golodhendil
Active Member
I am very familiar with Chinese and Korean history, thank you very much, and I am also reasonably familiar with the literature of genetic data on many Eurasian populations. Han Chinese never controlled more than 1/4 of the Korean peninsula for any significant amount of time, and even the mighty Tang dynasty was quickly beaten out by the Korean Silla. China has >50 different ethnicities, but 90-95% of the Chinese population are Han Chinese, a highly homogenous and genetically relatively isolated population despite a small amount of contribution from Austro-Asiatic genes to southern Chinese dating back from the initial southward Han migrations 1-2 millennia ago. Koreans and Japanese are even more homogenous and genetically isolated. On the other hand, ethnic groups in Pakistan (eg, Punjabis, Sindhis), Bangladesh (Bengalis) and Sri Lanka (Tamils, and the genetically related Sinhalese) are not only highly related but in fact shared with India; the only WASP thing here is the post-colonial artificial political division of South Asia that disregarded the cultural and ethnographical continuity of that subcontinent. An "East Asian' category, while might make some sense culturally or in terms of certain physical attributes, is thus highly inconsistent scientifically with a South Asian category.Now you're just proving my point. There are over 50 different ethnicities in China and some closer to Korean or (as you say) Vietnamese as they are other Chinese. The earliest known Korean state was Old Choson in what is now northwestern Korea and southern Northeast China and Han Chinese ruled Korea for many centuries, so there's an big intermix there culturally as well if you read ancient Chinese and Korean history. This is not the forum to be discussing this, but you've proved my point that they should just categorize as East Asian to be consistent with the South Asian category for the purposes of this high level precision survey on visible minorities in Canada.
Singapore is almost 80% Han Chinese ethnically, so that's not even a relevant comparison and I would in fact think (or at least, it would be reasonable) that Singaporean immigrants are already classified in the "Chinese" group. Without data I would also doubt how "relatively large" is the proportion especially for Philippines, though you can always play around with what you mean by "relatively large". I would, however, agree with lumping together most of the European groups because all Indo-European-speaking Europeans are in fact very closely related to each other; the current classification, though, might better reflect the history of various waves of immigration from Europe.Note that a relatively large proportion of the people who've emigrated from places like the Philippines, Singapore, or even Jamaica are - in part or in whole - ethnically Chinese. There's been enough diasporas over time (not just from China) to really dilute the meaning of these ethnic/national groupings and people that have migrated before are much more likely to migrate again (which is why many have made their way to Canada). That's partly why it makes no sense to lump some countries together and not others. To an extent, these cultural groupings are just the WASP/French establishment in Canada's way of sorting people out...differentiate between Korea and Japan, don't differentiate between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. It's a bit old-fashioned and will change eventually, especially as the demographic numbers change. As we become more familiar with larger numbers of people from various South Asian countries, we may separate them and begin lumping together the European countries with a dwindling demographic presence.
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