Why has China been so good at getting various ethnicities to consider themselves 'Chinese'...

Why has China been so good at getting various ethnicities to consider themselves 'Chinese'? They're like if the Roman Empire never truly fell in Europe/MENA. Even the northern barbarians who swept down to take over every few centuries eventually assimilated and LARPed as Chinese. What's their secret?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhonghua_minzu
academia.edu/31710981/Revisiting_the_male_genetic_landscape_of_China_a_multi_center_study_of_almost_38_000_Y_STR_haplotypes
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/朝貢
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tributaries_of_Imperial_China
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_system
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusi
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Departments_and_Six_Ministries).
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Brutal repression and cultural imperialism.

But to this day many minorities in China have privileged status. Is this a recent invention?

yes

Yeah, that is the modern state's approach.

Historically speaking, I wonder how peculiar it is to have nomads coming in an then assimilating. I mean the Huns and Goths with Christianity, the Turks and Mongols with Islam. Same rules apply?

Vast majority is Han Chinese, and places where they aren't the dominant ethnicity (Tibet, Xinjiang) have active separatist movements.

>Han Chinese

Han Chinese is a meme, they don't even speak the same languages.

arr rook same

one thing the chinese people were good at is assimilation, so much that they convinced the muslim in the north west to adopt chinese surname

>Ma for Muhammad (the most famous surname, ruling the northwest during the warlord era, xi bei san ma or Ma clique)
>Hu for Hussein
>Ha for Hasan
>Zheng for Shams
>Guo (Koay) for Kamaruddin

A comprehensive bureaucratic system of government that just made it easier for foreign invaders to use said system instead of applying their own. Once they started using this system it then became easier and easier to adopt other Chinese customs until eventually they were pretty much, at least culturally, Chinese themselves.

The Roman Empire is really a failure compared to China when you see the state of just Italy today even. Italians are regionalistic as fuck.

They all look the same so it was easy.

The average man in Yunnan or Guangxi is on average 3 inches shorter than someone in Beijing or Shandong, and has noticeably darker skin, a smaller nose, and smaller eyes, and is much more likely to have double eyelids. In other words, they look more like Southeast Asians.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhonghua_minzu

Brutal policies against the gweilo subhumans

All outside the Middle Kingdom are lower than animals

You have to understand that for the vast majority of history the so called Han Chinese had strong regional identities(corresponding with regional polities such as 吳人) where southerners(regardless of their actual linguistic affiliation) were not considered Chinese and only those from the geopolitical concept of a core northern Chinese region(中國 etc.) were considered the proper Chinese.

They had a cultural identity(華) where the Gongyang school made it that those who acculturated/assimilated were considered part of this Sinitic civilization.(So in historical terms Vietnamese and Koreans were considered part of the same orthodox traditions).

>Han Chinese is a meme, they don't even speak the same languages.
How is it a meme?

There was a never a biological component to ethnic identities and the Han view themselves as being descended from the same population.

You clearly haven't been to China if you are trying to conflate Southern Han from different provinces.

Yunnan Han are mainly descended from Ming/Qing migrations from central/northern China while the Guangxi and Guangdong Han are descended from a Tang era migration of a far lesser scale(hence their genetic affinity to local Tai Kadai speaking minorities).

>They just genocided the southern tribes completely, nope, nope, muh pure race!

Chinese have long divided people between civilized and uncivilized, not by race.

>They just genocided the southern tribes completely, nope, nope, muh pure race!
Reread what I stated. "Southern Han" is even more a meme than Han Chinese when they are descended from multiple migrations that assimilated different natives(Tujia in Hubei,Miao in Hunan,Zhuang in Guangdong/Guangxi).

Yunnanese Han are genetically different from Guangxi Han because the former is largely descended from recent migrations from core regions while the later is descended from tertiary migrations that never demographically replaced the native population.

Is the Chinese identity really that impressive, compared to, say, India? China had a legacy of unification, confucianism, and uses force when necessary. On the other hand, I am entirely unaware of any riots or separatist movements in India, outside of kashmir, which is pretty minor relatively speaking.

shaanxi are bei

India wasn't a unified country until very recently though. On the other hand the area that is now China had been unified at various points in the past. Plus, is there an "Indian Ethnicity" where people of various cultures, phenotypes, and languages all somehow consider themselves the same ethnicity, like the Han?

