cashew | Hey, Americans, stop calling every type of ethnic conflict "racist" (Reply)

Before you get on my case about how "racism" in modern usage refers to systemic bias by institutions towards individuals based on their membership in a particular race or ethnicity, I get it. That doesn't mean the word "racist" isn't still completely inadequate when talking about complicated ethnic and tribal tensions, nor the fact that the word stems from the concept of "race", which still retains the idea that people's sociological categorization can be justified using biological principles.

Ergo, "racism" still, in most people's minds and in most online discourse, refers to the "biological basis" of a claim to a certain in-group. And that concept is completely inadequate when talking about ethnic tensions.

Now I'm no expert on the subject, all I've got is my lived in experience, so I'm going to focus on talking about my personal experience of how Americans are completely incapable of understanding how minority works outside of their very race-conscious idea of People of Color. Specifically, I'm going to talk about Chinese-Americans and their inability to understand that "Chinese" is NOT AN ETHNICITY.

Chinese (中國人) is a very modern concept that sprouted up after the concept of nationalism: aka the Nation-State. Prior to the nation-state, there were no "Chinese" persons. Because Chinese refers to "people who belong to the nation-state of China". And the nation-state consists of, at the earliest conception, FIVE major ethnicities:滿(mǎn)、漢(hàn)、蒙(měng)、回(huí)、藏(zàng).

(I will use "Han" instead of 漢 for easier typing in the following texts.)

Note the first: During conception, the first in on the list is a "minority" ethnicity (滿), because THEY WERE THE RULING CLASS, despite the Han being the ethnic majority.
Note the second: 回 is a sinonized Muslim ethnic minority. Their physical features and even names are indistinguishable from their Han neighbors. Of course sinonization is a spectrum (just like gender!), but the majority of 回 people I've met IRL are basically visually indistinguishable from Han and do not practice the Islamic religion.

What I'm trying to get at is two points:

Not all minorities in China were "oppressed". In fact, China had two full dynasties of oppression by minorities of the majority (元、清).
You can't visually tell who is an ethnic minority. There's been too much genetic mixing through out history to draw the line between the majority and minority via bloodline "purity" genetics stuff. Even names aren't always recognizably different.

All of this is complicated by this political fact: In China (PRC), if you do not prove your parents are of a minority ethnicity, you are automatically registered as Han majority. In other words, you literally need to go through extra steps to be recognized as an ethnic minority.

To put it another way: Han majority IS A BIG MISHMASH OF "Not-Minority". THERE IS NO HAN PURITY.

So what is culturally "Han" is basically "the stuff in the middle kingdom that is not an identifier of minority status". Han is not and was never a delineated ethnicity.

...And since we're on the subject of Han, we're gonna have to talk about how this thing even came about. Unlike the United States, where European immigrants colonized another people's land, the Han dynasty inherited its territories from the Qin (秦) dynasty. (Qin is the origin of the Western word "China" BTW.) And people living in the Han dynasty were called "Han people". And then the name stuck.

And now the majority who live on the land that was the Han dynasty are called Han people, aka Han Chinese in modern parlance.

(I'm not going to get into the complicated question of "but what is China in pre-Qin times if the word 'China' came from Qin?". Just know that in Chinese, "China" is written as 中國 and those characters have appeared since 1038 BCE. Like, those words were molded in bronze artifacts that we can date, so archeology, yay! And even though the specific phrasing wasn't used in a generic way because the dynasty name takes precedence over the "middle state" concept, the government existed, because Chinese writing has been used continuously for ~4000 years, and we have archeological government records of this shit carved into bone. Because governments are gonna bureaucracy even when all you've got is bone.)

Since Dynastic China is filled with repeated civil wars, invasions, rebellions, and general chaos, the "Han" identity (again, originally referring to people who used to live on the land that belonged to the state of Han) came to mean a poorly defined general collective of traits:

Speaks the "official language" whatever dialect that might be at the time of whomever is ruling.
Writes 漢字, aka Chinese logographs that makes up the Chinese written language, which got copied by a bunch of surrounding Asian neighbors for about 1000 years until the movement to get rid of 漢字 from their language. (Ethnic note: many minorities in China still use 漢字 to write their own language, much like how Kanji exists in Japanese.)
Wears "Han style" clothes, which, as the dynasties wore on, seems to retain only a single trait and that's putting buttons/clasps/ties on the right hand side. Note that Han fashion basically borrowed everything from everyone around them and then changed the buttons to be on the right hand side.
Worships "Han" ancestors. Which actually meant any of the ancestors from the Zhou period, which in itself was inherited from the Shang period, which was a unification of five different major warring tribes, so like...Han purity is a myth.

(BTW: if you're wondering what about all those illiterate peasants who can't read and write? The answer is the ruling class didn't consider them to be "people", so ethnic identity didn't even apply to them. Human rights, another modern invention.)

TL;DR - There is no genetic basis for Han ethnicity. There isn't even a very clear historical cultural basis for the Han ethnicity, which has been and still is in constant flux.

So, given that very complicated mess of a cultural identity, "Chinese" is, as far as modern conceptualization goes, a reference to citizenship. Aka, do you have legal residence in the People's Republic of China or the Republic of China territories (because the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists left a giant gaping problem for the modern "Chinese" identity to wrangle with). Granted in the Republic of China, there is a movement to remove China and replace the political entity with Taiwan, so like...whatever, I'll leave that complicated issue to the people in the RoC to figure out.

