CHINESE
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
Han Chinese (漢族 or 漢人) are a heterogenous ethnic group dominant in China and the largest single human ethnic group in the world.
Han Chinese constitute about 92 percent of the population of the People's Republic of China and about 19 percent of the entire global human population. There is substantial genetic, linguistic, cultural and social diversity between its various subgroups, mainly due to thousands of years of regionalized assimilation of various ethnic groups and tribes in China. The Han Chinese are a subset of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu; 中華民族). An alternate name that many Chinese peoples use to refer to themselves is "Descendants of the Dragon."
Han Chinese trace their ancestry back to the Huaxia, people who lived along the Yellow River in northern China. The famous Chinese historian Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian dates the reign of the Yellow Emperor, the legendary ancestor of Han Chinese, to 2698 BCE to 2599 BCE. Although study of this period of history is complicated by lack of historical records, discovery of archaeological sites have identified a succession of Neolithic cultures along the Yellow River.
In the narrow, original sense, Huaxia refers to a group (or confederation of tribes) of ancient people living along the Yellow River who formed the nucleus of what later became the Han ethnic group in China. In this sense, the term did not originally represent China or Chinese civilisation as a whole, but referred instead to a specific ethno-cultural group (the Huaxia tribe or confederacy 華夏族) that was distinct from other Chinese peoples at the time, such as the Miao and the Dongyi. Subsequently, with the spread of Han culture over most of China, the term came to be used as a generic term for the Chinese nation itself, as well as for Chinese culture in general (including that shared by the overseas Chinese).
Han Chauvinism
Han chauvinism (大漢族主義, 漢沙文主義) is a term which is used in mainland China and Taiwan. Referring to people carrying ethnocentric viewpoints that favor the Han Chinese majority ethnic group in China at the expense of the other minority ethnic groups, often under the assumption of cultural superiority. Han chauvinists in the People's Republic of China often invent enemies of Manchus, Mongols and members of the Han nationality that oppose a monolithic view of the nationality. Han chauvinism is also sometimes manifest as nostalgia in the expansionist exploits by past Chinese dynasties, especially those identified with the Han nationality, but in some contexts also including the Qing Dynasty, a Manchu dynasty.
Those espousing chauvinistic attitudes often revive ancient pejorative and anachronistic terms to refer to other ethnic groups as "barbarians". In ancient times, the following terms were used by various peoples of the Zhongyuan (North China Plain) to refer to those peoples not under the political control or cultural influence of the main Chinese dynasty.
- "Nanman" (南蠻) – literally barbarians of the South - typically referring to southern ethnic groups in present-day South China, Southwestern China and Indo-China. Most of what were considered Nanman then are now Han Chinese (for example, the inhabitants of the province of Nanyue were originally labeled as Nanman, and today represent the Cantonese and various other subgroups of Han Chinese).
- "Xirong" (西戎) – originally an ancient ethnic group (Rong), this term was later used to refer to all non-Han ethnic groups in today's Northwestern China, who were mostly nomadic horsemen,
- "Beidi" (北狄) – originally an ancient ethnic group (Di), this term was later used to refer to all non-Han ethnic groups in today's Northern China, Mongolia, and Siberia, especially those who lived beyond the Great Wall.
- "Dongyi" (東夷) – literally barbarians (or archers) of the East, referring to ancient ethnic groups who lived in today's eastern China along the coast, including groups which have now been assimilated into the Han nationality.
"Barbarians" according to Chinese cosmology:
東夷 (eastern barbarians), 西戎 (western barbarians), 南蠻 (southern barbarians), and 北狄 (northern barbarians)
Han Diversity
In addition to a diversity of spoken language, there are also regional differences in culture among Han Chinese. For example, China's cuisine varies from Sichuan's famously spicy food to Guangdong's Dim Sum and fresh seafood. However, ethnic unity still exists between these two groups because of common cultural, behavioural, linguistic, and religious practices.
