【经济学人精读】河北东北缘何总遭遇地域黑？

　　Regional discrimination

　　地域歧视

　　Province and prejudice

　　省份与偏见

　　Life is often hard for internal migrants in China, especially those from Henan and the north-east

　　在中国，外来人口生活通常很艰难，尤其是来自河南和东北的外来人口

　　The schoolchildren started to vomit. Some fell unconscious and were whiskedinto hospital. Angry parents demanded an explanation. The food-poisoning scandal quickly lit up Chinese social media. A kindergarten teacher in the central province of Henan was detained—accused of adding sodium nitrite, which can be toxic in large doses, to the meal boxes of at least 23 pupils late last month.

　　学生们开始呕吐。有的已失去知觉，被迅速送往医院。愤怒的家长要求一个解释。这起食物中毒丑闻迅速在中国社交媒体上引起热议。中部省份河南省一名幼教被拘留，他被指控上月底在至少23名学生的饭盒中添加亚硝酸钠，大剂量硝酸盐对人体有毒。

　　Most comments online have focused on the evil of the act and have expressed sympathy for the parents. But a surprising number have noted the alleged perpetrator’shome province. “I’m not surprised. Henan people would stoop toanything,” says one commentator on Baidu Tieba, a social-networking site. “Apart from wicked, I can’t think of another word to describe Henan people,” chimesin someone with more than 50,000 followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, who identifies himself as a financial journalist.

　　网上的大多数评论都聚焦在这一恶行上，并表达了对家长的同情。但令人惊讶的是，有相当多的人注意到了犯罪嫌疑人的家乡。“我并不惊奇，河南人卑鄙，什么事都能做出来，” 社交网站百度贴吧的一个人评论道。“除了恶劣，我想不出其他的词来形容河南人，”此言来自一位自称是金融记者的微博博主（相当于中国版的推特），这位博主拥有5万多粉丝。

　　Urban Chinese are often contemptuousof these internal migrants, wherever they are from. But people from certain regions suffer higher than usual levels of negative stereotyping. Regional discrimination “is hard to see and touch” yet its impact is as painful as getting “a bloodied face”, said an academic quoted by a north-eastern newspaper. Yang Yong, a migrant worker from Henan who lives in Beijing, has felt this. He says he was once refused a construction job in the capital because of his home province. “When I answered I’m from Henan the boss said goodbye,” he recalls. Online job advertisements for domestic maids in Beijing often specify that “applicants from Henan and the north-east need not apply.” A recent trawlthrough a popular website for household work, 2x9d.com, found that a fifth of such jobs explicitly excluded applicants from these two regions.

　　无论来自哪里，外来人口都会被城市居民鄙视。但某些地区的人遭受的负面刻板印象比通常水平要高。东北一家报纸援引一位学者的话：地区歧视“很难看到和触摸到”，但其影响就像“在脸上划血口子”一样令人痛苦。现居北京的河南农民工杨勇(音译)也有同感。他说，他曾经因为老家的原因被一份北京的建筑工作拒之门外。“当我回答说我来自河南时，老板让我回家”，他回忆道。在北京，家政服务的在线招聘广告中经常明确指出，“河南、东北求职者勿扰”。最近，在一家颇受欢迎的家政网站2x9d.com上进行的一项调查发现，有五分之一的此类工作明确将求职者排除在河南、东北之外。

　　People from Henan and the north-eastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning are among those most commonly targeted, partly because those areas are such big sources of migrants. Henan is a farming province of about 100m people. The latest census, in 2010, showed that 7.5% of Henanese were living outside their home province, the second-highest proportion of any province. The highest was Anhui, on Henan’s eastern border.

　　来自河南、黑龙江、吉林和辽宁等东北省份的人是最常见的招黑人群，部分原因是这些地区是很大的外来人口输送地。河南是一个拥有约1亿人口的农业省份。2010年的最新人口普查显示，7.5%的河南人生活在家乡以外，这一比例在所有省份中位居第二。比例最高的是安徽，位于河南东部边境。

　　Even among better-educated urban residents, north-easterners are often stereotyped as quarrelsomeand pugnacious, and Henanese are commonly regarded as thieves and cheats. In Chinese television comedy, actors playing criminals often speak with a Henan accent. The “Spring Festival Gala” of 2017, the most-watched show of the year, included such a sketch. Some regional stereotypes are harbored only by people from a particular area. In a book published in 2015, Agnieszka Joniak- Luthi of the University of Zurich says that Shanghai residents sometimes describe people from northern Jiangsu, a province that borders on the city, as “boorish” and “unkind”. However, people from that region are not so despised in Beijing. Those from Anhui are also often scorned in Shanghai, but not so much elsewhere.

　　即使在受过良好教育的城市居民中，东北人也常常被认为是好争吵、好斗的，而河南人通常被视为小偷和骗子。在中国的电视喜剧中，扮演罪犯的演员常常带有河南口音。有些地区的刻板印象只存在于某一特定地区的人身上。在2015年出版的一本书中，苏黎世大学的阿格涅斯卡·琼尼可·卢斯说，上海居民有时形容来自江苏北部的人“粗野”和“不友善”。 然而，在北京，来自江苏北部的人并不是那么遭人鄙视。安徽人在上海也经常遭到嘲笑，但在其他地方就没那么多了。