Chinese people

Chinese people are the various individuals or groups of people associated with China (or Greater China), either by reason of ancestry or heredity, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, place of residence, or other affiliations.

Ancestry or heredity

A number of ethnic groups within the region of China, as well as people elsewhere with ancestry in the region, may be referred to as Chinese people.

Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China, are often referred to as "Chinese" or "ethnic Chinese" in English. Han Chinese also form a majority or large minority in other countries, and may comprise as much as 19% of the global human population.

Other ethnic groups in China include the Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, and Uyghurs, among many others. The People's Republic of China (PRC) officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, some of whom live in special administrative regions of the country. Taiwan officially recognizes 14 tribes of Taiwanese aborigines, who together with unrecognized tribes comprise about 2% of the country's population. The list of ethnic groups in China includes the major ethnic groups of China (PRC) and Taiwan.

Andy Lau

Andy Lau Tak-wah MH, JP (born 27 September 1961) is a Hong Kong Cantopop singer and actor. He has been one of Hong Kong's most commercially successful film actors since the mid-1980s, performing in more than 160 films while maintaining a successful singing career at the same time. In the 1990s, Lau was branded by the media as one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Cantopop.

Lau was entered into the Guinness World Records for the "Most Awards Won by a Cantopop Male Artist". By April 2000, he had already won a total unprecedented 292 awards. In 2005, Lau was awarded "No.1 Box office Actor 1985–2005" of Hong Kong, yielding a total box office of HKD 1,733,275,816 for shooting 108 films in the past 20 years. In 2007, Lau was also awarded the "Nielsen Box Office Star of Asia" by the Nielsen Company (ACNielsen).

Biography

Early life

Andy Lau was born in Tai Po, Hong Kong. A son of a fireman (劉禮), as a young boy Lau had to fetch water for his family up to eight times a day because their house was not equipped with plumbing. He later graduated from a Band One secondary school, Ho Lap College in San Po Kong, Kowloon. He also practices Chinese calligraphy. Lau converted to Buddhism in the 1980s. He was raised in a nominally Buddhist household and is now a follower of the Lingyan Mountain Temple in Taiwan.