Would India’s northeast be better off with China?

[jaunty]

No. We don't want to live in a police state.

Assam should be a part of Bangladesh, not only is Bangladesh geographically closer to Assam and the other NE states but our culture is much closer than mainland Indian culture.

Also the "chinky" look as you Indians call it is not alien in the north east of Bangladesh or the south east.

Bangladesh should be a part of Bay of Bengal.

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

If you have, try it in reality, than venting frustration in online forum. Even I want to see news items like, China captures N.E India or North East India no more a part of India but part of China from now on.

Though I want to see, I know I won't see that happen. But still all the best from my side!! Give a shot, no harm in trying right. Failure is the pillar of success!!

Is this so call self contemplation?

 

[INDIC]

Han Chinese can't live with non-Hans. Multiculturalism for Han Chinese is a joke.

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

Reply from your North East brothers..

woooooooooo, I just provoke someone seriously

Han Chinese can't live with non-Hans. Multiculturalism for Han Chinese is a joke.

are you talking about this NE chini-look alike in New delhi

 

[Aka123]

Is this so call self contemplation?

This is just to show you, how helpless you are.

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

This is just to show you, how helpless you are.

Oh really, how am I so helpless?

 

[INDIC]

are you talking about this NE chini-look alike in New delhi

I mean Han Chinese, who's traditional homeland was always inside Great of Wall of China.

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

I mean Han Chinese, who's traditional homeland was always inside Great of Wall of China.

And how you found a NE Chini-look alike in Indian capital, isn't him to be confined within the Great wall of China as well, there must be a rational explaination

 

[navtrek]

You Indians look down on Chini-look alike, soon or later they will have to decide which side will give them self-respect and dignity.

Dude you should know more about the problem before commenting. People are not discriminated because they look like Chinese but because a lot of north Indians are targeted and killed in the north east by insurgents with the reason that they dont belong to the north east.

Since North Indians are singled out and killed there is a very weird discriminatory situation here.. The situation has nothing to do with China or Chinese looks.

 

[INDIC]

A great article about Han Chinese view about non-Hans which shows they don't like them . @Kiss_of_the_Dragon @jaunty @DRAY @Aka123 @atatwolf @Soms @SouthDesi

BBC News - A Point Of View: How China sees a multicultural world

The vast majority of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, a stark contrast to the multiracial composition of other populous countries. What effect does this have on how China views the world, ask Martin Jacques.

I was on a taxi journey in Shanghai with a very intelligent young Chinese student, who was helping me with interviews and interpreting. She was shortly to study for her doctorate at a top American university. She casually mentioned that some Chinese students who went to the US ended up marrying Americans.

I told her that I had recently seen such a mixed couple in Hong Kong, a Chinese woman with a black American. This was clearly not what she had in mind. Her reaction was a look of revulsion. I was shocked. Why did she react that way to someone black, but not someone white? This was over a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed. What does her response tell us - if anything - about Chinese attitudes towards ethnicity?

China's population is huge.

What people aren't generally aware of, though, is that more than nine out of 10 Chinese people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han. This is remarkable. It is quite different from the world's other most populous nations: India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil. All recognise themselves to be, in varying degrees, multiracial and multicultural.

True, a country that is the size of a continent has obviously been home to countless different races down the ages. But that is not how the great majority of Chinese see themselves today.

Why is this?

The answer takes us back to the birth of modern China more than 2,000 years ago. China is extremely old - the longest continuously existing country in the world. The eastern half of China - where the vast majority of Chinese live now and lived then - has been more or less united ever since 211BC.

Over that extraordinarily long period - as a result of war, occupation, absorption, assimilation, ethnic cleansing and government resettlement - the sense of difference between the many races that lived in the eastern half of China was slowly eroded.

Fundamental to this process was the gradual emergence of a shared cultural identity.

China, along with part of today's Middle East, was home to the first settled agricultural communities in the world. They gradually supplanted nomadic culture and ushered in the beginnings of centralised governance.

Over the last two millennia, China has generally been one of the most advanced, often the most advanced, civilisation in the world. It is hardly surprising that, with a rich history like this, the Chinese have a very powerful sense of their cultural identity.

Every country has its own unique story of ethnicity. Take the US. It starts with arrival of the European settlers and the near extermination of the native American population, to be followed later by large-scale African slavery. Not surprisingly, these experiences have profoundly influenced American attitudes and the country's behaviour as a global power.

How did China evolve? It is essentially the story of the Han and the way in which over a period of two millennia they came to absorb the great majority of other ethnic groups.

