Huaxia is a historical concept representing the Chinese nation, and came from the self-awareness of a common cultural ancestry by ancestral populations of the Han people.

The earliest extant authentic attestation of the Huaxia concept is in the Zuo Zhuan, a historical narrative and commentary authored before 300 BCE.

[14] In modern historiography, Huaxia refers to a confederation of tribes living along the Yellow River who were the ancestors of what later became the Han ethnic group in China.

[22][23] Several studies show that northern and southern populations in Neolithic China intermixed and contributed to the genetic makeup of the Huaxia.

Southern ancestry gradually increased after the Middle Neolithic period due to northward migrations of rice farmers from the Yangtze River basin.