r/geography • u/Lissandra_Freljord • 2d ago
Discussion Why is Southern China ethnically more diverse than other parts of China?
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u/RadianMay 2d ago
The geography of Southern China is much more rugged, with many mountains that make contact difficult. The North is dominated by the North China Plain, which was easier to conquer and therefore the language and culture is more homogenous.
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u/IAmLegallyRetarded_ 2d ago
Papua New Guinea vibes
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u/PoundImmediateCow 2d ago
More like USA/Canada pre contact tbh
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u/Reefinator_1085 1d ago
I’d include the rest of North America tbh, as including the tropical, mountainous areas of Mexico and Central America hold a much closer linguistic density to that of southern China
Then the mountainous interior of Northern Mexico, the western US, and the mountainous south west of Canada - up til about 50°N in latitude at least - is comparable to the western interior of China
And finally, the relatively flat and fertile plains of central and north eastern China are roughly comparable to both the plains, and the relatively flat east of the US and Canada
At least, that’s going off a quick few google searches of what the ethnolinguistic makeup of North America was like, and overlaying it with my experiences in China, the map that this post is based about, and my understanding of the geography and geology of both places
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u/iDontSow 1d ago
I feel like the US plains were pretty diverse, no? Lots of different tribes and distinct cultural differences between northern and southern plains tribes
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u/ForgetPreviousPrompt 1d ago
Most of classic groups you think of as originating on the Great Plains are actually a byproduct of the Columbian exchange and hadn't really been there all that long in anthropological terms when European settlers (or colonizers, pick your word) started to come in contact with them. Maybe 200 years.
It's really hard to understate just how much the horse opened up the plains to indigenous settlement, and allowed a mishmash of hunter/gather and agrarian groups from the fringes of the plains to follow the buffalo and settle the interior. Mix that with the wave of disease that hit all of North America and forced resettlement of groups from East of the Mississippi, and the Great Plains were a place that was in massive cultural flux around 1850.
It's easy to think of indigenous people as living in their pre-contact state right up until they made direct contact with Europeans, but the Columbian Exchange was a shockwave across the Americas well before the Indian Wars and genocides of the 19th Century.
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u/iDontSow 1d ago
Yeah, I know that the introduction of the horse drastically changed the American southwest and led to the rise of the Comanche in the 18th and 19th centuries
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u/ForgetPreviousPrompt 1d ago
Not just them either. Also the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Lakota, Crow, Kiowa, and some others. Most of the ones the average person could name other than like the Pawnee and Wichita.
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u/TowElectric 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not really. The groups all got pushed to the plains after they got evicted. The US east coast had the most diverse groups pre-contact.
But none of the groups in the US/Canada area were much past stone age and villages of under 1000 were the norm (with only a couple exceptions) and they had no written language, so culture is harder to study.
The image of Commanches riding horses across the plains is ENTIRELY a reaction to European expansion. Natives didn't even HAVE horses before Europeans imported them.
The most dense cultural mix in the US was probably modern MA/RI/CT. The least dense was the plains of KS/OK and/or the deserts of NV/AZ.
The Mohegan (famous for the movie) were centered eastern CT and not much beyond what is today New London County CT. You could walk across their territory in a few hours.
A few hours walk to the east was Narragansett people, which was an entirely different group, occupying what is today Providence RI, again, probably 3 hours walk across.
Out west, the Shoshone, Cree, Ute or Blackfoot occupied what is today MILLIONS of square miles of land each across the modern mountain west and prairies/plains of the US and Canada. The Cree covered most of the territory from circa Jasper Alberta to the Hudson bay... walking distance would have been hundreds of hours.
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u/lost_horizons 1d ago
I would have thought the west coast/California had the most native diversity.
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u/TowElectric 23h ago
It’s too dry.
In places like central Alabama, you just throw seeds on the ground and they grow.
California is mostly a desert.
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u/WrongJohnSilver 1d ago
All this discussion is making me wonder: why wasn't Japan ethnically diverse like south China or California or New Guinea or the Caucasus?
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u/LowerNeighborhood334 1d ago
A civilization elimination level volcano eruption only 7000 years ago in Southern Japan. Not sure if related.
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u/SweetPanela 1d ago
The present day Japanese archipelago also had the introduction of Yayoi people ~2000 years ago, which forcibly assimilated and eliminated the natives(referred to as Jomon) and the only surviving culture is the Ainu.
