The Politics of ‘Race’

A young man - Mong Touch, 22 - shot and wounded by armed security guards in another recent case of land dispute between villagers and private firms. These images point to the lack of strength of and legal-institutional protection mechanisms or safeguards for civil society at large, creating ample scope for civil conflicts and politicised ethnic based tensions to be handled literally through physical violence by organised forces aligned with the political-economic establishments - School of Vice.

by School of Vice

Ref. Caught between two Kingdoms [Why Khmers celebrate Chinese New Year?] the Phnom Penh Post.

The Khmers are probably more racially mixed through interbreeding with other racial groups than they are aware or be willing to acknowledge, and in terms of Sino-Khmer ethnic fusion or integration, they are on a par with most neighbouring countries like Laos and Thailand. So to suggest that 'The Khmer-Chen, Cambodians with Chinese blood, make up fewer than nine per cent of the population' is at best misleading. Virtually, all Khmers are racially mixed through gradual contacts with foreign migrants, particularly, Chinese people from Chinese provinces bordering the Khmer Empire down the centuries. 

There are reasons why the Empire offered itself as such a promising destination to these migrants, and this has something to do with the all-round bountiful conditions of its environs, including demographic density and its corresponding demands on economic and natural resources like land use and food source. All of these factors stood in sharp contrast to those found in the ‘Middle Kingdom’ where constant struggle and competition for survival would have been far more intense and where natural disasters often led to famines and deaths for millions even without the added catastrophe and pressure of intermittent warfare between warring states prior to the Chinese communist revolution of 1949.  

Apart from traditional Chinese quarters that can be found in urban commercial districts of most of Cambodia's major cities where ethnic Chinese or Sino-Khmers are most visible, racial integration through marriage among Khmers and Chinese descents has carried on in an almost imperceptible fashion throughout the rest of the rural parts of the country. Yet the gradual manner in which this integration has been affected historically and the melting-pot, cultural capacities of the host culture to absorb and induct new-comers into its fold and customs, making them part of their own distinct ethnic fabric has meant that any alien entities would have sooner become seamlessly submerged or infused well within the host culture's dominant ‘pot’ without diluting or doing violence to either respective set of the merging cultures – a co-habiting process known in anthropology and ethnography as 'acculturation'. 

That the same process has proceeded up to today without experiencing - in relative terms – any notable racial-ethnic tension and disharmony is thanks in no small part to the peaceful, tolerant framework of the host culture, and in particular, the all-embracing outlook provided by Theravada Buddhism as this great influence had been adopted by the Khmers and adapted to their own existing indigenous cultural stock or pot.

Another factor worth noting is that the earliest waves of Chinese immigrants consisted mostly of men, and this is known to us partly through historical Chinese records gathered by Chinese envoys like Zhou Da Guan who travelled [and probably spied] the Kingdom during the late Angkorean period. Some of these men were former military conscripts; others were traders and drifters looking for adventure or on the run from the law back home; all of whom were lured into settling down in their adopted country by the temperate climate, the abundance of foods and the richness of the land in general, but just as importantly, for these men, the native women were exotic and easily wooed. Zhou’s observation on Khmer women’s apparently insatiable sexual appetite and their readiness to ditch their partners for new lovers when their carnal desire not adequately met may reflect more the prejudices and pre-conceived fantasies of the observer and of his fellow countrymen rather than anything with objective basis in reality. Nor was he the first and the last to have projected his own fantasies onto the people he was observing. European field researchers and anthropologists have been known to have produced libraries of archives about strange [“exotic”] and far-fetched romantic indigenous cultures whilst fathering, and eventually leaving to the care of the natives they studied, many an illegitimate child! 

There was, in addition, the psychological-sexual temptation or allure of a cross-racial marriage, specifically, between people of contrast skin colour or complexion. The ‘savages’ of various tribes of Africa, Latin America or the natives of the Pacific colonies and islands; a people the Chinese would have described as “barbarians” may not be held in high estimation in cultural or intellectual terms by the ‘civilised’ participating observer, yet they were irresistible objects of temptation and fascination to be raped and lusted after all the same.  Hence, most of these Chinese men never returned to their places of birth. And hence many Cambodians today carry Chinese surnames as Khmer people customarily pass down the paternal family name through their offspring.  

My reason for dwelling on this is to highlight the rather complicated issue of 'race' which has often been too conventionally and expediently exploited as a tool for advancing political motives. Indeed, in Cambodia's own recent past this exploitation had been engineered feverishly and to the detriment of all Khmers whether they considered themselves as "pure Khmer" [think of Saloth Sar's - Pol Pot - chosen pen name: 'Original Khmer'] or Sino-Khmer [Khmer-Chen] or even ‘Khmer-Vietnamese’ as this latter reference is becoming more and more pertinent in today's actual context even if people’s social attitude can be said to evolve at a much slower pace than do physical or biological phenomena. 

Under Pol Pot's rule, the 'race card' proved to be such a destructive double-edged weapon that it went well beyond any genuine 'patriotic' or nationalistic desire to preserve perceived notions of "racial purity" or national self-preservation as such, that this misguided xenophobic sentiment left itself wide open to and for intractable enemies of the Khmer nation to turn that same weapon against its own kind; to eliminate the ethnic Chinese who ‘polluted the Khmer race’; to wipe out the hated Vietnamese through their constructed representations in the forms of those identified as "having Khmer bodies with Vietnamese heads", which is precisely what had been achieved - it must be added - to almost the last Cambodian or Khmer! What a perverse yet devastatingly effective device that is: borrow the hands of a people to butcher off their own kind willingly and ferociously without so much of the sentiment of pity or the benefit of a troubled conscience on the part of the ones doing the borrowing! 

Sadly, there are still Cambodians who continue to harbour under this self-destructive ideology which they have unwittingly imbibed through twisted propaganda and indoctrination. What really defines a person or a ‘race’ is their actual emotion and attachment to a culture, a place or community which we all experience as humans. In short, it has everything to do with their social consciousness or self-perception which does not necessarily obey any biological laws or the limitations of any given artificially constructed concept like ‘race’ or ideology that throughout human history had been seized upon by political movements, national governments as well as states in the promotion of their own - often narrow - ends with untold bloody consequences. 

The need and struggle for national self-determination and emancipation from foreign oppression or yoke, on the other hand, can be viewed as a function of unjust, inequitable relations between national states, or more precisely, a demonstration of deliberate violation of one nation’s sovereignty by another through state-led agendas and practices. This is a fault or defective characteristic, not so much of a people or even less a race, but rather a reflection of ambition of organised associations and groups in terms of their desire and greed that drive that ambition on relentlessly and at cruel expense of those – in this case, a smaller nation with recognised incompetent leadership - less well equipped to withstand their rape and onslaught.  

Of course, it's not going to win me many awards writing about this emotive subject. But, still . . . 

Happy Chinese New Year!

- School of Vice