THE first discoveries by the China Human Genome Diversity Project are shaking deeply rooted prejudices and assumptions about the origins of the Chinese race.
Professor Jin Li at the Human Genetics Centre in Houston at the University of Texas has been helping his colleagues in China to apply the same gene-mapping techniques that forced researchers elsewhere to re-examine theories on the origins of humans.
In the early 1980s, when Chinese researchers began to report significant differences between the populations north and south of the Yangtze River, their papers were quietly ignored. The reasons are partly ideological.
Genetics was a forbidden 'bourgeois' science under Chairman Mao Zedong, who believed the Chinese constituted a biologically distinct group. The Chinese thinkers he read as a youth taught that China was populated by the Earth's original inhabitants.
Politicians such as Sun Yat-sen believed that humankind was divided into five races, including the Chinese. Determined to forge a national and racial consciousness out of the disparate peoples subject to the Qing emperors, Sun, Kang Youwei and others insisted that there was a distinct Chinese race, just as the Russians emphasised Pan-Slavism and Germans talked of the German Volk.
'The Chinese people are of the Han or Chinese race with common blood, common religion and common customs, a single, pure race,' Sun said.