There are no real separatist movements in China either. Just East Turkestan and Tibet, both of which are tiny (in terms of population, literally sub-1% of the country combined) provinces, and neither of which have much popular support. There is no mass movement of Cantonese-speaking peoples trying to break off to form their own country.

>There is no mass movement of Cantonese-speaking peoples trying to break off to form their own country
Hong Kong

India is less like China and more like what Europe would look like if the EU was a country instead of a political-economic union of sovereign countries.
>One city compared to the entire fucking Cantonese-speaking region.
mkay.

You need to take a look at the 1947-1988 period then

I've read that in the past the Chinese did not even have a proper name for their own country. Like, if you ask a Chinese person what country was from he would just say that he was a subject of whatever dynasty was in power at the time, but the country the dynasty ruled over didn't have an actual name of its own. How accurate is this?

False. We had a thread about this a few days ago.

It was simply called "the empire." Then the Mings & Qings made "Zhongguo" the state name, though "the empire" was still used.

It's not all perfect
You have the South Chomping out every time Modi speaks in Hindi and the SouthEast having Seperatist movements

Also Sri Lanka Pakistan and Bangdalesh are "Indian" but separated because of Religious Difference
in Sri Lanka's case it's weird because they are Buddhists and Buddhism was seen as a branch of Hindusm
Also the conservative Deobandis wanted to stay with India while the Europeanised Secular Elite were the main force behind Pakistan

Do you have a link? Tried searching for "Ming" and "Qing" in the archive but couldn't find the relevant thread.

>It was simply called "the empire."
Doesnf 天下 more properly refer to literally the whole world even beyond the actual boundaries of imperial control?

Depends.

The only ones that truly call themselves Chinese are the China Proper.

China proper hasn't changed much for the last 2000 years of recorded history. Pics related.

In places like Tibet/Mongolia/Xinjiang do not consider themselves "Chinese" as ethnic group. They consider themselves Tibetan/Mongolian/Uyghur/etc. They may nominally accept (forced to accept) the current China controls their land, but its simply not the case of adopting the ethnic "Han" identification.

That land already encompasses many different ethnicities though with their own languages, physical features, foods, local religions, etc. In 2007, 30%+ of the 'Han' Chinese didn't even speak Mandarin (itself a broad category- many 'dialects' are mutually unintelligible) as their first language. And prior to the modern era I have to assume that the proportion was much higher. How did they all come to see themselves as Han?

>double eyelids.


WHAT THE FUCK??!

>The only ones that truly call themselves Chinese are the China Proper.
Western meme. The only "China proper" that existed was the geopolitical Zhongguo/Zhongyuan core in northern China.

>How did they all come to see themselves as Han?
The question you should be asking is when did Han supplant regional identities and when was Han first used as a ethnicity based on shared ancestry.

Ming dynasty is last true Han chinese empire. Its size is roughly same as Han dynasty. Before that, Song dynasty also encompassed roughly same area. Before that, Tang dynasty had large areas into the western area due to their western conquest of the nomadic tribes. If you exclude the western part, its basically the same story. The Sui dynasty before the Tang dynasty is basically the same China proper that you see throughout.

>Ming dynasty is last true Han chinese empire.
Han was only one of the myriad identities then northern Chinese held and it had to be reintroduced by nomadic conquerors.

Historically most individuals identified with the ruling/fallen dynasty,hometowns or a former regional polity(Yan,Zhao etc.)

Southern Chinese(anyone south of the Qinling and the Huai river) weren't considered Han prior to the Ming.

>The Sui dynasty before the Tang dynasty is basically the same China proper that you see throughout.
For the historical Chinese "China proper" was limited to northern China.

>privileged status

doesn't fucking matter if they're only ~5% of the population and declining.

9% and growing actually.

they all speak derivatives of Middle Chinese and have considered themselves a part of 华夏 since the warring states period.

