泰坦尼克号上的“中国佬”

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About the Author

Cheng Wei, is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Excerpt (Translated from Chinese)

2012 marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. In the 3D supplementary version of Cameron’s film “Titanic” that was screened at that time, there was an obvious Chinese scene that was deleted from the 1997 version. The Chinese press then became very interested in the “Chinamen” on the Titanic, but the historical materials they cited did not go beyond the coverage of the shipwreck in the Chinese press in April 1912, and in 1912 The reports in Chinese newspapers in April used British and American “views” and British and American “memories” – these “subjective views” and “imaginary memories” were used as objective statements and were written into Chinese high school Chinese textbooks. , is also used as an example of the New Culture School’s “Criticism of National Character”, shaping the way generations of Chinese people view the Titanic shipwreck and the “heroes and cowards” behavior of Westerners and Chinese on board in this shipwreck. perception. Although the textbooks of the Republic of China were abolished after 1949, it is impossible for new textbooks with obvious anti-Western colonialist tendencies to include articles such as “Titanic Disaster”, but this is just to remove an “illustrative material” because As the spiritual successor of the New Culture Movement, the compilers of the new textbooks have even strengthened the weight of the New Culture School’s “Criticism of National Character” in the new textbooks. However, our theory of “national character” comes from Western colonialism’s “racial character” theory. “Construction, and echo it in a more extreme or masochistic way.

The Chinese-faced passenger who appeared in the 2012 3D supplementary version of “Titanic” led me to re-watch the 1997 version of “Titanic” in a new way. It turned out that this “China guy” appeared many times in the film. Although it is always fleeting. But the problem is that the treatment of the “Chinamen” on the Titanic in the film “Titanic” is completely opposite to the report “Chinese Stowaways” in the New York Times on April 20, 1912 that I read a few years ago. Challenging my established acceptance of stories about the “Chinaman” on the Titanic, having the “Chinaman” appear as a legitimate passenger in third class on the Titanic, and having him appear almost at the end after the shipwreck Among a group of men leaving the Titanic. Obviously, if Cameron is not imagining it out of thin air – but judging from the details of “Titanic”, the director seems to have an archaeologist’s enthusiasm – then he must have mastered some different things that have been buried. historical data.

Since I have been engaged in research on modern Chinese history in recent years, I immediately became interested in the related “Chinamen on the Titanic”. So, within a few months, I read hundreds of American newspapers from April to June 1912 through the U.S. National Library’s old newspaper PDF database, and wrote this “e-textual research” into this book. Reveal the racism of the Titanic shipwreck narrative that has been passed down to this day, and restore the reputation of the “Chinamen” on the Titanic who were framed by this racist narrative.

Late at night on April 18, 1912, New York time, after nearly four days of sea voyage, the Carpathia, carrying more than 700 survivors of the Titanic shipwreck, finally arrived in New York. Thousands of people of different identities and moods were waiting on the East River pier in New York under the drizzle: relatives and friends, reporters, police, New York customs officers, federal officials, church people, onlookers and some people with ties to the Titanic. The boss of a British or American multinational company with some direct or indirect interest relationship. Originally, they were prepared to welcome the arrival of the Titanic here with a completely different cheerful mood, but now only the survivors of the Titanic have arrived.

When the survivors of the Titanic’s first- and second-class cabins stepped off the Carpathia’s gangplank in twos and threes and passed through the police cordon on the pier, they were immediately surrounded by relatives, friends and reporters waiting there. From this moment on, as part of the entire narrative of the Titanic shipwreck – not an isolated part, but part of a whole that constitutes some kind of “racial contrast” with the “other part” – there are several ” Various rumors about the identity of “Chinaman” and his escape experience spread on the dock, and quickly spread to the entire United States and the world through telegraphs and newspapers; at this moment, those “Chinamen” who were constantly talked about by others “Lao” remained in the third-class cabin of the Carpathia until the early morning of the next day, when he was taken away by officials from the U.S. federal government and personnel from the New York office of the British Donald Steamship Company. On April 20, the New York Times published a report titled “Chinese Stowaways” written by a reporter from the newspaper at the dock in the early morning of the 19th:

Among the people rescued from the sinking Titanic, there were 6 Chinese. They snuck into one of the lifeboats before the Titanic left British port. When the ship hit an iceberg, they didn’t panic. They knew that if the Titanic was in danger of sinking, the lifeboat would be put into it. sea ​​surface. They all carried women’s shawls with them. When they heard someone on the boat shouting “ladies first,” they used the shawls to cover themselves, making the crew mistakenly think that they were women.

Darkness allows them to successfully avoid the scrutiny of others. It wasn’t until they were rescued aboard the Carpathia that they learned they were Chinese. It is said that some of the Carpathia’s crew wanted to throw them back into the sea, but its commanders did not want to do this and instead locked them in cells on the ship. As for why these Chinamen were not discovered by the crew and passengers of the Titanic in the first place, the people on the Carpathia were puzzled.

Today, federal officials removed the imprisoned Chinamen while the necessary procedures for their return are being processed.

