China's Population Overview
China is a country with a large population. In 2019, China’s population reaches
1.418 billion, making it the most populous country in the world. Moreover, it has a high population density with 137 people per square kilometer. However, the population density of China is unevenly distributed. The western and northern parts have a few million people, while the eastern half has about 1.3 billion. The vast majority of China’s population lives in major cities along the east coast.
The Diversity of Ethnic Groups in China
China’s Ethnic Groups
There are altogether 56 ethnic groups in China. The English phrase “Chinese people” generally refers to the Han people, which is also known as Han Chinese. It is also the largest ethnic group in mainland China. According to the national census taken in 2010, the Han people made up 91.51 percent of the country’s total population, totaling 1.2 billion. Han is the name that the Chinese have been using for themselves since the Han Dynasty (202 BC). The modern term “Chinese nation” is used to describe a notion of a Chinese nationality that transcends ethnic divisions. The Han people are found in all parts of the country, but mainly in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, and the Pearl River as well as the Songliao Plains.
Besides this Han-Chinese majority, there are 55 other ethnic groups which are categorized in present China, totaling approximately 105 million (about 8% of the whole population), mostly scattered in the bordering areas such as north, northwest, northeast, south, and southwest. Some ethnic groups settle down in the central interior areas. The largest is the Zhuang ethnic group in southwestern China. Yunnan Province, home to more than 20 ethnic groups, has the greatest diversity of minority people in China.
China has long been a unified multi-ethnic country. However, the name of each ethnic group had never been clarified before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party and the government realized the necessity of implementing policies on national ethics and nationalities. The first step is ethnic identification. After hard work for approximately 30 years, the basic composition of China’s ethnic groups was pictured and a total number of 56 ethnic groups were confirmed. The smooth implementation of ethnic identification has laid the foundation for the provision of national work.
The Han Ethnic Group: Language and Characters
The Han Ethnic Group
The Han people have their own spoken and written language. Han-Chinese speak Hanyu, literally the “Han language”. Similarly, Chinese characters, which are used to write the language, are called Hanzi or “Han characters”. The Chinese language belongs to the Han-Tibetan language family. It is the most commonly used language in China, and one of the most commonly used languages in the world. The Chinese have had a written language for more than 3,000 years which emerged in its embryonic form of carved symbols approximately 6,000 years ago.
There are two elements in the Chinese language: the written language, which is based on individual symbols called characters and each of which represents an idea or thing; and the spoken language, which includes a number of different dialects. The written language originally had no alphabet, but it was easily understood by literate people no matter what dialect they spoke.
Traditional Language System and the Simplified System
There are currently two standards for Chinese characters. One is the traditional language system, still used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. The other is the simplified system first introduced by the government of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950’s and finalized in 1986. The simplified system requires fewer strokes to write certain components and has fewer synonymous characters. Singapore, which has a large Chinese community, is the first and the only foreign country to recognize and officially adopt the simplified characters.
Some of the numerous dialects of spoken Chinese are totally different from each other. All of them use tones to distinguish different words. China’s official spoken language is Putonghua; it is sometimes known to Westerners as Mandarin and is the dialect of North China. This dialect was declared the common language in 1955. Although people from different regions of China may not be able to understand each other’s speech, they can understand each other’s writing.
Since the early 1950’s, a system using the Latin alphabet, called Hanyu Pinyin, also known simply as Pinyin, has been developed in China. Pinyin is the official Mandarin romanization system for the PRC. Most of the spellings of Chinese sounds and names in this book are based on the Pinyin system of romanization.