Their languages are no closer to one another than Spanish is to French is to Italian. Even many dialects of Mandarin are mutually unintelligible.

so? they still have a common sense of nationality. Also their written language was standardized and mutually intelligible.

"privileged status"

Chinese people are so fucking weird. The minorities occupy the same space as latins/blacks in America. They enjoy bit government help more than regular white people, but that doesn't mean they're in any way priviledged.

Just because your minorities are receiving bit of government doesn't make them priviledged.

There have been thousands of cases of Han Chinese impersonating minorities to get benefits and affirmative action placement in colleges.

>has rights to have more than 2 kids
>not already very privileged

check your privilege

Even 'Mandarin' isn't anywhere close to homogeneous. One example: 100+ million people speak Sichuanese Mandarin in China centered in the Sichuan province and parts of Qinghai province. They are very genetically divergent from the stereotypical ethnic Chinese in Northeast and their language only has 50% commonality with standard Mandarin, 5 tones instead of 4, and different grammar rules. It is mutually unintelligible with standard Mandarin for the most part, and even other dialects of Sichuanese Mandarin are unintelligible with each other. In any sane country, the Sichuanese would be a registered ethno-linguistic minority, as should the Hakka and Cantonese. The reason they don't do this is probably because then the country would be nearly 50% minorities, and all the minorities would be liable to receive affirmative action benefits.

>take away their sovereignty/self determiniation
>give them "rights to more than 2 kids"

PRIVILEGE

Guess who would take a trip to the labor camp?

*not me*

>They are very genetically divergent from the stereotypical ethnic Chinese in Northeast
Han from Mandarin speaking areas of China are rather homogenous due to the migrations that occurred throughout history.
academia.edu/31710981/Revisiting_the_male_genetic_landscape_of_China_a_multi_center_study_of_almost_38_000_Y_STR_haplotypes

The areas where Southwestern Mandarin and Lower Yangtze Mandarin correspond with the "old" south e.g. where the former para Sinitic polities of Ba,Shu,Chu and Huai Yi lived.

Wu,Gan and Xiang have less genetic continuity though in the case of some Wu speakers they are genetically closer to northern Chinese than some Southwestern Mandarin speakers.

Hakka,Min and Yue are the furthest away because the native component was significantly more "southern" shifted than the aforementioned regions as well as the lack of repeated migrations from northern China.

I understand all latin languages though

t. Castellano

Furthermore, they have a single written language.

>Doesnf 天下 more properly refer to literally the whole world even beyond the actual boundaries of imperial control?
If you take it literally, yes, but eventually down the road the word just meant "Empire." The term arose during the Zhou period when the states of Pre-Imperial China were pretty much the world as far as the Zhou Kings were concerned. Eventually they knew of the wider world but the name stuck. That, and it's simply the Hubris of Empires to consider that they have the world. Just consider the phrase "Roma Caput Mundi"

Just take for example how the Roman Empire is called in Chinese textbooks: "羅馬天下" "羅馬 (Luoma =
Rome) 天下 (Tianxia)"

There's a modern Chinese word for Empire- the dumbass sounding 帝国 (Diguo. literally Emperor State)- but it isn't used as much as Tianxia for Empire. Most of the time it's just used on modern Empires like the colonial Europeans or just to identify if a country had an emperor. Which itself is not a very Chinese since only the Chinese Emperor was
帝 (Di), while the rest was 王 (Wang, Monarchs). Blame the fall of the Qing, Republicanism, and the Cultural Revolution for such invented words

So their languages are as close to each other as the Latin-derived Romance languages are?

>mutually unintelligible

Let me guess, you speak neither Sichuanese nor Mandarin

An efficient bureaucracy for administration and a policy of forced migration whenever they conquer lands.
Whenever new land is conquered, they displace all the natives, break up their families and disperse them within the empire. Within 2-3 generations, they would have been assimilated into Han culture and the process repeats whenever they conquer new lands. The bureaucracy allows the forced migration/dispersion to be effectively carried out.

Don't forget that they operate under near constant surveillance and are prone to government crackdowns on them for... well just if the CCP particularly feel like doing it.

Are they not?

