Our Desk | Our Desk Dì Yù Heī

Julie Zhu

I do not dare to be so ignorant as to rigidly translate a term that has recently emerged from the Chinese language and has been trending into English. Nor have I managed to find a non-offensive way of determining what could be the corresponding English term to “Dì Yù Heī.”
Dì Yù Heī is a new term that has surfaced in mainland China, along with the rise of social media. The word “Dì Yù” stands for a region, a place, a city, a province, a location, and a country. The word “Heī” corresponds to an action of turning something dark, more precisely, speaking badly about something or someone, or creating a bad image of something or someone.
In mainland China, the two words combined represent a stereotype based on province.
This term interests me in the sense that it is similar to “racism.” When thinking about this term, I hope to reach the sound conclusion that throughout time, “stupidity” has always been labeled “racism,” meaning that people with “stupid” thoughts are never to be insulted, therefore making them feel smarter.
What is Dì Yù Heī then, and how is it related to racism while simultaneously having nothing to do with racism, only stupidity?
Dì Yù Heī examples follow a chain of discrimination. It starts from the city level, then it goes to provincial level, then national level, and later it will reach the planet level. This means that when two people come from a certain district, they often joke about each other’s streets. But when these two people are faced with a group of people who come from the same village but different district, their jokes will target them at a district level, because the interest of the former two is no longer conflict and they now share the same interest, which is fighting against the people from the other district.
At the provincial level, people from different provinces joke about another provinces, and this specific group is categorized as Dì Yù Heī.
If we keep elaborating on Dì Yù Heī, we will get to “racism” because people from the same country share more things in common and feel the need to pair up with their teammates to face other groups. Anthropologists will use cultural, physical, social, genetic approaches among many others, to explain this behavior, but this opinion only explains a small number of examples.
For example, it is said that Sichuan people eat spicy food; in Guangdong, people eat everything; Henan people are scammers, and so on. Each province in the mainland has its own labels. This is considered Dì Yù Heī in mainland China. Note that it has nothing to do with race or racism.
Outside of China, you find all these similar stereotypes. French people stay nude when going to the beaches; Brits don’t speak English well; Americans don’t know about the world because most of them have never traveled abroad.
How come these stereotypes, conclusions or whatever else are considered racism, while the rest of society refuses to point out the intellectual inferiority of these practices?
Why do we conclude that it is stupidity when your neighbors judge or comment on your affairs without knowing anything? And why, at the same time, do we conclude that it is racism when people from other countries judge or comment on another country’s or community’s affairs without actually having been to those places, or only having gone through the airport?
Why must stupidity be covered and wrapped inside the label of racism whenever the political term “country” is involved? Is it because people who are not racist are too nice to tell other people they are stupid?