Many answers here use mixed-race as the content, but I don’t think this is a perfect answer.
This man, you would think he is a Westerner, but he is actually a Chinese named Li Yizu, who was born in 1938 at Mackenzie Memorial Hospital ( now Tianjin Hospital ) in Tianjin, China.
You will be confused and amazed by his appearance. Yes, your doubt is not wrong, because racially, he is not Chinese, he is not even mixed-race.
In fact, he is the child of an American couple. His biological parents gave birth to him in China and then abandoned him in China shortly after he was born. They didn’t even give him a name or leave their own names, people only knew that he was the child of an American couple. In other words, he is an “abandoned baby of the West.”
However, not long after he was abandoned by his biological parents, he was quickly adopted by a Chinese couple.
This Chinese couple is from Shandong Province, China. The husband is named Li Duanfu (李瑞甫), a businessman, and his wife is named Zhao Xiuzhen (趙秀珍). They came to Tianjin, China on business in 1938 and adopted him from the hospital.
His adoptive father Li Duanfu named him Li Yizu (李憶祖). It’s a very typical Chinese name, which means that the couple does not feel alienated by his race, nor does they see him as “different”. The Chinese couple already had several children, but they treated him as their own , and the children welcomed him.
Li Yizu and his adoptive mother, Zhao Xiuzhen, at their home in Beijing.
Before the age of five, Li Yizu lived in Beijing with his adoptive parents and other brothers and sisters. However, due to the increasingly severe situation of the Second Sino-Japanese War, his adoptive parents had to move away from Beijing with their children. They moved several times in several Chinese counties and cities until Japan announced its unconditional surrender in 1945, and they moved back to Beijing.
Although because of the war, Li Yizu’s adoptive father Li Duanfu’s business work was stagnant for several years, his economic situation was unstable for a period of time, and he even had to move several times to escape the Japanese army. But Li Duanfu and Zhao Xiuzhen never let any of their children go hungry or miss out on school.
Li Yizu is no different from other Chinese children. They played together in the fields and indulged in reading popular Chinese wuxia novels (chivalric fiction) such as ” The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants “, etc. Although some of them only knew each other briefly due to the war, they still played and chatted happily together. The war never stopped them from making friends and playing various entertainment games.
“The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants” books from the early to mid-20th century.
No Chinese child ever paid attention to Li Yizu’s appearance or anything else. To them, he was just a playmate and a friend, and they didn’t care about anything else. And their parents have the same attitude as their children.
In this way, Li Yizu grew up in China in an ordinary way and completed all his studies in China. In 1961, he graduated from the Beijing Institute of Geology ( now China University of Geosciences ) and was subsequently hired by the government as an engineer.
Li Yizu and his classmates at the Beijing Institute of Geology
Initially, he was assigned to work in Beijing, but he believed that Beijing was advanced and wealthy, while the more backward regions needed more engineers to help develop.
It just so happened that the government was calling on people to go to poor and backward areas for construction, so he submitted several transfer applications to the government.
Finally, the government approved his application, transferred him to Xinjiang, and assigned him to the 156 Coalfield Geology Team of the Coal Industry Administration.
The 156 Coalfield Geological Team, referred to as the 156 Team, is not an ordinary geological survey team, because it is the first team in China organized by professional engineers and scientists to go to Xinjiang to conduct coalfield and geological surveys, and most of the team members are from Northeast China.
Later, he went to many backward areas such as Tibet and Shanxi due to work needs, but his main work place was still Xinjiang.
Li Yizu took this photo while working in Tibet, when his geological survey team was camped in the mountains of Tibet.
The work in Xinjiang is very hard. He and his colleagues slept in the open air and trekked in the wild all year round, but they overcame everything, and they worked in Xinjiang for 60 years.
Li Yizu and his colleagues take photos in front of their tent, it was 1962, and they were conducting a geological survey in Xinjiang.
His wife, Cao Jinxia (曹錦霞), was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China. Like him, she is a geological engineer. The two met through a blind date, introduced by Li Yizu’s classmate. They met in 1964 and got married in 1965.
Li Yizu and Cao Jinxia.
They are a long-distance couple. Because his wife had been working in Datong, Shanxi, east China, it was not until 1972 that she was transferred to Xinjiang, west China, to work with him in Team 156.
Li Yizu, his wife and their children.
In 1976, Li Yizu’s son took a photo with two miners. The mural in the background was painted by Li Yizu, and the photographer of this photo was also Li Yizu. At that time, he was stationed in the mining area of Toksun in Xinjiang.
He is now one of China’s top geologists and is currently engaged in education, serving as executive vice chairman of the Working Committee for the Care of the Next Generation, Principal of Urumqi No.41 Senior High School and a well-known geology lecturer in China.
Li Yizu and his “old comrades”, are both members of 156.
Li Yizu and his wife.
There is no doubt that the Chinese regard him as a Chinese.
It should be noted that there are 56 ethnic groups in China, several of which are white.
There are ethnic Russians and Tajiks in China.
The Kazakhs and Uighurs are not actually white, they belong to a mixed race.
In ancient China there were the Capricorns, the Tughlaos and many other tribes. One of them, the Tuhuolo, is the source of the main white genes of the Uyghurs. Historically, a part of the yellow Huihuo Khanate conquered the Tuhuolo and the two groups fused to produce the mixed-race Uyghurs of today.
Lin Hu (26 December 1927 – 3 March 2018) was a former deputy commander of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force and a lieutenant general whose biological mother was of Russian ethnicity. His father came to Harbin as a young man and met a Russian girl, and the two had three children, a sister and a brother in addition to him.
In 1951, Lin Hu joined the war against the United States, serving as deputy commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers Air Force, shooting down and wounding one American F-86 Sabre fighter in the Korean War. In 1958, he commanded an air battle and shot down two Republic of China Air Force aircraft and wounded one.
In 1985, he became the Deputy Commander of the Air Force of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and in 1988, he was awarded the rank of Lieutenant General of the PLA.
He retired from military service in October 1994.
On 23 August 1997, at the Moscow Airshow, 70-year-old Lin Hu experienced flying a Su-30 fighter jet and performing a Cobra manoeuvre.
Alyqin Yimingbhai Male, Uyghur nationality, born in September 1953, a native of Ingisha, Xinjiang, joined the Communist Party of China in June 1980, graduated from the Northwest Institute of Light Industry, served as Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People’s Congress and Director of the Standing Committee of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
