Han Biography

About 5 pages (1,356 words)

Han

The Han are the majority people among China's fifty-six state-recognized nationalities, and comprise the people usually known worldwide as the Chinese. They are the most numerous of the world's nationalities, approaching 1.2 billion in 2000, and are renowned for their highly distinctive and powerful languages and cultures and for their long and eventful history. The main concentrations of Han Chinese are in the eastern half of China, including Taiwan. Under the People's Republic of China, the state decides who belongs to which nationality. This decision is made according to a rigid definition devised by Joseph Stalin. One group that has, on occasion, requested separate identity is the Hakka, but the state considers them part of the Han nationality.

Population

In the mid-seventeenth century, China's population was about 200 million, the overwhelming majority being Han. The 1953 census showed the Han population at 547 million, which was 93.9 percent of the People's Republic of China (PRC) total. Census figures for 1990 and 2000 put the Han population at 1.04 billion and 1.16 billion, respectively, or 91.99 and 91.59 percent of the PRC total. Since the late 1970s, Han families in the PRC have been subject to a very strict policy rarely allowing more than one child per couple, without which the 2000 Han population would have been somewhat higher than in fact it was. About 98 percent of Taiwan's 1997 population of 21.7 million were Han.

At the end of the nineteenth century there were an estimated 4 million overseas Chinese. In 1990, this figure had grown to about 37 million Chinese living outside China and Taiwan, with 88 percent living elsewhere in Asia. The country with the largest Han population outside China was Indonesia, with about 7.3 million Chinese; the country with the highest Han proportion was Singapore, where the 1990 census showed a total population of 2.69 million, 2.09 million of them (77.7 percent) Han. Hong Kong and Macao, then colonial territories, had about 6 million Han Chinese, the overwhelming majority of both populations. Outside Asia, the country with the largest Chinese population is the United States (about 1.6 million in 1990).

Language

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. The Chinese written language dates at least to the fourteenth century BCE and consists of monosyllabic characters or ideographs. The characters were standardized in the third century BCE and remain essentially unchanged, although the PRC adopted a simplified writing system in the 1950s. Literate Chinese have always been able to understand each other through writing, which has acted as a unifying force throughout history.

Each character represents both a sound and a concept, but meaning is conveyed through characters either singly or in combinations. Chinese is not monosyllabic; objects, actions, or ideas are more likely to be represented through groups of two or three rather than a single character.

Spoken Chinese is sharply regional and divided into several sublanguages and numerous dialects. All of these are tonal and express grammatical relationships through word order, not word endings. The official language is Modern Standard Chinese, or Mandarin, which is based on the pronunciation found in Beijing. The north and southwest of the Han regions (essentially the eastern half of those territories ruled as part of the People's Republic of China, plus Taiwan) of China are dominated by the Mandarin dialects, most of them intelligible to a speaker of Modern Standard Chinese. Sublanguages of the southeast include Yue (Cantonese), Wu (spoken in Shanghai), Hunanese, Jiangxi, North and South Fujian, and Hakka. In the south, even dialects are often mutually unintelligible. Fujian is known for strong dialect differences from one valley to the next.

Approximately two-thirds of Han Chinese speak one of the Mandarin dialects as their mother tongue. In the twentieth century, successive regimes have attempted to have Modern Standard Chinese spoken, or at least understood, by all Chinese through education, radio, and television. Of the southern sublanguages, Wu has the greatest number of speakers, followed by Cantonese.

Culture and Economy

Under Emperor Han Wudi (reigned 140–87 BCE), Confucianism began to dominate the Chinese state, including its ritual, and formed the ideological basis of duty and service for the scholar-official class, which ruled the country. Confucianism laid great emphasis on morality within hierarchical human relationships, on creating and maintaining harmony within society and on the family as the central social unit.

Confucianism accorded greater social respect to men than women and to sons than daughters. Until the twentieth century, marriages were arranged by parents through the aid of matchmakers, and women were very subordinate. Although the revolutions of the twentieth century greatly raised women's status, allowing them to enter the work force, gender equality is nowhere on the horizon among the Han.

Confucian ideology was one primary reason why Han governance was generally far more secular than that found in other great civilizations. In the twentieth century, Confucianism came under strong attack from modernist nationalism and Marxism-Leninism. Modernist nationalists denounced Confucianism as hierarchical, patriarchal, and oppressive, even though Confucianists argued that they were the real nationalists because they upheld Chinese values and traditions. Mao Zedong (1893–1976) orchestrated attacks on Confucian and religious values everywhere in China, but there has since been a revival of Confucian influence in the PRC, and it remains strong in Han communities outside China.

Secularity of governance does not mean the Han are irreligious. To this day, folk religions, which attempt to harmonize relations between humankind and the cosmic order, remain highly influential. Buddhism and Taoism still have Han followers and their places of worship are common, though visitors are more often tourists than believers. However, religions that emphasize belief in a single God have never attained more than minor influence among the Han. Muslims are never classified as Han, but as Hui.

Below the scholar-official, Confucianism prized the peasant. Han society is based on agriculture. The staple in the south is rice and in the north wheat-based products, supplemented by a wide variety of vegetables. The meat most associated with the Han is pork. The Han do not care for dairy products, a taste even extensive Western influence has failed to change. To this day, local markets are important for the economy.

During the Song dynasty (960–1279), China was the world's most technologically developed society. Although Confucianism looked down on the merchant, China underwent a commercial revolution during that time, which produced a degree of prosperity that Marco Polo marveled at in the thirteenth century. However, China later fell far behind technologically and failed to undertake an industrial revolution until the second half of the twentieth century. Under Mao, the Han entrepreneurial spirit was suppressed. But since the late 1970s it has revived, with heavy industry being replaced by more consumer-oriented enterprises and self-reliance by foreign trade.

The commonalities of the Han should not disguise important regional differences. These apply not only to language but also to many aspects of culture and society, including cuisine, festivals, clothing, marriage customs, village architecture, and music and theater. Cuisine provides one example. The Han of the southwest (Hunan, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces) favor spicy dishes; in the southeast, Cantonese food is noted for its quick cooking and stir-frying at high temperatures, and for rich, sweet dishes.

Unity in the Twenty-First Century

The strength of their culture and the size of their population have made the Han at times inwardly focused, at times outwardly focused. Although there are periods of division in China's long history, and although localist elements remain influential to this day, the Chinese have shown a highly enduring sense of national unity. China's joining the World Trade Organization late in 2001 should reduce isolationist tendencies but will not undermine the essential features of Chinese culture or eliminate nationalism.