User:SuperSuperSmarty

Many people conflate nationality, ethnicity and race. So, I am going to spell it out for you, if you are here reading my User Page.

1. Nationality: citizenship. If you are a US citizen, and all your official documents show it, then you are an American citizen.

2. Race: what you look like. If you have dark skin, then you may be Black or Brown, but most likely not White.

3. Ethnicity: your language, culture, food, traditions, people and history.

With that said, if you are ethnic Han, speak some kind of Sinitic language and have ROC citizenship, then you are a Chinese citizen. The Republic of China has always been the government of China, even though many countries recognize the People's Republic of China as the only government of China. The people of the ROC is *Chinese* by nationality. The shortened name may be Taiwan and the presumed nationality Taiwanese, but Taiwanese can be extremely ambiguous. Taiwanese may refer to:

• people of Taiwan in general
• indigenous people of Taiwan (2% of the total population, by the way, as opposed to 98% ethnic Chinese)
• citizens of the Republic of China

I often cringe when people use Taiwanese-American, thinking that a celebrity is American of Taiwanese descent, because this is incorrect. More often than not, the person is ethnic Chinese who may or may not have Austronesian ancestry, but the family has been completely sinicized, hence the Sinitic surname. Also, the person may not hold a "Taiwanese nationality" if that person is born in the USA. The former nationality of the parents is irrelevant, and that person would be "Chinese-American". American by nationality, Chinese by ethnicity.

People do this to the Hmong people or the Hoa people... so why not the ethnic Chinese people in Taiwan?

Or perhaps, people are partial to the Western anti-China claims or ignorant of Chinese history to the extent that they will just conveniently slap a "Taiwanese" label as "former nationality".

There's my vent. It's a common annoyance that I find often on Wikipedia.

Addendum #1: One argument for the use of "Taiwanese" may be that it is used as a self-identifier. However, my viewpoint is this, people don't live in vacuums, and they do adopt whatever the general society uses, even if that usage is misleading and ambiguous. If a person does self-identify as "Taiwanese" with purpose and intention, then they may want to emphasize the former nationality of their parents instead of ethnicity, presumably thinking that that is more descriptive; and they especially don't want to be associated with the Chinese or overseas Chinese derived from the Mainland.

In any case, I strongly urge you to do 2 things:

• Stop using the term Taiwanese. It's very ambiguous, and it paints a picture that Taiwan is a nation-state formed by the indigenous Taiwanese people, a place where ethnic Han people just assimilate into. Well, the reality is quite the opposite. The Republic of China retreated to Taiwan and ruled there with the KMT government in charge, sinicizing all those who lived there and making Mandarin the official language of the Republic of China.
• Actually know the difference between race, ethnicity and nationality, and stop using them interchangeably! A person can never be of Taiwanese descent, unless they do have Austronesian blood and cultural heritage and want to emphasize that despite the Chinese side and Sinitic surname, maybe because of sheer hate of the PRC (aka China colloquially).

If you can't do these 2 things, then just use Sinitic people. Sinitic people focuses on a people's ancestry and ethnicity than nationality.

I personally may describe a person as having "Sinitic origins", because "Chinese" may be too nationalistic and "Taiwanese" is too ambiguous. If a person has ancestry from what is now Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and England, then I'll say that the person has "Germanic origins". Again, the -ic words are very useful in talking about ancestry and ethnicity.