看完春晚的那个关于非洲的小品，外国人不淡定了。。。。
#7#Feb 22nd 2018
THE annual “Spring Festival Gala”, broadcast on the eve of the lunar new year, is the most-watched television programme on Earth. It is also one of the most vetted by the authorities, for it is intended not merely to entertain its 800m-odd Chinese viewers. Less-than-subliminal messaging is designed to showcase how contented all Chinese are under a wise Communist leadership—and, in recent years, how gratefully the world welcomes China’s benign activities in it. So what could one make of an excruciatingly crass sketch in this year’s show that put racist stereotypes of Africans at the heart of the supposed jollity?
每年除夕播放的“春晚”是世上观看量最大的电视节目。它也是官方审查最多的节目之一，因为它的用途并不仅仅是娱乐8亿多的中国观众。几乎令人察觉不到的通讯用来展现所有中国人在明智的中国共产党领导下有多么满意，还展现近几年来世界欢迎中国在其的良性活动是多么感恩。所以，一个人怎能明白今年把非洲人种族歧视的原型当做心底应该是快乐的表演中的极其愚笨的描绘？
The skit’s topic was, for sure, a sketch-writer’s nightmare: celebration of a Chinese-built fast train in Kenya. And if the savannah backdrop and tribal dances with which the scene opened were the stuff of cliché, at least real Africans were used in the making of it. But then a Chinese actress appeared in blackface and African dress, with exaggerated fake buttocks and a bowl of fruit on her head. For no clear reason she had in tow a blackfaced Chinese man dressed as a monkey. The humorous highlight was meant to be when this woman’s daughter missed the prospect of a date with the show’s handsome Chinese host thanks to the unexpected arrival of his (Chinese) bride. Far from being upset for her daughter, the mother didn’t mind because, she exclaimed, “I love the Chinese people! I love China!” The audience were delighted.
这场小品的主题肯定是编剧的噩梦：庆祝肯尼亚的中国造的快速列车。而且如果无树大草原背景和开场的部落舞蹈是冗余的话，至少在制作过程中启用真正的非洲人。但是那时一位中国女演员化着黑脸，穿着非洲裙出现了，还戴着夸张虚假的臀部，头上还顶着一篮水果。不知道为什么她后面还跟着一只脸涂得黑黑的中国人假扮的猴子。该小品中滑稽的亮点发生在表演中帅气的中国主持人的新娘到来导致这位妇人的女儿错过了与他约会的机会。她女儿很焦急，但是其母亲却不介意。她呼喊：“我爱中国人民！我爱中国！”听众很高兴。
Chinese officials often try to portray racism as primarily a Western problem. Yet there is a widespread tendency in China to look down on other races, especially black people. Two years ago a television ad for a laundry detergent showed a young Chinese woman luring a black man closer, triumphantly popping a detergent capsule into his mouth and stuffing him into a washing machine. At the end of the cycle, out came a fresh-faced Chinese man, over whom the woman swooned. Among the tens of thousands of Africans living in a neighbourhood of Guangzhou known as “Chocolate City”, many report racist slights.
中国官员经常努力将种族歧视描绘成西方的主要问题。然而中国有广泛的倾向看不起其他种族，尤其是黑人。两年前一则关于洗衣清洁剂的电视广告展示了一位年轻的中国女人引诱一位黑人靠近，得意地将一枚清洁剂胶囊立刻放进他嘴里，并把他塞进洗衣机。洗完就出来一位容光焕发的中国人，这位女士看到他就昏厥了。成千上万名非洲人生活在广州的一个居住区被称之为为“巧克力城”，许多人报告种族轻视。
The outraged response of many netizens in China to the African skit suggests a growing awareness at home that bigotry is a Chinese problem, too. It may be one that time will help alleviate. After all, America went from bans on inter-racial marriage to electing a black president in a mere four decades. And even those Chinese who acknowledge that China has a problem rightly observe that it is far from the worst offender. Myanmar burns Rohingya villages, Islamic State tried to wipe out the Yazidis, and Sudan until recently enslaved black Africans. Racism in China, by contrast, is seldom expressed violently.
