Anti-Henan sentiment
Misrepresentations of Henan residents have manifested in derogatory jokes, media portrayals, and public discourse, often painting the province as a hub of crime, deceit, and backwardness.
Understanding the roots and impacts of this demonization sheds light on broader issues of regional prejudice and social inequality within China.
The fable Catching the Rabbit from the Warring States period Han Feizi concerned a peasant refusing to change old methods and Zheng buys shoes satirized an overly dogmatic person.
Misrepresentations of Henan residents have manifested in derogatory jokes, media portrayals, and public discourse, often painting the province as a hub of crime, deceit, and backwardness.
[12] This may have originated from the aftermath of the 1975 Banqiao Dam collapse, when locals affected by the disaster eventually become the first large batch of migrant workers to go to Guangdong.
[13] A popular quote going around was:[12]In the 2017 CMG New Year's Gala, actor Guo Donglin played in a sketch in which he prevented a relative from being scammed.
[14][15] From a political perspective, in mainland China, due to the fact that provinces serve as geographical units of centralized central government administrative divisions, rather than independent and complete structures, entities, or organizations of education, legislation, politics, language, culture, beliefs, and other functions, powers, and spirits, the understanding of these units and scales does not have definite and objective cognitive and deductive value beyond certain natural attributes and related statistical characteristics.
However, due to the dependence of human society on language and words, improper use of conceptualized cognitive forms and essentialist ways of thinking may lead to confusion and misconceptions, making it difficult to completely remove this existing fixed pattern for a period of time.
Commentators analyze the reasons for related phenomena and summarize them as follows: In the history of thousands of years, the Central Plains has undergone dozens of dynasties, as well as foreign invasions by the Mongols, Manchus and Japanese.
[22] Dr. Gao Yaojie was the first to reveal that farmers in some rural areas of the province were infected with AIDS by selling blood products for profit by government health departments.
The imbalance of economic and cultural development under the planned economy system is also related to the unequal socio-economic and political environment of the region - Henan has long been positioned by the national development strategy as "ensuring the agricultural foundation",[28][29] and the degree of openness is the lowest in the six central provinces, and the data at the end of 2006 shows that the relevant openness index is only 2%,[30] far lower than the domestic average level.
[34] In terms of social public rights and interests, taking higher education as an example, the state's division, allocation and restriction of public education resources in provinces have caused substantial damage to the rights of people in some regions,[35][36][37] including Henan, which is a phenomenon of official discrimination that has been widely criticized in recent years.
In the commentary sections of news portals, users' locations by IP address are shown next to their comments, which encouraged discriminatory texts against Henan people.
In addition, due to the long-term promotion of strong ideological "class struggle" thinking, "collectivist" propaganda and "patriotic" education, and the serious failure of "education" to cultivate people's cognitive ability, critical consciousness and humanistic spirit, it is easy to cause individual rights, values and dignity to be ignored or even trampled on, result in blind "self-centered" praise, beggar-thy-neighbor "chauvinism"; The collective unconscious of "non-self", "otherization" and even "demonization" strengthens and even creates the psychological basis and social environment on which regional discrimination depends.
[18] In the first case of regional discrimination, the Internet portal NetEase designed and produced a special webpage [52] entitled "Ren Chengyu, Li Dongzhao, Honor Defender of Henan People" in February 2006 and quoted distorted and fabricated insulting and discriminatory reports [53] by Shanghai Evening News.
Analysts generally believe that the fundamental solution to this problem lies in the awakening of people's "civic consciousness",[59][60][61] the sound spirit of social "rule of law" [unreliable source?
