Zhongguo Shaoshu Minzu – National Minority
There are 56 official ethnic groups in China. The largest, the Han, make up 92% of the population and so each of the other ethnic groups is a small percentage of China’s population, but, 8 % of China’s population is not an insignificant number. There are 18 minority populations with a population of a million or more people. The largest minority ethnic group in China, the Zhuang, who live in Guangxi, Yunnan, Guangdong, and Guizhou provinces are numbered at 16.2 million. This is larger than the population of Chile. The 106 million minority ethnic groups would be larger than the population of Australia.
Often times the ethnic minorities in China are the economically disadvantaged and don’t get equal or significant representation in the national government. They often are not allowed to practice their religion fully and they are often at an educational disadvantage. The government won’t let their religion allow them to gain independence, for example Tibetan Buddhism.
But, there has been an even greater religious minority problem in the province of Xinjiang. The traditional religion in that area is Muslim. The Chinese have had to deal with greater problems since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Muslims call the area East Turkestan. The Muslim Uygur population relates to Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. These all made up greater Turkestan which has been Muslim for 1200 years.
The ethnic minority groups with over a million people include:
Zhuang (16.2 m), Manchu (10.7 m), Hui (9.8 m), Miao (8.9m), Uygur (8.4 m), Tujia (8.0 m), Yi (7.8 m), Mongolian (5.8 m), Tibetan (5.4 m), Bouyei (3.0 m), Dong (3.0 m), Yao (2.6 m), Korean (1.9 m), Bai (1.9 m), Hani (1.4 m), Kazak (1.3 m), Li (1.2 m), and Dai (1.2 m)
The State of China Atlas pp. 30-31 has a great map showing the location of each of these minority groups.
The ethnic minorities with populations between 100,000 and one million each are the She, Lisu, Gelo, Lahu, Dongxiang, Va, Shui, Naxi, Qiang, Tu, Xibe, Mulam, Kirgiz, Daur, and Jingpo.
The ethnic minorities with populations of 10,000 to 100,000 each are the Blang, Salar, Maonan, Tajik, Pumi, Achang, Nu, Ewenki, Jing, Jino, Deang, Ozbek, Russian, Yugur and Bonan. Those whose population is below 10,000 are the Moinba, Oroqen, Drung, Tatar, Oroqen, Hezhe, Gaoshan (excluding those in Taiwan) and Lhoba.
The populations of all the Chinese ethnic minorities and the provinces where they live can be found at the website for the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco:
Even though these people are small in total the people of the various ethnic minorities inhabit 50-60% of China. The main areas where minorities live are Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Guangxi, Ningxia, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangdong, Hunan, Hebei, Hubei, Fujian, and Taiwan.
Most ethnic minorities in China live in places where there is a large amount of land with few people spread around in typically small villages in mountainous or grazing lands, and on high plateaus and dense forests. These are typically areas with many natural resources and minerals. Perhaps more importantly these sites are on the border regions of the entire country so important for national defense.
Much of this information was found at