[rawgabbit]

https://www.history.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Evelyn-Rawsk... Professor Evelyn Rawski of U of Pittsburg explained that the last Chinese dynasty was the Qing who were ethnically Manchu. They saw themselves as ruling five different peoples: Han China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Uighurs, and Tibet. She argues that sinicization is a modern invention.

Quotes from the PDF "What is at issue is not the magnitude of Qing achievement, but Ho's statement that "the key to its [Qing] success was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization". The new scholarship suggests just the opposite: the key to Qing success, at least in terms of empire-building, lay in its ability to use its cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia and to differentiate the administration of the non-Han regions from the administration of the former Ming provinces."

""Sinicization" -- the thesis that all of the non-Han peoples who have entered the Chinese realm have eventually been assimilated into Chinese culture -- is a twentieth century Han nationalist interpretation of China's past."