According to recent scientific studies, there are slight genetic differences throughout China. Due to several waves of immigration from Northern China to Southern China in China's history, there are strong genetic similarities in the Y chromosome between Southern and Northern Chinese males. However, the mitochondrial DNA of Han Chinese increases in diversity as one looks from Northern to Southern China, which suggests that many male migrants from northern China married with women from local peoples after arriving in Guangdong, Fujian, and other regions of Southern China. As this mixing process continued and more Han people migrated south, the people in Southern China became Sinicized and identified themselves as Han.
Historical documentation indicates that the Han were descended from the ancient Huaxia tribes of northern China. During the past two millennia, the Han culture (that is, the language and its associated culture) extended into southern China, a region originally inhabited by the southern natives, including those speaking Dai, Austro-Asiatic and Hmong-Mien languages. As Huaxia culture spread from its heartland in the Yellow River basin, it absorbed many distinct ethnic groups which then came to be identified as Han Chinese, as these groups adopted Han language (or variations of it) and customs.
For example, during the Shang Dynasty, people of the Wu area, in the Yangtze River Delta, were considered a "barbarian" tribe. They spoke a distinct language that was almost certainly non-Chinese, and were described as being scantily dressed and tattooed. By the Tang Dynasty, however, this area had become part of the Han Chinese heartland, and is today the most densely populated and strongest performing economic region in China, the site of China's largest city Shanghai. The people in the Wu area today speak the Wu dialects, which are part of the Chinese language family but are mutually unintelligible with other Chinese languages/dialects, and do not see themselves as a separate ethnic group. The Wu area is one example of many involving the absorption of different cultural groups in contributing toward the diversity of culture and language throughout the Han Chinese ethnic group.
Northern and Southern China
Northern China (北方) and Southern China (南方) are two approximate regions within China. The exact boundary between these two regions has never been precisely defined. Nevertheless, the self-perception of Chinese people, especially regional stereotypes, has often been dominated by these two concepts.
The boundary between northern and southern China is generally defined to be the Qinling Mountains and Huai River (Huai He). In the eastern provinces like Jiangsu and Anhui, however, the Yangtze River may instead be perceived as the north-south boundary instead of the Huai River, but this is a recent development. There is an ambiguous area, the region around Nanyang, Henan, that lies in the gap where the Qinling has ended and the Huai River has not yet begun; in addition, central Anhui and Jiangsu lie south of the Huai River but north of the Yangtze, making their classification somewhat ambiguous as well. As such, the boundary between northern and southern China does not follow provincial boundaries; it cuts through Shaanxi, Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu, and creates areas such as Hanzhong (Shaanxi), Xinyang (Henan), and Xuzhou (Jiangsu) that lie on an opposite half of China from the rest of their respective provinces. This may have been deliberate; the Mongol Yuan Dynasty and Han Chinese Ming Dynasty established many of these boundaries intentionally to discourage regionalist separatism.
Areas often thought of as being outside "China proper," such as Manchuria, Taiwan, and Inner Mongolia, are also conceived as belonging to either northern or southern China according to the framework above. Xinjiang and Tibet are, however, not usually conceived of as being part of either north or south.
The concepts of northern and southern China originate from differences in climate, geography, culture, and physical traits; as well as several periods of actual political division in history. Northern China is too cold and dry for rice cultivation (though rice is grown there today with the aid of modern technology) and consists largely of flat plains, grasslands, and desert; while Southern China is warm and rainy enough for rice and consists of lush mountains cut by river valleys. Historically, these differences have led to differences in warfare during the pre-modern era, as cavalry could easily dominate the northern plains but encountered difficulties against river navies fielded in the south. There are also major differences in language, cuisine, culture, and popular entertainment forms.
