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One thing: one really can't talk about "China" qua society, or "Chinese" qua ethnicity, in this context. While there's a long, long tradition of talking about Zhongguo 中國 ("the Middle Kingdom", though its original meaning was closer to "the states of the Central [Plain]"), and asserting monoculturalism, in reality Chinese regionalism has always been really pronounced -- hence the reality that when spoken, Chinese "dialects" (like Putonghua/Mandarin and Cantonese) are actually more different, and less mutually intelligible, than European Romance languages. (And it goes beyond language -- think regional cuisines. As further illustration, eespecially if you look at Warring States period cultures, there's actually a stark difference between the traditions of the northern plain and of the south, esp. the state of Chu 楚 -- you can even see it, obviously, in their art and artifacts. The aesthetic are wildly different.)

Now, you could argue that Taiwan represented a Chinese conquest of indigenous peoples. But even before the island was annexed (during the Qing dynasty, in 1683 CE) there had been fishermen and pirates from the mainland (and Japan) operating there to some degree.

Ultimately, you have various populations leaving the Asian mainland at different times. Sometimes later populations intermixed/intermarried with populations that had arrived in outlying territories earlier, sometimes they displaced them; usually it was a combination of both. But it wasn't some monolithic ethno-state exploiting a technological advantage to expand its reach -- the reality was much more complicated.

Yes your point is taken, I guess saying "people coming from the geographical area that's now China" is more accurate.

Coincidentally, yesterday I was watching "Civilizations" on Netflix, and they brought up the 1986 discovery of these incredible Bronze Age statues from the 12th-11th century B.C.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanxingdui

And they were saying this contradicts the "Middle Kingdom" idea, i.e. that all of Chinese culture came from one place. The book Sapiens reminds us that every civilization/government likes to make an argument for why it has inevitable "divine" authority, and China is no exception. They exaggerate their history to claim power.

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But I think there is probably a reasonable analogy to Europe. It's not inaccurate to say the "Europeans" conquered the Americas starting around the 1500's.

European states like Spain, Britain, and the Netherlands were constantly at war with each other. But they all made conquests to different places in the Americas at slightly different times (i.e. South and Central America for Spain, the Caribbean, North America, etc.)

These societies shared broad characteristics and influenced other. Not just agriculture, but also property rights, the rule of law, etc. Their spoken and written languages were mutually unintelligible, but they recognized each other's currencies and could trade with each other. They adopted each other's technologies.

Nobody would call them the same, but it is coherent to talk about them as "European". It's a matter of semantics, but I think you can also call a group of disparate people "Chinese" in the same way. Although in the latter case there is a much greater difference in time. The Europe of today has considerable cultural continuity with the Europe of 1500 (art, music, government to some extent, etc.). I don't know how true that is for pre-modern China, although I suspect that if you adjust for the time period, it's roughly similar.

I would be interested in pointers to more resources about that.

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Another point: what other term would I use besides "Chinese"? "Asian" does not seem accurate or what historians would use. I think historians would come up with a different term than "China" or "Sino" if the difference were extremely large.

For example, as far as I know Mycenaean society has basically nothing in common with modern Greece -- no continuity in art, music, government, etc. -- but it's still called "Mycenaean Greece" since the land area they occupied is the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greece

If there is another word for post-agricultural but pre-modern China, I would be happy to use it! "Chinese" is indeed a big and vague term with a lot of baggage to many people. (I am Chinese myself but born in America.)

> I guess saying "people coming from the geographical area that's now China" is more accurate.

Agreed, but a significant number of scholars still think the Yayoi people came from what's now Korea, and I think that there were also movements of peoples from the Southeast Asian peninsula into the Philippines and Indonesian archipelago. Now, there are certainly overseas Chinese communities in these places who came there recently, i.e. in the last few centuries, and have maintained their Chinese identity -- but the reason why most people in Indonesia look significantly different from most Papuans or Aboriginal Australians is not because of those recent arrivals, but rather because of a wave of in-migration from Southeast Asia that occurred millennia ago, long before China had taken on anything like its current form.

