The Lou Jing Ripple Effect
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

A mixed race 'Chinese Idol' contestant forces Chinese to take a hard look at racial attitudes.

What constitutes one’s identity? This is the question that has recently come up when Lou Jing, a mixed-race Shanghainese woman, has become the focal point of an American-Idol style competition in China.

The situation is a delicate one. Lou Jing was born to a Chinese mother and an African-American father she’s never met. The nature of such American Idol-esque programming is to exploit anything that sets any one contestant apart, whether it be their tone deafness and unhealthy aspirations towards stardom or their troubled upbringing. Glorifying Lou Jing’s mixed heritage proved to be too big a temptation and pretty soon, the show was featuring Lou Jing, whether she liked it or not.

A single Chinese mother struggling to raise a mixed child in a conservative and oftentimes racist society. The marketing department must’ve popped open some bubbly at their good fortune. There’s no way they weren’t going to milk this sympathy-laden story for all its worth.

So milk it they did and ironically, it did something much more than boost ratings. It forced a nation of a billion people to take a harsh look at themselves, to look at the deep-seated racism lingering under the surface of their society and acknowledge it.

I consider my parents to be much more racially accepting than most Asian parents but even then, I can sense a faint undercurrent of racism in their interactions. It might just be a general sense of wariness around certain types of people. Sometimes they’re just as wary of Chinese people as they are of other types of people.

Being around my friend’s parents and even my aunts and uncles, I’m well-acquainted with the racism associated with being Chinese. I’m not proud of it and but I’ve always seen it as a xenophobia in the older generations that couldn’t possibly be countered without mashing on some toes and my passive filial nature just didn’t see it happening any time soon. To my own disbelief, a cheesy Chinese reality show has begun a discussion I’d never thought would happen. If only American reality television could somehow harness this level of national introspection, even if by accident.