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I had never heard of "white left" until two or three days ago when I read this article by Chenchen Zheng in openDemocracy (5/11/17):

"The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult".

It's an intelligent, thought-provoking piece, followed by a stimulating discussion among the commenters who come from many perspectives and venture into all sorts of relevant areas (e.g., immigration, race, social constructionism, deregulation, privatization, healthcare, and so on, but even more purely philosophical questions as well).

What I find particularly interesting about the issues swirling around "white left" is that they were initially broached in the context of China, which means that both the advocates and detractors of "white left" thinking were outsiders critiquing the West, yet wondering what implications the "white left" critique of the social, political, and economic situation in the West hold for themselves.

Here's the epigraph:

Meet the Chinese netizens who combine a hatred for the ‘white left’ with a love of US president Donald Trump.

And here's the bulk of the third paragraph (out of sixteen):

Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Almost forgot this: báizuǒ 白左 ("white left").

The debate over "white left" in China has been surprisingly vigorous, especially considering the fact that the PRC government censors the internet so heavily. I suspect that the debate has not yet been squashed (or maybe it already will have been by the time I post this) because the authorities haven't yet made up their mind on whether to foster "white left" rhetoric or to denounce and ban it.

READINGS

1.

"The White Left" (spandrell, Bloody shovel, 5/15/17)

Here's the first paragraph:

So this article is doing the rounds. Chinese netizens have synthetized a very powerful compound which has the Cathedral in complete terror. What is it? The word 白左, the White Left. This means that some people in China understand that progressivism is a foreign conspiracy against the Chinese nation. And they see this is in overt racial terms. It’s not “Western left”. It’s the “White left”.

2.

"A Handy Loan-Word From Chinese: 'Baizuo', Meaning 'White Left'" (John Derbyshire, VDARE, 6/16/17)

[You may have to turn off a splash page by clicking on the X in the top right corner of what shows up first.]

Derbyshire is an admitted Sinophile ("with qualifications"), so he knows what he's talking about. Here's the conclusion of his piece:

The notion that you can love your own country without hating others — even while admiring and respecting some of the others — is not much in evidence on Chinese comment threads, any more than it is in the effusions of our own left intellectuals, though the conclusions drawn in the two cases are different. This could be a real hindrance as we get the Arctic Alliance up and running.

Still, even with those elements of arrogance, ignorance, and insecurity, Chinese attitudes overall are healthier than the pathological altruism and sickly ethnomasochism of our CultMarx elites — the baizuo.

You can never have enough scornful terms for your enemies. I hope baizuo will take off among English-language users. We have way too few loanwords from Chinese, most of them from coastal dialects (sampan, ketchup). Heck, if they can borrow “LGBT,” why can’t we use baizuo?

Cultural appropriation? Ptui, I spit.

(When mentioning loanwords, by the way, I can never resist adding that “loanword” is a loanword: from German Lehnwort. Wikipedia splits hairs and says it’s actually a calque, a loan translation, so only a sort-of loanword … but the hell with Wikipedia.)

I have a feeling that this is one Chinese calque that not only is going to stick in contemporary English vocabulary, but that is going to resonate in social and political discourse, unlike a number of others promoted by the Chinese government that never gained any traction outside of Chinese propaganda / soft power outlets.

"Chinese loans in English" (7/10/13)

[h.t. Bill Bishop and John Rohsenow]

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