China claims authority over all ethnic Chinese regardless of citizenship

Evidence

The Chinese government sees mainland China as the core state of a Chinese civilization toward which all other Chinese communities should orient themselves. Having long since abandoned its efforts to promote its interests abroad through local communist parties, the government has sought “to position itself as the worldwide representative of Chineseness.” To the Chinese government, people of Chinese descent, even if citizens of another country, are members of the Chinese community and hence in some measure subject to the authority of the Chinese government. Chinese identity comes to be defined in racial terms. Chinese are those of the same “race, blood, and culture,” as one PRC scholar put it. In the mid-1990s, this theme was increasingly heard from governmental and private Chinese sources. For Chinese and those of Chinese descent living in non-Chinese societies, the “mirror test” thus becomes the test of who they are: “Go look in the mirror,” is the admonition of Beijing-oriented Chinese to those of Chinese descent trying to assimilate into foreign societies. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 458

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘cultural China’ and the mirror test as a contemporary lens on diaspora identity politics, comparing Beijing’s racial-terms claim to other states claiming kin abroad.