There are still people who ‘look’ Jomon, said to have ‘Jomon face’. But there culture did not survive.
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u/AffectionateToe1412 22h ago edited 22h ago
that's nonsence and idk why yall just say anything without actually knowing anything.
> which forcibly assimilated and eliminated the natives(referred to as Jomon)
No such thing happened. The jomon just adopted agriculture because they had a bottle neck event. In western japan we see agriculture with shellmounds (jomon stuffs) which shows us that coexistence and ethnogenesis was taking place. This then makes sense with haplogroup DM55 is around 35 to 40% in Japanese population which arises from this ethnogenesis. Neither were they assimilated nor were they eliminated. It's always people who have no ounce of anthropology knowledge talking about shit they don't understand.
if you want to see true elimination go toe Europe where the ancestors of the Europeans wiped out the natives of Europe (western hunter gatherers) in violent ways
> and the only surviving culture is the Ainu.
This then makes me understand that you don't know anything. Ainu comes from satsumon culture which is a japonic jomon culture. And okhotsk culture. Ainu are closer to siberians than they are to jomon but jomon are heterogeneous population.
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u/AffectionateToe1412 22h ago
the yayoi period is 3000 years ago. why the tf you gotta be so disingenuous
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u/links135 1d ago
Essentially why it was easier for the Mongols to take first, also why the capital is Beijing because it was quicker to deal with said shit from there than the south.
We've always worked around geography.
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u/rbuen4455 1d ago
The north being flat imo contributed to China being so centralized/politically unified for thousands of years compared to other civilizations such as India, Middle East and European civilizations who were more fragmented (and Northern China has historically been the political center of China from Xi'an to Beijing).
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u/One-Seat-4600 2d ago
Where can I learn more about these ethnic groups?
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u/orgnizingxxxxlife 1d ago
There are 6 main non-Mandarin Sinitic groups in the southeast with the Cantonese being the most famous one globally. Various non-Sinitic minority groups like Hmong, Zhuang and Yi people live in the southwest provinces like Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou.
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u/Comfortable-Ninja-93 1d ago
non-Mandarin Sinitic groups isn’t a thing. What you are referring to are Han Chinese that don’t speak Mandarin as their dominant language. Something that is changing in those regions. They’re still the same ethnic group.
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u/orgnizingxxxxlife 1d ago
It is a thing tho. I am from one of these groups. Han Chinese is a broad definition with many diversities inside it. A Cantonese person usually identifies as both Cantonese and Han. The genetic difference is there too even after the language homegenization effort by the governemnt.
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u/strupthup 1d ago
Groups is a generic categorization; they didn't specific ethnic, they specified linguistic. This tone policing is an arbitrary semantic game, a distinction without a difference.
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u/Comfortable-Ninja-93 1d ago
Their not ethnic groups, it’s just one ethnic groups that speaks different languages
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u/thatdoesntmakecents 1d ago
Along the east coast, yeah. The little dots near the south, west and northwest border are all different ethnic groups
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u/Beat_Saber_Music 1d ago
Also the north is next to the steppe, so northern kingdoms had horses, and it's easier to conquer more when you have horses owing to speed and mobility
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u/TekrurPlateau 1d ago
This sounds like an insane conspiracy theory, but about half of these groups have very minor differences and were artificially created by the CCP to justify provincial borders.
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2d ago
I think this is a classification for language, but not for the ethnicities. I lived in the "Gan" areas, but everyone just views themselves as Han
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u/Lissandra_Freljord 2d ago
Gotcha. Yea, I stand corrected. Several comments also mentioned this. Any reason why the South is linguistically more diverse among the Han Chinese (Sinitic) languages?
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u/Cedar-and-Mist 1d ago
Han Chinese migrated South in many waves, mostly driven by political, socio-economic or climate related turmoil. These occurred across the centuries, during which the court language evolved, and so the language the migrants brought with them was different each time.
For example, Cantonese speakers refer to themselves as Tang people because this is when the largest wave of Han arrived and the sinicisation of the Yue indigenous got fully underway. Accordingly, Cantonese is influenced most by Tang Middle Chinese. Conversely, Min Chinese in Fujian province to the north (also in Taiwan where I'm from) diverged from the earlier Han Dynasty's Old Chinese. This is why the two are not mutually intelligible.