I actually think "Asian" is far and away the better term to use here, and the one historians (I actually am a historian of China) would use: it refers simply and neutrally to peoples from the continent of Asia, just as "Europeans" strictly speaking refers to peoples from the continent of Europe (in contrast with more culturally fraught terms like "Westerners", which connotes the technologies, currencies, etc. you mention). But there are in fact several different terms used to refer to the cultures that have affinities with China's when it comes to philosophy, linguistics, politics, etc. -- "Sinitic" and "Confucian" being the most prominent. (Some just call China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and certain pockets of other areas the "Sinosphere"). How appropriate those terms are is rightly debated, of course, but they are taken seriously as categories of analysis. Lots of members of the New Qing History school of historiography (e.g. Pam Crossley, Mark Elliott, Laura Hostetler, and Emma Jinhua Teng) have written about these issues, as have Ge Zhaoguang 葛兆光, Peter Bol, and Yao Dali 姚大力. James Millward had a good outline of attitudes regarding minorities (少數民族) and ethnicity from the Qing to the present-day in his New York Review of Books article on the current crackdown in Xinjiang a few weeks ago, though I think it's paywalled.

(BTW, I think the general feeling is, in fact, that Chu culture was lineally descended from the Sanxingdui culture -- Sapiens did well to use it as an illustration.)

For the case of Polynesia (including Hawaii), they are considered to be Austronesian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples

It is widely believed that they are related to (and originated from) the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, which is distinct from Chinese civilization in both genetics, culture and agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio...

When the Polynesians arrived by boat in New Zealand (Maori), Hawaii, Easter Island and other islands in the South Pacific prior to AD 1300, they were the first settlers there. Also, their expansion is completely unrelated to "Chinese expansion".

Hawai'i was already occupied before the population Cook met arrived. Like the Chatham islanders (still present when Cook landed, before the Maori learned of them), they were mostly wiped out. In Hawai'i only legends of "menehunes" remain. A similar process happened in England and Ireland, with Gauls displacing the Picts ("pixies"). The Gauls of Britain and Ireland lost their culture and land to Nordic invaders, but stiil represent much of the genetic heritage there.

The "menehunes" arrived via the Marquesas. The present Polynesian population came from Tahiti or Fiji, although all ultimately trace back to Taiwan.

There is some evidence that islands closer to New Guinea were populated more than 20,000 years ago, before the present population swept in.

Japan adds an interesting footnote: the samurai are said to retain a much higher proportion if Ainu genetic heritage than typical Japanese. This observation is not popular in Japan.

>I don't know much about the history of Japan, but it seems to have been inhabited by non-Japanese/Chinese and then the Chinese ancestors of Japanese conquered the land. If anyone knows details I'm interested.

That's quite a strong and controversial claim to be making without strong evidence. From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea. As one of the other replies pointed out, it's also a bit anachronistic to be applying terms like China and Japan in this situation.

> From what I understand, most modern Japanese historians are quite opposed to the above idea.

Japan is a country where even in academia, people often have an unshakable belief in the "uniqueness" of their culture. This has made Japanese unwilling to consider connections to other Asian regions and peoples. Consequently, a lot of the scholarly consensus on Japanese history has been formed by scholars from outside Japan who don't have an attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.

Generally, Korean has been seen as the probable source of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, not China, and there were Japanoid populations on the Korean peninsula centuries ago. However, Alexander Vovin (one of the world's most respected scholars on the history of Japanese) recently gave a thought-provoking conference presentation arguing that the Japanese language and certain aspects of Japanese culture may well ultimately spring from coastal China.

Do you have a link to Alexander Vovin's presentation somewhere online? It sounds fascinating.

I believe he posted it to his academia.edu.

>Japanoid

Given my experience with these outside "scholars" of my own culture, I'm going to go with the Japanese consensus. Often what these people claim as "objectivity" is actually just ignorance that they mask with the pseudoscientific language of the Humanities.

>attachment to the notion that Japan is particularly unique.

Every nation and culture is unique. Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors, this notion does not seem unfounded. The hostility that outside scholars have towards this idea does however seem less than objective.