>Why has China been so good at getting various ethnicities to consider themselves 'Chinese'?

China is not a multi ethnic empire. It's 95% Han and 5% miscellaneous they rule with an iron fist.

The fact that the "Han" is believed to be a single Chinese ethnicity and not a variety of races as diverse as the people of Europe is the signature of their success.

I think climate and geography that helped settling down were important. People only assimilate when their lifestyles allowed

>Just take for example how the Roman Empire is called in Chinese textbooks: "羅馬天下" "羅馬 (Luoma =
> Rome) 天下 (Tianxia)"
The ZH Wikipedia refers to it as the 罗马帝国, is this a regional thing?

>in before the theory that the Chinese writing system is good for assimilating people speaking different languages

It doesn't. People who adopted the writing are still speaking different languages and can continue to do so until modern technology force them otherwise.

As diverse of the people of Latin Europe maybe.

There are two seperate questions.
1) why do Chinese people believe they are Chinese. People can be non-Han but still want to stay in china.

2) why do Han people believe they are Han people. This is more complicated and requires more specific definition.

Suppose a peasant in the southwest subscribe to the story that his ancestors came from the heartland, despite he has different look and speaks a different language, and this is considered an evidence of Han assimilation, this can be attributed to several factors.

He most likely does it to claim association with the local powerful families and to distance himself from the local natives.

Then the question becomes why is the local powerful family a Han family. The answer would be the result of a imperial expansion. The problem is which one? The Ming or the Qing?

Romans made the Greeks think they're Roman.

Many multiculturalism is a sham no matter who tries it and that's the best that can be realistically achieved because in-group preference is just that strong.

Multiculturalism could work if the government spent time de-centivizing the in-group behavior.

Singapore is a decent example, still not perfect, but much better.

Of course not

nope, that's just that guy bullshiting

Effective central bureaucracy presence is the key.

First level of assimilation is Tributary state 朝贡.
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/朝貢
Where lord of the land acknowledge 天子's suzerainty.
China emperor has nominal right on deciding the lord's successor.
e.g. Japan, Korea and Vietnam in various time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tributaries_of_Imperial_China
>recognize china's supremacy, had local monarchy, had local social order.


Second level is 羁糜(Ji Mi) and 土司(Tu Si)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_system
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusi
JiMi is well known for Tang's central Asian territory, mongolian and the turks, while
TuSi is well known for southern china region with significant non-Han presence, yunnan hunan guangxi etc.
The system is essentially a land that adopted Chinese legal/financial society system, surrendered diplomatic and military right to central authority, while maintaining certain judicial and administrative power delegated to local Chieftains.
Certain local post of power are allowed to be held hereditary by local powers.
>adopt chinese social organization, under emperor's authoritative, local family takes up local official post.

Third level is 改土归流.
改 Replace/Change
土 土司Tusi/Chieftain
归 Return
流 流官Flowing bureaucrat.
Essentially taking away local hereditary power, instating flowing bureaucrat. Under central authority, bureaucrat across Empire is qualified by Imperial exam, monitored/rated and assigned/appointed by ministry of personnel 吏部 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Departments_and_Six_Ministries). Chink system place emphasis on ensuring officials didn't get to
consolidate power bases, bureaucrats are rated promoted/demoted and appointed onto different region every *election* cycle, hence "Flowing bureaucrat".

>羅馬天下
wtf is this nonsense, did anyone really believed the shit he spat?

罗马帝国=Roman Empire is as universally accepted as 数学=Mathematics, if you want name of rome in ancient text, it's 大秦 great Qin.

天下 TianXia carries the connotation "all your base belongs to us", it was rarely used outside context of territorial achievement, like 一统天下.
海内 HaiNei ( everywhere within the sea) is also used to the same effect.

When self referring compared to not-chinese, 九州 神州 华夏 中原 中土 中国 are used.
for example, 中土风情 "Middle Land's customs" can be used in comparison to 西域风情 "Western territories' customs", while 天下 can not be used to such context.

Also consider 神州大地=Heavenly continent 华夏儿女=Descendents of Hua&Xia 中原人士=People of Middle Land e.t.c, which all contains geographical connotation.