Editorial | Reckless remarks by US official risk rise of ‘yellow peril’ rhetoric

The fallout from the racial characterisation of China-United States relations by US State Department policy planning director Kiron Skinner continues to reverberate. President Xi Jinping has used the platform of an Asian summit in Beijing to hit back against the view floated by Skinner at a think tank defence forum that rivalry between the two countries is a “clash of civilisations”, with China being the first major rival to the US that is “not Caucasian”. She said this was “a fight with a really different civilisation and ideology the US hasn’t had before”. In a detailed repudiation that reflected an escalating confrontation with the US, Xi warned that the thought one’s own race and civilisation were superior, and the inclination to remould or replace other civilisations, were “stupid”.

They are worse than stupid, or utter nonsense that many Americans also find affronting. They are dangerous too, not least because they play into the hands of hardliners in Beijing. It is not difficult to envisage them concluding that Skinner’s remarks show that tensions with Washington are not the result of political differences, or because China is seen to be at fault in the trade war, but purely racist – “because we are not Caucasian people”. It is therefore good to hear Xi, while delivering the keynote speech to the conference on dialogue of Asian civilisations, take the unusual step of directly repudiating such talk from an adviser appointed to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team by President Donald Trump.

Skinner’s remarks hark back to a 1996 book by American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he argued that future wars would be fought between cultures, not countries. She described China-US rivalry as “a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology”. The logic of the “clash of civilisations” theory is flimsy, but it is none the less dangerous if it were to become ideologically dominant and people in the US administration began to believe it.

Amid a worsening confrontation with the US, Xi called on nations to respect each other, adding that cultures were distinctive but no better or worse than each other. “We should hold up equality and respect, abandon pride and prejudice, deepen our knowledge about the differences between . . . civilisations, and promote harmonious dialogue and coexistence,” he said.

The history of human conflict shows that most of it comes from within similar cultures. Examples of two totally different civilisations fighting each other are rare. Thanks to Skinner’s reckless remarks, critics fear that history is more likely to be repeated in the form of a revival of the racist “yellow peril” rhetoric used against generations of east Asians and to justify bans on Chinese immigrants.