[HuShifang]

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.

[chubot]

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.)

[HuShifang]

> 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.)