Origins

The term Chinese refers to immigrants and their descendants who trace their origins directly or indirectly to China. Enormous in size, China’s land area of 9.3 million square kilometers is as large as the entire continent of Europe. Aside from the mainland, which occupies most of the southeastern part of the continent of Asia, China consists of other coastal territorial entities and offshore islands, including Hainan, Hong Kong (a British colony until 1997), Macao (a Portuguese overseas territory to revert to China in 1999), and Taiwan (under its own Chinese government). Within this territory live about 1.2 billion people (1992), making China the most populated country in the world.

The Han people comprise the vast majority (93 percent) of China’s population. The rest of the inhabitants consists of fifty-five minority groups, many with their own distinct language and culture, living primarily in peripheral or remote areas of the country. Historically China was ruled by the Han, except for a few dynasties such as Yuan (1279–1368) and Qing (1644–1911).

China’s national language is guoyu (the national language), which is commonly known as Mandarin, and after 1949 officially called putonghua (the generally understood language). The national language, taught in schools throughout mainland China and Taiwan, is similar to northern Mandarin (spoken around Beijing). The latter, together with southern Mandarin (Yangtse region) and southwestern Mandarin, are spoken by about 80 percent of China’s mainland population. Some regional dialects (fangyan), especially those along the southeastern coast of China, differ radically fromputonghua in phonetics. Major Chinese regional dialects are Wu (Shanghai, also in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces), Gan (Jiangxi province), Xiang (Hunan province), Yue or Cantonese (Guangdong province), Minbei (Fuzhou city), Minnan (Fujian province and Taiwan), Kejia or Hakka (a mixed dialect used in regions of south China), and Chaozhou or Teochiu (around Fujian and Guangdong border).

The Chinese written language, based on a system of script using one ideogram for each word that dates back to the fifteenth century B.C.E, remains common for all Chinese dialects. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the classical Chinese writing style was reformed to reflect the “plain speech” of northern Mandarin spoken around Beijing. This plain-speech literary writing style is used in contemporary Chinese writing. Since 1949, the written Chinese script has been simplified in mainland China (known as simplified Chinese characters) to reduce the complexity and number of Chinese characters, but the use of traditional Chinese script (complex Chinese characters) has been retained in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Aside from the population of China itself, there are an estimated 35 million ethnic Chinese living in 135 countries worldwide. Three-fifths of them live in neighbouring countries of southeast Asia. Ethnic Chinese make up 76 percent (2 million) of Singapore’s population and 34 percent (6.1 million) of Malaysia’s population. The Chinese population is also sizable in Thailand (6 million), Indonesia (6 million), the Philippines (600,000), and Cambodia (300,000). Moreover, until the mid-1970s there were perhaps 2 million Chinese in Vietnam. In all these countries the Chinese are mainly urban dwellers who engage typically in finance, commerce, and retail trade. (See also CAMBODIANS; FILIPINOS; INDONESIANS; JAMAICANS; MALAYSIANS-SINGAPOREANS; THAI; VIETNAMESE.)

Several terms have been used to refer to ethnic Chinese residing outside China. A widely used term in the Chinese language since the late nineteenth century is huaqiao, which literally means Chinese nationals sojourning or residing overseas, and is often translated as “overseas Chinese.” The term implies jurisdiction of the Chinese government over Chinese all over the world and it is based on a loose interpretation of descent. In 1955 the People’s Republic of China abandoned race or blood relations as criteria to define Chinese nationals, and it has maintained a policy to oppose Chinese overseas holding dual citizenship of China and the country of their residence. The Republic of China (Taiwan) does, however, recognize dual citizenship for Chinese living outside China. Recently, scholars have used the more neutral formulation, “Chinese overseas,” to refer to ethnic Chinese outside China, that is, people whose ancestral or ethnic origin is believed to lie in China regardless of their present citizenship or country of residence. In the North American context, the terms “Chinese American” and “Chinese Canadian” are also used by scholars to stress the North American roots of those communities and to avoid the foreign connotation that the word “overseas” implies.

The Chinese have the oldest continuous civilization in the world, estimated to have begun about 5,000 years ago in the Huanghe (Yellow River) basin and the middle Yangtzi region. As early as 2100–1600 B.C.E., the dynasty of the first Chinese kingdom (Xia) came into being, and by the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E, the Chinese had adopted the idea that their emperor was the “Son of Heaven” who derived his mandate to rule directly from heaven. China was to be governed by several dynasties, the last of which was the Qing, or Manchu, dynasty, which lasted from 1644 until the end of imperial rule in 1911. Although traders from China had for centuries ventured to other parts of southeast Asia and to other parts of the world, it was not until the last few decades of the Manchu rule, from the mid-nineteenth century, that large-scale Chinese emigration began.

This was a period in which China’s imperial order was becoming increasingly undermined. Rapid population growth in the eighteenth century was not followed by an increase in agricultural productivity. While China’s population doubled from 200–250 million in 1750 to about 410 million in 1850, the amount of cultivated land increased only from 950 million mu (63 million hectares) in 1766 to 1,210 mu (81 million hectares) in 1873. Declining productivity was further devastated by the frequent floods and famines that characterized the latter half of the nineteenth century. Such demographic, economic, and natural calamities only intensified the existing social contradictions in China. The rural countryside was inhabited for the most part by an impoverished peasantry barely able to survive on lands owned by absentee landlords. The vast Chinese hinterland had few towns and cities, and the coastal ones were noted for extraordinary wealth in the hands of a small landowning and mercantile class.

