Examining Ethnicity: Patterns of Minority Identification Among Children of Interethnic Marriages in China

Ethnic iden-tity is a highly contested issue in China. Yet, the lit-er-a-ture on the social con-struc-tion of ethnoracial iden-tity is dom-i-nated by research on the Americas. In this study, we inves-ti-gate pat-terns of eth-nic iden-ti-fi-ca-tion among chil-dren of inter-eth-nic par-ents in China using cen-sus data from 2000 and sur-vey data from 2010-2018. We focus on chil-dren who are aged 20 or youn-ger and have one par-ent iden-ti-fied as an eth-nic minor-ity and one par-ent iden-ti-fied as an eth-nic Han. We find that the stron-gest pre-dic-tor of a child's minor-ity iden-ti-fi-ca-tion is the father's eth-nic-ity. Minority iden-ti-fi-ca-tion is also asso-ci-ated with gen-der, birth year, mother's edu-ca-tion, house-hold income, migra-tion sta-tus, par-ent's per-cep-tion of the child's dil-i-gence, the geo-graphic con-cen-tra-tion of minor-i-ties, and eli-gi-bil-ity for eth-nic-ity- based bonus points on the col-lege entrance exam-i-na-tion. Taken together, the results sug-gest that chil-dren's ethnoracial iden-tity is shaped by fam-ily demo-graphic char-ac-ter-is-tics as well as by edu-ca-tion policy.