They carried out the ethnic classification project in the 1950s because it's what was done earlier in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet model was seen to work well in promoting multi-ethnic unity.

Earlier in the 1930s and early 1940s, when Fei Xiaotong did research on the culture of the ethnic groups in the southwest, he was criticized by the ROC government for encouraging separatism among people who were officially regarded as 'Han'.

Hum.

But honestly speaking, how many people are still Han after thousands of years of intermarrying with other groups, like the steppe nomads that came into China or the Mongols or Manchus or whatever else you got.

Do you mean in terms of genetics, or in terms of identity?

If the former, then what standard would you set for being 'genetically Han'?

I think I will go off topic but first, I think in terms of genetics, when I think of Han, I think of Tang-Han; like when people talk about glorious times of China, they think of Tang and Han, but then you first need to have a concept of identity then you identify the heritage through genetic means so the more I think of it, the more I don't see the difference b/w identity and genetics.


I mean, genetically speaking, genetic pools were probably very very similar b/w most Asians, that is its small enough for me to completely ignore their differences until someone can tell me what is in their genes that makes them uniquely special from all the other Asian genes. So my thinking now will probably go with the you first conceive the idea of a identity, then you justify it by tracing a heritage, and you prove it through genetic means.

What do you think?

But just on identity alone, I am not too sure if people back then would call themselves Han in Tang. Is there any confirmation or dispute on this? I think most literature I read where the concept of ethnic identity do not come up simply b/c back then no one have ethnic identity [and even in China its really hard to say that the Chinese have these identity b/c when Song enter Liao territory during the Song-Jin alliance, Han people there simply ignore and sometimes even fought against the 'liberation' army] and that most people in Europe do not have the concept of identity till Napoleon's campign.

That is a major theme of my PhD research. What I'd say on a preliminary basis is that in the Tang empire, whoever was not 'Fan' 蕃 was automatically 'Han', thus you always saw the binary Fan-Han being used. The question then is that if Fan was not so much an ethnonym as a generic label for 'foreigner', then was Han an ethnonym?