i'm late to this thread, but i think this is mainly due to two things which are not simply ethnicity or genetics: 1. speaking chinese  chinese is a language based on imagery. their words are not so much abstract things as they are representations of objects or the sounds they make. basically all their animal names are based on the sound the animal makes mao - cat, gou - dog, ji - chicken. their character for a tree looks like a tree - , add another tree in and it is the word for forest - , add a third tree and it means a whole lot of trees - . the symbol for female is a woman kneeling down (serving the family food) - . a male -  is a combination of the symbol for field -  and strength -  (originally a plow).  contast this to english where almost all words are completely abstracted. we have an alphabet so there is no visual connection whatsoever, some of our words are from the sounds objects make, but those are more so referring to the sounds themselves than the objects that make them.  in english, we have abstract words defined by other abstract words defined by other abstract words, so the vocalization itself can carry immense meaning. in chinese, each word has a more fundamental representation, the vocalization and context clues in the sentence serve to remind the speaker of the fundamental meaning of the individual words. 2. chinese people hate uniqueness and individualism with a passion and wish to be a perfectly uniform people. my chinese teacher in high school told us a story of how when she was a kid she had a fairly uncommon surname. she hated how her surname made her different and the other children made fun of her for it. she decided that she wanted to marry a man with a very common surname so she could be "just like everyone else", and ended up fulfilling that dream by marrying a dose with the surname chen.
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