The rate of farm tenancy was high in many regions; for example, in the province of Guangdong, 70 percent of all farm families were tenants (1888). In north China, a quarter or more of the rural households were without land in the early nineteenth century. Even among the majority of landowning families, the system of “partible inheritance” that divided land equally among sons meant that, to survive, the average landowning family had to engage in labour-intensive agricultural production on what, over time, became smaller and smaller plots. The tenancy system and the inheritance system discouraged mechanization of agricultural production and limited farm yields.

The year 1839 marked the beginning of foreign incursions, which intensified following China’s defeat three years later to Great Britain in the Opium War. The country’s internal political and social weakness made it difficult for China to resist industrialized states that were interested in exporting their manufactured products to China and in extracting Chinese raw materials and cheap labour. Between 1838 and 1900, Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Russia engaged in a series of wars by which they succeeded in securing trading rights and territorial concessions from China, including ports like Shanghai, Canton, Hong Kong, and Macao. Foreign military and economic incursions in China contributed to the further disintegration of China’s already weak indigenous economy. The worsening social and economic conditions led to peasant upheavals such as the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted sixteen years (1850–64), affected most of China south of the Yangtzi River, and was eventually put down only with the help of foreign powers. The increasing interference of foreign countries in Chinese affairs resulted in the Boxer Rebellion (1900), mounted by Yi He Tuan (Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists or the Boxers), which was an anti-Manchu secret society popular among peasants. Although the Boxers were eventually defeated with assistance from outside powers, it exposed the weaknesses of the Manchu government and contributed to its eventual downfall in 1911.

The reform period also produced a group of Western-oriented students, including the medical doctor Sun Yatsen, who, in 1911, led a revolution that replaced the imperial government with a new Chinese republic. Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party (Guomindang or Kuomintang) won a majority in the first national election, but the new republic was quickly threatened by the ambitions of Chinese warlords. Thus, in 1926 the Guomindang formed an alliance with the Chinese Communist Party (established in 1921) to launch a military expedition against the warlords, but Sun Yat-sen died and China remained divided. The Nationalist-Communist alliance was short-lived, however, and Chiang Kai-shek, who succeeded Sun Yat-sen as head of the Guomindang, engaged in a protracted civil war with the Communist Party. Aside from internal political conflicts, China was invaded in 1931 by Japan, which the following year annexed Manchuria and then in 1937 launched a full-scale war that brought much of the Yangtzi valley and east-central China under Japanese control.

China became a member of the Allied coalition during World War II and the Nationalists and Communists cooperated in principle to drive out the Japanese. With the end of the war and the defeat of Japan, however, the struggle between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists once again intensified, with the United States supporting the Nationalists and the Soviet Union the Communists. In 1949 the Communists succeeded in driving the Nationalists out of the mainland, and under their leader Mao Zedong they established the People’s Republic of China. The defeated Nationalists retreated to the island of Taiwan, where the Guomindang maintained the Republic of China.

Under Mao Zedong, China was transformed into a socialist country in the 1950s characterized by state-owned industries, collective farming, and a dogmatic ideology that stressed national self-reliance, personal sacrifice, and the political correctness of the Communist Party. Mao’s socialist reforms raised the agricultural and industrial production of China in the 1950s, mainly through mobilization of the masses and collectivization of production. These changes helped China to alleviate the problems of starvation, poverty, and inequality, despite periodic setbacks due to political struggles and ideological ambitions, such as the purge of intellectuals and party members in 1957 and during the Great Leap Forward Movement (1958–61). A more serious struggle began in 1966 when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution aimed at purging those elements deemed revisionist or counterrevolutionary by Mao’s handful of political strategists, later branded the Gang of Four, as well as large numbers of young followers, known as Red Guards. The Cultural Revolution resulted in almost a decade of political turmoil and economic devastation, with factories and universities virtually closed, and many experienced party cadres, senior bureaucrats, and reputable intellectuals imprisoned or banished. After Mao’s death in 1976, China began a program of modernization that led to the expansion of the market economy and the liberalization of foreign investment in China. Increased economic activities and improved living standards in the 1980s also brought problems of corruption and inequality, and many university students demanded political reforms. The students’ democratic movement culminated into a six-week demonstration in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, but it ended when the Chinese government used military force to suppress the protest.

After World War II, Hong Kong under Great Britain and Taiwan under the Republic of China underwent substantial population growth and economic development, brought about initially by the flight of mainland capital and labour. By the 1970s, first Hong Kong and later Taiwan became the fastest growing regions in Asia, known for their manufacturing industries and export trade. Mainland China’s economic reforms since the late 1970s provided expanded opportunities for capital investment from Hong Kong and Taiwan and further stimulated economic growth in these regions. In 1997 Hong Kong was returned to China after being ruled by Great Britain as a colony since 1842.

The People’s Republic of China, like the Republic of China (Taiwan), has always considered itself the legitimate government of China, of which Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao are integral parts. Until 1971 China was represented in the United Nations as a permanent member by the Republic of China (Taiwan), and since 1971 by the People’s Republic of China. Canada established formal diplomatic relation with the People’s Republic of China in 1971, and today most world countries have done the same.