As an addendum to this, (please forgive me for what I'm about to post) in the Netflix series "Bling Empire," which is a reality housewives-esque show that traces the lives of very rich Asian-Americans living in Los Angeles, one of the characters on this show claims he can trace his ancestry back to one of the Song dynasty emperors. Nobody gives a shit about this except for Westerners, and he's just a doctor now. His ties to "nobility" aren't meaningful because In China there isn't a feudal noble class to speak of, and there's no like ancestral wealth he can tap into.