I am diasporic Chinese AND a native citizen of an SEAsian country. I am also an immigrant in the Anglosphere dealing with such conversations. I’d appreciate input also from Chinese historians who ARE CHINESE, if they wish to clarify what I’ve said here is accurate.
As much as it shouldn’t be controversial to reiterate this, it seems like a majority of people haven’t yet decolonized their beliefs to see that:
Some Asian people are indigenous to their homelands.
Said indigenous Asian people experienced colonisation by Eurocolonialists and Japan, have been subjected to slavery and genocides. The only difference is a lot of them have won and survived in reclaiming their homeland.
Some Asian people are diasporic descendants and migrants and multigenerational descendants of migrants within the same Asian region itself. While ALSO bearing the status of being born citizens once nation-states aka countries became a normalised (Western) concept, and therefore being considered native to the country.
Some Asian people are multigenerational descendants of Asian immigrants in the Anglosphere, just like the Anglo-Saxon immigrants there—except without the colonial violence against the Indigenous populations.
Chinese people such as the Han, are indigenous to China. [Just as many Indians are indigenous to India, and many Malays are indigenous to the Malacca Straits etc].
Yet many people don’t believe it because they subscribe to the Forever Foreignor myth and most people in the Anglosphere encounter only diasporic Chinese persons and expats.
Furthermore, Chinese people are not afforded the same degree of respect for their cultural preservation, because they do not fit the Eurocolonial model of Indigeneity. This allows people to turn a blind eye to the atrocities that Eurocolonialists and Japanese colonisers have done to China, and what is continued to be done towards them.
Chinese people do not technically qualify as “indigenous” under the Eurocolonial standards for this term, as they do not fit the criteria of being ethnic minorities surviving on colonised land. This is also why Taiwan is seen as having “Taiwanese natives”, but not the Chinese.
Furthermore, given China’s cultural revolutions and multiple unifications as a systematic defense system against foreign colonial threats, many do not see them as retaining unique regional and tribal characteristics, cultures and spirituality. But I can say that Hokkien people ≠ Cantonese people ≠ Hakka people ≠ Teochew people. All of us have varying physical features, body shapes, eye shapes and sizes, hair texture and types, skin tones and colour, too. Some natives in China may identify as ethnically, culturally and nationality-wise as Chinese. Others differ in their preferences and may identify with only a few, one or none of these.
Our Chinese dialects and our types of food are NOT interchangeable. Some of my elders even insist we have different cultural characteristics [ie some are more hardened while others are more gentle]. But we are all Chinese at the same time and most of us can speak the unified Chinese tongue aka Mandarin, enough to find solidarity with each other.
Although the cultural revolutions and unifications were a “tribe-on-tribe” war, this wasn’t just in-fighting. It was an immune system reaction and defensive apoptosis aimed at preserving all of China and its hundreds of tribes as a whole, against the divide-and-conquer tactics of the West.
The unification of the dialects into the primacy of the Mandarin tongue, and how Mandarin has been legitimised as a “civil language”, means that people don’t view Mandarin-speaking Chinese as natives.
Many in the West doubt that an indigenous culture can be an ethnic majority. They doubt native cultures can be so globally recognised, civilised, romanticised, “cultured”, with such an extensive ancient history. The most baffling of all to them is that an indigenous culture can have a legitimate and fully autonomous governing body with a MASSIVE homeland ruled by its natives, not by white people.
Much of this enables them to argue the right of Chinese people in “occupying China”, and tries to split China into the “natives VS colonisers” per Eurocolonial models of Indigeneity.
Modern day China is literally one example of what could have happened if native peoples had defeated colonial rule. China successfully pushed out the Russian, American, British, European and Japanese colonisers, but it did all of this at the cost of so much blood, lives, pain, economic and infrastructural destruction, and an intergenerational spiritual-cultural wound that hasn’t healed.
It wasn’t just “wars”, as much as the West wants to frame it as an equal conflict. Just as they’re doing right now to the genocide in Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan.
It was colonialist influences attempting and sometimes succeeding in colonising parts of China, as they did to Aotearoa, Australia, America and many parts of Asia.
