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> 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.) |