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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

> A China that leads the world will not offer the chance to be Chinese, because it is impossible to become Chinese.

I feel that this only applies for the elite, especially when there's a lot of political infighting; marrying an outsider will weaken the whole family which is really bad in a low trust society but that's another topic. This is not true for all social levels of China. China has practiced for what my international affairs prof terms as "reverse genocide". What is it? When an ethnically Han Chinese man or woman marries a non-Han partner, their children and their whole family are considered Chinese. To be fair, there are exceptions since China (and you can argue most of Asia) is still somewhat racist. If your children do no look "Chinese", they will not be considered as chinese.

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> This is not true for all social levels of China.

I somewhat disagree.

That type of "reverse genocide" only works in East Asia. One of the reasons for the ongoing conflict in Xinjiang is that the local Uyghur, Kyrgyz, et al. don't look Chinese and don't pay any lip service to the "superiority" of Han culture.

> If your children do no look "Chinese", they will not be considered as chinese.

And this is the reason why.

Even though their mother is 100% Han, my own children easily pass as average WASPs. No matter how long they live in China, no matter how fluent they are in Mandarin, they will never be accepted as Chinese by anyone other than her relatives.

I'm confused. You "disagree", yet I don't see anything that really disagrees from my post.

> One of the reasons for the ongoing conflict in Xinjiang is that the local Uyghur, Kyrgyz, et al. don't look Chinese and don't pay any lip service to the "superiority" of Han culture.

If Han Chinese ever start intermarrying with Uyghurs in greater numbers this will change. Given the ratio of males to females in the mainland, I would guess that this will happen way before a sexual revolution in China (which the lack of imo is the reason for the gender population gap). I feel that this is the same reason that Han chinese started to intermarry with both Mongols and Tibetans.

> Even though their mother is 100% Han, my own children easily pass as average WASPs.

Not all Happas pass as WASPs. A lot of my cousins can pass as Han. This guy is another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Locke

In all fairness, many Europeans (and Americans, of course) are "somewhat racist" too.

The word is "human".

I feel there's a big difference when you compare the US to either Europe or Asia as a whole: we are very open about it and our failings with it. It's in our consciousness to work hard to fight against it.

I think Europe is getting there with this frame of mind, but I don't feel that Asia even pretends to try.

I might agree with you, but I still think that declaring it outright might provoke the old "arrogant American" reaction.

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