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Funny that China is the only country where they specify the ethnic group, even though many other countries in that list have sizable ethnic minorities.
by yetanotherphd 13y ago
Funny that China is the only country where they specify the ethnic group, even though many other countries in that list have sizable ethnic minorities.
- obstacle1 13y agoThey broke India into two sections as well. I don't know enough about India to know whether or not that distinction reflects an ethnic divide, though.
- jey 13y agoMost people in South India are mostly Dravidian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_peoples
- yetanotherphd 13y agoGood point. I also don't know enough about India to comment on that. What I was pointing out in my post was a subtle bias towards overemphasizing China's multi-ethnic nature. China is not especially multi-ethnic, and many of the countries in that list have ethnic minorities of similar size to China. E.g. Afghanistan, Israel, Poland, Russia and South Africa (Khoisan vs Bantu).
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago91.5% of the people in China are Han, and the next biggest minorities (Zhuang and Hui) are very Han-like in appearance (the Hui are descended from Han who converted to Islam with a bit of Persian/Arab mixing). Consider that the visually distinctive Uighurs and Tibetans, which are like #5 and #9, barely add up to 1.25% of the total population. China has "sizable" ethnic minorities when considering raw population, but as a percentage they aren't so sizable anymore; i.e. China is relatively homogeneous. Of course, the minorities tend to concentrate in areas where they are sizable, especially in the sparsely populated west. The problem is that the Han are so overwhelmingly large in number that all the other minorities are worried about encroachment and complete assimilation (even in the west).