ABSTRACT
The overwhelming majority of people in China belong to an ethnic group the Chinese state calls Han. The term appears to have originated through a desire to unite the Chinese against the Manchus when the latter ruled China under the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), but most people nowadays normally equate the Han with ‘the Chinese’. They are themselves anything but uniform and demonstrate great linguistic and cultural diversity. Cantonese, the language spoken by the people of Guangdong, Hong Kong and other parts of the south of China, is totally incomprehensible to a speaker of Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin), which is based on Beijing pronunciation. At the same time, the written language of Chinese characters does not depend on region and is understood by literate Chinese all over the country, though it is true that Taiwan and Hong Kong still use the traditional full-form characters, whereas other parts of China have adopted simplified characters. The written language is perhaps the most important of many aspects of consistency among Han Chinese.
