It literally means "mixed-blood child" and is used for all mixed race people.
For decades following the Chinese Communist Revolution, marriages between laowai (foreigners) and Chinese were unusual and perhaps even nonexistent during the Cultural Revolution, but they were never explicitly banned or judged unacceptable on a racial basis.
It was only in the mid-1970s that the first petitions for permission to marry foreigners were accepted, with the thawing of diplomatic ties between China and the United States.
[citation needed] Such marriages remained relatively unusual for another two decades.
[3] This has caused a major shift in China's attitudes to race and to Chinese children of mixed race heritage, because of globalization.