Westerners would think that it’s ridiculous that we are not all racist, but this very opinion is actually a product of deliberate miseducation and a very manufactured narrative.

Race is not a biological reality but a social construct. This means that it’s an invention – it was invented by humans. Although the idea of race is unempirical, it had a tremendous hold on Western culture, up until very recently.

Before World War II, that race is a biological reality was accepted as common sense and scientific in Western societies. However, beginning in the post-second world war period, many anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists have contributed to the enormous amount of evidence establishing that biological race in humans is non-existent – it was an unscientific idea. Much of the consensus that race is not biologically real follows the idea that there is more genetic variation within socially constructed racial groups than between “races”.

However, although “race” has no biological basis, it doesn’t mean it has no social meaning. This is what we mean when we say that race is a social construct. It’s clearly possible then that different societies or cultures construct “races” in different ways. Many don’t group human beings in racialised ways at all or theorise physical and cultural differences in racialised ways.

All people see difference, seeing difference is not racist. Instead, it’s the particular way perceived differences are interpreted that makes it racist. It’s the particular way that Western cultures interpret perceived differences that becomes racist. Racial ideology has very specific ways of interpreting difference and this encourages very different kinds of behaviours.

What is morally problematic is putting differences onto a hierarchy of value. For example, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “[Native] Americans and Blacks cannot govern themselves. They thus serve only for slaves,” or “The white race possesses all motivating forces and talents in itself.”

These kinds of views, that “civilisation” is only available to a single group of people and that the rest must serve as slaves to them is morally problematic, and the actions accompanying them, for example, the genocide of entire continents of people and entire ethnic groups such as the genocide of the Native Americans and the attempted genocide of European Jews during the Holocaust.

It is these kinds of attitudes that I describe as racist and I argue are not universal. Instead, they are culturally specific and rooted in certain philosophical assumptions.

That many today are not aware that racism is the Western ideal is due to a concerted effort on the part of Western governments to whitewash [their] own history. Up until the 19th century, no European questioned the fact of racial hierarchies.

Until very recently, race was a positive ideal in the self-image of the West. The West referred to themselves as “Anglo-Saxons,” “Aryans,” and “Teutons”, for example.

Whereas, before World War II, racial ideology was meant to “inspire confidence in what was portrayed as a unique and superior Western civilisation”, today, it is politically taboo.

There are three reasons this happened. (1) “Fear of racial revenge” from non-whites in the colonies. (2) The challenge that the Soviet alternative of racial egalitarianism provided. (3) Most importantly, a new anti-racist consensus was a reaction to the Nazi Holocaust. Racial politics is now associated with the Nazis and so discredited.

You have traced modern Western racism to the ancient Greek notion of the “barbarian”. Can you explain?

The barbarian is an unempirical idea or ideology that is projected onto actually existing peoples. The barbarian is an assumption.

To understand racism and racialism, we need to understand its ancestor concept, the “barbarian”. As with so many things in the Western tradition, we need to go back to the Greeks (just as in the Chinese tradition you need to go back to the Warring States texts).

You need to look at the dualism between the Greek (man) and the “barbarian”. Greek (men) had access to reason (logos). This particular nature allowed them to transcend their (embodied) nature. It was assumed “barbarians” could not do this. They were incapable of being rational and so could only serve as slaves.

Aristotle formulated this idea as the theory of natural slavery. For Aristotle, all foreigners are barbarians and barbarians are natural slaves. The only way they could participate in reason is to listen to the commands of the master. Aristotle’s idea of natural slavery survived into medieval times and was used by the Spanish to justify their colonisation of the Americas and to enslave their people. It is this idea of the barbarian that informs the idea of the “white man’s burden”.

You can see literally the invention of different “races” and its connection to “barbarian”-cum-natural slave in the Portuguese slave trade.

“Negro” is the derived Portuguese word for the colour black, and “Negro” represented a race of people. This race was most often associated with black Africans. This equivalence between “Negro” and slavery was well established by the second half of the 15th century such that “Negro” was synonymous with “slave” across the Iberian peninsula. Almost from its inception, the term “Negro” thus designated the “barbarian” natural slave.

Did premodern Chinese not have a notion of the “barbarian”?

In the Chinese context, we do not have a concept of the “barbarian”. Terms that are often translated as “barbarian” in the sinological literature, for example, Yi, Di, Rong, Man are generic words meaning “aliens,” and were employed indiscriminately in Chinese texts to indicate foreign peoples and their polities. Often, the Chinese just used the tribe’s own appellations too. Their usage was generally meant to be objectively descriptive. Terms such as siyi (tribes of the four quarters) act as shorthand to describe the totality of these various tribes surrounding China.

Objectively describing actually existing peoples is a very different thing to having a metaphysical concept like “barbarian” and projecting it onto foreigners.

Nowhere in the Chinese classics do you find the idea that there are some kinds of foreigners who are incapable of becoming properly human. This stands in stark contrast to the Western tradition in which the key opinion makers throughout various epochs overwhelmingly pontificated at length and on record about why certain groups serve only as slaves or should be made extinct.

Instead, in the Chinese tradition, what is overwhelmingly asserted is the idea that all things form a continuum that is capable of transformation into each other.

