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people of tribal ancestry often have been registered as Han rather than as Miao, Yao or Yi.17
On the other hand, from the viewpoint of livelihood of traditional type, the mountain dwellers' habitat has been shrinking with time. Since the shifting fire-field mountain farmer requires a forest of some sort to burn to provide the necessary ashes to fertilize the sterile and thin soils of mountain slopes, the destruction of forests on an increasing scale necessarily shrinks the space for his cycle of operation. As Han Chinese population has increased, it has moved deeper and deeper into the mountain ravines, forcing the non-Han mountaineer into lesser space. This would tend to accelerate the re-use of land in shifting cultivation abandoned during an earlier part of the cycle and leaves less time for new forests to regrow. Ultimately, mature trees for restocking the mountains become depleted so that only coarse grass, ferns and shrubs cover the slopes. Today, some ninety to ninety-five per cent of south China hill lands are denuded of forests and are unsuitable for the mountain farmers' type of shifting cultivation. The basis for support of tribal peoples such as the Miao and Yao would have decreased with time, and so, presumably, has affected the size of their populations.
This restriction of their habitat no doubt has had its influence in causing the Miao and Yao as well as other mountain peoples of south China to cross the southern frontiers into adjoining countries of Southeast Asia where forests are still abundant in the mountains.
Table I lists the populations of the fifty ethnic groups listed by the 1953 census on mainland China as reported by Fang Jen.18 These groups together with later revisions have been analyzed by S. I. Bruk, a Soviet ethnographer, in a short monograph accompanying a two-sheet map of ethnographic groups in China on a scale of 1:5,000,000. The following account is largely based upon this map and accompanying monograph.
17 Kuei-yang Chung-yang Jih-pao, Hsin Kuei-chou kai-k'uang (The development of new Kuei-chou), Kuei-yang, 1944, 280.
18 Fang Jen, Wo-kuo shao-su-min-tsu ti jen-k'ou yü fen-pu (The populations and distribution of our national minorities), Ti-li chih-shih (Geographical Knowledge), Vol. 9, No. 6, (July, 1958), 258-259.
19 Solomon I. Bruk, Naseleniye Kitaya, MNR i Korei (Peoples of China, Mongolian People's Republic and Korea) Moscow, 1959, (as translated by the United States Joint Publications Research Service, No. 3710, 16 August, 1960, Washington, D.C.).