©2006 WC Tan
China today has a total population about 1.3 billion people. It has been speculated that the first Chinese came from the "Peking Man". It is more reasonable to speculate that the Chinese people that we see today originated in the present day Henan Province, where the Yellow River flows through. For thousands of years, that area had been often the battlefield for many tribes, especially the northern tribes from beyond the Great Wall of China. These tribes felt the need to seek shelter to survive the severe winters, so they came south. Over the centuries, these northern nomads were called by the Chinese the "Xiong Nu". Eventually, they settled down and intermarried with local Chinese. Also, during the later dynasties, the tribes from the western part of China in Shanxi and Gansu mixed with local inhabitants. Altogether, they are the northern Chinese of today.
During 7th century, in the Tang Dynasty, the kingdom of Tibet invaded China and came as far as Chang An (the Capital of Tang Dynasty). The Tang emperor, in order to make peace of Tibet, married one of his daughters, Princess Wencheng, to the king of Tibet. The Tibetans were thus appeased and retreated to Tibet. At the height of the Tibetan empire, its territories comprised one third of present day China. If the Tibetans really became independent, China would be one third smaller than it is today.
When Princess Wencheng went to Tibet to marry the king of Tibet, she brought along with her silk, tea, Chinese art works and some Chinese inventions but most important of all, the religion of Buddhism. Many people think that Buddhism came from India to Tibet. This is true maybe later on, but Buddhism came first definitely from China into Tibet. Later, after the Mongolian conquest, the Mongols amalgamated China, Tibet, Mongolia and East Turkistan together to form a new Dynasty called the "Yuan Dynasty". It was during this period the Marco Polo came from Venice to China. The territories consolidated into the Yuan Dynasty are the sovereig territory of China to this day.
After the Ming Dynasty, the Manchurians entered China, conquered all of China and inherited the sovereignty of the Mongols. Now the territorial sovereignty became even larger with the addition of Manchuria, Mongolia, and the eastern Turkistan which is known as Xinjiang Province today. China became the largest country in the world. Thus when China became a republic in 1911, it inherited all of the territories which had been acquired by all of its previous dynasties.
A question to be asked by Canadians is: has China invaded Tibet? In fact, in the Tang Dynasty, well over 1000 years ago, it was Tibet that invaded China. Later, in the Yuan Dynasty (14th-15th centuries), it was the Mongolian Empire that conquered China and Tibet together and made it into one country. This produced the territorial sovereignty of today's China.
At any rate, China has never treated the Tibetans the way the European Canadians have treated the Native Canadian aboriginals, that is, taking all their lands and forcing them onto reserves, wiping out their culture and reducing them to become unemployable by varying degrees of genocide. Tibetans are but one of the 56 minorities in China, and Tibet's sovereignty is a modern day issue. Canadians should not use this single issue to stereotype the entire Chinese history, saying that China will become a superpower, disregarding China's past tradition and philosophy.
China is a country, but not only of one race and one language. All countries in the world today have minority races. China is not an exception. Today, there are 56 nationalities in China. The predominant majority is the Han people who comprise about 95% of the population. The other minorities, in the order of population, are the Muslims, Mongolians, Manchurians, Tibetans and many others.
It should be pointed out that although most Chinese Muslims live in Xinjiang, Gansu and Ningxia, every province in China has Muslims. Apart from the Uygurs and the Kazaks who have their own languages, other Muslims speak mainly Chinese.
Practically, all of the minorities can speak Chinese. For example, the Tibetans naturally speak Tibetan, but in school they also learn Chinese and English.
It is estimated that there are about five million Uygurs in China. There are many Koreans, living in Manchuria today. In Yunnan province alone there are 24 minorities. China has perhaps the second largest Muslim population in the world next to Indonesia, about 40 million. I have visited many of the minorities in different part of China. In Yunnan province, the minorities still believe in the deities of the nature. They do not easily destroy nature because for them nature is divine.
