With over 1.2 billion people, Han Chinese is not only the largest ethnic group in China but also in the world. The basic tenets of an ethnic group are common ancestry (encompassing both blood and culture), language and geographical space (the idea of a common homeland). Travelling around China you will experience some very different places, people, languages and culture, and yet many of the people you meet will describe themselves as Han. After a while one can be excused for finding it hard to believe that Han Chinese are any sort of homogenous ethnic group.   

Photo: wenzhousx.com

Han, like every other ethnic group in the world, is a construction. With the nomadic nature of life the idea that any group can have a clear linear history is far flung. In China the standardization of language only really started after the creation of the Republic in 1912 and even now many people still prefer to communicate using their local dialect. If you put a person from Beijing, from Shanghai and from Guangdong in a room together and told them to only speak their local dialect, they would not be able to communicate.

Defining China’s nationalities

In China, as with much of the rest of the world, discussions of ethnicity and nationalism often focus on minority groups, despite China’s minorities only making up 8.49% of the population. The majority ethnic group is then often defined in response; it is defined by what it is not, and the nation becomes divided between the centre and the periphery, the ‘us’ and the ‘other’. This division was summed up nicely by Dru Gladney when he said, “Widespread definition and representation of the ‘minority’ as exotic, colourful and ‘primitive’ homogenizes the undefined majority as united, monoethnic and modern.”

Despite knowledge of peripheral groups in China, it wasn’t until the Long March that the leaders of the CCP began to grasp the extent of China’s social diversity. In the 1950s the CCP began a process of investigation and identification of the various ethnic groups living within its borders. According to Dr. Sam Mitchell, an Asian History professor based in Kunming, Yunnan, The Minzu Shibie (Nationalities Identification Project), was for its time “incredibly broad in scope and remarkably accurate”. It is only recently that examinations into the Han majority have gained traction.

Constructing the ‘majority’

When it comes to ethnicity construction, history is key – building a lineage that you can point to is important. With an ancestry, arguments of ‘we were here first’ can be effectively used to rally the public against an enemy. And so the Han majority takes its name from one of early China’s prosperous dynasties, Han (206BC-220AD).

Towards the end of the Qing dynasty there was a drive for unity within the country. However, it wasn’t until Sun Yat-sen unified opposition against the ‘foreign’ invaders that the Han identity took off, and nationalism in China found its bearings. Sun “turned anti-Qing sentiment into anti-Manchu racism”. The Manchu’s were invaders that had taken control of Han China. The concept of a unified Han helped unite resistance not only against the Manchu’s but also against the Japanese invasion, and Western imperial powers with their “unequal treaties”. A narrative had been born and history re-written in terms of these relationships, the ‘insiders’ vs. the ‘outsiders’.

Fei Xiaotong and ‘snowballing’

The Yellow river valley has been critical in most discussions of Han lineage. Many believe this is where the Chinese race began. Archaeological excavations around Anyang, Henan province, have been used to date the Han Chinese race back to the Shang civilizations. However, this is a small area in relation to the whole of China, so how did the race spread?

Fei Xiaotong, a Chinese ethnologist, recently put forward the concept of ‘snowballing’. His argument is that the Yellow River basin was the core of Han ethnicity. This core culture was more prosperous than indigenous and nomadic groups surrounding it, and so as its people spread out, those surrounding groups were enveloped into the folds of Han ethnicity. And like a snowball, as it spread it grew more dense and compact, forging the worlds largest ethnic group. 

In the name of Han (or China)

The ‘us’ and ‘them’ narrative is still very much a part of identity in China today. Han has become synonymous with Chinese. The two ever interlinked, despite China actually being a multiethnic nation. Key points in history are understood in terms of this narrative. It is established within the society’s consciousness. For the government it is an important tool in building their legitimacy of control. In Taiwan the term Han is not commonly used as a way of describing identity, however, in China it is the bedrock of the ‘One China’ policy. We are one group, one ethnicity.

It has become about including groups within the ‘us’ and reconfirming who is the ‘other’. As a result China is able to include groups of people who are definitely not Han and in fact claim independence, while the idea of the dangerous foreigner still seems to sit at the forefront of society’s psyche. Examples of the latter have been most noticeable in the growing aggression towards white men hitting on Chinese women, in anti-Japanese sentiment and in the casual racism towards black people. While the issues behind these examples are far more complex than can be expressed here, they are a product and a continuation of the narrative of China.

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Keywords: Han Chinese largest ethnic group in the world