Opinion | Racist ideas will set back Chinese diplomacy

Next month, Hong Kong begins free trade negotiations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. But is "Asia's world city" ready to treat as equals its 600 million neighbours to the south?

Hong Kong should and can be a beacon of pan-Asian if not pan-global identity, shunning ethnic divisions, chauvinist mentality and racial stereotypes. But recent evidence suggests there is much to be done, work which may be difficult in the face of demands to be "patriotic", which means "my country, right or wrong".

Relations with Asean nations, which in both colonial and post-colonial times have been a key to Hong Kong's commercial and financial role, are not going to be easy as long as China treads so hard on the toes of our two nearest neighbours, Vietnam and the Philippines, and has claims on the seas off Malaysia and Indonesia. So Hong Kong should at least be making an effort to remove any other areas of friction between itself and its non-Chinese neighbours.

At best, education officials in Hong Kong are clueless when textbooks that are supposed to promote racial harmony denote brown-skinned Asians as doing menial jobs such as domestic help and construction work. That is what so many in Hong Kong do - because they are only allowed in on that basis and paid wages lower than locals doing similar jobs. Likewise, white people are depicted as professionals wearing suits. Such stereotypes feed natural prejudices against foreigners.

These authors need reminding that it was not so long ago that rich families in the Philippines imported domestic helpers from Fujian , and that Chinese labour was found to be the cheapest almost the whole world over, resulting in Chinese finding themselves volunteering to be shipped to work in appalling conditions from Peru to Mauritius. Or that most construction workers in Britain, for example, are and always have been white.

More broadly, China needs to understand that much of its obsession with Han genes and identity is based on misconceptions. We are told by none other than Xi Jinping that Han people do not have "the invasion gene". But who are these Han anyway? Genetically, a large percentage of the inhabitants of southern China, descendants of the various Yue peoples who were absorbed into the Chinese empire, are genetically closer to many Southeast Asians - Vietnamese and Thai in particular - than to people from the original Han heartland in northern China.

Han is more a cultural than a genetic concept, but by fixating on skin colour, the textbook implies the superiority of the paler races, which easily translates into political assumptions - such as China's right to the whole South China Sea even though the coastline mostly belongs to other peoples.