GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HOW CHINA BECAME CHINESE • 323
proceeded to swallow up dozens of non-Slavic peoples, many of which
retain their original language and cultural identity. Just as American history
is the story of how our continent's expanse became American, Russia's
history is the story of how Russia became Russian. India, Indonesia,
and Brazil are also recent political creations (or re-creations, in the case of
India), home to about 850, 670, and 210 languages, respectively.
The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world's
most populous nation, China. Today, China appears politically, culturally,
and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople. It was already unified
politically in 221 B.C. and has remained so for most of the centuries since
then. From the beginnings of literacy in China, it has had only a single
writing system, whereas modern Europe uses dozens of modified alphabets.
Of China's 1.2 billion people, over 800 million speak Mandarin, the
language with by far the largest number of native speakers in the world.
Some 300 million others speak seven other languages as similar to Mandarin,
and to each other, as Spanish is to Italian. Thus, not only is China not
a melting pot, but it seems absurd to ask how China became Chinese.
China has been Chinese, almost from the beginnings of its recorded history.
We take this seeming unity of China so much for granted that we forget
how astonishing it is. One reason why we should not have expected such
unity is genetic. While a coarse racial classification of world peoples lumps
all Chinese people as so-called Mongoloids, that category conceals much
more variation than the differences between Swedes, Italians, and Irish
within Europe. In particular, North and South Chinese are genetically and
physically rather different: North Chinese are most similar to Tibetans and
Nepalese, while South Chinese are similar to Vietnamese and Filipinos.
My North and South Chinese friends can often distinguish each other at a
glance by physical appearance: the North Chinese tend to be taller, heavier,
paler, with more pointed noses, and with smaller eyes that appear
more "slanted" (because of what is termed their epicanthic fold).
North and South China differ in environment and climate as well: the
north is drier and colder; the south, wetter and hotter. Genetic differences
arising in those differing environments imply a long history of moderate
isolation between peoples of North and South China. How did those peoples
nevertheless end up with the same or very similar languages and cultures?
China's apparent linguistic near-unity is also puzzling in view of the