Geomax defining east and southeast asia

[AlexBrown84]

do you agree with this categorization?


yes some parts of china are southeast asia imo. anything south of guangzhou

and i’ve been to every country in asia

 

[AlexBrown84]

crazy i’ve conquered all these countries at the age of 22

im a subject matter expert of this region so ask me anything

 

[BiggChungus]

southeast asia starts at the border of hapltype O whatever, which coincides with the asian population expanding out from mongolia, basically

southern china absorbed tons of people who never invented the wheel. thankfully they were far enough from africa that the gene pool wasnt as disastrous ad the middle east, but the damage was done

 

[Rance]

I basically agree but here's my take on it. I specifically think that Guangxi and Yunnan provinces should be included in SE Asia but no other Chinese provinces.

Also edited Myanmar to be completely within SE Asia.

Also cut a bit of Tibet out that was sticking into SE Asia.

 

[Rance]

I got funky with it and map a whole labeled map



Yes sentimentally I feel that Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands are part of East Asia even though they're all Russian people.

 

[BiggChungus]

take a look at the dna charts they have. people in guangzhou are half or more southeast asian by descent. the admixture goes up to 20% even in the north because in the past the southern provinces were full of poor people that couldn't farm properly and got distributed to the north as slave labor

the chinese themselves say shanghai is firmly in "the south". and look, it's solidly in the middle of the country. the south existed as a gigantic slave plantation for a thousand years. the chinese have been in taiwan for less long than canadians and americans have been in the new world.

 

[Rance]

take a look at the dna charts they have. people in guangzhou are half or more southeast asian by descent. the admixture goes up to 20% even in the north because in the past the southern provinces were full of poor people that couldn't farm properly and got distributed to the north as slave labor

the chinese themselves say shanghai is firmly in "the south". and look, it's solidly in the middle of the country. the south existed as a gigantic slave plantation for a thousand years. the chinese have been in taiwan for less long than canadians and americans have been in the new world.

That's fair, and of course bordering areas are going to have admixture. I still think there's enough Han Chinese blood and mainstream Chinese culture in Guangzhou to classify it as East Asian though. This is very different from Yunnan which almost doesn't seem like China at all, where the minority ethnic groups dominate the faces you can see every day.

Taiwan has been thoroughly Sinicized enough to definitely consider it East Asia. The aboriginal people are not too different from Native Americans in the U.S. Though there are more of them per capita than Native Americans, they're still a minority group.

Basically the question I asked myself for the East Asia/Southeast Asia border was "does this place seem more like typical China or more like Laos/Vietnam?" Only Guangxi and Yunnan fit the bill IMO, though I've been to neither so I'm no expert.

Hainan province is basically a shitty Chinese version of Hawaii that's been thoroughly colonized and has almost no indigenous culture to speak of so I looped it in to the East.

I think the North/South divide for China is an interesting topic but not particularly relevant. You might as well be talking about North and South Korea. South China has always been considered part of East Asia in general.