Fox News Anchor Tucker Carlson hauled the American “woke” liberals on coals in the aftermath of the bitterly acrimonious US-China meeting recently held in Alaska. In a blistering attack against the Biden administration, Carlson faulted the newly elected US government for being soft against the Chinese even as they displayed utter disdain for the American regime. During his monologue, he mentioned a Chinese word, ‘Baizuo’.
The Chinese diplomats in their meeting had used the Black Lives Matter campaign to mount an attack against the United States around the issue of racism and human rights violations. Carlson was appalled by the fact that the US diplomatic team allowed the Chinese to lecture them on human rights. He pinned the blame of this predicament on the “self-hating professional class” in the United States whom the Chinese describe as “baizuo”.
What is baizuo?
Baizuo whose rough translation from Mandarin is “White Liberal”, is “a Chinese neologism and a political epithet pejoratively used by the Chinese to refer to western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white leftists.”
Baizuo according to the popular Chinese definition is a hallmark of virtue-signalling hypocritical humanitarians who support peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”. They are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”. They believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”. As per the Chinese, baizuo are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.
The connotation of baizuo in the Chinese context unambiguously resemble liberals that are termed as regressive or left-leaning liberals in popular parlance. Former US President Barack Obama was considered by the Chinese state media as an advocate of baizuo ideology.
However, the term baizuo is not limited to referring to the white liberal elites alone. The derogatory slang is also for those who romanticise Islamism and enthusiastically bat in favour of the Islamists. According to Zhang Chenchen, a PhD in political theory and science, baizuo first emerged to describe German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her decision to welcome more than 1 million third-world immigrants to Europe, which infringed upon Chinese people’s right to stay in Europe.
Additionally, other observations about baizuo include intellectuals who “advocate inclusiveness and anti-discrimination but cannot tolerate different opinions.” The political opinions of baizuos are considered so shallow and facile that they tend to maintain social equality by embracing ideologies that run against the basic concept of equality.
Carlson uses Chinese slang ‘baizuo’ to slam racist policies by Democrats against the Asian students
Carlson cites a scholar from Peking University who had said “baizuo are phoney and hypocritical and will make the situation in the West go from bad to worse.”
According to Carlson, Chinese internet users use “baizuo” to slam the Democratic Party’s emphasis on affirmative action policies [which are] perceived as discriminating against Asians. He then highlights Harvard’s admission policy as an instance to allege how the policies by the white liberals in America has perpetuated racism against Asian students.
“A study of Harvard’s admissions policy, for example, found that if the school admitted students solely on merit, as we thought they did, the percentage of Asian students in a given class would double to 43%,” Carlson said.
“Harvard doesn’t want that many Asians, so it denies admissions to Asians because they’re Asian. That’s the definition of discrimination. That’s what racism is. But it’s everywhere. It’s going on in all elite schools right now, as well as in almost every major corporation. The current administration wholeheartedly supports it,” Carlson said.
Carlson then goes on to cite how the Biden administration dropped a lawsuit against Yale for racist anti-Asian admissions practices, which were proved. He alleged that the Biden administration supported the prejudiced practice by the Yale University and therefore they did not show any motivation to pursue the case against the University.
Carlson further added that the standardised testing, which was designed so that people who have no social connections – ambitious and talented immigrants, for example – could succeed in the United States are disappearing because of the lobbying baizuo from woke Democrats. “The meritocracy is racist, they claim. So is succeeding through hard work,” Carlson said of baizuos from the Democrats.