How is "Japanoid" pseudoscientific language? It is standard practice in linguistics and archaeology to add -oid to X to denote languages that the historical record shows were related to X, but were not necessarily the same as X. (Another example are the dialects further north in the Balkans in the first millennium that were related to Albanian but not necessarily Albanian, hence Albanoid).

> Given that their language is not even in the same family as any of their neighbors.

Again, Japanese shares the same family with neighbours they had on the Korean peninsula before the Korean peninsula's demographics changed. Almost no one disputes this. Longer-range connections like Altaic or Martine Robbeet's Transeurasian hypothesis are more controversial, but still within the scholarly mainstream.

See my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19713685

As mentioned, the Chinese exaggerate their history to claim power. But "modern Japanese historians" aren't exactly disinterested either.

I'd be interested to read more informed sources on the topics, rather than vague policing of words.

Okay, now the hard question.

Why should we care that anybody was a "first people"? And how long down the line will we recognize a group of people as fist people? Do they not make babies with non first people?

10k years from now are we still going to be going on about "so and so is of so so blood line making him indigenous" ?

While they seem like shitty questions, they are serious, because for somebody like me who knows little about his past, its hard to wrap my mind around being so attached to a group identity that really seems like it matters very little to your ability to succeeded and live a happy life today -- unless -- you declare being indigenous is something special and thus gives you extra rights, or more say, or something? And if having the label brings nothing, they why such the fuss?

Also, I am sure we can all trace our blood back to some "first people", so now what? Can I go back to my "first peoples" land and demand to be called indigenous?

your ancestry and heritage are very much attached to your ability to succeed and live a happy life today, in most parts of the world. That is why people want these things recognized so that statistics can be collected to shape public policy. This is even more so for people that would be indigenous such as native americans, aboriginals, tainos, and ainu.

Speaking from experience in India, the indigenous people in India form the lowest strata of caste system. They were I'll treated and exluded from society for 1000s of years. Government now has a "schedule" of indegenous people that require government aid and affirmative action in jobs. These are people living in abject poverty.

Part of the issue is cultural preservation, Distinct cultures, particularly indigenous ones, have unique oral and recorded histories, and translation can lose important cultural context.

As an example of that, there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu.

Also, ethnic discrimination against indigenous peoples has a long history pretty much globally. Legal equality is often not enough, because the past couple centuries have been spent whittling their economic and social capital to basically nothing. Reparations or subsidy is required for even a hope of getting those people on equal footing.

> there are a total of 10 Manchu native speakers left in the world. This is a problem because many Qing-dynasty documents are in Manchu

The lack of Manchu native speakers is not a problem for dealing with Qing-era state documents. The Manchu language is well-described and for many, many decades Han Chinese scholars (and then foreign scholars in Europe and North America) have been trained to work with Manchu sources. Does the lack of Latin native speakers hinder anyone from working with a new Roman-era text or inscription?

Furthermore, those handful of remaining native Manchus heavily code-switch with Chinese, and they have lost a great deal of their native Manchu vocabulary (a common phenomenon as a language dies), so even if you did show them a Qing-era text, they would probably be unable to understand much of its terminology without special training.

I am all for protecting language diversity, but your Manchu example is uninformed.

A lack of native speakers can inhibit context. How many translations exist of, say, the Aeneid, or Beowulf?

If Manchu didn't need to be protected because of how widely known it is, the notoriously assimilationist PRC would not be launching an initiative to translate all the documents, and would not be promoting Manchu language use and education[0]. You don't see similar efforts with, say, Shanghainese.

[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/1982570/quie...

Language changes, and texts that were written before in a language are not necessarily intelligible to native speakers today. 2000 years after the Aeneid was written, ordinary native speakers of the language it was written in (i.e now French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.) are unable to make much sense of it, let alone provide valuable insights to scholars. It is trained non-native speakers who are able to read it at all.

Similarly, even if Manchu had not become so moribund, its native speakers probably would have been no more proficient in Qing-era texts, especially considering that they represent an elite literary style and bureaucratic terminology, than trained non-native speakers.

