ABSTRACT
China’s Minority Peoples China’s minorities in 1949, when the communist government first came to power, probably numbered less than 6 percent of the country’s total population. Even now, after years of government pressure on the Han Chinese majority to practice family planning while applying far less stringent restrictions to the minorities, minorities constitute slightly over 8 percent of the population of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Moreover, there are 55 officially recognized minority groups, and although there is great variation in the sizes of the different groups, no single minority is especially large (Table 13.1).
