Chinese Minorities

Ethnic minorities in China are the non-Han Chinese population in the People's Republic of China (PRC). China officially recognizes 55 ethnic minority groups within China in addition to the Han majority. As of 2010, the combined population of officially recognised minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population of mainland China. In addition to these officially recognized ethnic minority groups, there are PRC nationals who privately classify themselves as members of unrecognized ethnic groups (such as Jewish, Tuvan, Oirat, and Ili Turki).

The ethnic minority groups officially recognized by the PRC reside within mainland China and Taiwan, whose minorities are called the Taiwanese aborigines. The Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan officially recognises 14 Taiwanese aborigine groups, while the PRC classifies them all as a single ethnic minority group, the Gaoshan. Hong Kong and Macau do not use this ethnic classification system, and figures by the PRC government do not include the two territories.

By definition, these ethnic minority groups, together with the Han majority, make up the greater Chinese nationality known as Zhonghua Minzu. Chinese minorities alone are referred to as "Shaoshu Minzu".

The Chinese-language term for ethnic minority is shaoshu minzu (simplified Chinese: 少数民族; traditional Chinese: 少數民族; pinyin: shǎoshù mínzú; literally: "minority nationality"). In early PRC documents, such as the 1982 constitution, the word "minzu" was translated as "nationality", following the Soviet Union's use of Marxist-Leninist jargon. However, the Chinese word does not imply that ethnic minorities in China are not Chinese citizens, as in fact they are. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, governmental and scholarly publications have retranslated "minzu" in the ethnic minority sense into English as "ethnic groups". Some scholars, to be even more precise, use the neologism zuqun (Chinese: 族群; pinyin: zǔqún) to unambiguously refer to ethnicity when "minzu" is needed to refer to nationality.

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