Zhonghua Minzu (中華民族): a primer

Note: most of the background information in this article comes from properly cited Chinese and English Wikipedia pages. The related articles in both languages are quite spotty, so citations were key in deciding what could be included. I've added some other information based on my understanding of current events.

The term Zhonghua Minzu, (中華民族), literally the "Chinese ethnic group," has been a politically loaded term since it was coined in 1899 by reformist and constitutional monarchist Liang Qichao (梁啟超). It's first uses were rather vague, but by 1903 Liang defined the term to include the Han, Manchurians, Uyghurs Muslims, Mongolians, Hmong and Tibetans ("合漢合滿合蒙合回合苗合藏，組成一大民族"). Such an inclusive definition was a break from a long Han Chinese tradition that viewed non-Han people as barbarians (though such sentiments were obviously punishable when non-Han people, such as the Qing dynasty of his time, ran the government).

The term became an important theme for the early Chinese Nationalist Party. This is reflected in their first flag, which bore five stripes of different colors representing these groups banding together to form one country. A popular (but unofficial) interpretation of the PRC flag is that the five stars represent the five major nationalities, with the largest being the Han.

Sun Yat-sen, who used the term heavily himself, may well have considered the Chinese nation and the Zhonghua Minzu to be synonymous. Political divisions in China during the early years of the Republic made arguing for a "united" China depend on something other than political reality on the ground.

The PRC adopted the term, widening the definition to refer to all of it's fifty-odd officially recognized ethnic groups.

Zhonghua Minzu became widely used in the KMT-directed education in Taiwan to help ingrain the idea that Taiwan and China are one country with one future. Such a line was especially necessary for the regime given the efforts to mobilize Taiwanese to "retake" China and the complete lack of political relations between the two sides of the strait, not to mention ethnic conflicts between the post-1949 immigrants, the Holo, the Hakka and the aborigines.

Zhonghua Minzu is now being embraced by both the PRC government and the KMT administration to avoid discussing sovereignty issues as the two sides prepare to re-enter talks using the "92 consensus," largely because both sides have a different definition of that key term. Thus, to avoid mentioning either the KMT's "One China, two interpretations" or China's "One China principle," both sides have largely decided to leave definitions of "92 consensus" off the table while embracing Zhonghua Minzu as a common denominator, since populations in both countries are familiar with the term.

Chinese media rarely uses Zhonghua Minzu when discussing overseas Chinese or ethnic Chinese in Singapore, Malaysia or other diaspora areas, instead preferring "the Chinese people of the world" (全球華人) or "the sons and daughters of Chinese people throughout the world" (全球中華兒女). There is occasionally some overlap between these three terms, but Zhonghua Minzu is fundamentally -- though not explicitly -- political and territorial while the later two terms include ethnic Chinese around the world; you find very few references to "the Zhonghua Minzu of the world" (全球中華民族) when doing a search of the internet, and where you do the context tends to be extraordinarily nationalist in tone.

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