People

The Chinese outnumber all other people in the world and are the most widely dispersed ethnic group on earth. The People's Republic of China (P.R.C.), founded in 1949, is the third largest country (after Canada and Russia) and is the most populous nation in the world today. On January 6, 2005, China’s population reached the 1.3 billion mark, meaning more than one-fifth of humanity now lives in China, and this is in addition to the sizable and widely dispersed diaspora (by 2000 an estimated thirty-four million overseas Chinese live in over 140 countries across the globe). Almost 92% of China's population is ethnic Han Chinese, but the remaining 8% (over a 105 million people, more than three times the population of Canada) belong to one of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minorities that compose China's multicultural society.

These ethnic groups are culturally and linguistically distinct from the Han Chinese, and some also have their own separate writing system, like the Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchurian, and Uyghur peoples. Ten of these ethnic groups are Muslim, which even by conservative estimates number more than the entire population of Iraq. Most of these minorities occupy the northwest, west and southwest border regions of the country, and are spread over half of China's territory. While some ethnic minorities number in the several millions (the Zhuang at 15.5 million is the largest group) and others are widely dispersed (the Hui, the largest single Muslim group in China, have large concentrations distributed across fifteen provinces), others number only a few thousand and are confined to specific geographic locales.

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