[Tai_Chung]

I have a hard time believing that China is a multi-ethnic country comparable to the United States.

[SeekAndFind]

I have a hard time believing that China is a multi-ethnic country comparable to the United States.

She is not as multi-ethinic as the USA in the sense that the HAN RACE is close to 90% of the population. Here in the USA, blacks comprise about 13%, Hispanics about 15%, Asians about 5% and Whites about 68%.

Besides the majority Han Chinese, China recognizes 55 other "nationalities" or ethnic groups, numbering approximately 105 million persons, mostly concentrated in the northwest, north, northeast, south, and southwest but with some in central interior areas.

The major minority ethnic groups are Zhuang (16.1 million), Manchu (10.6 million), Hui (9.8 million), Miao (8.9 million), Uyghur (8.3 million), Tujia (8 million), Yi (7.7 million), Mongol (5.8 million), Tibetan (5.4 million), Buyei (2.9 million), Dong (2.9 million), Yao (2.6 million), Korean (1.9 million), Bai (1.8 million), Hani (1.4 million), Kazakh (1.2 million), Li (1.2 million), and Dai (1.1 million).

So, when you meet a Chinese, there is a 90% chance that he is a HAN.

[joey703]

I have a hard time believing that China is a multi-ethnic country comparable to the United States.

Well, you can think about it linguistically. China resembles Europe more than the United States in a linguistic sense (think that most people have their own dialects and large linguistic subgroups, i.e. germanic/slavic/romance), but a language that most people can speak (like English in Europe vs Mandarin in China).

But, ethnically speaking, it should be very, very diverse (it's just that the diversity doesn't span from people from different continents and skin colors)...I'd put India in this category too...