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Our struggle with China is racial
There are aspects of human civilization which would, with enough time be understood and adapted by any sexually reproducing species of sufficient intelligence, simply because they are instrumentally valuable with regards to the instincts that all biologically similar animals share. Animal likes food too. Animal likes sex too. Animal plays games too. Animal fights enemies and wages war for resources too. Many animals beat few animals, so animals have incentives to form alliance structures or be outcompeted and exterminated. Yet wouldn't it be surprising if they valued the same things, or felt the same ways, where instrumental necessities didn't require it? Shouldn't we then expect to see, dramatic differences in what are superficially institutions, even amongst intellectually comparable animals?
Consider the family. Every functional civilization has been patriarchal at least until recently; and the physical and cognitive differences explaining this are seen in the animal world as well. Woman needs man, and man must find his mate. It'd be great if she were loyal though. Yes you could punish disloyalty after the fact but that's not exactly foolproof. Hey what if she literally couldn't run away? If every couple breaks the feet of every daughter then she'll make a perfectly suitable mate! The logic here is of course unimpeachable; and yet is there any reason to believe Nero himself wouldn't react with a similar disgust to it as modern (non-anthropologist) man?
Where unimaginable cruelty naturally pervades even the closest family bonds between the strong and the weak; concern for outsiders may be expected to be similarly lacking. A toddler bleeding out in plain view to the complete indifference of most passers by is not at all surprising when you remember what their close genetic ancestors did, nor are the countless similar videos you can find on the Chinese interwebs: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECeC4R-Gjtc.
I don't need to mention that where humans cannot expect compassion, the fate of man's best friend is not at all uncertain.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
A people with innately different instincts in one field, might also be odd in other ways, like committing mass cannibalism against political enemies in the absence of famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre .
Their literature might include bizzare scenes, like a inferior man demonstrating his pious hospitality to his superior by secretly killing and cooking his own wife to feed him. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ghmx4v/what_can_romance_of_the_three_kingdoms_liu_an/
Different from birth
Someone covers your nose or lays you face first against the bed. What do you do? Seemingly every non-disabled European American newborn that isn't cognitively impaired has the same reaction; to move, struggle and fight against this horrifying imposition. Nearly every Chinese American baby has a different reaction; complete non-reactivity.
Isn't this precisely the kind of difference common stereotypes, a history of slavish behaviour, and the above section would suggest? Can you think of a more elemental test of innately different instincts than a newborn's reaction when you screw with his breathing? Have you noticed that basically everyone still wearing a mask is Asian?
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0
** The necessity of racism **
What does it mean to allow members of a high IQ species of alien fundamental moral and aesthetic instincts to increase their power in our institutions?
What does it mean, for an entire nation of them to become the dominant power on the planet?
You aren’t really doing a good job of making the Chinese all that alien. They don’t have Michael Angelo but what Civilization outside Europe in a certain era does? Certainly not the US. They do have the terracotta warriors, and while not fond of eating dogs Rome had crucifixion.
Footbinding, as a universally engaged in practice among the Chinese upper class for hundreds of years basically the entirety of my point, in that it represents a qualitative deviation from anything the Europeans ever did; in that it represents extreme entirely unprovoked cruelty carried out personally again close innocent kin. As the treatment of close kin is the most basic area where base moral instincts could be expected to operate in, one could expect those who are qualitatively depraved in this area to exceed others in their quantitative depravity elsewhwere. Everything else is just window-dressing to show that the same soulless genes has not dramatically altered it's nature.
Most civilizations outside of Europe have populations of considerably lower IQs. No one has ever suggested that the problem with the Chinese was mere stupidity, with eugenicists like EA Ross (who campaigned to keep them out of the US, nonetheless agreeing that they were our intellectual equals. Thus, where people of equal or higher capacity to do something, do not in fact do that thing, inferring an absence of interest is more than reasonable.
The dog issue is only relevant in that they are still up to it - today. I'm fully aware that both European and non-european civilizations have been extremely cruel to animals in the past. Find me evidence of Brits or Germans cooking dogs alive when they had similar material conditions to modern China (beginning of 1900s) and you'll have a strong point.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for Chinamen, but you're aware that Euros sold their children into slavery for centuries?
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Dire conditions spawn traditions that take a long time to die off.
The Swiss dog and cat eating in remote valleys doesn't mean the people there are nutritionally deprived. Merely some almost certainly old people keeping a dying tradition barely alive.
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Ah, cruelty carried out on the innocent. My favorite topic. There was the castration of church choir boys, that went on for a couple hundred years. And circumcision of infants, americans still do it. People in sicily sold their children into slavery to miners as late as the turn of the century (the last one, not this one). Corporal punishment in school was common in some places until the 70s, what's 7*6? I don't know. Hands slapped with a wood stick.
China today is not comparable to any place in europe in the last century. Some place are very rich but some places are extremely poor. How many places in europe can you find where people resort to eating rats? None, but it still happens in china.
That said, depending on how you feel about horses, I may have bad news for you.
Go further back in time to Anglo-Saxon England and you'll find my favorite (read: most disturbing) example.
And this was in a literate society. I get that parchment wasn't cheap back then, but Christ...
Wait, you're telling me they whipped the shit out of children as a primitive form of court stenography???
I know it sounds like a Monty Python skit, but there it is...
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Agamemnon, leading the great expedition to Troy, had to sacrifice his own daughter for favorable winds.
Herodotus tells us of an Egyptian pharaoh who, finding himself trapped in a burning room by his enemies:
The great bulwarks of Christendom in Constantinople were fond of blinding or castrating political rivals and brothers in order to render them nonthreatening. Their successors in Constantinople would take it a step further, Mehmed II would legalize fratricide:
Later, Mehmed III would murder 19(!) of his brothers upon ascending the throne.
Meanwhile in the Americas, To quote my man Douglass on the plight of the slave children fathered by slaveowners:
So either America should accept that the Chinese are people, or we should accept that Southerners weren't.
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Do you realise what European childrearing was like before the 1950s-or-so turn against corporeal punishment? Either way, you've singled out one particular type of cruelty that your culture happened to not engage in. On the other hand, while China did have some form of slavery, to my best knowledge it has no recent history of anything resembling the Atlantic slave trade and the institutionalised slavery that waited at the end of it, or the Holocaust. Are you sure the Germanic peoples of Europe are not the ones with the "soulless genes", considering especially how the almost same memes played out conspicuously more humanely in Fascist Italy and the Hispanic Americas?
Why do you single out dogs, except because your culture just happened to put them in the "fur babies" category? Liveleak is unfortunately gone, but a few years ago it carried a number of videos from a pig slaughterhouse in Northern Europe that hinted at a completely normalised culture of wanton cruelty towards animals that are generally considerd to be more intelligent than dogs. Fox hunts and safaris also didn't exactly emerge and persist under conditions of scarcity, and I hear kosher slaughter is not the nicest thing either.
The use of "equals", rather than "superiors", in this context to me seems to hint at plain old motivated reasoning, seeking to rationalise prior disdain in the face of inconvenient absence of the most common criterion to do so (average IQ).
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