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Easy to answer but before you propose to read further, you must also suspend your presumption that there is no answer but the PRC passport.

Who is a Zhongguoren is not a question that can be answered by using PRC passports or citizenship certificates. This much is absolutely certain. There are millions of ethnic Chinese who are living abroad as citizens of foreign countries who think and feel like Chinese in their moral values and who observe key Chinese festivals like the Chinese New Year, the anniversaries of the death of their forebears like Qing Ming, and the many rites of engagement and marriage as well as funerary rituals, who also speak a dialect of China, even if not the Beijing dialect called Putonghua. That they are not Chinese subjects or citizens is obvious. That they are ethnic Chinese or Zhongguoren is also incontrovertibly true.

Granted that there exists such a group of ethnic Chinese who are by traditional and historical designation and definition equally Zhongguoren and Chinese as the mainlanders, but who have allegiances to foreign governments abroad and have no intention of relocating to the mainland, there is a valid question of how to determine with some degree of certainty that they possess the requisite degree of acculturation in Chinese values, philosophy, tradition and language to be identifiably different from a descendant of Chinese forefathers who no longer ethnically is Chinese.

Let it be clear, however, that such a distinction would be based on the attributes of the candidate's values, customs and language, rather than based on his possession or lack of a PRC passport -- which is the main thrust of my thesis.

Once this point is established, there is no going back to insisting that only a PRC passport can determine who is an ethnic Zhongguoren or Chinese, however complex or difficult the process of determination of cultural identity of a particular person may be.

With this in mind, we can freely discuss the means by which even the Overseas Chinese Diaspora can distinguish those who are still ethnically Chinese and those who have ethnically been assimilated by other cultures and thus are not just foreign citizens but also ethnically non-Zhongguoren.

First, we must agree that the determination of ethnicity can only be probabilistic and approximate, even if we can raise the bar and require that a consensus estimate of such probability be above a certain value, say 0.75 or even 0.95, as the case may be.

Secondly, we must also agree that while blood lineage would be a strong factor, it is not sufficient, and even if theoretically can be made necessary by some fundamentalist arguments of historical continuity with the people of China, it cannot always be determined by historical records or physical means. For example, Mr. Wang may claim to be a Zhongguoren because he says his great great grandfather came from Guangzhou or Fujian, but he may not have any records to support his contention, and even his name may have been changed by local laws into a non-Chinese name. Even his looks could have been changed by intermarriages along the way. Thus, the determination of blood lineage can be impossible to establish in a significant number of Overseas Chinese Diaspora, who nevertheless for all intents and purposes are considered ethnic Chinese by even the native people of these foreign countries.

Thirdly, the language capabilities of many Overseas Chinese have been degraded and stunted by decades of anti-Chinese-education in countries in Southeast Asia, or lack of opportunity for learning it in youth, as in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Africa and Europe. To the extent, however that a person lacks any knowledge of any dialect or formal language of China, to that extent, his claim to being a Zhongguoren can be questioned and reduced. But again, this factor cannot be the complete decider either.

Fourthly, a socially accepted structure of recognition of the ethnic identity of Overseas Chinese remains yet to be created, for the very purpose inquired of in this chain of posts. That there is none yet does not mean there cannot be one, or that the PRC passport should become the gold standard of their Chinese ethnicity, a proposition we have already shot down as historically inaccurate and logically inconsistent with the fact that the PRC itself continues to say that they are to be regarded as brothers and sisters of the mainland Chinese. We can say that the PRC passport can be construed as a SUFFICIENT CONDITION for determining if a person is an ethnic Chinese, and retain its great usefulness in this regard. However, we must also insist that the PRC passport cannot be construed as a NECESSARY CONDITION for determining if a person is an ethnic Chinese or Zhongguoren, because in fact there are millions of ethnic Chinese who are foreign citizens who continue to practice Chinese moral philosophy and observe Chinese customs as well as communicate in some dialect or language of the Chinese people. This fact cannot be rationalized away as irrelevant by those who want to simplify everything for their own economic, political or social convenience.

Fifth, the above considerations lead to the conclusion that there is an urgent need for the PRC and ROC to engage the Overseas Chinese Diaspora in establishing means and measures of the claims of the latter's members that they are still ethnic Chinese, through mutually acceptable requirements and allowances, instead of rejecting them wholesale as Chinese or Zhongguoren using the expedient of their possession or lack of a piece of paper called a passport, that may be out of their reach for generations, and which in reality has nothing to do with their actual personal values and practices.

Thus your question of who is to be the decider of who is a Zhongguoren or Chinese is this. It should be a committee or institute of Sinology that takes into account the natural variation of the dialects, customs, and values of the Chinese people as a whole, including those who have lived abroad for generations. Its purpose is not to be a racist organization that seeks absolute racial purity, as the Nazi's would have demanded of such an organization, but one that seeks to include as many as possible in its common values and common traditions, taking care to exclude those who clearly do not identify with such values, reject them, or refuse to learn any dialect or language of the Chinse people by means of which they can update themselves of the changing mores and priorities of the Chinese people of the 21st century.

Let me repeat, such an Institute of Sinology is not to be constituted as a race-supremacist organization, but a Bo Ai Kuan Rong de Zu Zhi, but first and foremost, the laws of the PRC obstructing this just and fair treatment of the Overseas Chinese -- existing laws which wholesale reject them as all non-Chinese and non-Zhongguoren if they do not carry PRC passports -- must be repealed. Only then can an unreasoning, unfeeling, and perfidious Official Anti-Overseas-Chinese-Diaspora policy be replaced by the true spirit of the Chinese people, the so-called 中华民族伟大的精神文明。