This would also be interesting about China.
China’s topography has historically encouraged regional separatism, but Han culturalism provided unity for the Chinese. Han Chinese culturalism arose to distinguish between the culture of the Han, or inner people (nei ren) and the ‘barbarians’, the outer people (wei ren), Chinese social institution and feelings of cultural and aesthetic superiority have provided reassurance for the Han Chinese in the face of barbarian penetration and conquest.
The concept of Han culture began with the Shang dynasty, 1750 -1040 BC, whose political centre was located north of the Yellow River. The Shang provided China’s first written history as well as the assertion of central cultural superiority over the surrounding people by designating as barbarians everyone who did not yet acknowledge the central government supremacy. The Chinese distinguished between ‘raw barbarians’ (shengfan) or the unassimilated people and the ‘cooked barbarians’ (shufan) or assimilated taxpayers who enjoyed the fruits of Chinese culture. For example, Han Chinese officials separated the ‘cooked’ Li of the coast of Hainan, who enjoyed the benefits of Chinese civilisation, from the wild ‘uncooked’ Li of the central forests, far from the influences of Han culture.
Barbarians were given generic names in the Chinese classics and histories: the Yi barbarians to the east, the Man to the South, the Rong to the west and Di to the north (when westerners arrived by sea, they were officially designated until the late 19th century as Yi). Until the 1930s, the names of outgroups (wai ren) were commonly written with an animal radical: the Di, the northern tribe, were linked to the Dog; the Man and the Min of the south were characterised with reptiles; the Qiang was written with a sheep radical. This reflected the Han Chinese conviction that civilisation and culture were linked with humanity; alien groups living outside the pale of Chinese society were regarded as inhuman savages. To be labelled a barbarian was a cultural rather than racial distinction.
That the custom of sharply distinguishing went along with calling China the Middle Kingdom (zhong guo), , which began by ruling the Central Plain (zhongyang) in North China. Rather than using outright military conquest of outsiders, the theory of ‘using the Chinese ways to transform the barbarians’ (yongxiabianyi) was promulgated. By Chinese cultural absorption or racial integration through intermarriage, a barbarian could become Han Chinese (hanhua). To be counted within China, groups accepted the rituals and cosmology that gave the Han dynastic state the Mandate of Heaven to rule over mankind. Non acceptance of this politicised culture left one outside of Zhongguo or China
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As they say -
hamam men sab nanga