Except for the first and last sentences (or part of the last sentence), all other descriptions in the report about the identities of these “Chinamen”, their escape experiences, and their treatment on the Carpathia are all fabricated. Although the fabrication was so bizarre, it was immediately reprinted and quoted by other newspapers and magazines as fact. The American journalism industry in the 1910s was in great need of such “Chinaman stories” that could prove the “racial inferiority of the Chinese” to stimulate the racial imagination of the American public in order to support the racist “Chinese Exclusion” that was being implemented in the United States at that time. the legality of the Act. The reports about the “despicable deeds” of these “Chinamen” that have been published in various newspapers and periodicals are the same as “Chinese Stowaways”. Most of them are products of racist imagination, and the details between them are conflicting-conflict. Accounts from the same person can even be inconsistent without destroying their credibility. This requires looking for the reason from the psychological mechanism of “rather believe”. In fact, reporters didn’t even have to bother going to the docks to interview those chatty survivors—those “English-speaking” survivors, because the “Chinaman Story” might have been written in the American anti-Chinese language before they left the newspaper or news agency. The existing imagination of doctrine has been conceived, just like those American and British surviving passengers in the first and second classes of the Titanic who had never met the “Chinamen” on the ship repeatedly claimed to their relatives, friends and reporters that they had “witnessed “The same “despicable behavior” of these “Chinamen”. A person can “witness” things that never happened, which only means that these things happened in his imagination, and he is the witness of his illusion. As for the identity of these “Chinamen” and how they escaped from the shipwreck, it is neither important nor worthy of concern to them. Anyway, 6 of these 8 “Chinamen” survived, which alone is enough to prove that they survived in a despicable way: for no other reason than their “racial despicability.”

When people “prefer to believe” in the authenticity of these conflicting stories, they enter the realm of “belief” – the so-called “belief” realm is a realm of “value” or “meaning” rather than a realm of “facts”. People do not believe in “God” because of the existence of “God”, but they feel the need for a “God” and create such a “God” for themselves. Rather, it is a kind of “psychological realism”, a way of discourse that constructs the landscape of the world and gives it order and meaning – just as they “would rather believe” that the Anglo-Saxons on the ship or the American and British men were shipwrecked All of them are as courteous as gentlemen, as resolute as knights, abide by the rule of “women and children first” and are willing to leave death to themselves; in fact, among all 705 survivors of the Titanic shipwreck (this does not include those who died of freezing) Among the American and British men who died in the lifeboats or after boarding the Carpathia), men accounted for half, and American and British men accounted for more than half of them, and most of them fled before those “Chinamen” Titanic, and refused to let the lifeboat he was on return to rescue people (in the end, only one of the nearly 20 lifeboats returned to the sinking site), although most of the lifeboats still had empty seats, and 6 of them were almost empty. Most of the seats were enough to accommodate another three to four hundred people, and there were 165 women and children abandoned on the sunken ship. However, racism is not a kind of knowledge, but a will to power, which is accustomed to justify itself by “making facts”. Rather than saying that the “despicable behavior” of the “chinks” on the Titanic first preceded the “racial despicability” of the Chinese, it is better to say that the discursive construction of the “racial despicability” of the Chinese first preceded the “despicable behavior” of the “chinks” on the Titanic. The “despicable behavior” of the “Chinaman”. Their “despicable deeds” occurred in the imagination of anti-Chinese activists. If we equate the popular narrative of the Titanic shipwreck with the Titanic shipwreck from the beginning, or “restore” the Titanic shipwreck from the popular narrative of the Titanic shipwreck, then we will not be able to understand the narrative of the Titanic shipwreck. “Storytelling” remains fully alert. The reason why “memories” are often unreliable is that when people “recount history,” they are often “inventing history.”

Putting aside the most core economic reasons for the moment (the popular narrative of the Titanic shipwreck is characterized by avoiding economic discussions in order to “romanticize” the shipwreck, and economic explanations will be a focus of this book), from the perspective of psychological history It seems that the narrative of the Titanic shipwreck in April 1912 is deeply rooted in a modern anxiety in the Anglo-Saxon patriarchal society of the United Kingdom and the United States, fearing that men of the Anglo-Saxon race will be “confused” by modern ideas of equality and lose their “masculinity” and lose their “masculinity”. Thus losing the ability to rule (over women, the lower classes, and “inferior races”), it thus exaggeratedly imagines the “archaic” “chivalry” of upper-class Anglo-Saxon men in the Titanic shipwreck. Block various modern demands for equality (such as gender equality, class equality, racial equality) that pose internal and external challenges to Anglo-Saxon patriarchal society. However, if Anglo-Saxon racism is not accepted by the “inferior race” it defines itself, it will always remain a one-sided or invalid accusation. In order for racist assumptions (such as the “inferior nature of the Chinese”) to actually work among the “inferior races” defined by it, they must gain access to those Westernized or “inferior races” who hold cultural leadership within the “inferior races” during their transnational spread. The general approval of the “British” intellectuals, and through the continuous reproduction of their words, has internalized the “bad character of the Chinese people” into an attitude and way of discourse for the nation to view itself. — Archived Report