In countries like France and Norway, the government census strictly avoids asking about race and ethnicity. Governed by a desire for national unity, these states operate on a firm premise: categorising citizens by skin colour risks creating divisions and reinforcing prejudice.
Across the Atlantic and in the Commonwealth, you find a different philosophy. The United States, United Kingdom and Canada measure race and ethnicity. In these societies, data collection isn’t seen as a wedge to divide people, but as an essential tool to spot discrimination, design better social safety nets and address health disparities.
Yet both models are falling short. As global migration accelerates and people move fluidly between countries, our basic data buckets are failing to keep up. By lumping vast, highly diverse populations into monolithic labels like “Asian”, “Chinese” or “Indian”, standard census forms miss the rich subgroup dynamics that drive business, culture and community life.
Take the Teochew people, to whom I belong, a subgroup originating from the coastal Chaoshan region of Guangdong province. On a typical census form in North America or Europe, a Teochew individual is recorded simply as “Chinese” or “Asian”. Yet many Teochews in the West are also diasporic migrants from Southeast Asia self-identifying as Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai or Singaporean.
A single checkbox erases a complex identity, a deep history of migration and an economic network that spans the globe.
Look at the box-office success of Dear You, a film rooted in the Teochew language and heritage. It touched a raw nerve across the global diaspora by portraying the history of qiaopi, the family letters and remittances sent home by migrant workers to southern China.