In Manchuria, I visited the Manchu autonomous county. I was surprised to find that none of them speak Manchurian language anymore. In fact, all of them speak Mandarin Chinese. Most of them were farmers and as such they were heavy users of chemicals in their farming. When I asked them why they don't use manure to fertilize the soil, they replied using manure is very inconvenient. It is simple and easy to use the chemicals.
In Helongjiang Province, near the border of Siberia I visited two Korean minority schools and the people in the village. They are bilingual speaking Korean and Mandarin Chinese. Their homes are cleaner than those of the Han Chinese. The Korean minorities by nationality are Chinese citizens. All 56 minorities in China are Chinese citizens.
In Ningxia Muslim Autonomous Region, I lectured in their university and visited the different sites of agriculture. Their landscape is continually destroyed by the grazing of goats. In Xinjiang province, the Kazaks and Uygurs are all Muslims and there are more mountains, more grassland and more desserts. I was told that the people from Turkey and the Uygurs in Xinjiang have a common language and they can communicate with each other.
In Tibet, I was doing religious pilgrimage at the Jokang Temple in Lhasa with pilgrims from all over China and visitors from many other countries. The many Tibetans I met at the temple came from other parts of China. There are Tibetans living in Manchuria and in Beijing. Many Tibetans can be found living in Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces.
In the city called Golmud Qinghai, I was told that most of the inhabitants are Tibetans. But when I visited Golmud, it seemed that I saw only Chinese. Later I found out why: as a matter of practicality, all the Tibetans dwellers there speak Mandarin Chinese and dressed like other Chinese. I found a similar phenomenon in Lhasa Tibet: many Tibetans there are educated in Mandarin Chinese and dressed like Chinese. Tourists conclude that there are more Han Chinese in Tibet than native Tibetans.
Golmud Qinghai is the starting point for long distance buses and train into Lhasa. The trip may take a day and a night going through very high mountain passes which can cause breathing difficulties for travellers. Visitors are required to carry water and oxygen on the trip. I was told when I was in Tibet that there are still pockets of non-Tibetans minorities inside Tibet, namely Catholic and Mongolian people, but I did not have a chance to visit them.
In Guangxi Province, I visited the Miao tribe outside Guilin and the tribal girls conducted a mock wedding ceremony in which I participated, for a fee of course. It was quite a lengthy ceremony and I was assigned to marry a Miao girl and was obliged to go through the tribal customary rituals. Although the whole thing was a mock, the lengthy procedures made me feel that I was really getting married and certain emotional attachment to the assigned lady precipitated. It took me half a day afterward to recover from this paid event.
In Henan province, which is the cradle of Chinese civilization, one would have thought that there would be no minorities at all, just the Han Chinese, but not so. I knew better than most people there that there are Jewish people in Kaifeng. About a thousand year ago, seven large Jewish families with their slaves traveled along the Silk Road arrived at the Kaifeng, then the capital of Northern Song Dynasty. They were welcomed and received by the emperor of Northern Song Dynasty. The emperor permitted them to settle down in China and conferred upon them seven Chinese surnames. The largest family received the surname "Zhang".
When I visited Kaifeng in 2001, I was received by the leader of Jewish community, Moshe Zhang. He told me that there were still some six hundred Jews in Kaifeng. The Jews in Kaifeng have been visited by personnel of the Israeli Embassy in Beijing and offered free passage to return to Israel, but they refused the offer. The Jews in Kaifeng have also been approached by American Baptist Missionaries who offered them 500 US dollars per person to converted to Baptist Christians. This they also refused.
When I told Moshe Zhang that my mother's surname is also Zhang, he exclaimed in excitement that if so, then I am a half-Jew. He said that actually, we are all children of Abraham. Officially, there are 56 minorities in China but this count does not include the Jews, because a thousand years ago, the Chinese did not know how to classify them. There was no such racial category in their registry. The Jews to this day in China are still not classified as a minority. There are simply Chinese.