It's not a particularly hard question, it's answered in the article for that specific case:

The act implemented Japan's compulsory national education system in Hokkaido and eliminated traditional systems of Ainu land rights and claims. Over time, the Ainu were forced to give up their land and adopt Japanese customs through a series of government initiatives.

This was in 1899, not 10,000 years ago. I don't know if they are 'shitty' questions but they aren't very serious since they are framed in a pointedly inaccurate and uninformed way.

>This was in 1899, not 10,000 years ago

The first people were in 1899? Or just the "second" people came in 1899?

Part of my argument is that you can't be a "first" person in 1899, because the first people arrived thousands of years before.

Even the first subject is only partly decedents of the "first" peoples.

So if we are going to go down these lines of people get rights, or special treatment based off being indigenous, what are we really looking at? There are have been 1000s of years of intermingling both known and unknown, a "people" are not a static group, people are changing all the time.

Shitty was not the word I wanted to use but I was in a time crunch, callus is more how I feel on the subject.

special treatment based off being indigenous

Not having your language and culture coercively erased is not 'special treatment'. Again, framing it like that is not some flinty insight into a hard truth. It's just making stuff up.

> Not having your language and culture coercively erased is not 'special treatment'.

Languages and cultures have a life cycle, I am not sure any of us would want to live in a society that tolerated and nurtured every culture that ever existed.

That being said you / me / they, are not their culture. You are a individual, and people should only be treated based off their individual merit. Using your culture as a way to distinguished your self and get special treatment, respect, or reconsecration is literally an extension of racism. This is not something you chose, there for it should be meaningless much like the color of your hair, or skin color. When you treat culture like you are -- you are creating exclusionary boundaries based on happenstance. There is nothing to be proud of because you were born in X culture, because you have done nothing. There is nothing to be ashamed of because you were born in Y culture because you as a individual have done nothing but simply existed. Wanting to preserve it -- and not make anew is just burying your head in the sand.

The article is about discrimination and coercion, not the natural ebb and flow of languages and cultures. If you haven't had a chance to read it, it's probably a good time to do so if you want to discuss what's actually in it.

And this thread is about a small part of the topic. We don't need special designations or considerations to combat discrimination. I am also calling into the question the entire notion of indigenous people -- considering that many of groups in question have lived on the same land for 100s of years. I also call into question the notion that your (as in you/me/anybody) ancestors have any tangible relation to today. In such, that, we grant a clean slate to EVERYBODY when they are born, and judge and treat them only on their merit.

In short, your ancestors accomplishments/failures or sins matter not, for you are a new person.

It's not a hard question...

Indigenous peoples have their own cultures, languages, traditions, etc. Unfortunately, colonization has oftentimes wiped out these things, as said in the article:

>The act implemented Japan's compulsory national education system in Hokkaido and eliminated traditional systems of Ainu land rights and claims. Over time, the Ainu were forced to give up their land and adopt Japanese customs through a series of government initiatives.

>High levels of poverty and unemployment currently hinder the Ainu's social progress. The percentage of Ainu who attend high school and university is far lower than the Hokkaido average.

Recognizing that the Ainu are an indigenous people is one of many steps that are necessary to create a more inclusive society so the Ainu can preserve their culture/traditions and not be forced to assimilate.

> agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples

Isn't part of the history of Plymouth that the Mayflower pilgrims had no idea how to farm and were woefully unprepared and thus on the verge of starving, but the indigenous Wampanoag people helped them learn how to do it and survive?

Isn't there massive, widespread and overwhelming evidence that most indigenous societies in the Americas as an example practiced sophisticated agriculture and had an enormous variety of developed crops and techniques including selective breeding, biochar, terracing, enormous terraforming projects, large scale irrigation systems, special varieties of maize for arctic, desert and salty biomes, as well as developing massive trade networks that managed to get central american grown cocoa as far north as Utah?

How could it be that such cultures could possibly be described as being distinguished by not having agriculture?

> > agriculture is the essential difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples

Yes, that part of the parent comment stuck out at me as grossly untrue. While some were hunter-gatherers, many American indigenous populations had widespread agriculture [1].

[1] I know it's a bit uncouth to cite wikipedia, but it was easy as a source for something I already knew to be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Amer...