The Chinese tradition did not see the “myriad things” as radically discontinuous with each other. Ubiquitous is the assertion that humans are born the same and it is environment, practice and education that results in differences between peoples. Because it is the process of human growth that defines them, a human is merely a potential that can become whatever her environment is. This is very different from the racialised idea that your essence or race defines you, and your environment cannot change that most essential definition about you.

This means that foreigners always had the potential to assimilate into Chinese culture and this stands in stark contrast to Western culture which stressed racial purity.

In the [traditional] Chinese world view, “human” is a state to be arrived at, not an essence that we already possess. Under this view, human-ness is arrived at through the process of one’s growth (interaction with one’s environment).

Can you explain how “China”, “Chineseness” and “Han Chinese” have been misunderstood and misappropriated?

“Chinese” is not the name of a race of people. Although the term “China” is used in many languages, it does not have an exact correspondence in the Chinese tradition.

The term “China” comes from a transliteration of “Qin.” So it refers to the Qin dynasty. Han is also a dynasty.

Chinese diaspora are familiar with tangrenjie (“Chinatown”), that is, “Chinese” people refer to themselves in reference to the Tang dynasty – they are people of the Tang. The Qing government, for example, referred to itself as daqingguo, “the great Qing state”.

In the pre-Qin period, for example, zhongguo would have meant “the central states”. Another near-equivalent, huaxia refers to the domains that enjoy great ritual propriety and ceremonial dress.

According to the scholar Yan Sun, the 55 ethnic minorities in China today are an artificial creation of the ethnic policy agenda of the Communist Party of China, which followed the Soviet model.

The concept of “ethnicity” would have been alien to traditional China, and thus the classification of the different peoples inhabiting China engineered many identities that had not existed before, or had existed only weakly. As Sun points out, it was this classification project that created the “Han people,” as the “Han” were just those who did not identify with any particular group. The Han is not a “race” and it’s very misleading to refer to China as a “nation”.

“Chineseness” has been misappropriated in the sense that we overwhelmingly use Western experience to think about Chinese identity. The Chinese themselves are partly to blame. Due to the globalisation of Western ideas, there wasn’t enough of an attempt to systematise one’s own way of thinking.

I am arguing that we have to remember that there used to be very different ideas and very different realities than what we take to be normal today.

Would you say the modern Chinese state – whether after 1912 or after 1949 – did take on some institutionalised features of Western modernity including racism?

“Modernity” is a very ambiguous term and the rectification of names is again needed here.

One of the best accounts of what is conventionally meant by “modernity” comes from the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel. He gives an account of the developmentalist myth of “modernity”.

European civilisation is superior to all others. Non-Europeans joining the ranks of civilisation/development is an emancipation. Europe’s domination over other cultures is justified as a necessary pedagogic violence (“just war”).

When the underdeveloped peoples irrationally rebel against their own emancipation-through-conquest, they double their culpability.

Under this view, yes, insofar as we take on these (European) ideas, “racism” is going to be globalised. And I would say that racism has been globalised, especially anti-black racism and white supremacism.

You can see this globalisation of racism in the [Chinese] Republican era when there were intellectuals who tried to frame China’s relationship to the world in racial terms and Chinese identity in racial terms. As I have said, the Soviet system of ethnic classification is also not native to the Chinese tradition.

However, Dussel gives an alternative sense of “modern” as having a meta-awareness of your own culture. Through colonisation, different cultures were brought into contact with one another. In this process, peoples can critically assess their own cultures.

As I have described it, racism is rooted in very ancient and medieval ideas. They are the opposite of “modern” – in the sense of empirical. Indeed, one can, following the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, call them “mythic”. “Modernity” in the sense of the engagement between different cultures just might allow us to forcefully challenge it.

The very idea that Europe is more advanced or more modern is racist mythology. In many ways, other civilisations were more advanced during the age of colonialism. And colonialism helped them get ahead of other cultures.

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Indeed, some of the defining ideas that Europe takes to be symbolic of “modernity” emerged from European engagement with non-European cultures. For example, the Confucian tradition – that was made available by Jesuit missionaries to China and who translated these texts into European languages – was enormously important for Enlightenment thinkers to rethink the nature of political order and to transition to a post-feudal world.

“Progress” is always a result of interaction with difference. “Modernity” in the latter sense can enable emancipation.

How can we recover this lost “Chinese cosmopolitanism”, perhaps akin to contemporary multiculturalism?

Chinese Cosmopolitanism is quite different from liberal multiculturalism.

Liberal multiculturalism prescribes that we leave each other’s cultures alone. For Chinese Cosmopolitanism, this leaving each other alone signals the failure of “cosmopolitanism”.

Under Chinese Cosmopolitanism, we need to actively engage with each other’s world views and be ready to change our own received ideas. The image I use to symbolise Chinese Cosmopolitanism is Confucius’ “san ren xing, bi you wo shi yan”, that is, in the company of two others, I can always learn something and use that observation to help myself self-reflect on my own conduct and to grow as a result. Growth is challenging because it means changing myself in some way, it means not staying the same. Chinese Cosmopolitanism is thus active or an active participation and dialogue with others. Cultures and peoples grow through interaction and dialogue.