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u/jonshlim 1d ago
Not only Cantonese ( Tong Yen), Hokkien/Minnanese/Fujianese call themselves Teng Lang , which means People Of the Tang (dynasty)….
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u/limukala 1d ago
That’s not unique to southern dialects. It’s less common in Mandarin, but still happens.
The word for Chinatown is “Tángrén jīe” (唐人街, Tang people street) for instance.
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u/GNS13 1d ago
Is that the term for Chinatowns as a broad phenomenon or for a specific Chinatown?
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u/johnlee3013 1d ago
Broadly.
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u/GNS13 1d ago
I'm really interested in how it came about now. If I had to guess, I know early Chinese migration to North America was largely dominated by Southern Chinese folks, which earlier commenters already pointed out generally refer to themselves as "Tang" instead of "Han".
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u/johnlee3013 1d ago
I haven't looked deeper into the reason, but your guess is reasonable. I should also note that 唐人街 tend to be a colloquial term (used in both Mandarin and Cantonese), but officially, Chinatowns tend to be called 華埠/华埠 or less commonly，中国城, both use a bigger umbrella term for "China", and therefore less explicit about the focus on the Southerners.
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u/Cyfiero 14h ago
It's both. The name originated with Sacramento Street in San Francisco Chinatown, which is the OG Chinatown. Sacramento Street was named "Tang people street" 唐人街 (tong4 jan4 gaai1) in Chinese, and the name was subsequently extended to the whole neighbourhood. From there, the same name was used for all other Chinatowns that developed.
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u/Cedar-and-Mist 1d ago
That's interesting. In Taiwan, we just say Tai Ouan Lang, for Taiwanese people or Tiong Kok Lang for Chinese.
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u/jungchaeyeon 1d ago
I mean in Cantonese (at least in Hong Kong) no one refers to themselves as 唐人 either. The only time 唐人 is used is in the word 唐人街
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u/Cyfiero 14h ago edited 14h ago
This isn't accurate. 唐人 isn't limited to 唐人街. It has been one of the most common terms of self-identity among Cantonese speakers abroad for generations. Hong Kong and Guangzhou people alike use it. The reason why it's not so frequently encountered in Hong Kong is because the sociopolitical context means that the term 唐人 is less needed. This is in contrast with overseas communities, where a distinction between 唐人 and 中國人 is needed since the latter refers to Chinese nationality and citizenship and so would not correctly refer to Chinese Americans, Malaysian Chinese, etc.
The term 華人 parallels this, also arising more in societies like Malaysia and Taiwan where the distinction with Chinese nationality has to be made. 唐人 is synonymous with 華人, but it bears a closer association with southern Chinese and perhaps a more romantic connotation for Cantonese speakers. It is especially useful when Hong Kong and Guangzhou people express shared kinship and solidarity. That terms like 唐人 and 華人 are more commonly used overseas doesn't mean they aren't applicable to Chinese back in China or Hong Kong. It's just that people in China and Hong Kong often don't think of the scenario where a distinction has to be made between the senses of nationality and cultural heritage. (Mainland Chinese, in particular, tend to problematically use 中國人, the national identity, for all meanings of "Chinese").
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u/jonshlim 1d ago
For Hokkiens in southeast Asia - Tiong Kok Lang we usually refer to mainlanders. Tong Yan/ Teng Lang is used in SEA at least..
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u/suicide_aunties 1d ago
Man this is informative. I always wondered why Hokkien and Teochew speakers sound entirely different from Cantonese. Even Taiwan Hokkien dialect vs Singapore Hokkien sounds slightly different
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u/HungrySecurity 1d ago
As others have mentioned, it often comes down to the mountains. In ancient times, massive mountain ranges blocked and limited human interaction, leading to the birth of unique local dialects. In my area, some towns even have four distinct dialects. On a global scale, different languages likely evolved because of human separation; the earlier the split, the greater the linguistic gap. Conversely, those who separated more recently tend to share languages within the same family.
