The Checkbox: Tangled Identities of the Chinese Diaspora

Every high school student in China has seen the checkbox. Buried in the gaokao (高考, China’s national college entrance exam, a single test that determines the trajectory of nearly every eighteen-year-old in the country) registration form, nestled among fields for name, school, and ethnicity, there is a small box labeled huaqiao zinü (华侨子女, children of overseas Chinese). Check it, and you get bonus points, five, ten, sometimes more, depending on the province. In the northern provinces, far from the old emigrant coasts of Fujian and Guangdong, almost nobody checks it. And almost nobody can tell what a huaqiao actually is.The standard assumption is simple enough: a Chinese person living abroad. But this definition has been written, erased, and rewritten at least five times in the past 150 years, and each rewrite left a few million people on the wrong side of the line. Today, Chinese law maintains a precise three-way taxonomy: huaqiao (华侨, Chinese citizens residing overseas), huaren (华人,…