People's Republic of China

The national dress of the Philippines is worn over a shirt named for Chinese laborers.

The phrase is Spanish for Chinese man's shirt, borrowed whole into Philippine English, with the Tagalog form kamisa tsino alongside it. The garment is ascribed to Chinese laborers in the islands before and during Spanish rule. It is now worn mainly as the undershirt beneath the barong tagalog.

An engineers' joke about digging to China became the name of a real fear twelve days before Three Mile Island.

American nuclear engineers used the phrase in the 1960s and 1970s for the worst case of a loss-of-coolant accident, riffing on the children's idea that a hole dug deep enough comes out in China. The film The China Syndrome opened on 16 March 1979; the accident at Three Mile Island began on 28 March. Physically the core would stop far short of the mantle, let alone the far side of the planet.

Before Chinatown settled into English, American writers tried Chinadom.

The word uses the dom of kingdom and Christendom, the old ending for a realm or a domain. The Reverend J. C. Holbrook wrote on Chinadom in California in Hutchings' Illustrated California Magazine in September 1859, using it for the Chinese quarter of San Francisco. Chinatown, recorded in the same city in the following decades, won out, and Chinadom is now obsolete.

The word was coined in California before it was ever used of London or Sydney.

English took it up in the 1850s for the Chinese quarter of San Francisco, built up by migrants drawn to the gold fields. The pattern proved productive and gave English Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Little Saigon and Greektown. No such district is called a Chinatown inside China itself.

It is a rain spirit with a hare's eyes, not a fire-breathing lizard.

English needed the qualifier because the creature has almost nothing in common with the European dragon: the Chinese long is a benevolent water deity credited with rivers and rainfall rather than a monster to be killed. Imperial law reserved the five-clawed dragon for the emperor, leaving four claws for nobles and three for lower ranks. Some English writers now use the Chinese word directly, as loong.

The man who built a career on anti communism was the one who could shake Mao's hand.

Nixon had spent twenty five years as one of the most aggressive anti communists in American politics, so his visit to Beijing in February 1972 could not easily be called softness. The idea is usually put as only Nixon could go to China. The phrasing spread further after Star Trek VI in 1991 gave it to a Vulcan character as an old proverb.

The joke only works for a reader who knows Chin is a common Chinese surname.

The simile puns on a double chin and the surname Chin, and assumes a Chinese telephone directory running to page after page of the same name. Wiktionary labels it humorous and offensive and credits Joan Rivers with popularizing it; its earliest citation is a 1981 Time article about a Rivers television special, with newspaper and book examples through the 1990s and 2000s. The parallel form have more chins than Chinatown does the same work with a different yardstick.

Most English speakers met this phrase through a hit parody single.

Like its twin it puns on chin and the Chinese surname Chin, but it counts the residents of a Chinatown instead of the entries in a phone book; Chinatown is itself a word built from China. Weird Al Yankovic put the line in Fat, his April 1988 parody of Michael Jackson's Bad, and Wiktionary credits him with popularizing this version. Wiktionary labels the phrase humorous and offensive.