Before the victory of the Qin dynasty in 221BC, China was divided into many different states. The process of its subsequent unification was the creation of an empire. But whereas all the other great empires of the world have long since broken up, China remains united. Why? In one word - the Han. The Han identity has served as the glue which has kept a geographically and demographically vast country together. Without that shared identity, China would long ago have fallen apart.

The China I have been talking about is the eastern half of present-day China, where more than 90% of the population lives. What then of the western half? This is a different story. It accounts for over half the territory of China but contains only about 6% of its population.

Whereas the eastern half of China dates back about two millennia, the western part is far more recent, having only been incorporated about 300 years ago.

From the mid-17th Century, large tracts of the western region were conquered by the Qing dynasty in a series of brutal wars. The inhabitants of these lands were not Han. With their different physical appearance, darker skin, distinctive customs and lower level of development, the Han saw them as the Other, as "barbarians".

Not surprisingly, the Chinese government, both imperial and communist, has long had a troubled relationship with parts of the western regions, notably Tibet and Xinjiang.

If the strength of the Han identity is that it has held China together, its weakness, I would argue, has been its relative lack of respect for difference, an underlying assumption that the non-Han should become like the Han - indeed eventually be absorbed into the Han. This attitude is not difficult to understand, it is how the Han became almost, but not quite, synonymous with being Chinese, or, to put it another way, how China was created.

Ethnicity is a powerful determinant of how societies perceive others. So how is China, as a global power, likely to view the rest of the world?

Just as with the US, China will naturally tend to see the world in its own image. An unusual feature of China, in this respect, is that its history is so atypical: a huge population who overwhelmingly consider themselves to share the same identity. This helps to explain why the Chinese have tended to think of Africa as one, just like China, rather than a complex mosaic of different ethnicities and cultures.

The fact that China has had little experience of, or exposure to, the rest of the world until very recently - the past 30 years to be exact - has served to reinforce a tendency to see other countries through a Chinese prism.

Bear in mind, too, that the Chinese have a deep pride in their own cultural achievements, many believing that, for understandable reasons, their civilisation, and their history, is greater than all others. Such an outlook also tends to accentuate a China-centric view of the world.

When I first got to know the Chinese, one of the things I most enjoyed about them was their powerful sense of who they were, their confidence in who they were. They did not defer to white people. I liked that and respected them for it. It was as if their remarkable history resided in each and every one of them and made them walk tall.

Despite the fact that for the best part of two centuries China came to suffer hugely at the hands of the West, and to lag badly behind the West, the Chinese never stopped believing in themselves. Such pride and confidence is to be admired. In my view, though, it can also have a downside - a tendency to look down on others. If the Chinese have always considered themselves to be at least the equal of white Westerners, a common, though by no means universal, attitude has been to regard those of darker skin as inferior.

My horrified student friend was a case in point.

But why is this? Its roots are deep. For many centuries, white has had positive connotations in Chinese culture and black negative ones. Perhaps the reason is that those who toiled all day in the fields became dark while the aristocratic elite, protected from the sun, remained pristine white. To this day, interestingly, skin whitening products are enormously popular amongst Chinese women, as they also are in Japan and Korea and elsewhere.

Over the past two centuries, the Chinese have been hugely aware of the fact that white societies around the globe have been dominant while those of colour, especially African, have been poorer and much less developed. Success breeds respect, failure can all too easily attract scorn. Remember, those of African descent, until the past few decades, have been remote and distant from the Chinese, far removed from their knowledge and experience, a situation which can foster ignorance and prejudice.

There are small signs of change.

Didier Drogba, the Ivory Coast footballer who now plays for Shanghai Shenhua, has spoken in glowing terms about how the Chinese have received him.

As China becomes increasingly familiar with the world - as is now happening in such a dramatic way, from Africa to Latin America, and South Asia to Central Asia - parochial if deep-seated prejudices will come under growing pressure.

 

[amitkriit]

Don't Chinese have enough problems on their own? First let them deal with the domestic ethnic conflicts. Persecution of Ethnic and Religious minorities in China by the Han government is a serious concern for the international community. If we know so much about it despite strict media censure-ship then we can only imagine how volatile/desperate the situation really is.

 

[INDIC]

And how you found a NE Chini-look alike in Indian capital, isn't him to be confined within the Great wall of China as well, there must be a rational explaination

Even martians are Chinese, stop making me bored with your crap.

A Han Chinese see all non-Han Sino-Tibetan people as barbarians, hate their culture and tried to destroy it.

Don't Chinese have enough problems on their own? First let them deal with the domestic ethnic conflicts. Persecution of Ethnic and Religious minorities in China by the Han government is a serious concern for the international community. If we know so much about it despite strict media censure-ship then we can only imagine how volatile/desperate the situation really is.

