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.
"Barbarians" according to Chinese cosmology:
東夷 (eastern barbarians), 西戎 (western barbarians), 南蠻 (southern barbarians), and 北狄 (northern barbarians)
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"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).
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"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,
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"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.
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"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.
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 (中國北方) and Southern China (中國南方) 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 (Minnan), 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.
Mainlanders (外省人; Waishengren) are descended from the people who followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan after the Kuomintang (KMT) lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949. These people included KMT officials, soldiers, merchants, bankers, executives, scientists, various other intellectuals, and anyone else who sensed that the Communist regime would ultimately be worse, and had the connections and money to escape mainland China. Until the 1970s, these people controlled the political systems of Taiwan; this, along with the looting and corruption that occurred under Chen Yi's military government (228 Incident) immediately following the Japanese surrender in 1945, generated resentment among benshengren (Taiwanese people) and was one of the main causes of the Taiwan independence movement.
228 Massacre
The 228 Incident, also known as the 228 Massacre, was an anti-government uprising in Taiwan that began on February 27, 1947 and was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang (KMT) government. Estimates of the number of deaths vary from ten thousand to thirty thousand or more. The Incident marked the beginning of the Kuomintang's White Terror period in Taiwan, in which thousands more Taiwanese vanished, were killed, or imprisoned. The number "228" refers to the day the massacre began: February 28, or 02-28.
In 1945, 50 years of Japanese rule ended, and in October the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) handed administrative control of Taiwan as a province to the Kuomintang-administered Republic of China (ROC). But one year (16 months) of KMT administration led to the widespread impression that the party was plagued by nepotism, corruption, and economic failure. Tensions increased between Taiwanese and the ROC administration. The flashpoint came on February 27, in Taipei when a dispute between a female cigarette vendor and an officer of the Office of Monopoly triggered civil disorder and open rebellion that lasted for days. The uprising was violently put down by the military of the Republic of China.
The subject was officially taboo for decades. On the anniversary of the event in 1995, President Lee Teng-hui addressed the subject publicly, a first for a Taiwanese head of state. The event is now openly discussed and commemorated as Peace Memorial Day (和平紀念日), and details of the event have become the subject of investigation. Every February 28, Taiwan's president gathers with other officials to ring a commemorative bell in memory of the victims. The president bows to family members of 2-28 victims and gives each one a certificate officially declaring the family innocent of any crime. Monuments and memorial parks to the victims of 2-28 have been erected in a number of Taiwanese cities, including Kaohsiung and Taipei.
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 (Minnan) 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).