中国许多网民对这部非洲小品被激怒的反应暗示了国内越来越多人意识到盲从也是中国人的一个问题。时间也许会帮助缓解这个问题。毕竟，美国在短短四十年内经历了从禁止跨种族通婚到选举了一位黑人当总统。甚至那些承认中国有问题的中国人立刻察觉到这比最严重的冒犯还要严重。缅甸烧毁罗希亚村庄，穆斯林国家努力扫除雅迪兹人，还有苏丹直到近来奴役非洲黑人。相比之下，中国的种族主义很少被大量曝光。
But a problem it is, and one that is aggravated by the authorities’ efforts to suppress discussion of it (censors raced online to delete criticism of the TV sketch). The Communist Party fears that such debate may undermine its efforts to portray Chinese people as victims of Western racism during the 19th and early 20th centuries—a narrative of humiliation which the party regards as a crucial explanation of why it has the right to rule.
但它确实是个问题，一个被官方竭力抑制讨论而被激怒的问题（审查员在网上竞赛删除对这场电视的批评）。共产党害怕这样的辩论可能会削弱其努力把中国人描绘成19世纪和20世纪早期西方种族主义的受害者的效果——是对该党将此羞辱视为其有权利统治的重要解释的一种陈述。
It does not help that long after scientific notions of race were demolished in the West, and social or behavioural classifications of race shown to be imagined constructs, race remains an accepted form of discourse in China—even in academic circles. Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong argues that contemporary notions of race in China began to develop at the end of the 19th century among modernisers, who were inspired by Western intellectual fads such as social Darwinism. As the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, crumbled, the search was on to find a unifier for a sprawling empire, culturally and linguistically diverse, that encompassed Manchu rulers, Tibetan herders, Turkic caravan-drivers, Hunanese peasants, Shanghainese entrepreneurs and colonial subjects in Hong Kong. Neither religion nor language (no standard Chinese existed then) would serve.
对种族的科学解释在西方被推翻后，上述的努力帮助不会长久了。社会或行为主义对种族的分类被展示为想象中的构建，在中国对种族的定义仍是刚接受时的样子——甚至在学术圈。香港大学的Frank Dikötter提出，中国当前对种族的概念开始发展于19世纪末，流行于受到如社会达尔文主义这样西方知识时尚启发的现代主义者。随着最后一个朝代清朝瓦解，就开始了一场对混乱帝国统一者的搜寻，该帝国的文化和语言多元化，包括满族统治者、西藏牧羊人、突厥赶车人、湖南农民、上海商人和香港的被殖民者。无论宗教还是语言都不会起作用（那时还没有标准汉语）。
Race, then, became the tool to forge an accidental nation out of empire—a project that absorbed Chinese nationalists for much of the 20th century. After the death of Mao Zedong, when academic life began to recover at universities, anthropology was rehabilitated. Its practitioners threw themselves into an orgy of cranial, serological and other tests—supposedly to prove that Tibetans, Uighurs and other officially defined “minority” peoples in China’s borderlands were closely related to a “Han” Chinese majority, and that all shared a common origin. The mythical Yellow Emperor enjoys an approved cult status in China as the progenitor of the Chinese race. Chinese academics remain curiously resistant to an “out of Africa” explanation of human origins.
那时种族成为从帝国铸造成一个偶然的国家的工具——这是一项20世纪大多数时间吸引中国爱国人士的工程。毛泽东去世后，大学的学术生命起死回生，人类学复活。其实践者投身于对头颅、血清学和其他测试的狂欢——应该能证明西藏人、维吾尔人和其他官方定义为中国边界“少数”民族和中国人中大多数的“汉族”紧密相连，所有人都共享共同的血缘。神秘的黄帝作为中华民族的祖先享受全中国的朝拜。中国学术界仍然抵制从非洲演变而来的人类起源的说法，这令人感到好奇。
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