Thread:Univero/@comment-24166893-20190726015356/@comment-24166893-20190726034831

Let me ask you something? Poland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc are considered part of Western civilization correct? Well guess what Taiwan is considered part of Chinese (aka, Confucian civilization) and many historians also consider Korea and Vietnam to be part of Chinese civilization.

When somebody says that this person is Latino, what does it mean? That they come from a culture that is descended from the mixing of the Spanish or Portuguese conquerors / colonists and varous indigenous nations (e.g. Maya, Quechua, Nahuatl, Aymara, etc). Some speak Portuguese, some speak Spanish, and some don't speak either but an indigenous tribal language. All of them are Latinos. Guess what Chinese may speak Mandarin, Teochiu, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, or some other regional dialect but they are all Chinese. Though there are ethnic variations, such as Han Chinese or Hakka Chinese.

What does it mean to be Catholic? There are regional diffrences between an Italian, French, Spanish, Mexican, Brazilian, or Filipino Catholic. Shaped by history and local cultural adaptations (seen in customs, traditions, festivals, holidays, saints, and so on), yet all in theory look toward Rome and the Pope, and are considered Catholic. Well what makes someone ethnically Chinese is not their skin color (variations from pale white to brownish), nor their dialect (there are dozens with Mandarin being the biggest), nor their region (Han is the biggest), nor their nationality (PRC, Taiwan, Singapore, United States, Canada, etc). 

What makes one Chinese are the cultural elements since Chinese is not a race but a people that emerged over millennia from the expansion, colonization, and conquest of the rest of China by the Xia Chinese who originated in Shaanxi province. They intermarried with those they conquered, sometimes willingly and sometimes by force, resulting in the range of skin tone, plus a range in height and body types (tall and slender to short and stocky).  What unites them is common history (real or perceived - Middle Kingdom, the Mandate of Heaven, etc),  common customs and religion (Chinese system of beliefs and traditions formed by Confucianism, Daoism, Chinese Folk Religion, and Buddhism), and the Chinese writing system of pictograms / characters.

It's the latter which is most important. In Europe the migration / invasion / conquest of what used to be the Roman Empire by various Germanic tribes who spoke different languages eventually gave rise to distinct nation-states populated by distint peoples. Who spoke different languages, had different customs, and even though they used the Roman alphabet, they were unable to understand each other's writing. In China that did not happen and the biggest reason is because of the Chinese writing system. It didn't matter if you spoke Hakka, Teochiu, Cantonese, Mandarin, or some other Chinese dialect. Yes, they can't understand each other, but they didn't have to. When it came to written news, contracts, laws, regulations, proclamations, religious text, and so on it was all done using the same written system. All of them understood what this or that character / pictogram said. Together with the imperial civil service and the ideology of the Mandate of Heaven,  the writing system was one of the major components of the glue that held the Chinese empire together and contributed to its restoration whenever it fell due to civil war or invasion. That same writing system passed down the same ideas, customs, beliefs, ideology, etc to each new imperial dynasty, the elites (nobility, aristocratic landowners, merchants, imperial bureaucrats, military officers, etc), and later the masses (in the modern era).