Episodes of division into North and South include:
- Three Kingdoms (220-280)
- Sixteen Kingdoms (317-420) and Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589)
- Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907-960)
- Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) and Jin Dynasty (1115-1234)
- Warlord era (1916-1928)
The Southern and Northern Dynasties showed such a high level of polarization between North and South that northerners and southerners referred to each other as barbarians; the Mongol Yuan Dynasty also made use of the concept: Yuan subjects were divided into four castes, with northern Han Chinese occupying the second-lowest caste and southern Han Chinese occupying the lowest one.
Today: In modern times, North and South is merely one of the ways that Chinese people identify themselves, and the divide between northern and southern China has been complicated both by a unified Chinese nationalism and as well as by local loyalties to province, county and village which prevent a coherent Northern or Southern identity from forming.
During the Deng Xiaoping reforms of the 1980s, South China developed much more quickly than North China leading some scholars to wonder whether the economic fault line would create political tension between north and south. Some of this was based on the idea that there would be conflict between the bureaucratic north and the commercial south. This has not occurred to the degree feared in part because the economic faultlines eventually created divisions between coastal China and the interior, as well as urban and rural China, which run in different directions from the north-south division, and in part because neither north or south has any type of obvious advantage within the Chinese central government. In addition there are other cultural divisions that exist within and across the north-south dichotomy.
Stereotypes: Nevertheless, the concepts of North and South continue to play an important role in regional stereotypes.
The stereotypical Northerner:
- Is taller
- Has small, slit-like, and/or slanty eyes with single eyelids (i.e. an epicanthal fold)
- Has a longer rugged face (possibly with considerably more facial hair than southerners)
- Speaks a northern Mandarin dialect
- Eats wheat-based food rather than rice-based food
- Is loud, loyal, boisterous, warm-hearted, open, and prone to "thunderbolt" displays of emotion, such as anger
The stereotypical Southerner:
- Is shorter
- Has large, almond-shaped eyes with double eyelids
- Has a smooth, round face
- Speaks a southern dialect such as Wu, Yue (Cantonese), or Min
- Eats rice-based food rather than wheat-based food (see celiac disease)
- Is clever, calculating, wealthy, hardworking, and prone to "mincemeat" displays of emotion, such as brooding melancholy
Note that these are very rough stereotypes, and are greatly complicated both by further stereotypes by province (or even county) and by real life.
History of the Major Socio-Cultural Groups in Taiwan
According to the Republic of China government, the majority of Taiwan's 23 million population consist of 98% Han Chinese (GIO 2004) with a minority Austronesian population of less than 500,000. Migration to Taiwan from southern Asia began approximately 12,000 B.C.E. but large scale migration to Taiwan did not occur until the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century as a result of political and economic chaos in China. The first large scale migration occurred as a result of the Manchu invasion and conquest of China, overthrowing the Ming dynasty and establishing the Qing dynasty, which was established in 1644 and remained until 1911.
In 1624, the Dutch East India Company, with the suggestion of the Ming Court, established an outpost in Tainan in southern Taiwan. The Dutch soon realized Taiwan's potential as a colony for trading deer hide, venison, rice, and sugar. However, aborigines were not interested in developing the land and transporting settlers from Europe would be too costly. Due to the resulting labor shortage, the Dutch opted to hire Han farmers from across the Taiwan Strait. Migration of male laborers from Fujian steadily increased into the 18th and 19th century. In time, this migration and the gradual removal of ethnic markers (coupled with the acculturation, intermarriage and assimilation of plains aborigines with the Han) resulted in the wide spread adoption of Han patterns of behavior making Taiwanese Han the ethnic majority.
It was not until the Japanese arrival in 1895 that Taiwanese first developed a collective Taiwanese identity in contrast to that of the colonizing Japanese. When the Chinese Civil War broke out between Kuomintang nationalists and the Chinese communists in 1945, there was another mass migration of people from China to Taiwan fleeing the communists. These migrants are known as the Mainlanders. The descendants of Hoklo, Hakka and plains aborigines who have lived together on Taiwan for over four hundred years and have come to be known as benshengren, or native Taiwanese.
