Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: Strategic Asymmetry for the USA (2013) [pdf]
I know very little about China, but the report mentions in passing that racism is pervasive in Russia where I was born, whereas Western societies have done a remarkable job addressing racism.<p>It is not obvious to me that the American approach of racial quotas in high education (which incidentally penalizes Asians very heavily today, perhaps more than any other  group) is particularly different from the Soviet approach of racial quotas in high education (which to some degree penalized ethnic Russians by reserving spots for people from the other &quot;republics&quot;, and heavily penalized students from &quot;overrepresented&quot; minorities, quite similarly to penalizing whites somewhat and Asians more heavily in today&#x27;s US.) It doesn&#x27;t seem different from Israel&#x27;s affirmative action where Arabs get preferential treatment at the expense of Jews, either. Perhaps it seems reasonable to some to blame Chinese for <i>not</i> having racial quotas which supposedly &quot;address&quot; racism, but especially since Asian Americans get heavily penalized in the scheme, it&#x27;s hard to respond to an argument from a Chinese person that the scheme doesn&#x27;t address racism but institutionalizes it.<p>Nor is it obvious to me whether the average Westerner of any particular group is more or less racist than a citizen of Russia, including both ethnic Russians and those who are not. It&#x27;s fairly obvious that the Westerner might be more reserved in expressing racist views, fearing repercussions, although at other times the Westerner will actually be very loudly racist if it is currently in vogue to be racist against this particular race (right now anti-white sentiment is celebrated, which, whatever its reasons, will surely produce terrible results; the broader point is that it&#x27;s not obvious that being racist against one race at one time is fundamentally different than being racist against another at another time, and even if we agree that it&#x27;s done for very different reasons, it does not follow that it will produce very different results.)<p>I&#x27;m not saying that Russian attitudes toward race are the same as Western attitudes, just that the report&#x27;s claims about the Russian society and the Western societies which I kinda sorta know things about (though it&#x27;s hard to summarize millions of people very precisely or to inform oneself about them fully in the first place) make me suspicious with respect to its main topics, Chinese attitudes to race. It would be interesting (though not necessarily representative of the entire Chinese population) to hear Chinese people weigh in on this.