Chinese states reinvented border peoples as Han subbranches to legitimize territorial control

Evidence

Politics have been an essential factor in the emergence of racial discourse in modern China: in order to legitimize control over the territory which was part of the imperial realm until 1911, the political leaders of the Republic until 1949 and the People’s Republic after 1949 have reinvented subject peoples in border areas as mere subbranches of the Han. This assimilationist vision emphasizes both the organic entity of all the peoples living within the political boundaries of China and the inevitable fusion of non-Han groups into a broader Chinese nation dominated by the Han: the political boundaries of the state, in short, could be claimed to be based on a more profound biological unity between the various peoples of China. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3300

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to literature on nations as imagined communities and the ideological manufacture of ethnic homogeneity, but here it is a state-driven retroactive race-making project distinct from Western colonial racial science.