Genetic Studies
Both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists have often tried to validate their political claims based on biology and implied ancestry. Despite the advancement of genetic research and diaspora studies of human populations around the globe, there is no clear evidence to suggest any correlation between genetic or biological similarities or differences, and political or national identities.
The Hoklo and Hakka linguistic groups, which statistically make up the majority of Taiwan's population, can trace some of their historical cultural roots to Minnan- and Hakka-speaking peoples come from what is now China, predominantly the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. The observation that the most common human leukocyte antigen (HLA) haplotype among these two groups has also been found to be the most common haplotype among Thai Chinese and Singapore Chinese suggests that this haplotype is the most well-conserved ancient haplotype of the Yueh (Lin 2001). Much of the original migrations from China were largely male, so there was considerable intermarriage with local plains aboriginal groups. The human leukocyte antigen typing study and mitochondrion DNA analysis performed in recent years show that more than 88% of the native Taiwanese population have some degree of aboriginal origin (Sim 2003). The lack of a definite genetic record of plains aborigines, or conclusive understanding of their proto-Austronesian roots, further complicates the use of genetic data (Blust 1988). A study of the depletion of Asian and Pacific Islanders demonstrates a noticeable difference between Han in China and on Taiwan (Anne C. Stone 2000). A Mahalanobis generalized distance survey of 29 male groups categorized Taiwanese as a separate subgroup of Northern Asian different from Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou, associating Taiwanese closer to groups from Hainan, Korea, Ainu (Japan) and Atayal (Pietrusewsky 2000:400-409).
History of Fujian
... early records stating that the indigenous people in Fujian, primarily those living along the Min River, were Austronesians with "large eyes, flat nose and tattooed bodies", who made their living by fishing.
These people were probably the original inhabitants of southern China. Some of them may have been assimilated, driven further south, or exiled during Han Dynasty to eastern China (north of present-day Shanghai).
For the Han Chinese, this area was also known as Minyue. The word "Mǐnyuè" was derived by combining "Mǐn" (閩), perhaps an ethnic name and associated with the Chinese word for barbarians (蠻), and "Yue", after the State of Yue, a Spring and Autumn Period kingdom in Zhejiang Province to the north. This is because the royal family of Yuè fled to Fujian after their kingdom was annexed by the State of Chu in 306 BC. Mǐn is also the name of the main river in this area, but the ethnonym is probably earlier.
Minyue was a de facto kingdom until the emperor of Qin Dynasty, the first unified imperial Chinese state, abolished the status. In the aftermath of the fall of the Qin Dynasty, however, civil war broke out between two warlords, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang; the Minyue king Wuzhu sent his troops to fight side-by-side with Liu Bang, and his gamble paid off. Liu Bang was victorious, and founded the Han Dynasty; in 202 BC he restored Minyue's status as a tributary independent kingdom. Thus Wuzhu was allowed to construct his fortified city in Fuzhou as well as a few locations in the Wuyi Mountains, which have been excavated in recent years. His kingdom extended beyond the borders of contemporary Fujian into eastern Guangdong, eastern Jiangxi, and southern Zhejiang. By this time Minyue was being sinicized and had a combination of aboriginal (possibly Austronesian) and Han Chinese elements.
History of Guangdong
What is now Guangdong was first brought under Qin influence by a former Qin Dynasty general named Zhao Tuo, who annexed and absorbed territories into the kingdom of Nanyue. Nanyue included the territories of modern-day Guangdong, Guangxi and northern Vietnam and its capital was situated at modern-day Guangzhou. This kingdom was fully brought under Han control under the Han dynasty, but it wasn't until subsequent dynasties such as the Tang dynasty and Song dynasty that major waves of Han Chinese literati migration to the South occurred. The migration came in waves, inter-mixing with existing local populations at different time periods and to different extents, causing a spectrum of Chinese populations to occur, have evolved into the present-day Cantonese, Hakka and Chaozhou groups in Guangdong.