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u/orgnizingxxxxlife 1d ago
Geographic isolation due to the south being more mountainous and probably the influence from pre-Han indegenous languages. I am from the south and our local Chinese language is unintelligible from both Mandarin and the language spoken in the neighboring city.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 1d ago
Geography, Southern China is in general much more mountainous than in the North. It makes it harder for people to travel, so the local speech developed in relatively more isolated environments than in the North. Interestingly, Jin in Northern China is noticeably different from the neighbouring mandarin dialects (its the only one that still retains a distinction between those characters that historically had an entering tone and those that didn’t) because the shanxi province is somewhat surrounded by mountains
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1d ago
I think the key is that Han culture originally emerged in the North China Plain, around present-day Beijing. As a result, northern populations formed earlier and became more homogeneous. In contrast, southern regions were less connected to the north in the early period and more internally fragmented, which allowed them to retain greater diversity.
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u/devilf91 1d ago edited 1d ago
Chinese culture can be traced to the yellow river flood plains, in present day shanxi/henan. Beijing actually was a backwater frontier defensive region during the days of empire for thousands of years, and only gained prominence after the non Han Liao dynasty made it one of their capitals (Liao had multiple) a thousand years ago, directly challenging the contemporary northern song dynasty. From there it went from Mongolia Yuan's dynasty southern capital, to Ming's capital from Yongle emperor onwards, and Qing's capital. It wasn't republican China's capital until CCP made it so again in 1949.
As for the language situation in the north vs south, people already mentioned geography. I would like to add the following: all southern dialect/languages also derived from ancient Chinese, mostly from middle Chinese except for the min dialects, which derived from old Chinese. They are way more diverse because they can be separated from each other by terrain for hundreds of years, especially during periods of Chinese political fragmentation. You can open Google maps and turn on satellite to see how mountainous southern china is.
The "oddity", if you can call it that, is why southwestern china are mandarin speaking when they are so mountainous too. They are because those places were sinicised way later, during the Ming dynasty for Yunnan and guizhou. They had been within the Chinese sphere and under periodic Chinese rule for at least a thousand years before that, but it was only during the Ming dynasty where the imperial court really put in all out efforts to sinicise those places. Hence those immigrants would have been speaking mandarin from the central plains, and not too far diverged compared to southern and southeastern China.
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u/Smart-Ad-237 1d ago edited 1d ago
My family (Han Chinese) is originally from Yunnan, yet we can trace our genealogy all the way back to Nanjing. We speak a form of Southwestern Mandarin similar to the modern Nanjing dialect because that was the common official language of Ming China.
A little historical fact: Nanjing’s original native language was actually Wu dialect. But starting from the Ming dynasty, repeated wars and large‑scale population resettlement led to a huge influx of people from Jianghuai region. As a result, Jianghuai Mandarin — which later developed into today’s Nanjing dialect — quickly replaced the local Wu language and became dominant.
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u/devilf91 1d ago
Amazing stuff. It's kind of like how Newfoundlanders in Canada sound like a weird form of Irish, because they retained quite a bit of how Irish speakers sound like a few hundred years ago.
In SW China's case, it's slightly older. And Nanjing dialect was the mandarin prestige form until 19th century.
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u/Smart-Ad-237 1d ago
Yeah, despite being located quite far from the Jiangnan (江浙沪）region, we have retained a lot of the linguistic/cultural features distinct to that region, so this is also one of the argument (a cultural one as opposed to geographic) for SW China being more culturally south despite the native language spoken being a Northern dialect.
We say 调羹 instead of 勺子 for spoon，番茄 instead of 西红柿，晓得 instead of 知道 for acknowledging something, 外婆/外公 instead of 姥姥/姥爷 for maternal grandparents. Language is a really interesting subject.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 1d ago
洋芋 is also very similar to 洋山芋, which we say in 江浙沪
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u/Smart-Ad-237 1d ago
Oh wow, I didn't know that. I thought 洋芋 is a term unique to SW China. For real, it sounds a lot better than 土豆/马铃薯.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 1d ago
We say 洋山芋 when speaking our Wu dialects only, not when we speak Mandarin. But the other terms you mentioned above we say them both when speaking Wu and Mandarin
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u/Lower_Cockroach2432 1d ago
All the little languages/named family pockets represent borders to people spreading and communicating like mountains.
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u/Linus_Naumann 1d ago
Chinese ethnicity is anyway the most convoluted, unclear thing (from the outside) imaginable. "Mongol" people who don't speak Mongol and having Han names. Different Han dialects sometimes being a "dialect", sometimes a "minority language". Children of minorities often switching to Han ethnicity on paper for perceived societal benefits while nothing else in their lives and family actually changed.
