What is “Han” anyway? Are they the people originally citizens of the Han empire? Bare in mind that there were a lot of migration of people and inter-marriages during that time. Many Huns (Or Xiong Nu) choose to live inside Han empire and gradually abandoned their normantic life style and adopted Han culture. So what are they? Han?

Bare in mind also that in ancient China there was no concept of “race” or country, as the world as a whole is supposed to be the subject of the Emperor. What originally distinguished between the so called “barbarians” races and and the “Chinese” race is a concept that is generally not based on birth, but on the cultural differences.

I am a firm supporter of our country to abandon the idea of racial difference all together. For me the idea of “Chinese citizen” is good enough, and what is more important is the Chinese culture values and customs. Say if a person of European origins thinks and behaves like a typical Chinese, he is Chinese by all means in my book. On the contrary, if a person of Chinese parents did not have the culture characteristics, he/she will not be regarded as a Chinese but a foreigner by me.

CMD, that said, if you say I’m wrong, then I’ll stop defending you and let Stuart’s “grow up” comment stand.

Back to the language/dialect thing. For anyone who’s curious, CMD is referring to a quote usually attributed to Max Weinrich, “A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” (You can see discussion in Wikipedia about possible origins.)

The interesting thing is that the quote is usually used to explain why two more or less mutually intelligible “languages” (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese) are not called “dialects”. Because, of course, they are politically independent and often at odds.

China has turned this on its head by taking “languages” that are much more distant linguistically than Spanish and Portuguese and insisting on calling them dialects.

But I agree with CMD that the quote is still applicable.

Grow up. Respond with maturity or not at all. This has never been a blog for ‘tit for tat’ diatribes. There is no vestige of racism in my remarks; if there had been, Jeremiah would have deleted the comment.

“…because it lends legitimacy to the claim that the land area of China has always been inhabited by Chinese.”

Exactly. And that imperative, in my opinion, overides the principles of scientific research in this area.

I am sorry that you are little too late to the language debate that was settled long time ago.

Difference between language and dialect? One has a army.

btw. I grew up speaking Sichuanese, which is rather close the Beijing dialect, and is usually classified as part of Mandarin’s southern branch.
But people from Beijing in general has no idea what we are talking about.

@Stuart

Nice try. The support for multiregional hypothesis by SOME Chinese anthropologists has everything to do with politics.

Current Chinese establishment favor the theory over “Out of Africa” theory because it lends legitimacy to the claim that the land area of China has always been inhabited by Chinese.

Yes, I agree with you that when you are a racist, you would see evidences of racism all around you.

The “purity” thread also extends into linguistics — more my area of interest. There is a long academic tradition of believing that Mandarin has NOT been influenced by other languages (e.g. Manchu), despite some evidence to the contrary.

More prominently, there is an ongoing and sometimes vitriolic effort to call “Chinese” a language rather than what it most inarguably is, on any rational basis: a family of related languages. This argument is so political that it extends right into the bowels of academics where some researchers, out of a quite rational fear of stepping on sensitive Chinese toes, still refer to the (mutually unintelligible) languages of Cantonese, Wu, etc. as “dialects” of Chinese. (At least when speaking English. In Mandarin the term 方言 is more neutral). Such conflation is understandable in everyday language, but you might hope for better in academic discussion.

The language issue is inextricably intertwined with race in the term hànyǔ (汉语) of course, but in this case the ethnic minorities with their distinct languages can get a bit of support from those Han who do NOT speak Mandarin as their native language.