BBC Radio Oxford has also reported the news that a full-page advertisement was published on a Hong Kong newspaper complaining about Chinese mainland “locusts” swarming into the territory. Perhaps many British people believe that a large part of us, Hong Kong people, hate Chinese mainlanders, and they feel proud of their colonial rule.
In Hong Kong, there have been two sorts of responses to that advertisement: that it is always wrong to discriminate against the mainlanders; and very differently, that we can make use of the discrimination to resist the Chinese Communist Party. The latter suggestion is a chimera; at least it is so at the present stage of Hong Kong politics. How about the wrongness of discrimination?
Discrimination causes two kinds of harm: harm to others and harm to self. Obviously, it can harm others, for in most cases discrimination is motivated by malicious stereotypes, which are seriously disrespectful to the victims, and these stereotypes may lead to the outcomes that are much more violent than disrespectful attitudes. A friend of mine has explained that nicely: “A stereotype needs not function as a valid and sound accusation against a group of people to be dangerous; all it needs to do is implant a certain image in people's minds, which is inevitably and subconsciously invoked when we interact with that particular group of people.” This kind of implanted image, being the product of oversimplification, can be very effective in motivating actions (consider the Holocaust and Nanjing Massacre).
What, then, is the self-harm of discrimination? Very often, we discriminate against others because of ignorance and arrogance on our part, but ironically, we are inclined to give moral reasons (the superficial ones, of course) for why we discriminate against others. In such a way, we are being inconsistent and morally ugly: the inconsistency needs no further explanation, and moral ugliness is nevertheless ugliness whether we love to scorn at morality or not. These can count as self-harm. There is another kind of self-harm, a more tangible one. Stereotypes, as said, are products of oversimplification; interestingly, they in turn encourage further acts of oversimplification. In our case, some Hong Kong people’s stereotyping of mainlanders must have made themselves even more ignorant about their countrymen through oversimplification, and oversimplification, in this wonderful self-sustaining cycle, encourages more arrogance and laziness of thinking, both of which are fantastic cheerleaders for discrimination. (First draft on 10th February)
