Quote:
Originally Posted by Officer of Engineers
Legacy of Chinese labourors brought over to build the transcontinental railways in both the US and Canada. By design, they had less rights than black slaves in the confederate states, even after the American Civil War.
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Literately speaking, China-man is not a bad word. But the ugly cartoons and stories depict the China-man druing and after that historical period you mentioned above made it into a bad word.
This is similar to the N word for the African Americans. It was the racist people and KKK who made ugly cartoons and stories using the N word, which made it into a bad word.
China-man is also used by Japanese as a racist word for Chinese.
The proper word of “Chinese” in the Japanese Kanji is 中国人 (should be exactly the same as the traditional Chinese).
Some racist Japanese mainly before WWII translated China-man into 支那人 (Sino man) and depicted 支那人 with ugly cartoons and stories.
Even today, the right wing Japanese anti-China propaganda still use 支那人 in their Chinese and Japanese documents and China-man in their English documents.
Because very few people in China are really familiar with English or Japanese or the history behind this word, most of them wouldn’t know or consider this word to be racism except for small number of the college graduates.