Guest speakers at a public talk held by the US embassy in Beijing recently confessed to their Chinese audience that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had treated China as a "whipping boy" during the presidential debates.



Even after the elections, the infamous "Chinese professor" advert, showing a laughing classroom mocking US decline, was still running on US TV stations.



But prejudice against China goes beyond politics. Olympic gold medalist Ye Shiwen was another defining case earlier this year that exhibited a practiced distrust towards the Chinese.



While many in the Western media pointed out the bias of the accusations, others were all too willing to swallow charges made without the slightest hint of evidence.



Admittedly, the past record of Chinese Olympians has not always been clean, but nor, as numerous scandals have revealed, has any other nation. The innocent Ye, trained and raised in Australia but of Chinese nationality, wouldn't have faced such suspicions had she been European or American.



Anti-Chinese prejudices have not become as taboo in Western society as other forms of racism or colonial bigotry. Their casual use too often goes unremarked, either in media or in conversation.



In Western cinema, recurring stereotypes display a flippancy toward China and East Asia in general.



Too many film roles for Asian actors manage to this day to turn mangled English, harebrained mysticism and military incompetence into a source of easy humor.



But if Asian actors aren't comic figures, they are menacing ones, Fu Manchu-esque villains representing the perennial fear of the "Yellow Peril," newly fueled by China's rise.



Among Western expats in China, whom one might hope would be more sensitive to these issues, prejudices still linger. There are persistent phrases in the argot of shared experience among expats that exemplify this bias.



The first is the use of "so Chinese!" as a derogatory label for any inadequate service or failed device, for anything from a late delivery to a broken humifier. What's meant by "Chinese!" here isn't always clear, but it has clear connotations of incompetence, poor design, laziness, or quality.



The second simply uses "China" to refer figuratively to an absurd, immovable object; a fact that cannot be negotiated, reasoned with or understood. I've often heard the retort "But, come on, it's China!" used to champion disengagement over dialogue. And it's rarely spoken without a tinge either of resignation or resentment.



While in some ways the use of these terms recognizes that the country is what it is, and complaining does little to change it, they also push China into a realm of alien incomprehension.



Solvable problems, perhaps even ones that could be tackled by the speaker themselves, are dismissed as the inevitable outcome of an unchangeable and foreign culture. And the underlying hostility behind the use of such phrases carries a dismissive and offensive charge. Imagine the feelings in the US if "That's so American!" was regularly used to describe the incompetent, shoddy, or lazy by Chinese visitors.



Prejudices only disappear when confronted. Casual racism, sexism, and homophobia have gradually become increasingly unacceptable in Western discourse. Sinophobia will only disappear when it produces the same disapproving stares and awkward silences that other bigotry does.



The author is a copy editor with the Global Times. jackaldane@globaltimes.com.cn