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> China was also very open to immigration and inclusive in what counted as "Chinese." I'm pretty sure this claim is invalid. Say you took a measure of genetic

> China was also very open to immigration and inclusive in what counted as "Chinese." I'm pretty sure this claim is invalid. Say you took a measure of genetic diversity in various populations, I'm pretty sure you would find that Han Chinese are less heterozygotic than other neighbouring Asian populations. Take for example, their Southern neighbour, India, I predict you see far more genetic variation. I think this maps out to just looking at phenotype variation. I have travelled a bit through South East Asia and India, and just looking at visible attributes like skin color, eye color, hair color, and so on, one sees huge variation, also their languages are distinct (not even from a single linguistic family like Sino-Tibetian). In contrast, in China, where I have lived in, I found that the amount of variation was much smaller (just small differences between Northern Chinese and Southern Chinese) which I predict corresponds with much lower genetic diversity and thus the "openness to immigration" is quite suspect.

qiqing 11y ago
Here's an interesting pickle about linguistic diversity: Jane Austen is roughly temporally equidistant between modern day and Shakespeare, yet our level of mutual intelligibility is so much higher. What changed? Standardization (such as printing a standard dictionary) drastically reduced the rate at which languages evolved. And one major historical difference between China and India is a history of unification, starting with the Qin Dynasty, which introduced dictionaries, standardized weights and measures, a single currency, and standard widths of roads. They were brutal in their implementation and it ultimately led to popular revolt, but the standards stuck. However, that would not be the last attempt at unification. In China's history, there have been repeated efforts at unifying an empire, splitting into multiple nations, re-unification, rinse, repeat. Have you noticed that all the terms that translate into "ethnic Chinese" in English are named after dynasties? At one point in time, identifying oneself as "Han" was like saying "I'm an American." Sure, my ancestors are a mix of Wu and Manchurian, but now we're part of the Han Nation. Or a different mix of other ethnicities for the Tang Dynasty. To put it another way, let's say the EU became one nation that lasted at least a century. People who previously identified as "German" or "Italian" (or Anglos? Saxons? Celts?) all self-identify as European. Fast forward another century. The empire is expanding, and Central Asia is part of the equation now, so European is defined "as opposed to" another group, but another unification event happens, and now everyone on that continent refers to themselves as Eurasian. And sometimes, on the East Coast, there's an influx of Australian immigrants which adds up over the next century. How arbitrary is it to say that Eurasia is 95% Eurasian? As for visual phenotype difference between Northern and Southern Chinese being "minor" -- these differences look very pronounced to me. Yet I have trouble telling the difference between, say, British and German people, for instance. Maybe we're just trained on different data sets?
- seren 11y ago
  One of the theory on face recognition is that we learn to recognized people by "storing" the difference between an average face and the people we are looking at. And we build that average face from the sum of all people we met. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect So indeed the different training set has a big impact.
qiqing 11y ago
I would also like to offer another data point. The way that Jews were treated in Europe vs in China in the same time period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews
- meric 11y ago
  Also, for Muslims, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people
barry-cotter 11y ago
> I'm pretty sure you would find that Han Chinese are less heterozygotic than other neighbouring Asian populations. Yes, but that's less a function of openness to immigration than the enormous number of native Chinese. The development of rice farming lead to a massive demographic expansion in a very short period of time. It's mostly founder effects. > Take for example, their Southern neighbour, India, I predict you see far more genetic variation. You will, but that's more because the Indian population structure is I think, about 2,000 years younger. China's population has more or less one base. Modern Indians (subcontinent, not Republic) are a mix of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian. http://www.unz.com/gnxp/indians-as-hybrids-a-k-a-aryan-invasion-in-the-house/?highlight=%22ancestral+north+indian%22 http://www.unz.com/gnxp/indians-as-hybrids-a-k-a-aryan-invas...
- linuxkerneldev 11y ago
  > the Indian population structure is I think, about 2,000 years younger. China's population has more or less one base Wouldn't your above statement that China's population is a single base invalidate the OT's statement that China was more open to immigration? Reading that link and following up on ASI, it looks like this is a truly ancient population set, ie: 3rd oldest after the first or second wave of migration out of Africa and past the Middle East. So it is interesting that this population set merged with numerous other population sets to form all the variation we see in South and South East Asia.

qiqing 11y ago

Here's an interesting pickle about linguistic diversity: Jane Austen is roughly temporally equidistant between modern day and Shakespeare, yet our level of mutual intelligibility is so much higher. What changed? Standardization (such as printing a standard dictionary) drastically reduced the rate at which languages evolved. And one major historical difference between China and India is a history of unification, starting with the Qin Dynasty, which introduced dictionaries, standardized weights and measures, a single currency, and standard widths of roads. They were brutal in their implementation and it ultimately led to popular revolt, but the standards stuck. However, that would not be the last attempt at unification. In China's history, there have been repeated efforts at unifying an empire, splitting into multiple nations, re-unification, rinse, repeat. Have you noticed that all the terms that translate into "ethnic Chinese" in English are named after dynasties? At one point in time, identifying oneself as "Han" was like saying "I'm an American." Sure, my ancestors are a mix of Wu and Manchurian, but now we're part of the Han Nation. Or a different mix of other ethnicities for the Tang Dynasty. To put it another way, let's say the EU became one nation that lasted at least a century. People who previously identified as "German" or "Italian" (or Anglos? Saxons? Celts?) all self-identify as European. Fast forward another century. The empire is expanding, and Central Asia is part of the equation now, so European is defined "as opposed to" another group, but another unification event happens, and now everyone on that continent refers to themselves as Eurasian. And sometimes, on the East Coast, there's an influx of Australian immigrants which adds up over the next century. How arbitrary is it to say that Eurasia is 95% Eurasian? As for visual phenotype difference between Northern and Southern Chinese being "minor" -- these differences look very pronounced to me. Yet I have trouble telling the difference between, say, British and German people, for instance. Maybe we're just trained on different data sets?

seren 11y ago
One of the theory on face recognition is that we learn to recognized people by "storing" the difference between an average face and the people we are looking at. And we build that average face from the sum of all people we met. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect So indeed the different training set has a big impact.

qiqing 11y ago

I would also like to offer another data point. The way that Jews were treated in Europe vs in China in the same time period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaifeng_Jews

meric 11y ago
Also, for Muslims, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people

barry-cotter 11y ago

> I'm pretty sure you would find that Han Chinese are less heterozygotic than other neighbouring Asian populations. Yes, but that's less a function of openness to immigration than the enormous number of native Chinese. The development of rice farming lead to a massive demographic expansion in a very short period of time. It's mostly founder effects. > Take for example, their Southern neighbour, India, I predict you see far more genetic variation. You will, but that's more because the Indian population structure is I think, about 2,000 years younger. China's population has more or less one base. Modern Indians (subcontinent, not Republic) are a mix of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian. http://www.unz.com/gnxp/indians-as-hybrids-a-k-a-aryan-invasion-in-the-house/?highlight=%22ancestral+north+indian%22 http://www.unz.com/gnxp/indians-as-hybrids-a-k-a-aryan-invas...

linuxkerneldev 11y ago
> the Indian population structure is I think, about 2,000 years younger. China's population has more or less one base Wouldn't your above statement that China's population is a single base invalidate the OT's statement that China was more open to immigration? Reading that link and following up on ASI, it looks like this is a truly ancient population set, ie: 3rd oldest after the first or second wave of migration out of Africa and past the Middle East. So it is interesting that this population set merged with numerous other population sets to form all the variation we see in South and South East Asia.