Sorry, woke mob – China Girl does not make David Bowie a racist

With crushing inevitably, cancel culture has come knocking on the door of David Bowie and his 1983 hit China Girl. The song appears early in the setlist of Bowie’s 2000 Glastonbury performance broadcast by the BBC over the weekend as part of its tribute to the festival (which has obviously fallen victim to Covid-19).

Flanked by a multi-racial band that includes African-Americans Gail Anne Dorsey on bass and Sterling Campbell on drums Bowie tackled the track with aplomb. “I could escape this feeling, with my China girl,” he sings, wavy hair fluttering in the Somerset night. “I feel a wreck without my little China girl.”

As was fated to happen, social media quickly weighed in on the video. “Look, there's something a bit racist about China Girl,” went one Tweet. “There just is. You're all thinking it. We don't talk about it but come on”. Another Tweeter took issue with the “asian keyboard riff” with which the number opens. Just like that China Girl was “trending” – always a bad thing – on Twitter.

The subject of Bowie and race is simultaneously complicated and completely straightforward. As was more or less mandatory for cocaine-fuelled rock stars in the Seventies, Bowie went through a “fascist” period.

“Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars,” he told Playboy in 1976, adding “I believe very strongly in fascism”. That same year, he appeared to give a Nazi salute exiting Victoria Station (he always contended he had been snapped out of context and was merely looking at clouds).

However, Bowie would later insist his fasciation with Hitler was all to do with Nazi occultism and entirely unrelated to race.

“My interest in [the Nazis],” he told NME in 1993, “was the fact they supposedly came to England before the war to find the Holy Grail at Glastonbury… the idea that it was about putting Jews in concentration camps and the complete oppression of different races completely evaded my extraordinary f___ed-up nature at that particular time.”

And anyway, all of that was behind him – along with the “cocaine and milk” diet that had sustained Bowie circa the Playboy interview– during the recording of the Let’s Dance album and China Girl in the Eighties.

He did Let’s Dance with producer Nile Rodgers – making him one of the few big-league pop stars of the era to work with an African-American (Madonna, who had collaborated with the Chic leader on Like A Virgin, was another).

China Girl itself was an attack on what would today be referred to as “white privilege”. Bowie’s narrator is an archetypal “white saviour” who fetishises his Asian girlfriend’s “otherness”. It is a commentary on Western imperialism, cultural and otherwise, and its tendency towards fascism – and turns increasingly dark as the lyrics tumble out.

“I stumble into town just like a sacred cow/Visions of swastikas in my head,” Bowie sings. He adds: “My little China girl/You shouldn't mess with me/ I'll ruin everything you are.” Seldom has a song more chillingly articulated the barbarism running through the West’s sense of manifest destiny.

“If you ever took Bowie for what was on the surface, you were missing something,” Tiffany Naiman, a contributor to David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, told the Washington Post following Bowie’s death in 2016.

“I think he was well aware of his elite cosmopolitanism. He was able to move through different cultures because of his privilege but he understood otherness and wanted to highlight that.”

China Girl is complicated by the fact that Bowie had a fling with Geeling Ng, the New Zealand model and actress who portrays the object of his affections in the video. Meanwhile, the original 1977 Iggy Pop version was inspired by Pop’s infatuation with Vietnamese-born Kuelan Nguyen. Then there is the theory that, rather than a didactic unpacking of race and privilege, it’s actually all to do heroin. “I figured China Girl was about doing drugs,” commented Nile Rodgers. “Because China is China White which is heroin, girl is cocaine.”

The bigger point is that China Girl was by no means an aberration in Bowie’s catalogue. In the Seventies, when Bowie fled Ziggy Stardust and the gaudy shackles of glam rock, one of the places in which he took refuge was African-American music. Young Americans, released in 1975, was his love letter to the Philadelphia soul scene. Here, Bowie was at pains not to be a tourist in someone else’s genre and worked closely with, among others, vocalist Luther Vandross and with Puerto Rican guitarisniet Carlos Alomar.

