The Demographic and Socioeconomic Composition of China’s Ethnic Minorities

Abstract

Although demographers have recently devoted considerable attention to investigating the population of the People’s Republic of China, few have studied China’s minority populations. In great measure, most of the research on Chinese minorities conducted by Chinese and non-Chinese scholars pertains to specific minority groups [1]. Much of the work by Chinese scholars has focused on ethnodemographic analyses of field surveys carried out among specific minority populations. This work provides us with detailed social histories of these groups and classification of the minority groups according to their predominant forms of sustenance organization, marriage norms and patterns, religious and cultural orientations, and linguistic practices (Lu 1986). However, since the various studies were conducted by many different scholars, the research has lacked standardization in concepts and methodology and the findings are not directly comparable from one group to the next. Analysis of the demographic composition of the Chinese minorities has focused mainly on their fertility patterns (e.g., Qiu and He 1984; Li et al. 1984; Jia and Poston 1987). Other features of socioeconomic and demographic composition have received scant attention.