Ren De

To further illustrate the point about “Chinaman” allow me to write a bit more about how you describe things in Chinese.  If you want to refer to a Chinese person you say meiguoren, meaning “American person.” However, suppose you want to describe an American object, like a TV or a computer?  You use the term de (pronounced “duh").  Thus while an American person is meiguoren, an American car would be meiguode.  In other words, there is a character (ren) for describing people in Chinese, and there is another character (de) for describing objects in Chinese.  (There are lots of contextual variations on this rule, of course, but these are the basics.)

In English, and most western languages, we don’t make this sort of distinction.  “He is a Chinese person” and “This is Chinese food” both use the same adjective to describe the subject of the sentence, whether it is people or food.  However, this is not how Chinese works.  “Chinaman,” being literally the way a Chinese man would refer to himself in Chinese (zhonguoren) is a perfectly legitimate means of referring to a Chinese, whether or not the left-wing hurt-feelings police have deemed it otherwise.

The point of these last two posts has not been to try to get some grass-roots movement going to legitimize the use of the word “Chinaman.” It’s primarily to show that these stupid rules which society foists upon itself, usually rules decided by a self-anointed elite, are often the result of people who know absolutely nothing about what they’re being offended over.