After US birthright citizenship ruling, lessons from how foreigners once ‘became Chinese’
Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship comes amid rising xenophobia. A look at how premodern China offered varied paths to assimilation
Questions about who belongs to a nation and how citizenship should be acquired remain as contentious today as they have ever been. The rise of xenophobic, far-right politics in many countries is an ugly consequence of this debate.
Yet the broader questions highlighted by the case – who can become part of a community, and on what basis – are ones that all peoples have attempted to answer, with varying degrees of success.
Like most premodern states, imperial China did not possess a nationality law in the contemporary sense, nor did it maintain a standardised legal procedure through which foreigners could apply for citizenship.
Instead, “becoming Chinese” was determined by a combination of cultural identity and political allegiance.
For most Chinese people before the modern era, “Chineseness” was a concept that emphasised shared civilisation, language, customs and loyalty to the imperial order rather than race or ethnicity. As a result, foreigners could gradually become accepted as Chinese through several well-established pathways.
One common route was voluntary submission to imperial authority and permanent settlement.