[...] The current racial reality of China is informed by a 2000-year history of Chinese cultural imperialism and a more recent history of Han ethnocentric nationalism, as much as it has been moulded too by Western colonialism. It should be no surprise then, that Han Chinese people who have grown up in the West are often vastly different beings from those raised in a country where they are the normative citizen.

What does all this mean? On a personal level, I will never find representation in Chinese serial dramas; language aside, the only culture I really know is one that is entirely different, in which people like me are marginalised. Beyond this, British Asian, Asian-American, Asian-whatever Western diasporic identities are shaped by specific experiences of Eurocentric racial alienation as much as by any links we might have left to the homeland. This is the context that bounds our specific requests, and is not one that ‘real Asians’ share. We are not born racial subjects, but become so through our location in a racialised context. [...]

To argue that the opinions of all people of the same ‘race’ matter equally in a specifically Western debate is to reify the Western construct of race as unerringly real.