What does ethnic Chinese, ethnic Jew, etc mean?
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Ethnic means bloodlines and features. For example, you can be ethnically Jewish, but not religiously Jewish and vice versa. It’s mostly used to specify what you are in relation to an ethnogroup. Ethnic Chinese could be someone who is from Chinese bloodlines and has Chinese features (such as eye shape, body size, hair texture) but has no connection to China and views their home as where they were born/raised.
Both “Chinese” and “Jew” have both cultural and ethnic meanings. There are people who live in China, think of themselves as Chinese, were brought up with Chinese culture, but are more closely related to an ethnic group other than the Han population – maybe the family immigrated to China at some point in the past. You can think of them as being more distant from the majority of Chinese people on the massive family tree of all humans – they are culturally but not ethnically Chinese since they don’t share the same group of ancient ancestors with the ethnically Chinese.
Same for Jewish people – there were an ancient group of Jewish people from whom the ethnically Jewish can trace their family tree. There are also people who think of themselves as Jewish and practice Judaism but aren’t a part of that same family tree – they are culturally but not ethnically Jewish.
I just want to mention really quickly that a lot of very weird people use these terms to justify some very fucked up actions against groups of people on the basis of their cultural or ethnic identity – be sure to be wary and critical of people using these terms since they’re not inherently bad concepts but are often used in some unsavory ways.
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