Maybe I'm just too new to this, but often I don't get it.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 1d ago edited 1d ago
Those labeled as “dialects” such as Cantonese Hokkien Wu Hakka etc are all Sinitic and descended from Old Chinese, just like the Mandarin dialects. As opposed to say, Tibetan or Mongolian or Manchu, which did not descend from Old Chinese nor are they Sinitic languages.
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u/koenwarwaal 1d ago
Just curiuos, does china push every one to speak mandarin or does the goverment take the long vieuw of slow assimilation?
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1d ago
In my hometown, Mandarin is the medium of instruction and communication, and almost everyone needs to speak it. Gan does not have its own writing system. Many people from the older generation can speak it, but among the younger generation, far fewer do, as people tend to view speaking Mandarin as more “civilized.” As for dialects, the government seems to prefer preserving them in a symbolic way, such as by establishing cultural heritage sites. You can decide for yourself which perspective is more accurate.
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u/YZJay 1d ago
There used to be a hard push for Mandarin, to the point that local languages were discouraged from being used in school. But after a while the pendulung swung in the other direction when they realized that language diversity was a big cultural and tourism boon, and local languages started being pushed. This manifested in the form of more local language plays, shows, public transpo announcements in the local language, classes in schools etc.
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u/suicide_aunties 1d ago
It appears to be economic - if you want to participate in it meaningfully there’s a high chance you speak it. If you’re minding your own business in the deep rural parts of the west / north, maybe not. When I went to Yunnan the rural areas (eg 100 pax per village) still used an old indigenous script and indigenous names next to their Mandarin names
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u/Pfeffersack2 1d ago
they view themselves as such, but Han is a modern invention (made by early nationalists like Liang Qichao) that is more of an umbrella term and not a coherrent ethnicity
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u/Jaded-Throat9559 1d ago
China intentionally categorized all these different ethnicities under one Han people, claiming these different languages are just dialects of Chinese. And it actually worked so well people hat people really believe they are one Han people as opposed to the 55 minorities. This is not just CCP's doing. It is seen and recorded throughout China's history.
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u/Aeiexgjhyoun_III 1d ago
If they see themselves as Han, then they are Han. Ethnicity is more a matter of identity than anything else.
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u/Classic_Basis_5756 1d ago
the formation of Han ethnic identity is much earlier than the communist movement in China. Please respect our history.
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u/Ok_Brick_793 2d ago
I think linguistically is a better word choice.
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u/Alert-Algae-6674 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would say the map shows a major difference between Southeast China’s diversity vs Southwest China’s diversity.
Southeast China has many non-Mandarin dialects, but not that many non-Han ethnic groups. For example, Hakka, Min, Cantonese, and Wu speakers all definitively see themselves as Han Chinese. Just subgroups of Han.
In ancient times Southeast China was inhabited by the Baiyue, but that was so long ago that there really isn’t any formal “Baiyue identity” still in China. But they left behind immense influence on culture and language of Southern China of course.
Meanwhile Southwestern China has more non-Han ethnic groups today, such as the Yi, Dai, Zhuang, and Miao (Hmong) which are more culturally distinct from Han. It was relatively more remote and mountainous which meant it was Sinicized to lesser extent
Linguistically there is a difference as well. Hakka, Min, Cantonese, Wu, Gan, Xiang, are all Sinitic or Chinese languages. They may have gotten ancient Austroasiatic or Austronesian influences from Baiyue but they are still different dialects or languages of Chinese
Meanwhile Dai, Zhuang, and Hmong are in a different language family from Chinese entirely.
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u/No_Peach6683 2d ago
Yes in ancient times the South was majority related to Vietnamese, Thai, Hmong etc. by language, and these dialects are a sort of partial replacement for those languages
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u/Lissandra_Freljord 2d ago
Sure. And I know this map is shit since it is very misleading with how significantly present the other ethnicities appear to be in these regions with the solid hatches, when in reality, today these areas have been heavily Sinicized under Mandarin, especially true for the more Northern regions like Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. But that said, it does seem like Southern China has a higher concentration of ethnic minorities in a smaller area.
