Chinese elites conflated race and ethnicity to make culture derive from blood

Evidence

If socially constructed “races” are population groups which are imagined to have boundaries based on real or imagined biological characteristics, and if they can be contrasted to socially constructed “ethnicities,” which are population groups thought to be based on culturally acquired characteristics, then both were seen to be coterminous by political elites in modern China: ideas of “culture,” “ethnicity,” and “race,” in other words, were often conflated by political and intellectual elites in order to represent cultural features as secondary to, and derivative of, an imagined racial specificity. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3298

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage usefully sketches the analytic distinction between socially constructed race (imagined biological boundaries) and ethnicity (culturally acquired characteristics), then shows their conflation in China.