Earlier this year, China picked Ding Hui, a young man from Hangzhou, for its national volleyball team. In August, a 20-year-old Shanghainese, Lou Jing, made the last 30 in the Chinese version of Pop Idol. Neither event would have attracted unusual notice but for the one thing the two young people have in common: they are in a small, and for China, novel category of mixed-race citizens, children of black fathers.

    Their emergence into the limelight has forced the country into an uncomfortable and often shocking debate about what it means to be Chinese.

    Lou Jing was brought up by her mother, a single parent, after her African American father had left China for reasons not explained. The crude abuse directed at her mother on the internet uncovered a deep well of prejudice.

    China has not been a country of immigration. Who is really Chinese is not the easiest question to answer in a country that officially has 56 ethnic groups.

    For decades following the revolution in 1949, marriages between foreigners and Chinese were rare and, in the xenophobia of the Cultural Revolution, they were banned. It wasn’t until as recently as the mid-70s that the first petitions for permission were accepted, and such marriages remained relatively unusual for a further two decades.

    Racism in what has thought of itself as a monocultural society is certainly a large element in the discussion. But the ambivalence about race is a reflection of profound and unresolved questions about the identity of modern China, as the world’s most populous state reaches for a role in the 21st century after the painful dislocations of more than a century of political and social upheaval.

    Today China is threatened by a new phenomenon - that of inward migration. In Lou Jing’s home town of Shanghai, for instance, there have been some 3,000 mixed-race marriages each year for the past decade and in Guangzhou, according to local reports, as many as 100,000 Africans have settled in what is known locally as “chocolate city”.

    If China continues on its current trajectory, there will be many more cases like those of Lou Jing and Ding Hui, Chinese citizens whose appearance and personal history will force the world’s most populous nation to confront the ambiguities of its own identity.

    Source: www.guardian.co.uk

    混血儿引发身份认同辩论

    今年年初，杭州男青年丁慧入选中国国家排球队。8月，20岁的上海姑娘娄婧在选秀节目中杀入30强。这两件事都没有特别值得关注之处，这两个年轻人惟一的共同点是：他们同属中国为数不多的混血儿群体，父亲都是黑人。

    他们成为引人关注的焦点使中国陷入了一场不愉快的甚至常常招人反感的辩论，辩论的主题是，中国人该如何定义。

    娄婧是由单身母亲带大的，父亲是非洲裔美国人，不知什么原因离开了中国。网上对她母亲的粗鲁谩骂反映出一种深深的偏见。

    中国并非一个移民国家，在一个由56个民族组成的国家，谁才是真正的中国人并非轻易就能作答。    1949年后的很多年里，很少有中国人和外国人结婚，“文化大革命”期间，这种行为甚至被禁止，直到上世纪70年代中期才重新被批准。但在随后的20年里，这种婚姻依然比较少见。    在一个认为自己是单一文化社会的国家里，人种偏见肯定是一项重要因素。但是，随着这个世界上人口最多的国家结束了100多年的政治和社会动荡，并且开始在21世纪扮演日益重要的角色，对人种的矛盾情绪反映出现代中国在身份认同上一些尚未解决的深刻问题。

    当今中国受到一种新现象的威胁，那就是外来移民。例如，在娄靖的家乡上海，据报道过去10年中每年至少有3000对异国男女结为夫妻。而在广州，据当地媒体报道，居住在当地所谓“巧克力城”中的非洲人多达10万人。

    如果中国继续沿着这一趋势发展下去，将会出现越来越多像娄靖和丁慧这样的中国人，这些人的外貌和个人经历将会使这个世界上人口最多的国家不得不面对身份认同不确定这一难题。