Even in SEAsia, although we have had lateral violences between ethnic groups, many of these were consequences of the involvement of British and Dutch colonial rule, the disastrous affairs, inequalities and political imbalances they created in their wake. Some Anti-Black, Sinophobic, Islamophobic and Xenophobic sentiments were brought over by these Eurocolonialists, which formed complex systematic racisms that extends beyond what is familiar to American critical race theories. They also permanently embedded things like homophobia and transphobia which different greatly from the queer consciousness of Asian cultures at the time.
It is NOT that there was a complete absence of xenophobia, queerphobia and ethnocentrism in Asia, but that it wasn’t to such an extent, it didn’t involve such strict binaries of “masculine and feminine” with ideals of such enshrined in whiteness, nor did it follow the same dehumanising colourist categorisations of Eurocolonialism.
Millions of Chinese natives were killed in these colonialist genocides, human-experimented upon, subject to war crimes, women children and the elderly raped city by city. Many were human trafficked as sex slaves, and even when they were “saved” by the West’s soldiers, they were just resold to White soldiers. Drugs such as opium were forcibly imported by the British for population control and to reduce economic power, and when the Japanese colonised parts of China, they established a global drug trade based in China which formed a significant percentage of drugs circulating the world.
Immigration, refugee status AND this slave trade created the diasporic populations across Asia and the West. It wasn’t just “Chinese people fleeing Chinese governments”, it’s also the fact that many were fleeing colonial influences in their regions, and many became collateral in the conflicts instigated by colonial influences against the Chinese governing bodies.
In SEAsia we even have myths and legends created by fear of the Portuguese & Dutch colonisers who would rape, kidnap our women and children and sell them as slaves overseas. So embedded in our culture was our fear for these people that our legends tell of these white devils, and we recognised them for their characteristic fair hair and red hair. Our people and ancestors have suffered systemic slavery; Look up the Pacific slave trade and Blackbirding. Chinese natives underwent indentured labour in extremely dehumanising conditions, due to legally-bound, coercive and frequently inescapable circumstances, which constitutes a form of slavery [6 Forms of Slavery]. Our women were subject to literal sexual slavery, human trafficking and even the adoption industry and the deceptive Philanthropism which has been built off child trafficking and the destruction of Chinese families.
In self-defense, China underwent violent revolutions to push out Eurocolonial and Imperialist influences from Japan, Russia and America. They had to meticulously exterminate the sneaky influences and strings pulled by the West to influence East Asian politics aiming to ideologically and religiously “convert” aka erase Chinese culture. And while the West may have secured relations and influence to commodify Japan and Korea for its Eurocolonial expansion, China did not give in, and sacrifices were made to reach this end.
Much of this defensiveness continues to this day. But in reading the publicly-accessible book published by the US FBI, where they admit to infiltrating the internal affairs of Asia, you’d realise that this isn’t unwarranted. Yet why is it that China isn’t afforded the same grace as if it were say, a Native American group investigating and protesting against white American colonisation?
This is why the views on Japanese and Korean people are so different from how the West views the Chinese as inferior labourers, uglier, lower class, uncivilised, backwards, and terror threats.
China and Asia is devoid of issues with recognising ethnic minorities and existing tribes. China does have a history of Colonisation and Imperialisation, as well as violence against ethnic minorities. Countries like Indonesia have committed genocide and ecocides against the Melanesians and Papuans. And there have been lateral violence and race wars between ethnic groups within SEAsia.
Chinese Indigenous peoples should equate their situation with American Indigenous peoples and Australian Indigenous peoples.
But that Eurocolonial models of Indigeneity and colonialist violence often lacks salience when applied to international politics. Lateral violence and what is frequently presumed to be unprovoked authoritarianism and totalitarianism forgets the subtle involvements of the West in provoking such violent means of self-preservation.
The Chinese who form the ethnic majority ARE natives who survived the violence at the hands of their own government, but MOST OF ALL at the hands of Eurocolonialists and Japanese colonisers. They have won, but their losses, what they have had to do to survive, and their continued battle to preserve their cultures from the propaganda and politics of Eurocolonialists, should not be made invisible.
There are still existing tribes who wish to preserve their cultural traditions and some do not agree with the Unified standards of the “larger tribe”’s government. But this isn’t the same as the American government’s relationships with the Native American people and American Indigenous peoples.
Chinese people from China, and even diasporic descendants, should be given more recognition in Indigenous discussions for them to speak about their motherland and connecting with their native homeland.
At the same time conversations should be diverse enough to recognise diasporic Chinese people for their different backgrounds—some with immigration histories more violent than others.
