AHC: More Chinese majority countries

Blood as in blood relations. Whether your full chinese or half chinese, quarter chinese,etc.

If it is culture, then I do no think this will be possible.

OTL Britain and US as an example. Same language, same history. However, at one point in time, diverge into a different country, different culture.

We can also say that for OTL Singapore and China. They may came from China but they aint loyal to China. Even if you say it is culture, the Singaporeans have a different culture from the one in Mainland even though they have certain commonalities much like US and UK have.
What does Chinese mean though? If you mean Chinese to be descendents of people living around the Yellow River, then most southern Chinese are only a little bit Chinese if at all. Taiwan would be as Chinese as Mexico is Spanish. Han is a problematic term as well. You don't have to have a drop of Han ancestry to be considered Han as long as you adopt the culture.
 
What does Chinese mean though? If you mean Chinese to be descendents of people living around the Yellow River, then most southern Chinese are only a little bit Chinese if at all. Taiwan would be as Chinese as Mexico is Spanish. Han is a problematic term as well. You don't have to have a drop of Han ancestry to be considered Han as long as you adopt the culture.

But how far would be the culture be. Singapore took a lot of its culture from Han Chinese but has already created its own different culture than mainaland Han Chinese. So in away they are already Singaporeans with a unique identity not anymore Chinese even though ethnic wise they have Chinese blood. The same way can be applied to Malaysians Chinese or Indonesian Chinese or Chinese Americans.

The same way Australia/USA/Canada are to UK. You do not call Australians/Canadians/Americans British anymore nor their culture even considered British anymore.
 
I think the best metric of "Chineseness" in the general sense (as in not necessarily ruled by a single Chinese government) is if they use a Chinese writing system and to a lesser extent speak a language that is either spoken in China or directly rooted in one that originated there.
 
I think the best metric of "Chineseness" in the general sense (as in not necessarily ruled by a single Chinese government) is if they use a Chinese writing system and to a lesser extent speak a language that is either spoken in China or directly rooted in one that originated there.

If we do retain speaking language in China, comparing it to other cultures, English is still dominant in Australia, US, Canada, UK. Does this make them all British culture?

If I understood this correctly, If directly rooted/originated there, wouldn't anyone with ethnic blood Chinese qualify as well regardless if it was their parents/grandparents or great grandparents or more that were Chinese? Or did you mean only parents or themselves who came directly from China?
 
If we do retain speaking language in China, comparing it to other cultures, English is still dominant in Australia, US, Canada, UK. Does this make them all British culture?
Yes, at least in that specific sense.

But China is not Britain. Britain is an island and not very big; as such the breadth of its cultural diversity is far less than that of China, which is the size of Europe. It is also clear that in Britain, the main culture is essentially English rather than Scottish or Welsh.

Which part of China, as mosodake brought up, is representative of "Chinese" culture? Mandarin is the main language now, but it has only existed in its current form for a relatively short period of time and was not well-propagated until about half a century ago. There are 7 categories Chinese spoken languages that are not mutually intelligible at all, like Cantonese and Shanghainese. In 1900, Mandarin-speakers made up a plurality but by no means an overwhelming majority. And they often spoke their own variations of Mandarin that might not be immediately intelligible if you weren't from that area. Basically, China and therefore the idea of "Chineseness" is incredibly diverse.

Some people argue that being Chinese stems from being ruled by the Chinese emperor, or by a polity that claims the same prestige. But what if the country finds itself in a period of chaos? Are the Chinese people no longer Chinese? This is why I say that the real definition of "Chinese" lies in the usage of Chinese characters. This is the only definte unifying factor. "Chinese" doesn't mean chopsticks, it doesn't mean dumplings, it doesn't mean pagodas, it means Chinese script.

Now of course, there need to be some considerations: Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese all used Chinese characters 100 years ago; Japan still uses them and the Koreans have only recently phased them out of common use. So were these people Chinese? I'm not going to say that they were, but the fact is that by using Chinese characters they connected themselves in a linguistic and thus a rather deep cultural sense to that multiethnic, multiregional country in East Asia we call "China". It's also worth noting that none of the three countries I mentioned fully adapted Chinese script to their languages; Japanese for instance is composed of many completely native words that aren't rendered in Chinese characters, as well as Sino-Japanese terms (and western loanwords). So they are not Chinese.

If you have populations in other countries who came from China, and write Chinese, then they are culturally Chinese. It's similar to how one can be both American and of another nationality, since the idea of "American" does not limit itself in the way that European concepts of national identity tend to do.

If I understood this correctly, If directly rooted/originated there, wouldn't anyone with ethnic blood Chinese qualify as well regardless if it was their parents/grandparents or great grandparents or more that were Chinese? Or did you mean only parents or themselves who came directly from China?
No. As I explained above, the idea of "being Chinese" is ultimately only concerned with the Chinese script and its derivative languages. In OTL the areas ruled by a central Chinese polity tend to correspond with the areas that use Chinese characters, but this is only incidental. If you do not use Chinese characters, or would not learn them if you were to become literate (since many Chinese, have historically been unable to read) in the area that you live in, you are not, generally speaking, culturally Chinese.
 
I presume having China break up would be cheating? If the Manchu invasion is less effective or the Taiping revolt moreso we are looking at two or more dynasties.
 
There was a map floating around showing an Australia settled by Chinese criminals, exiles, and other undesirables. Most settlement occurs in OTL Queensland where the climate is most similar to the homeland, while more temperate southeast settled later (perhaps when they strike gold).

Interestingly the same map suggests this *Australia is building an empire of its own in the South Pacific, by collecting tributes from the kings and chieftains of the islands. While Australia is majority Chinese, the South Pacific remains populated by Polynesians and Melanesians who learnt Chinese as a prestige language. That yields a dozen Sinophone countries which are not ethnically Chinese.

What's the URL ? I'm interested in the map. Thanks !
 
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