ABSTRACT
Although the Chinese terms min, meaning a or the ‘people’, and zu, corresponding roughly to an ‘ethnic group’, have been in use since ancient times, the combination, or minzu, is not found until the 1880s. The word means ‘nation’ or ‘nationality’ and has been subject to various definitions and understandings. Official circles in the PRC have adopted a definition based closely on one propounded by Stalin in 1913, and although it is not universally accepted by any means, it is the one most commonly used by Chinese scholars and government workers. It states that a minzu is ‘a historically constituted stable community of people, having a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and a common psychological makeup which expresses itself in a common culture’.
