"... there were many different civilisations in China 3000 years ago. So it
really challenges us to rethink what we know about Chinese history"
- Tan Hui Sm, Deputy Director, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore.
The Chinese ethnic group, known otherwise as the Han Chinese (汉人), Tang-ren (唐人), or Hua-ren (华人), is often propagated as a unified people group that had its origins in the Yellow River basin (or Central Plains) some 5000 years ago. This is a myth. In reality, the term encompasses a wide range of regional tribes, each with their own origins, history, culture, and identity. (In stating this, I am not even including the recognised minority groups in China such as the Miao, Tibetan, Hui etc). To state that all Chinese are the same would be akin to deny all nations within Europe of their own identities apart from being "European".
The common "Chinese" identity has its roots as a political tool to subjugate and assimilate the various groups under a dominant Han tribe that estalished itself into an imperial power in the Central Plains and finally conquered the other regions in modern China. The terms "Chinese" (derived from "Chin" or "Qin" - the first dynasty that "unified China"), "Han" and "Tang" all refer to the height of political and military dominance by this particular ethnic group. Hua-ren (华人) - derived from Zhong-hua (中华 - the literary name for China), is the modern equivalent of this propaganda tool.
It is argued that all Chinese are unified by a common Han language (汉语). In truth, the many people groups share the same written language only because the Qin emperor had forcibly burnt and destroyed all other forms of written text during a reign of terror, thus depriving the other people's of their own literary and historical heritage. This authentic diversity, however, is survived by the existence of spoken languages. Though widely termed as dialects and not languages, these verbals are clearly distinct. For example, the Minnan dialect used around the Fujian province, has only 46.1% mutual intelligibility with Mandarin (source: www.Glossika.com). Mandarin, used now as the standard spoken language for all Chinese, is in reality the dialect of the northern Chinese - where again the seat of political dominance lies in Beijing (literary: northern capital). By instituting Mandarin as the official national language, the other Chinese groups will in the long run gradually forfeit their own distinctiveness in subject to the northern Han tribe.
My ancestry is from southern China. I am Teochew, a people group from Chaozhou (潮州) region, now in east Guangdong province. The culturally and linguistically akin Chaozhou and the nearby Shantou city are together known as Chaoshan(潮汕). Although sometimes similar with the other southern Chinese groups such as the Hokkiens and Cantonese, our customs and manners are markedly different from those of the northern Chinese. Consciousness of this south-north divide is accented by the recent years' mass arrival of northern Chinese in Singapore, where most of the Chinese population's forebears had come from the south.
Interestingly, the separate distinctiveness between the southern Chinese, specifically the Chaoshan people, from the nothern Han has been backed by a recent genetic study. This 2006 report by the Center for Molecular Biology and Forensic Genetics Laboratory, Shantou University Medical College, Shantou, Guangdong states:
"The phylogenic tree analysis based on the HLA-A and -B allele frequencies of
all the 10 Chinese ethnic groups revealed that Chaoshanese, while clustering in
general with the southern China-related Han Chinese, had the highest affinity to
the Mainland Minnanese, but separated distinctively from the northern Han
Chinese."
(See full report "Genetic link between Chaoshan and other Chinese Han populations: Evidence from HLA-A and HLA-B allele frequency distribution" in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Citation&list_uids=16883565)
No wonder I am a dog lover - naturally, I am not Chinese.