Meanwhile, in the PRC, which is what people mean when saying "China", what it means to be Chinese (again, a legal citizen of the political entity known as China) on a cultural level is...uh...being fought over. However, continuing the grand tradition of "we have no fucking clue who is part of our in-group so communication is the main standard", the ill-defined social consensus of "being Chinese" (again, here the "Chinese" refers to "person belonging to the political entity known as China" aka 中國人, not Han ethnic majority aka 漢人) is:

Can read and write Chinese (中文). (Note: Written Chinese is grammatically the same no matter the spoken dialect.)
Can speak a dialect of Chinese (中國話). There's like over 200+ of these dialects. The official one is Mandarin, but like...there are definitely grandmas who can't speak Mandarin.

Notice that in the Chinese language, the spoken and written language are conceptually different things. While the written form is unified (more or less), the spoken one is not.

And...that's pretty much it. Any other standard meant to exclude minority ethnic groups will inevitably end up excluding some part of the Han majority due to the fact that the Han majority DON'T HAVE HOMOGENEITY.

So.

With all of that said.

When a Chinese-American complains that their Chinese relatives in PRC don't consider them "real Chinese" because they "can't speak or write Chinese" and that's being "racist"...

...all I've got is STFU. Chinese is not an ethnicity. And if you don't have basic communication skills in the Chinese language, then you need to get out of the discussion of what it means to be Chinese. You are an American. Keep your nose out of other people's domestic problems.

Edit to add:

So because everything is just called "Chinese" in English, this makes it really difficult to talk about the Chinese language as the oldest extant continuous written language.

Note all the modifiers. Extant. Continuous. Written.

So, in Chinese, we have the writing system which uses the logographs. Think of them as similar to emojis. They're pictures meant to convey a meaning without indicating how that meaning is pronounced. Over time, those logographs become stylized, standardized, simplified, reformed, restructured, etc. etc. etc. However, the logograph (aka Chinese character) meaning is understood despite the many, many changes made to the writing system over time. And then there are certain characters that basically didn't change after 4000 years, like the word 人 (person/people - there are no plurals in Chinese).

This also raises the issue of a single "word" having multiple forms. Like Pokemon regional forms. They are recognizably the same word, but depending on the dynasty, one form will be officially recognized as the "correct" way of writing, while the other is the "incorrect" way of writing. With the advent of the computer, these different forms have been re-classified as "different" words, even though they all mean the same thing. (Much like "color" and "colour" are both English words and mean the exact same thing, but the "correct" spelling depends on the government ruling over you. Same thing in Chinese, except this is the case for something like...99.999% of the vocabulary.)

Anyway.

Because of the logographic writing system, that meant for the longest time (aka up until about the early 1900s), Chinese has no unified pronunciation. So governments usually hired "local translators" to be able to match the written language to the spoken language. Yet somehow, despite this seemingly ridiculous barrier, everyone still managed to identify with the same written language.

Again, I would like to remind people that there are languages written with the Chinese logograph (漢字) as the writing system, but the written language is their own language and not Chinese (中文). So when we're talking about "Chinese as the oldest extant continuous language", we're specifically talking about the written form, 中文, not the logograph (漢字) itself.

This is because the logograph 漢字 has precursors that cannot be called 漢字, since 漢字 existed only after the Han dynasty began. Prior to the Han dynasty, the logograph were called other things (too many to name). But, because politics and nation-states and also history is hard and complicated, they're all collectively referred to as 漢字 in casual conversation.

So back to language and politics and identity.

As mentioned in the earlier bits, "Chinese" is definitely not an ethnicity. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely no cultural identity associated with the "middle state" (中國) from which the political entity known as China sprung up.

In the Chinese language, that culture is not described as "Chinese" (中國的), but instead is called the "belonging to the central plains" (中原的) or "華夏" (er...Huaxia?). Because the phrase "中國" is associated with a government. But the culture is not defined by government, it's defined by the people who decided they belong to the same in-group. And the origin of that culture is...well a bunch of people living in the central plains and, after some fighting over resources, came together to form a government, making the first political entity known as China (but called 商, Shang, because nation-states didn't exist as a concept yet). In ~1600 BCE. (I could probably get jailed for not calling 夏 era, which preceded 商, a real government, but I'm trying to stay academically honest, not politically correct. Also, the 夏 era is where 華夏 comes from, because it is culturally identified as the "origin", although the archeological records are a bit more...uh, there were definitely people there...but that's all we can say for certain.) Now, is stuff prior to that "Chinese"? I mean, that culture definitely got passed down and no one else can really lay claim to it besides the current "Chinese" people who originated on the central plains...

But if the United States can claim the 13 colonies under English rule as part of US history, y'know, stuff that existed before the existence of the political entity recognized as The United States of America...then I see no reason why modern day Chinese shouldn't claim that shit as their own, too.

So. All that to say that language, especially the written version, and its use is the basis of the, so-called, Chinese culture. English is really bad at capturing the concept, so it's like almost impossible to explain how "Chinese" is a very outsider perspective of what's going on culturally.

Edit 2: Following up on the language thing, I felt it's important to acknowledge that there is some attempt to try to equate "central plains" (中原) with China (中國). This is deeply xenophobic, as it excludes not only the officially recognized minorities from their historical influence on Chinese culture in modern PRC, it also stems from a desire to "purify" what is considered "Chinese".

Even before the conception of the nation-state, the political entity known as China has always been a multi-ethnic state. In the modern nation-state conception of the political entity know as China, both RoC and PRC have been founded on the recognition of ethnic minorities as legitimate members of the nation with a political claim to the concept of "Chinese".

Chinese is not about being Han. Chinese is not about being of 華夏 descent. Chinese, in the modern nation-state concept, is about being a citizen of the nation known as China. Anyone who tries to claim otherwise, STFU. (And yes, writing this might also get me into political trouble. It's why I use VPN.)