Chinaman

In Chinaman: A Short History of an Ugly English Word, Michael Keevak traces the complex history of the English word “Chinaman,” now considered obsolete and offensive although it still crops up in public discourse from time to time. He suggests that the term originally grew out of the simple elision of a two-word phrase, “China man,” which was one of the most common ways to refer to a person from China or of Chinese descent before the eighteenth century and before the modern adjective “Chinese” had become standardized. He argues that, unlike other parallel examples in English, which utilize the adjectival form rather than the name of the country such as “Englishman” and “Frenchman,” the irregularity as reflected in “Chinaman” was meant to mock Chinese people and to perpetuate Western stereotypes about the elemental and “childlike” nature of the Chinese language. The term was indeed developed in a colonialist spirit and carries a racist and offensive meaning in modern-day English.

Michael Keevak is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Taiwan University. His books include On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (HKUP, 2022), Embassies to China: Diplomacy and Cultural Encounters Before the Opium Wars (2017), Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (2011), The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (HKUP, 2008), The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (2004), and Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture (2001).