The Opium Wars resulted in China's loss of control over Hong Kong, which was ceded to the British Empire. Macao, a Portuguese settlement subjected to Chinese sovereignty since Ming Dynasty (16th century), was subsequently turned into a colony.
The turmoil of the second half of the 19th century compelled many residents of Guangdong to seek their fortunes overseas. Until the second half of the 20th century, the majority of overseas Chinese emigrated from two provinces of China, Fujian and Guangdong. As a result of these migrations, many Chinese with Cantonese ancestry have settled throughout the world, particularly in North America, Australia, and Southeast Asia.
Unlike the migrants from Fujian, who mostly settled in Southeast Asia, many Cantonese emigrants also migrated to the western hemisphere, particularly the United States and Canada. Chinese immigrants in North America were brought as cheap labourers to build the transcontinental railroads in the United States and Canada, while those in South America were mostly forced laborers in the brought as coolies. Chinese in California participated in the California Gold Rush, while Chinese in Hawaii found employment in sugar plantations as contract laborers. These early immigrants founded communities of Chinatowns but faced hostility and a variety of discriminatory laws that targeted them, such as denying the immigration of women to prevent Chinese families from taking root, culminating in anti-immigration laws that restricted Chinese migration. A large proportion of these early immigrants came from the Siyi (Seiyap) region of Guangdong. As a result, these early communities spoke mostly Taishanese, one of the dialects of Yue distinctive from Standard Cantonese, and Hakka. The Taishan (Toishan) dialect is still spoken in Chinese communities in the Americas, by older people as well as more recent immigrants from Taishan. It should be noted that Taishanese and Standard Cantonese are not mutually intelligible. The relaxing of immigration laws after World War II allowed for subsequent waves of migration to the United States from both mainland China and Hong Kong, while the majority of the Chinese-Vietnamese boat people from the Vietnam War spoke Cantonese either as a first or secondary language. As a result, Cantonese continues to be widely used by Chinese communities of Guangdong and Hong Kong origin in the western world and has not been supplanted by Mandarin.
Hakka
The Hakka (Mandarin: Kèjiā) are a subgroup of the Han Chinese people who live predominantly in the provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Fujian in China. Their ancestors were often said to have arrived from Northern China or Central China centuries ago. It is still a contested issue where the Hakka originated. It is said that in a series of migrations, the Hakkas moved, settled in their present locations in southern China, and then migrated overseas to various nations throughout the world. The Hakka have had a significant influence on the course of Chinese and overseas Chinese history: in particular, they have been a source of revolutionary, political and military leaders.
Their ancestors migrated southwards several times because of social unrest, upheaval, and the invasion of foreign conquerors, since the Jin Dynasty (265-420). Subsequent migrations occurred at the end of the Tang Dynasty when China fragmented, during the middle of the Song Dynasty which saw massive depopulation of the north and a flood of refugees southward, when the Jurchens captured the northern Song capital, at the fall of the Song to the Mongols in the Yuan Dynasty, and when the Ming Dynasty fell to the Manchu who formed the Qing Dynasty. .
During the reign of Qing Emperor Kangxi, the coastal regions were evacuated by imperial edict for almost a decade, due to the danger posed by the remnants of the Ming court who had fled to what is now Taiwan. When the threat was eliminated, the Kangxi Emperor issued an edict to re-populate the coastal regions. To aid the move, each family was given money to begin their new lives; newcomers were registered as "Guest Families" (客戶).
In Taiwan, Hakka people comprise about 15% of the population and are descended largely from Guangdong: they form the third largest population group on the island. Many Hakka moved to lands high up in the hills or remote mountains to escape political persecution. Many of the Hakka people continue to live in these hilly locations of Taiwan.
Taiwan's Hakka are concentrated in Hsinchu City and Hsinchu County, Miaoli County, and around Chungli in Taoyuan County, and Meinong in Kaohsiung County, and in Pingtung County, with smaller presences in Hualian and Taitung County. In recent decades many Hakka have moved to the largest metropolitan areas, including Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung.
