Glossary

The phrase “white left” first arose in prominence as a piece of Chinese internet slang around 2015. While it has not been adopted as a Party slogan, the phrase, mostly used as a pejorative, has slowly made its way into higher intellectual discourse since its internet debut.

The term  is used to distinguish the post-materialist concerns of Western leftists with the political program of the Chinese left, which frames political conflict through traditional class categories. Like Westerners, Chinese understand their politics in terms of a right-to-left spectrum. But “right” and “left” carry a very different valence in China, where the “left“ is generally associated with nostalgia for Maoism, unapologetic nationalism, disdain for limited government, and a hostility to capitalist enterprise, and the “right” is associated with market reforms, support for civil liberties, and a more cosmopolitan worldview. In a country where most political attitudes can be placed on a sliding scale between Josef Stalin and John Stewart Mill there is no easy home for the 'woke' political priorities of the Western left. While demands for justice for racial, sexual, and ethnic minorities do not resonate with either the Chinese right or the left, they usually provoke the most vitriolic response from Chinese leftists, who see identity politics as a betrayal and perversion of the international left’s traditional concern for the poor of the Earth.

Tied up in this critique of Western leftism as a political program is the stereotyped image of the Western leftist as a social type: in Chinese internet debates the Western leftist is often depicted as Pharisaical, shallow, and privileged; she makes showy gestures of solidarity and moralizes on human rights while living a comfortable, urbane life at the top of a system of privilege she has no real intention of overturning. In this sense the “white” [bái 白] in  “white left” [báizuǒ 白左] is not just a reference to the race of most social justice leftists, but also a play on two words that describe character traits that Chinese leftists associate with the social justice movement: “wasted effort/to try in vain” [báizuò 白做] and “idiocy” [báichī, 白痴]. To capture the term’s popularity as an insult, the pun-minded translator could thus fairly translate the term as the “useless left” or the “imbecile left.”