There is something strange about ethnic identity. When my Chinese friends begin a conversation with something like "we Chinese," I get thoroughly confused by the inclusiveness implied in that reference to a mythical entity, through which they and I share the same genealogy and the same destiny.

I asked a friend of considerable learning once: can I choose not to be a Chinese? His laconic reply was, yes, the individual can choose not to be a member of a race, but the whole race cannot deny their ethnicness.

My query was entirely academic. It does not matter How I choose; either way, I am classified as a Chinese by the law. I am condemned to be a Chinese in the eyes of both Chinese and non-Chinese, whether I want to be one or not.

But there is something else. If I publicly denounce my membership of my race, I will be subject to the kind of contempt, ridicule and probably open insults from countless Chinese in Malaysia.

The label "traitor to the race" evokes the despicable image of Wu San Kui, the Ming general who opened the gate at the eastern end of the Great Wall of China for the Manchurian soldiers to invade and conquer the whole of China a few centuries ago.

Many Mandarin educated readers would have heard of Po Yang who wrote the bestseller The Ugly Chinaman . He is one of the foremost scholars and writers in Taiwan today. During Chiang Kai Sheik's dictatorial rule, he was jailed for over a decade for penning some satirical words to a cartoon in a newspaper.

Near treachery

He was invited to Malaysia in the late 1980s (I think), to give a series of talks to Chinese audiences in various towns and cities. When asked by a member of the audience in Melaka whether he would like to be born a Chinese again, he answered in the negative. He was to come under a deluge of severe criticism in the local Chinese press for what was considered as near treachery to his ethnic heritage.

A couple of years ago, a survey was conducted among young Singaporeans, on whether they would like to be born Chinese again. Again, the answer was rather predictable: nearly 90 percent were so satisfied with life as a Chinese that if they had a choice they would gladly repeat that experience in a future life. Predictably, the dissenting minority of 10 percent came under fire from another round of condemnation for their lack of loyalty to their community.

The question whether we want to be born into any race is both hypothetical and loaded of course. Our birth is not an exercise of will on our part, not even if we adopt the Buddhist concept of reincarnation. Furthermore, given the ethos of the Chinese people today, the "right" answer is already assumed in the question. Whether I want to be born as a Chinese again or not, is not a valid question.

That the question is taken so seriously by many Chinese is an indication of what makes the "Chinese Soul" tick: Many Chinese want to be Chinese, and are proud of being Chinese.

These would sound like very common-place, almost self-evident truths to most of my Chinese friends. But it still puzzles me. Why should we want something over which we have no choice? How can we take pride in anything that is not an achievement, but a given fact?

As the "black" columnist Gary Young once wrote in the Guardian , if being black is a vocation, he would rather not choose it, because the hours are long, and the pay is lousy. The same could be said of any Chinese wanting to be Chinese, or any Malay wanting to be Malay for that matter.

Young's comment was meant to be facetious of course. Racism is a serious problem in England, what with a massive influx of immigrants and asylum seekers in recent years. Thirty percent of the population of London are non-whites, and they make it possible for Red Ken to become the mayor of that great metropolis.

Naturally, you would expect a certain degree of xenophobia among the more ignorant home-grown Anglo Saxons.

Recently, a BBC reporter went under cover and enrolled himself as a new police recruit. Over a seven-month training period, he taped in secret the racist remarks of his fellow trainees. His findings were broadcast in a special programme just last week, and in the furious uproar afterwards, a few recruits were dismissed. Racism with the British police force seems likely to remain for many years to come.

Ethnic identity force

Knowing that racism exists throughout the liberal democratic developed western world throughout the entire world in fact does not make it right. Neither does it make me feel less terrible, living as I do in this land where the daily political discourse is saturated with racial undertones even in the enlightened space of malaysiakini.

I am still bewildered by this visceral primal motive force called ethnic identify, felt and expressed by socio-political agents in both their subjective and objective capacities. Is this compulsive identity with an ethnic home as perennial a human condition as our religiosity, or our sense of family ties, a "social fact" as Anderson would have it?