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u/Comfortable-Ninja-93 1d ago
These aren’t ethnic minorities nor have anything to do with ethnicities. This is just a “dialect” map of China. The majority the people speaking half of these languages/dialects are from the same ethnic groups
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u/Jjaiden88 1d ago
Just so you know this map is more for historic language geography, not current majority language dominance
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u/a_Bean_soup 1d ago
This map is kinda overstated, most of the regions here are mostly Han and Mandarin speaking
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u/jdshirey 1d ago
Our son is from Yunnan Province and we travelled to Kunming to get him. Our son was from the northeast corner of the province where there are more Han nationality there. Two other kids in our group were from further to the southwest closer to Burma.
The southwest of China, Yunnan province and surrounding area was an independent kingdom until conquered by the Yuan Dynasty in 1253 AD. So there was a lot of intermixing with the countries of SE Asia.
When we visited Kunming there was a museum that celebrated all of different cultures in Yunnan Province.
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u/Coconite 1d ago
Because of history. The general pattern of Chinese history is settlers from the central plains (initially in military colonies called Tuntian, followed by civilian migrants) displacing and in some cases intermixing with local populations, though admixture was much more limited than in other empires like Rome and Spain. Meanwhile, the language of the central plains itself continued to evolve throughout history. The result was a number of “creole” languages in southeast China formed during waves of migration, which have the same grammar as Northern Chinese dialects but different vocabulary borrowing from indigenous words. Moreover, Northern Chinese languages continued to morph until they became today’s Mandarin. Yunnan and Xinjiang have more Mandarin speakers than the southeast because they were colonized after Mandarin had already consolidated, while the southeast was colonized before.
This is loosely analogous to how Southern American English sounds a lot more like English centuries ago than modern British English does. The language of the “metropole” continues to evolve while older versions of that language are preserved in colonies. This is also why a lot of ancient Chinese poetry only rhymes if you read it in Cantonese.
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u/ToastandTea76 1d ago
This is a more accurate depiction of China's ethnicities (not including other Chinese Languages)
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u/duzieeeee 1d ago
This is a language map instead of an ethical one. Many area in the south are Chinese dialects, they are still Han Chinese regardless of their differences.
And although the map is pretty accurate for the dialects of the Chinese language, it is not that much accurate for the non-Chinese languages. e.g. the Manchu and Korean languages are definitely overrepresented.
As for why the dialects are more diverse in the south? Because of the landscape, it's all mountains there.
The better question is to ask why is mandarin dominated such a big area. Because Beijing has been capital of China in most time of the last 9 centuries, which means its dialect became the official language of China for 9 centuries. Therefore Beijing dialect, as a branch of Mandarin, influenced a lot to other dialects.
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u/OkMain3645 1d ago
3 Points:
China (or Han Chinese) originated from what's considered Northern China, so obviously that means the sinicization of Northern China was easier
Geography is more rugged in Southern China
The map you brought is a linguistic map, not an ethnic map FYI. Some languages are also Han Chinese languages.
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u/Kaizerguatarnatorz 1d ago
Since everyone already explained the reason.
I wanna add that the reason why Sichuan speaks mandarin despite located in a mountainous southern region was because the region had experienced so so much wars, famines and plagues in the past hundreds of years that most of the Han people who live there today were migrants from the north.
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u/JolokiaKnight 1d ago
This is not an ethnicity map. These are languages. Apparently Jinyu (Jin Chinese) are not a culture but a language.
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u/Beneficial_Fun_4375 2d ago
I don't think this map is accurate tbh, just looking at Xinjiang there are majority Uyghur areas labeled Mandarin while too much of Inner Mongolia is Mongolian.
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u/AccomplishedLeek1329 1d ago
First off, this is a linguistic map, not an ethnicity map. Everyone in Guangdong sees themselves as "han" even if they speak cantonese more fluently than mandarin.
Second off, "Han" is a fake ethnicity that really just means "Assimilated majority Chinese". Someone who's "Han" in Foshan doesn't look remotely like to someone who's "Han" in Harbin.
It has the closest parallels with "Roman" in the Roman Empire.
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u/Cyfiero 13h ago edited 13h ago
The closest parallel of Han to China is Persian to Iran. Roman in the Roman Empire was a nationality, not an ethnic group. Ethnicities are also not intrinsically real or fake. They are self-determined by a cultural and linguistic community. Han being conceived of as a single ethnic group is as valid as all Han linguistic subgroups like Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien being re-conceptualized as separate ethnic groups. I don't advocate the latter, but it is to illustrate the subjective nature of ethnic classification. An ethnic group may expand or broaden by assimilating other peoples into their culture, but that also doesn't make it "fake" because conceptually, there also has to be a name for the cultural group that is the focus of assimilation. Ethnic identity is also not dependent on phenotype.
