The category ‘Chinese’ conflates race, language, culture, and descent across the diaspora.

Evidence

The term “Chinese,” whether referring restrictively only to the Han or more inclusively to the people of China, is a generic category comparable to the Victorian notion of “Anglo-Saxon”: it is assumed to be a race, a language, and a culture, even when its members are dispersed across the globe. Symptomatic of this phenomenon is the inclusion of Taiwan in most discussions of China, despite the radically different history, politics, cultures, and languages of the island nation: it would be roughly comparable to a contemporary textbook on England which expatiated on Australia and the United States. Not only is it assumed that “Chinese” is a language shared by most inhabitants of “Greater China,” despite ample evidence to the contrary, but also that all the “Chinese” are linked by virtue of descent. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3357

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Chinese as Anglo-Saxon’ analogy parallels how the reader’s own work treats ‘Arab’ or other civilizational categories as racial-linguistic-cultural bundles — a strong cross-domain peg for the graft/identity theme.
• SEED: The England-Australia-USA comparison as a lens on Taiwanese identity is a strong framing device for an essay on how collective-category thinking erases internal distinctness — usable in a piece on nationalism and taxonomy.