{"id":52036,"date":"2024-02-01T16:40:39","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T16:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com"},"modified":"2024-02-05T19:28:40","modified_gmt":"2024-02-05T19:28:40","slug":"who-gets-to-be-chinese","status":"publish","type":"wpm-article","link":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/who-gets-to-be-chinese","title":{"rendered":"Who Gets To Be Chinese?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe must go to the root and criticize the Han chauvinist ideas which exist to a serious degree among many Party members and cadres<\/em>.\u201d
\u2014 Mao Zedong<\/strong><\/p>

SHANGHAI \u2014 For a time, Joseph and I would go to the park at dawn to take in the sights of a Chinese morning: the sun rising over Jing\u2019an Temple, the elderly practicing Tai chi, stray cats gazing maliciously at us. Inevitably, a retired Shanghainese would walk up. How handsome he is, they would say. He looks nothing like you. Our Chinese genes are much stronger than yours.<\/p>

What qualifies a person to be Chinese, anyway? My son holds a U.S. passport; his hair is brown and his skin looks the same as mine (although he has the bluish mark on his bum that a Mongolian friend told me is a sign of Genghis Khan\u2019s DNA). On the other hand, he certainly has his mother\u2019s deep, dark eyes.<\/p>

America is paper, one retiree told me; China is blood. What this person meant was that U.S. citizenship is a matter of bureaucracy and paperwork \u2014 in theory, open to anybody. In contrast, Chinese citizenship is a closed loop. If you\u2019re in, you can never really escape \u2014 and if you\u2019re out, there\u2019s no way of entrance.<\/p>

It is for this reason that some call China an ethno-state, contradicting the official recognition of 56<\/a> ethnicities (sometimes called nationalities) that are equally entitled<\/a> to citizenship. Of course, many who consider themselves (and are considered by others) to be Chinese are not citizens of China. The borders of China and the limits of Chineseness map onto each other incompletely.<\/p>

China\u2019s borders encompass individuals who are, like me, impossible to mistakenly identify as Chinese. Meanwhile, most major cities in the world have a Chinatown, and even villages and truck stops in America have Chinese restaurants. These places have nothing much to do with the Communist China that emerged in 1949.<\/p>\n\n

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\n “The collection of peoples we call China is not really a society of citizens. Rather, it is an organization \u2014 a government \u2014 keeping tabs on populations and territories within its domain.” <\/div>\n\n \n