and marginalize African Americans in the name of white supremacy.
But it was also a form of economic regulation designed to prevent blacks from
participating fully in the labor market and to protect business from the
supposedly dire threat of rising wages. Such statist crony capitalism doesn’t
detract from the moral horror of Jim Crow, but it does help put it in context.
In China, there is systemic discrimination against
non-Han Chinese. Ethnic minorities — about 10 percent of the Chinese population
— are routinely denied access to elite universities and urban job markets in
the name of Han supremacy. Under China’s internal-passport system, many non-Han
aren’t permitted to even look for work outside of their rural provinces.
Tibetan and Uighur citizens are often barred from using Chinese hotels.
Not only does China have its own version of Jim Crow, it
still has its own version of slavery. Under its prison labor system, laogai (“reform through labor”),
millions of slaves churn out all manner of “Made in China” wares and even
provide many of the organs for transplant surgeries in China.
Other ideas that arouse rage (“cultural appropriation,”
“cultural genocide,” “occupation,” “xenophobia”) get much less attention in the
Middle Kingdom than they do elsewhere. The Han are simultaneously erasing
minority cultures and reducing them to kitsch for Chinese tourists. Mongols now
make up less than 20 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population. Minority languages
aren’t taught in many schools in places such as Tibet.
In America, we increasingly hear that enforcing
immigration laws is a kind of hate crime. But we mint about 700,000 new
citizens each year. Meanwhile, in China, it is almost impossible to become a
Chinese citizen if you weren’t born there to Chinese parents. The 2010 census
found just 1,448 naturalized citizens. (Yes, total, not just for the year
2010.)
Earlier this month, the United Nations reported that
China is holding millions of Muslim Uighurs in a sprawling gulag of
“counter-extremism centers” and “re-education camps for political and cultural
indoctrination.” Prisoners are forced to swear loyalty to Chinese leader Xi
Jinping. Bans on Muslim garb and long beards are becoming more common. Much of
this has gone unnoticed in America, no doubt in part because many refuse to be
distracted from their constant watch for Islamophobia here.
I am not offering any policy prescriptions here. Nor am I
saying that we should turn a blind eye to our problems or shortcomings just
because China’s are worse. But it does seem as though we’re most reluctant to
invoke our moral lodestars precisely when they most apply.
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