lbert Einstein made shocking comments about Chinese people and viewed them as being intellectually inferior, it has been revealed.
The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein, translated from German to English for the first time, show he did not think like that during earlier travels to the Far East and Middle East.
That year he set out on a five month trip that included China, keeping diaries that were not intended to become public.
In diaries, he called China a "peculiar herd-like nation" and said its citizens were "often more like automatons than people".
He wrote: “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse."
"It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”
According to the publishers the diaries "contain passages that reveal Einstein's stereotyping of members of various nations and raise questions about his attitudes on race".
Ze’ev Rosenkranz, the editor of the book, said Einstein had made comments that were "pretty unpleasant" and at odds with his humanitarian image.
Derogatory descriptions of Chinese people in Albert Einstein’s 1920s travel diaries – contradicting his image as a humanitarian icon – reflect “cultural bias” rather than bigotry, according to China’s social media denizens.
Some social media users even said they agreed with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s assessments of society given the time in which he was writing – a period of widespread poverty and declining quality of life in China, just a decade after the founding of a republic that ended aeons of dynastic rule.
“Einstein was telling the truth,” one Weibo user commented, “But he would not make the same comments if he visited the big Chinese cities today.”
© Image | Weibo
“Everyone’s point of view is limited by the times,” read the most liked comment on a Weibo post by state-led media Global Times, typifying the internet’s mostly indifferent response to the revelations.
One Weibo user named “Winston” also cautioned that Einstein’s xenophobic ruminations should be viewed in the context of his youth – and that he was writing down his thoughts in a journal never meant to be read by the public.
Later in his life the genius called racism a "disease of white people" and became a champion of the civil rights movement in the United States. Einstein’s opinions from later periods of his life did in fact show greater tolerance.
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Source | telegraph, scmp
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