National Minorities—China
A 2000 census in China revealed that 106 million people in that country, or about 8.41 percent of the total population, belonged to an ethnic minority. Thus, China is a multiethnic state. The areas populated by the fifty-five national minorities make up about 60 percent of the total Chinese territory, although in most areas the Han Chinese are in the majority. In 1990 the largest minority, the Zhuang, numbered almost 15.5 million people, and the smallest minority, the Lhoba in Tibet, only twenty-three hundred. (See Table 1.)
Except for the Hui, all these nationalities have their own languages, but most Manchu and She (not included in Table 1) use Chinese. Until the late 1940s, nineteen groups still used their own writing. Since the 1950s, new scripts based on the Latin alphabet were created by the Chinese government.
Traditional Perceptions
Against the background of more than two thousand years of Chinese culture, during most of which time a central power held sway, traditional perceptions have shaped the government's conduct toward other people (minorities) and the expectations about how those minorities must behave toward the central power. Imperial China saw itself as the cultural center of the world and its culture as the culture of humanity.
This page contains 201 words.
National Minorities—China article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,575 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Minority group Article
