A brief follow up to my earlier post about immigration, identity and race in China. A commenter, darts, makes a point that I want to bring forward for further discussion. Here it is:
Sorry if the below seems
excessively focused on sex as a driver of societal development, but …
I imagine "mail order brides" will likely be the major component of
foreign migration, like in Taiwan and South Korea (two countries with
similar cultural backgrounds and, more importantly, sex ratios nearly
as bad). There's already about a billion women on earth who live in
countries with lower per-capita incomes than China. As China's growth
continues, that number is only going to get larger.
These women (and the children they bear) are going to be the ones
who make rural Chinese men want to rethink their attitudes, when they
see racial discrimination happening to their own loved ones. At first,
the brides will probably be from the "near abroad", the same countries
that supply TW and SK with women — Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia,
Uzbekistan (and maybe North Korea, if Kim Jong-Ill becomes Kim
Jong-Dead); the women won't quite pass for Chinese, but their children
could easily. But of course, China will have tens of millions of "bare
branches" by 2020, and in any given country, the proportion of women
who are willing to get married to foreign strangers is not going to be
that high. So the Chinese are going to have to start looking farther
afield to fill their demand – Moldova/Ukraine/Belarus, the poorer
countries of Latin America and Africa, etc.
As various commenters have noted, there is a significant racial aspect to "Chinese" identity, which makes it difficult to foresee a multi-racial notion of "Chineseness" emerging in the near future. I am not going to give up on the possibility of wider Chinese multicultralization, but this counterargument is strong. That being said, I had not thought about the gender dimension of the question until darts raised it. And it seems to me that this could be an important dynamic. We know of the very significant sex imbalance in PRC society, due to the one-child policy and the historical preference for male children. It seems plausible to me that the millions of young, single, Chinese males could very well search for brides from foreign countryies. And that dynamic could eventually lead to an expansion of the racial definition of Chineseness.
I continue to take the counterargument – i.e. that "Chinese" has become fused with certain racial assumptions such that a white person or a black person will not be considered Chinese by most Chinese – so there still may be a certain socio-cultural limit on how far sex-driven multiculturalization might go. But if the process begins to unfold, if more and more "foreign" women, women from racial categories not traditionally considered "Chinese" (I'm thinking India here) marry Chinese men and have children, might that open the door to at least a future possibility that a black woman might be accepted a Chinese?
The short term answer to the question is no. But let's think into the future fifity years. Then, perhaps my daughter will meet Chinese people who would be open to saying "yes, a black woman – and thus by extension a black person – can be Chinese."
I'm imagining I won't be around to see it myself…..
The Useless Tree 
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