It was Harris who described it as China's "great wall of sand". The Chinese regime was "provocative and expansionist", he told the US Congress. The Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague ruled in 2016 that China had no legal basis for its claims on maritime territories that were also claimed by its neighbours. The Chinese government refused to acknowledge the court's jurisdiction and ignored its ruling. Harris was concerned that the rule of law was giving way to the law of the jungle. He wanted to use his fleet, the biggest on the planet, peacefully yet vigorously to demonstrate the meaning of this ruling. "I don't think we have as a mission enforcing tribunal rulings," he told The Wall Street Journal at the time. "But we can show support for the rulings". He proposed "flying, sailing and operating everywhere international law allows". This made him an "arch-villain in the Chinese narrative", as the Journal put it. But the admiral was restrained by his president, Barack Obama, according to specialist US newspaper Navy Times and other media. Obama wanted to advance co-operation with China in other areas. The Chinese government went on to fortify and militarise its newly built islands.

But it wasn't enough for Beijing to denounce Harris for his views. The Chinese regime imputed motive. And the motive it ascribed to Harris was racial. The second strand of Beijing's attacks on Harris is based on the fact that his mother was Japanese. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, in 2016 explained: ''Some may say an overemphasis on the Japanese background about an American general is a bit unkind. "But to understand the American's sudden upgraded offensive in the South China Sea, it is simply impossible to ignore Admiral Harris's blood, background, political inclination and values." Chinese references to his "blood" and "background" infer that he is prosecuting a historic Japanese race feud against the Chinese. He carries the poison of Sinophobia in his very genes, they're insinuating, never mind his US nationality, citizenship, oath or lifetime of service. Harris' father was a sailor in the US Navy and fought against the Japanese in the Pacific War. After the war, while based at the US naval station at Yokosuka, he married Harris' mother. They moved to America. Harris' mum refused to teach him Japanese, telling him he was fully American.

Why does the Chinese government, and its mouthpieces, dwell on his part-Japanese heredity? The first reason is to show that he is "disconnected" from the rest of the US government, Harris told The New York Times, an attempt to position him as an outlier. Second, he said, "they try to demonise me, and that's really ugly". He called the Chinese government's rhetoric "tone deaf and insulting". It is, of course, although Harris doesn't use the term, racist. Harris is a particular target of the Chinese authorities, but the conflating of nationality and race is not a tactic they reserve for him. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, Commander, US Pacific Command, and Donald Trump's choice to be the new US ambassador to Australia. The concept of race - "blood" - is commonly used by the regime as a way of constructing unity among the Chinese and as a way of claiming the loyalty of the Chinese diaspora, wherever they may live.

Premier Li Keqiang said in a speech last year: "The Chinese race is a big family and feelings of love for the motherland, passion for the homeland, are infused in the blood of every single person with Chinese ancestry." Yet there is no such "blood". Official Chinese Communist Party policy marks out 56 different ethnicities in China, dominated by the Han but also including Tibetans, the Muslim Uighurs, Zhuang, Yi, ethnic Koreans, and so on. Han is itself a constructed category. Han Chinese make up some 90 per cent of China's population, yet there is nothing monolithic about them. The Han comprise eight huge language groups that the Chinese call dialects but which "exhibit levels of mutual unintelligibility that would likely be treated as differences of language were they observed in the European contex", in the words of Stanford scholar Thomas Mullaney. But "blood" or race is deployed according to the purpose of the party. And it's easy to do. Consider President Xi Jinping's signature project, the achievement of the "China Dream". What is the China Dream? It is, according to all the official translations, "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". Yet some linguists have questioned the translation. The word for "nation" - minzu - can just as readily be translated as "race".

"In China, minzu can mean both nation and race," says Feng Chongyi, associate professor of China Studies at University of Technology Sydney. "There's no clear distinction. It can mean race, or nation or nation state or party-state. It can mean Han Chinese or all Chinese including 56 ethnic groups together. It means different things depending on context." The Australian sinologist Geremie Barme says that "if you wanted to be naughty, you could even call it the Chinese Volk," the German term for folk that the Nazis deployed to connote a racially superior people with a unifying mission. This raises uncomfortable questions about the definition of China's dream. And because race is such a sensitive topic in Western societies, we generally assume that it's equally sensitive in others. But, as the Dutch historian of China, Frank Dikotter, has written, China's "racialisation of collective senses of identity has actually increased within both state circles and relatively independent intellectual spheres, particularly since the erosion of Communist authority after the Tiananmen massacre". The Chinese Communist Party is only too ready to use race to unify. Or to divide. As Harry Harris has discovered. Peter Hartcher is international editor