I'd delve deeper beyond my comment because there's a lot of reasons I'm not the greatest source, not the least of which I'm just some white american dude with a comically terrible grasp of ONE dialect/language of Chinese and a wikipedia sourced knowledge of Chinese history.

Here's my understanding: Chinese can refer to many things that have their origin in what we call Mainland China these days. Chinese Language. Chinese History. Chinese Food. Chinese territory. Chinese government. Chinese people (citizens). Chinese people (ethnicity). The word is super-descriptive in that way, because that region, for three thousand years, was "homogenous" in a convenient way for propagandists and the history writers throughout time.

But if you delve in, you can see that it's truly absurd to refer to anything as Chinese. Chinese language - well, sure, Mandarin, right? But only because the seat of government is in Beijing, and it just picked that flavor. Nearly every city in the borders of the PRC have their own distinct dialect, or straight up separate language. The written system was invented in the 1950s based off a historical system that didn't just write Chinese, it wrote Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and also every language in between (Guangzhounese aka Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese sub-languages, etc). Which is "Chinese writing?" Which language is "Chinese language?" And what about when the Huns were around? What about when the Mongolians ruled it all? Was that "Chinese?" (a PRC censor would say ABSOLUTELY NOT and probably say you were treasonous to the harmony of Chinese culture for even suggesting it).

Chinese food - different in every city.

Chinese government - which one, the Democratic one that is seated in Taiwan, or the Autocratic one seated in Beijing? Or the City State of Hong Kong? Or the dead kingdoms?

I'm trying to indicate here why trying to say "Chinese is a nationality, not race" is a silly thing to say when Chinese can mean so many things that so say it's "not" something is a hard thing to prove. On top of all this, walk up to your average American and say "Chinese" and these subtleties are completely lost - EVERYONE knows what you mean by Chinese, well, it's Orange Chicken and Communism! That's what the American education system teaches us, after all, or at least, what it taught me growing up in rural America.

Ask Chinese people, or Taiwanese people (which I have done), what it means to be a Chinese person, and you'll likely get a very careful separation of the concept of Chinese person from the PRC. Many Taiwanese people would consider themselves Chinese if they had the opportunity to ensure the distinction was being made that this didn't mean they were pro-Beijing, simply that their history and culture shared or was identical to many people that happened to be born in Beijing.

> Nobody on Hacker News who encounters the phrase "Chinese hacker" is going to suddenly start discriminating against Chinese people,

Yesterday there was a thread about the experience of Black programmers in tech and I got into some discussions there that have destroyed my ability to believe in a sentence like this. There are avowed racists on this site. I went through the history of one who danced the blade well enough to occasionally fire off comments about how African people are genetically predisposed to lower IQ, without getting flagged/banned. This is a website like any other, a good one with better rules and moderation, yes, but an internet breeding ground anyway.