Chinese racial hierarchy mapped old imperial social ranks onto global racial categories

Evidence

The social hierarchy which existed between different groups of people in the empire was expanded into a vision of racial hierarchy characterized by “noble” (guizhong) and “low” (jianzhong), “superior” (youzhong) and “inferior” (liezhong)y “historical” and “ahistorical” races (youlishi de zhongzu). The distinction between “common people” (liangmin) and “mean people” (jianmin), widespread in China until the early eighteenth century, found an echo in Tang Caichang (1867-1900), who opposed “fine races” (liangzhong) to “mean races” (jianzhong). He phrased it in evenly balanced clauses reminiscent of his classical education: “Yellow and white are wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white are rulers, red and black are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and black are scattered” (Tang, 1968:468). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3315

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did the pre-18th-century liangmin/jianmin distinction actually operate as law — and what did ‘mean people’ status entail before its abolition?
• SHARE: The Tang Caichang couplet — ‘Yellow and white are wise, red and black are stupid’ — is a striking one-line encapsulation of racial pseudoscience in classical Chinese rhetorical form.