Population & Minorities

● Brief Introduction of 56 Minorities

China is a large country famed for its dense population and vast territory. According to official figures, in 1990 the population of China was 1,115,000,000, nearly 20 percent of the world's total population. Of these, about 20 percent lived in cities although since then this has certainly increased as peasants pouring into the coastal cities looking for work. More than a quarter of the population is illiterates, while 600 million have been to school and 4.4 million are university graduates.
There are altogether 56 Minorities in China, among which 55 are officially recognized ethnic minorities except Han. The defining elements of a minority are language, homeland, and social values. The 53 ethnic groups use the spoken languages of their own; 23 ethnic minorities have their own written languages.

● Han Chinese

Han Chinese makes up 93 percent of the total. According to the 1995 sample survey on 1 percent of China's population, there were 1,099.32 million Han people (an increase of 56.84 million since the Fourth National Population Census of 1990), accounting for 91.02 percent of China's total population. The Han people are found in all parts of the country, but mainly in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River (Huanghe), Yangtze River (Changjiang) and Pearl River (Zhujiang) rivers and the Northeast Plain. The areas inhabited by the ethnic minorities are mainly in the border regions of the north, northeast, northwest and southwest China.

The Han people have its own spoken and written language, known as the Chinese language, which is commonly used throughout China and a working language of the United Nations. The Hui and Manchu ethnic groups also use the Han (Chinese) language.

● Ethnic Minority

Most of the 7 percent of the minorities live in the vast areas of the West, Southwest and Northwest. The largest is the 12million-strong Zhuang in southwestern China. Although minorities account for about 7% of the population, they are distributed over some 50% of Chinese-controlled territory, mostly in the sensitive border regions. Minority separatism has always been a threat to the stability of China, particularly among the Uighurs and the Tibetans, who have poor and often volatile relations with the Han Chinese. Therefore, the Chinese government has set up special training centers, like the National Minorities Institute in Beijing, to train loyal minority cadres for these regions. Equality, unity and common prosperity are the fundamental objectives of the government in handling the relations between ethnic groups. To this end, while maintaining unified leadership of the state, China exercises a policy of regional autonomy for various ethnic groups, allowing minority peoples living in compact communities to establish self-government and direct their own affairs.


● Self-government of Ethnic Minority

Self-government in ethnic minority autonomous areas is affected through the local people's congress and people's government at the particular level. There are currently five autonomous regions in China. They are Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region founded on May 1, 1947, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region founded on October 25, 1958, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region founded on October 1, 1955, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region founded on March 5, 1958 and Tibet Autonomous Region founded on September 9, 1965. Besides these, China also has 30autonomous prefectures and 121 autonomous counties (or in some cases, banners). The committee of the People's Congress and the head of the government of an autonomous region, autonomous prefecture or autonomous county are of the area's designated ethnic minority.

Organs of self-government in regional autonomous areas enjoy extensive self-government rights beyond those held by other state organs at the same level. These include enacting regulations for self-government and specialized regulations corresponding to local political, economic and cultural conditions; making independent use of local revenue, and independently arranging and managing construction, education, science, culture, public health and other local undertakings. The Central Government has greatly assisted in the training of minority cadres and technicians through the establishment of institutes and cadre schools for ethnic minorities to supplement regular colleges and universities. It has, in addition, supplied the ethnic minority autonomous areas with large quantities of financial aid and material resources in order to promote their economic and cultural development.

What is more, China has implemented family planning to control the population growth with the speed of 15 million per year. The basic demands of the family planning are late marriage and late childbirth, having fewer but healthier babies specially one child for one couple. At present, family planning as a basic state policy is supported by a vast majority of the Chinese people.