That same year, he created history as the first white artist to appear on Don Cornelius’s Soul Train TV show. “We are very proud to have with us one who is very easily one of popular music’s most popular and important music personalities,” says the professorial Cornelius in his introduction.

“A great welcome gang for the gifted singer, composer, producer… Mr David Bowie.” On totters Bowie, hair luminescent orange, clearly four-sheets to the wind, and gamely takes questions from the audience.

Someone asks if he’s making a film with Elizabeth Taylor – to which Bowie offers a baffled “no”. Then another punter inquires about his interest in soul music. Bowie explains that he discovered James Brown as a 17-year-old frequenting “French clubs” in London. He’s out of his gourd, off his face, away with the cocaine fairies – yet his respect for African-American music is obvious.

Carlos Alomar would go on to join Bowie’s band full-time and is a looming presence throughout 1976’s Station to Station. The highpoint of Bowie’s “Thin White Duke” phase, Station To Station was his most contradictory record – and the one which is sometimes called out as his “fascist” LP.

The Thin White Duke character certainly had a whiff of the Aryan übermensch (Bowie had explicitly referenced Nietzsche in 1971 with Man Who Sold the World’s Supermen). And though laid down in Los Angeles by a coked-to-the-eyeballs Bowie, the record had a buttoned-down “European” sensibility. It sounded, in essence, like a slightly paranoid r’n b album recorded by Teutonic pop titans Kraftwerk.

Still, there was nothing remotely “racist” about it. Alomar's guitars are ever present; Station to Station also features an African-American drummer and bassist in Dennis Davis and George Murray. If Bowie was a pro-fascist he was pretty rubbish at it.

But he wasn’t, of course, and as soon as he kicked the drugs his loathing of racism became one of his defining qualities. In his private life, Bowie was completely colour-blind.

He had a relationship with singer and model Ava Cherry while his lovers were rumoured to include Ola Hudson (mother of guitarist Slash). And in 1992 he married Somali-American model Iman.

He also famously called out MTV’s unofficial blacklisting of African-American artists during an interview with the channel in 1983 (below).

“Having watched MTV over the past few months, it’s a solid enterprise with a lot going for it,” Bowie told interviewer Mark Goodman. “I’m just floored that by the fact that there’s so few black artists featured on it. Why is that?”

Goodman responded that the network was “trying to move in that direction”. Bowie, with Paxman-esque doggedness, pressed on.

“The only few black artists one does see are on in about 2:30 in the morning until 6:00,” Bowie said. “Very few are featured prominently during the day. I’ll see that over the last couple of weeks things have been changing, but it’s been a slow process.”

This wasn’t just talk – what might be referred to today as “virtue signalling”. With Let’s Dance in 1983, Bowie had seized the opportunity to make a stone-cold hit. When I asked Nile Rodgers if Bowie’s intention with the LP had been to create a soaraway chart-topper he provided a one-word answer: “Yes”.

That didn’t mean Bowie was going to compromise his principles, though. When it came time to shoot a video for the title track (the biggest smash on the LP) Bowie had the idea of travelling to Australia and commenting on the marginalising of the Aboriginal community.

This was the mid-Eighties, when most of his peers were knocking out bombastic promos featuring super-models and gallons of hair-spray. Bowie, by contrast, went out of his way to create art that stood for something, using the Let’s Dance video to critique Australia’s historical mistreatment of its indigenous peoples. A shot of a young girl scrubbing the street, for instance, was widely interpreted as a commentary on the practice of training Aboriginal children to be domestic servants in white homes.

“David wanted it to be in Australia and he wanted it to be politicised,” the director of Let’s Dance, David Mallet, would later say. “That was his bottom line…That’s down to his genius and boldness in thinking because it wasn’t a comfortable subject even in Australia… A lot of people were horrified about what we were doing.”

“We see so many shows about Australia and they’re all very one-dimensional,” agreed filmmaker Rubika Shah, who made a documentary about the video called Bowie in the Outback. “The glittering harbour. The Outback. [Let’s Dance] made Aboriginal people feel proud of their culture.

“They’re not a spear-wielding tribal people out in the middle of nowhere. They live like everybody else does… It was the first time that Aboriginals had been seen on global television like that.”