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As far as I know as an ignorant non-expert, the genetic separation between Han Chinese people and Japanese or Korean people is pretty small, small enough to make genetics not seem like an obvious explanation for things not shared between those populations. Especially if you're going to characterize it as a millennia-old difference, rather than some more recent bottleneck like who survived under Mao (or at least civil wars postdating the separation). Something like conscientiousness or conformity I could buy, those seem similar between East Asian subgroups, but dramatically lower empathy is a much harder sell. Even if you think East Asians in general harbor a lower level of empathy that the high-intelligence and conformity is compensating for in some subgroups, it means the primary driver of conflict is cultural and political rather than racial. Certainly the racial differences don't seem to have stopped Japan from rapidly becoming an ally after WW2. Even pre-WW2 Japan doesn't seem to have been particularly cruel to each other like current Chinese culture stereotypically is, especially not when compared to pre-modern cultures of any race. Even if we buy the argument that Europe's heavy use of the death penalty made the population more genetically empathetic quite recently, either Japan benefited from a similar phenomenon or the difference isn't big enough to stop them from riding their high intelligence (and possibly conscientiousness) to one of the lowest crime rates in the world anyway.
If you want to do population genetics, even speculative amateur genetics, then you should actually do population genetics. Look at when populations split off from each other, research whether it's plausible there was the appropriate genetic bottlenecks, see what work has been done of the subject. Actually try to disprove your hypothesis, don't just go looking for things that fit your story. Don't just point to some anecdotes of Chinese culture being low-empathy and assume it must be genetic. A glance at history shows quite a lot of low-empathy behavior in every population group, and meanwhile you haven't justified why they would have such a large genetic difference from other East Asians, so cultural explanations seem quite plausible. And while I share your impression that Chinese culture is unusually low-empathy, you didn't even try to establish that beyond some scattered anecdotes. Objective measures like crime rate, while worse than other East Asian countries, aren't that bad compared to white countries, especially similarly poor or low-trust countries like Russia. I don't even know how many of the "Chinese society being weirdly sociopathic" anecdotes I hear are the product of actual differences vs. it being a product of how China views itself, like how Japan is more preoccupied with low birth-rates than various other countries that have since declined until they are even lower. Or something like Chinese people playing up low-empathy explanations for their actions because being a compassionate 'sucker' is low-status, while people in other countries do the opposite.
This is particularly silly. Japan has of course been spectacularly successful at exporting anime, an art form especially focused on human beauty. There don't seem to be any notable differences between populations in the ability to appreciate either it or beauty in general, let alone between population groups as closely related as China and Japan.
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