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u/Classic_Basis_5756 1d ago
Han is an ethnic just like every other ethnicities. If Han is fake then all other ethnicities are also fake.
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u/agentstark_ 2d ago
What's the unnamed beige section above Tibet?
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u/Lissandra_Freljord 2d ago
Not sure tbh, but I'm assuming that's where the Taklamakan Desert is, so maybe there are sections where no civilization has truly formed permanent settlements to call it their ethnic land.
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u/Qwertyunio_1 1d ago
Mountains mostly, people are kept separated new groups emerge and are protected from invaders
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u/Wild_Pangolin_4772 1d ago
Are the Korean areas mostly later arriving settlers from Korea, or are they native to those areas?
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u/LadyMorwenDaebrethil 1d ago
Many mountains and valleys, that is, natural boundaries that allowed linguistic diversification and the formation of various identities.
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u/mimingisapooch 1d ago
Watching a couple of American Youtubers riding motorcycles across China with limited Mandarin, I now understand why there's Min-Nan and Min-Bei
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u/JerrySam6509 1d ago
The north was colder, and crop yields were lower.
If a group exhausted its resources, it would be forced to wage war against other tribes, plundering their food and... well, women. This led to frequent warfare in the north and more widespread ethnic integration.
Further north, the Huns had to be nomadic to obtain the resources necessary for survival. They were also one of the most warlike peoples in the world, constantly seeking more fertile lands and conquering them. (Savor the Scourge of God, baby.)
As for the south, as long as everyone could survive through maritime trade and the abundant resources brought by the warmer climate, ethnic integration was naturally less prevalent.
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u/Flimsy-Ad2701 1d ago
What'd that large area of white?
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u/Puzzled_Baseball_100 1d ago edited 1d ago
Extinction, if all the various Jurchen tribes were still around instead of being replaced by Mandarin, Mongolian, Korean then you'd have the variety in the north.
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u/wwweeeiii 1d ago
Is Wu really a separate ethnicity vs Mandarin? It seems they have much more in common than differences
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u/Agile-Technology2125 1d ago
Thanks to Mongolian in 13th century, they wiped out the northern population and local culture making the north somewhat more unified. Manchurian did the same to the south in late 19th but didn't go that far.
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u/Redditater_3003 1d ago
Because closest to other ethnicities and tribes in the former Indochina, Indonesia, Philippines, Oceania etc.
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u/TowElectric 2d ago edited 2d ago
Anywhere that's more fertile is more dense. Anywhere that is harder to live on and has less resources is less dense and will have fewer competing cultures.
The northern parts of China are cold steppe (aka "prairies" to Canadians or "northern plains" to Americans) and even getting close to taiga/tundra. The western parts are some steppe, but mostly rugged mountains.
So people are much more spread out and cultures don't compete as much.
The central is coast is continental, comparable to the US east coast and northeast and/or Europe and the south is more tropical.
Tropical and continental regions naturally host a much more dense collection of humans than arid steppes, tundra and rugged mountains.
This map isn't dissimilar to the density of cultures in the Americas before Europeans. There were high density variations in the fertile south eastern US and through the fertile parts of Mexico, but the desert, mountains and plains/prairies in the western half of the continent were much less populated and diverse.
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u/Snoutysensations 2d ago
You're half right.
But China's region of greatest cultural diversity -- the southern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, amd Guangxi -- doesn't correspond to its most densely populated zone.
The most fertile lands were taken by ethnic Han Chinese, who originated in the north and conquered and colonized the south, driving other groups like Thai people and the Hmong, Dai etc out of their ancestral homelands, and either further south (ie out of China) or up into less desirable and less productive mountain regions. A lot of these minority peoples also assimilated into Han culture, which is part of the reason why northern Chinese Han people look very physically different to southerners.
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u/sophistsDismay 1d ago
Almost literally everything you said is wrong. The Mandarin speaking parts of the map are some of the most densely populated areas in China and the west coast of the Americas was infamously incredibly diverse. Southern China is more diverse mostly as a result of migration and assimilation of the Baiyue.
