> China is largely ethnically homogenous This is a fiction that was created by Chinese nationalists [1] [2] [3] over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

> China is largely ethnically homogenous This is a fiction that was created by Chinese nationalists [1] [2] [3] over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. "Dialects" between provinces can be very different and mutually unintelligible verbally. In many other contexts they would have been considered different languages, but since the imperial bureaucracy and the Chinese writing system helped maintain a sense of unity in spite of it we don't. All this isn't to say Han identity is any less real than any other identity. The idea of "ethnic identity" is fundamentally constructed and imaginary across the board. That's also why it's not a great explanatory factor for much of anything. These categories aren't primordial, they're usually reflective of the very thing for which you're trying to use it as an explanation. [1] https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinesestudies/2016/09/23/8632/ https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinesestudies/2016/09/23/863... [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025378?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025378?seq=1 [3] https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07s1h1rf https://escholarship.org/uc/item/07s1h1rf