With the end of the reign of the Manchus who governed
the Chinese Empire for three centuries, and
with the advent of the Republic (1911), the minority
issue took on a dimension impossible to imagine in
1 9t h-century China. Aware of the fragility of national
cohesion in this immense land of heterogeneous
population groups, Sun Yatsen, founder of the Republic,
still minimized the influence of minorities, affirming
the supremacy of the Han, the majority ethnic
group and founders of one of the first Chinese dynasties.
The question of numbers quickly became a
focus of debate. Proclaiming that, of a population total
of 400 million inhabitants at the time, the minorities
represented only slightly more than 10 million,
Sun Yatsen implicitly called upon them to disappear
into the Chinese melting pot. The statistics published
at the time, however, contradicted the President’s
assertions by listing 26 million non-Han Chinese.