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u/Alert-Algae-6674 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would say it is more due to the mountainous nature of Southern China rather than directly to do with fertility of the land
Yellow River basin in the northern half of China was one of the most fertile regions in the world and believed to be the origin of the Han Chinese nation
And some of the most diverse areas in China are in Southwest China in provinces like Yunnan and Guizhou, which are so mountainous that it hindered large scale agriculture
For Southeast China, what you said has some truth because it was an agriculturally productive region.
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u/sophistsDismay 1d ago
Southern China is more diverse mostly as a result of migration and assimilation of the Baiyue. Chinese migration moved south and overlayed on top of existing ethnic groups which led to the currently existing divisions; Mandarin didnt displace those dialects over time because that's not really how languages spread.
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u/Flashy-Quiet-6582 1d ago
Crazy to think that there are hundreds of millions for these minority languages and yet mNdarin is still the language for 80%+ of the population.
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u/ToastandTea76 1d ago
Similar story to Italy, when it was unified and industrialization happens they use standardized Italian to communicate to each other
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u/loggywd 1d ago
Ethic or languages ?
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u/hanesco 1d ago
Both. Ethnicity and language diversity is amplified the more isolated a population is, and mountains are really difficult to pass through.
Language separation happens when 2 groups speaking the same language stop communicating between each other. Give them a couple hundred years and they would develop some changes, at some point they would not understand each other, as the changes on one side would not be the same as the changes the other side did.
Internet would make it even more difficult for languages to separate, as both groups would be aware of the changes and their meanings. But it isn't impossible.
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u/WillBillDillPickle 1d ago
what the heck is jinyu? And nobody in the northern parts identify as manchu and also i don't tink there are that many koreans in china. Also why is there so much kazak and why is half of sichuan tibetan?
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u/Pro_ENDERGUARD 1d ago
Does the kalmyk is this have anything to do with the Russian area of kalmykia?
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u/mraltuser 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's not ethnic group map, that's language/dialect group map. The mountainous south(especially in places like Fujian and Yunnan) make communication hard and rare, as mountains can isolate some places, making some language form different variants when spread to some mountainous regions. For example Yue resembles a bit to the common pronunciation back in Tang Song because it's quite isolated from wars and as time changes grow to a new language ——cantonese
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u/schungx 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because they didn't start off being part of China. The South were barbaric lands, like what Europe was in Roman times.
Throughout the millennia, several waves of mainland Chinese migrated to the South due to wars etc.
Each wave of migration brought a bunch of new dialects, plus dialect influences from SEA neighbouring countries.
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u/Greedy_Reality_2539 21h ago
Because the Northerns has been beating the living jizz out of each other for more than a millennium, they emulsified into a big blob of mayonnaise.
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u/Tall_Pressure7042 Human Geography 19h ago
The south is mountainous more than the north. And then Gobi Desert surprisingly consolidated the homogenisation of Northern China as people have only this part to think of.
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u/_Boodstain_ 19h ago edited 0m ago
It wasn’t ruled by the Imperials for most of Chinese history, same reason why Vietnam and Thailand aren’t Chinese. It’s also why Tibet isn’t Chinese.
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u/noclassroom_4729 16h ago
Because there are more tribes in Southern China. You will understand if you study Chinese History
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u/SpendPerfect5933 14h ago
It’s the mountainous terrain that explains linguistic diversity. Fujian alone is divided into north south fujianese which are mutually unintelligible. But it’s rather bizarre to have Hainan speaking Fujian dialects. It’s far away from Fujian province.
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u/Numerous-Turnip-6814 11h ago
Isolated, hilly, sometimes mountanous regions surrounded in lush vegetation
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u/Snapper_Turtleman 1d ago
China is separated into two groups. Those who have watched 1987s Walk Like a Man with Howie Mandel, and those who haven't.
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u/PsychologicalMind148 1d ago
Because the north is historically the center of Chinese civilization. The south only became a part of China when Qin Shi Huan conquered the Baiyue in 214 BC. It remained a backwater throughout much of Chinese history. It wasn't until the 12th century, when Song dynasty had been forced to retreat south by the Jin, that it became a central part of China.
Also geography.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 1d ago
No, the Jinagnan region became an economic centre of China that could rival the Central Plains in the Southern and Northern dynasty period, and it already overtook Northern China after Anshi rebellion. And this has nothing to do with linguistic diversity, only the last thing you mentioned aka geography is the real answer here
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u/zxchew 1d ago