Is it possible that, this lingering remnant of our tribal past is merely a social construct that has been enhanced by the rise of nations and nationalism in the last two hundred years or so? If so, will these racial and ethnic sentiments become less relevant, with the decline of the nation state in times to come, as Hobsbawm seems to indicate?

Perhaps there is a bit of the lingering tribesman in all of us humans. Perhaps the herd instinct resides still in the barest rudiment of our humanity, such that we seek survival through the group survival of the tribe to which we belong.

Fear of death, and perishing into nothingness, lies at the root of seeking sustenance and security through strength in numbers. Self-preservation, self-interest, and even selfishness are all primal bricks, upon which the mansion of ethnic identity has been erected.

Thus, racial politics in any multiracial society is bound up with economics, the "external goods" (in the words of Aristotle) which secures man's survival. Inevitably, beneath the rhetoric, the polemic and the jingoism, personal economic interest is the motivation to which ethnically-coloured political mobilisation appeals.

Therefore, a Chinese must vote for MCA, Gerakan or DAP, because they fight for Chinese rights, some economic benefits of which may trickle down to the individual voter. Likewise, the Malays must vote for either Umno or PAS, and the poor Indians will have only the MIC.

Perish the thought that a Chinese political leader would want to fight for the rights of the Malays or the Indians, and vice versa. He would not believe it in his heart, and his constituents (read "all Malaysians") would not believe him.

Here we discover a glaring paradox. If self-interest motivates racial politics, then the tension between the self and the tribe would threaten to tear this tribal bondage asunder.

After all, survival is a much muddied concept; it means different things to different people. A person's idea of personal survival may be different from the tribe's idea of group survival. Besides, it happens so often that a tribal leader may identify his own interest with the group interest of his tribe, thereby encroaching upon the territory of tribe members.

Therefore, the real enemy from any tribe usually comes from within. Take the Chinese for instance. They had 5,000 year history of endless wars and famines, and massacres of horrendous dimensions.

The greatest killers of the Chinese people have been Chinese. Against that great rivers of human blood spilled over a few millennia, the slaughtering of half a million Chinese in Nanjing by the Japanese during the Second World War was but a drop in the bucket not that it made the Nanjing Slaughter any less monstrous.

Modern M'sian phenomenon

There is a corollary to the above paradox. Sometimes, it is possible to further one's economic self-interest without recourse to any kind of political struggle in the name of racial equality. Then, the importance of ethnic identity pales. This is the modern Malaysian phenomenon of "migration'. (And I always thought that "migration" applies only to birds only.)

A million Malaysian Chinese the cream of the crop, so to speak have "migrated' overseas since 1957. In recent weeks, a few of those have written in to malaysiakini, reporting with smug self-congratulatory delight their discovery of the greener pastures in Australia and New Zealand, and their wisdom in voting with their feet. Where then is the visceral primal bond of that "we Chinese" between them and those they have left behind?

I am reminded of a pail of live crabs that you find in any Malaysian wet market. The odd ones will manage to scramble out over the rim of the pail. What will they think of the rest of their fellow crabs dragging one another down, into the bottom of the pail, and destined for the dinner table?

If the Chinese diaspora were eternal wanderers looking for fresh pastures for survival, then the idea of Chinese ethnic identity could be much more easily explained and understood. Unfortunately, the Chinese collective psyche if such a thing exists is really much more complex in reality.

The diaspora does not always forget their imagined homeland, which is not necessarily related to any geographical location. In recent years, there have been tentative proposals for the creation of a Greater Chinese Cultural Circle, a kind of global Chinese village existing in imagined space created by linked Chinese media throughout the world. The foremost proponent of this grandiose idea is Tiong Hiew King (photo), the Sarawak timber tycoon turned international media magnate.

Now why should anybody want to propose such an idea? And why should others respond positively to it? Surely it is motivated by more than just economic self-interest and personal survival?

For that, we have to delve into the universe of meaning.

[To be continued next Saturday]