Ethnic Diversity and Distribution

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most far-reaching effects of interprovincial population movements in recent decades has been to Sinicize China’s separate minority groups and integrate them and their previously isolated territory into the Chinese economy and society. As of the 1953 census 94 percent of the country’s population was counted as the Han ethnic group. For millennia this numerically dominant population had moved into areas thinly settled by smaller groups, either intermarrying with and assimilating them or pushing them into mountainous and other marginal agricultural areas. Intermittently since at least the first millennium B.C. much of the Han migration into minority group areas has been organized and aided by China’s government, with the settlers accompanied by army units and acting as soldier-households for border defense (Lee 1978, 20–39). By 1949 successive waves of Han migration had ensured their numerical dominance throughout most of central, southern, and eastern China, but their domination never took hold in the far north and northwest because the land could not support settled agriculture using traditional techniques. The vast grasslands, the deserts, the northern forests, and the mountains were mostly left to minority groups who moved with their herds or traded on their camels or lived in remote isolated villages.