LIFE
Einstein was a racist? His 1920s travel diaries contain shocking slurs against Chinese people
Maria Puente
USA TODAY
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Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist who helped decipher the universe, inspired America's atomic bomb project and famously vowed to fight racism, had some pretty racist things to say about the Chinese back in the 1920s, according to his own travel diaries.
Such as: The Chinese are an “industrious, filthy, obtuse people.”
Yes, he really said that. Wandering around China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Palestine and Spain between 1922 and '23, Einstein jotted down some of his thoughts about the people and places he encountered.
His musings were published this week, for the first time in a stand-alone volume, in "The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923," the latest book emerging from the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Some of Einstein's thoughts make for eye-opening, unsettling reading: China is a “peculiar herd-like nation," its citizens "often more like automatons than people,” he writes. He says "even the children are "spiritless and look obtuse.” After commenting on the alleged fecundity of the Chinese, he laments:
“It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”
How could this sort of thing come from the pen of a man then in his 40s and already a world-famous physicist (for his 1905 and 1915 theories on relativity)? He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 while he was on his travels.
"It exposes more of the darker side of his personality, which makes him more human and prompts all of us to examine our own attitudes and beliefs," says Ze’ev Rosenkranz, editor of the diaries.
As the senior editor of the Einstein papers at CalTech, Rosenkranz is the scholar who may know him best, having spent 30 years reading, thinking and writing about Einstein. He says four more volumes of diaries are coming, covering the scientist's travels in South America in 1925 and in America in the 1930s.
Chinese defend Einstein's portrait of their people as 'filthy' and 'obtuse'
Chinese internet users have defended Albert Einstein’s recently published travel diaries in which the physicist calls the Chinese “industrious, filthy people.”
Portions of
the diaries from his travels in Asia in the 1920s were posted online this week and their content surprised Einstein fans.
“
Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods,” he wrote.
Einstein's travel diaries reveal 'shocking' xenophobia
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“All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.”
The theoretical physicist, who once said racism was “a disease of white people”, added: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”
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While some internet users called for a “boycott of Einstein” and said his observations proved “all humans, even Einstein, have a stupid, shallow side,” most said the China Einstein witnessed is nothing like it is today.