You have to go into Chinese history, Hans had never respected the non-Han culture of the conquered land. They just destroyed and tried to assimilate them forcefully as Hans, who ever protested was brutally destroyed by Hans. This Chinese just pretending that they care about entire Tibeto-Burmese people. The Southern Hans were assimilated as Hans during Tang Dynasty around 10th century. Your views @Kiss_of_the_Dragon

 

[dray]

Every time Beijing lays claim to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh as being part of its national territory, New Delhi’s hackles rise. Arunachal, as indeed all the northeastern states, are indisputably part of the Indian Union. Or are they? While political India claims sovereignty over them, so-called ‘mainstream’ India – another, and misleading, word for the Hindi-Hindu belt – treats them like foreigners.

The tragic case of Nido Tania, the young student from Arunachal Pradesh, who was beaten to death in New Delhi after he got into an altercation with ruffians who had cast a racial slur at him is just one of a long list of hate crimes against people from the northeast when they come to the Indian heartland.

Because Nido was the son of a Congress MLA, his case has drawn VVIP attention: Rahul Gandhi has publicly expressed his support and sympathy for all those from the northeast, and home minister Shinde has told the police to expedite their investigations.

Just four days before Nido was fatally attacked, two women from Manipur were assaulted by a bunch of goons, barely a few kilometres from where the young student from Arunachal was fatally beaten up.

In both these cases – and in all the countless such incidents that go unreported and unrecorded, precisely because they are so common that no one bothers to take note of them – the only provocation was that the victims looked ‘different’ from what Indians are ‘meant’ to look like – whatever that might mean.

People from the northeast are routinely labelled ‘Chinki’. They are frequently asked if they eat dogs, and are presumed by many so-called ‘mainstream’ Indians to be sexually promiscuous, particularly in the case of women who are made to suffer offensive physical and verbal advances.

Days after Nido’s death, newly-appointed Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal promised a number of measures to help fight such racist discrimination, including making a study of the history of the northeast mandatory in schools and the appointing of a special panel comprising people from the region to look into cases of such hate crimes.

Welcome as these and similar proposals are, the question that arises is: Why are such special protective measures necessary at all? Why is Indian society so hostile to anyone who doesn’t in appearance or custom fit into a cookie-cutter stereotype of what being an ‘Indian’ means?
Despite the national mantra of ‘Unity in diversity’, India is increasingly becoming more and more intolerant of any form of difference from the ‘mainstream’, whether that difference is of ethnic appearance or that of sexual preference, as shown by the Supreme Court’s recent ‘recriminalising’ of homosexuality.

Minorities of any kind – ethnic, religious or sexual – feel increasingly unsafe in an India which seems growingly allergic to any kind of heterogeneousness, any kind of diversity or difference.
Political India insists that the northeast is part of the Indian republic, ‘mainstream’ India rejects – often with extreme violence – all ‘foreign-looking’ northeasterners.

So, would our northeastern states be better off with China, or at least better off independent of India?

Nido Tania might have had an answer to that question. And he might have been alive today to answer it if he hadn’t been compelled to be part of a country whose self-appointed ‘mainstream’ hates all people like him.

Would India’s northeast be better off with China? by Juggle-Bandhi : Jug Suraiya's blog-The Times Of India

For our North Eastern brothers, we don't look you difference from us, and you will never be. just gave these Indians the middle fingers and join us instead. And you're no longer to worry about Brahmaputra water.

Mr. Jug Suraiya, I recognize that there is a problem and we definitely need to correct it. But your question: "Would India’s northeast be better off with China?" - can actually be very demeaning to a nationalistic citizen of India from NE states, are they any less Indian than you are that such a question would arise? Or you are questioning their bond with their country that they might be willing to join another country with which we have a rather bitter relations?

Further, what gave you that idea that Chinese are not racist? You may look for some information about how majority Han Chinese treat minorities, you may also look for some information on Uyghur Muslims in China, they were officially prevented from keeping Ramadan fast, their mosques have been violated and Chinese flags were hanged inside mosques, they were beaten up & fined for wearing burqas. What made you think that Chinese are superior animals than us?

 

[Kiss_of_the_Dragon]

Dude you should know more about the problem before commenting. People are not discriminated because they look like Chinese but because a lot of north Indians are targeted and killed in the north east by insurgents with the reason that they dont belong to the north east.

Since North Indians are singled out and killed there is a very weird discriminatory situation here.. The situation has nothing to do with China or Chinese looks.

then why use Chinky as excuse to deal with your NE people, you could very well use Vietnamese or Pinoy to label your NE people.

 

[scorpionx]

For our North Eastern brothers, we don't look you difference from us, and you will never be. just gave these Indians the middle fingers and join us instead. And you're no longer to worry about Brahmaputra water.

Nice try, but no buyer here