Zhonghua minzu | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | 中華民族 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Simplified Chinese | 中华民族 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Transcriptions | |
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Standard Mandarin | |
Hanyu Pinyin | Zhōnghuá Mínzú |
Bopomofo | ㄓㄨㄥ ㄏㄨㄚˊ ㄇㄧㄣˊ ㄗㄨˊ |
Wade–Giles | Chung-hua min-tsu |
Wu | |
Romanization | tson平 gho平 min平 zoh入 |
Gan | |
Romanization | Zung1 fa4 min4 zuk6 |
Hakka | |
Romanization | zhung24 fa11 min11 zuk5 |
Yue: Cantonese | |
Jyutping | zung1 wa4 man4 zuk6 |
Southern Min | |
Hokkien POJ | Tiong-hôa bîn-cho̍k |
Zhonghua minzu (Chinese: 中华民族), translated as "Chinese nation" or "Chinese races", is a key political term that is entwined with modern Chinese history of nation-building and race.
Since the late 1980s, the most fundamental change of the People's Republic of China's nationalities and minorities policies is the renaming from "the Chinese People" (Chinese: 中国人民 or Zhongguo renmin) to "the Chinese Ethnicities" (Zhonghua minzu), signalling a shift from the communist statehood with people of various nationalities to a multi ethnic statehood based on a single nationality.
During the early Republican (1912–27) and Nationalist (1928–49) periods, the term Zhonghua minzu comprised Han Chinese people and four major non-Han ethnic groups: the Man (Manchus), the Meng (Mongolians), the Hui (ethnic groups of Islamic faith in northwestern China), and the Zang (Tibetans), a notion of a republic of five races (Chinese: 五族共和 or Wuzu gonghe) that is advocated by Sun Yat Sen and the Nationalist Guomindang Party. During the Communist period after Mao's death, the term Zhonghua minzu was resurrected to include the mainstream Han Chinese and 55 other ethnic groups as a huge Chinese family.
The immediate roots of the Zhonghua minzu lie in the Qing dynasty founded by the Manchu clan Aisin Gioro in what is today Northeast China. The Qing Emperors sought to portray themselves as ideal Confucian rulers for the Han Chinese, Great Khans for the Mongols, and Chakravartin kings for Tibetan Buddhists.