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.

Chinese

Chinese can refer to:

Asian people

Asian people or Asiatic people are people who descend from a portion of Asia's population.

There are varieties of definition and geographical data presented by organizations and individuals for classifying the ethnic groups in Asia.

Definitions by country

Anglophone Africa and Caribbean

In parts of anglophone Africa, especially East Africa and South Africa, and in parts of the Anglophone Caribbean, the term "Asian" is more commonly associated with people of South Asian origin, particularly Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

Australia

The Australian Census includes Central Asia. The Australian Census includes four regions of Asia in its official definition. Defined by the 2006–2011 Australian Census, three broad groups have the word Asian included in their name: Central and Southern Asian, South-East Asian and North-East Asian. Russians are classified as Southern and Eastern Europeans while Middle Easterners are classified as North African and Middle Easterners.

Canada

Ching chong

Ching chong and ching chang chong are pejorative terms sometimes employed by speakers of English to mock or play on the Chinese language, people of Chinese ancestry, or other East Asians perceived to be Chinese. Several public commentators have characterized the term as derogatory while noting that assaults or physical intimidation of East Asians are often accompanied by racial slurs or imitation Chinese.

Historical usage

The term "ching chong" is based on how Chinese supposedly sounds to English speakers who do not speak it. The "ch" reflects the relative abundance of voiceless coronal affricates in Chinese (six in Mandarin Chinese: [ts], [tʂ], [tɕ], [tsʰ], [tʂʰ], [tɕʰ]), whereas English only has one: /tʃ/ (written ⟨ch⟩). The "ng" reflects the greater commonness of nasals in syllable codas in many varieties of Chinese; for example, Mandarin only allows [n] or [ŋ] (written ⟨ng⟩ in both English and in romanization of Chinese) in syllable codas.

While usually intended for ethnic Chinese, the slur has also been directed at other East Asians. Mary Paik Lee, a Korean immigrant who arrived with her family in San Francisco in 1906, writes in her autobiography that on her first day of school, girls circled and hit her, chanting: