My casual sentiment on Xiangqi being considered a "variant"

If I understood it right, the Chinese use the phrase "international chess" when they refer to the FIDE game, where "chess" is spelled with the same two kanji as Xiangqi. So that they in fact say "international Xiangqi" for (western) Chess. That makes me wonder how they would write "chess variant" in the first place. If 'xiangqi' is their word for 'chess', it should be translated as "variant of Xiangqi"

What exactly is their in that that would upset them?

The common rebuttal to that I would guess is that "International Xiangqi" is inaccurate and unfair also.

Either that, or "international" isn't quite the same as "variant".

If anything, I would take the second rebuttal. We recognize Xiangqi as "Chinese Chess". We English-Speaking westerners recognize Chinese as "international". That doesn't make it any more of a "spin-off". (But, of course, after our long dialogue about that point (Spin-off), I have come to understand the different concepts and umbrella use of the word "variant".)

I agree that xiangqi is a game in itself and not a variant of anything. They should have major chess games like standard chess, shogi, xiangqi, etc. then the variants would be like capablanca chess, Fischer random etc.

Everything is always a variant of something else; it just depends on how much variation you allow. Fact is that you don't have to allow much variation at all to go from international Chess to FIDE or vice versa. They are practically the same game. The have a 2-dimensional board of cells with 8-neighbor topology, they have many different pieces, winning occurs by threatening one of the pieces with unavoidable capture. Some of the pieces are even identical between the two. The differences are much smaller than those that exist between other games that we consider chess variants.

So it is not an issue whether Xiangqi or Chess are variants. This is an undeniable fact, following from the definition of 'variant': similar realizations of the same broader concept. It is just the question what they are variants of.