CHINA'S 35 MILLION NON-CHINESE
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been pushed into the higher mountain districts and are surrounded by Han or T'ai people in the lower valleys.
The chief Yao concentration is in the border mountains where Hunan, Kwangsi and Kwangtung come together. In Kwangsi they form a compact group in the Yao Mountains. According to Bruk, only a third of the Yao still speak the Yao language; the other two-thirds are said to have adopted one or the other of the Miao, Tung, Chuang or Han Chinese languages. Of the Miao-Yao group, but set somewhat farther apart culturally by time, is the She cultural group which mostly are in the east coast provinces but consider themselves to have come from Kwangsi. All except about 3,000 of the 151,000 She are in Fukien and Chekiang, the most compact settlement region being Ching-ning district in southern Chekiang, in which about a third of the total number reside.
Aside from whatever problem the minorities constitute to the controlling Han Chinese, their occupation of the frontier regions of south and southwest China give them a peculiar significance. Many of them inhabit blocs of territory overlapping the international boundaries. With the development of national consciousness, especially in periods of real or imagined oppression by governments not of their own choosing on one side or the other of the border, resentments tend to be reflected in desires for pan-national or pan-ethnic consolidation. Trouble on one side of the border leads to easy flight across the border to receptive and related peoples on the other side. This also works for criminal elements wishing to escape from police authority in their home territory. Frontier smuggling and banditry require the cooperative effort of friendly neighbour states, but are hard to deal with when neither side exercises effective control in the isolated, sparsely-settled frontiers of southwest China. International grievances over minority peoples in the past have been numerous between former British-controlled Burma and China.
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Within China, the ethnic character of its southwest clearly indicates its frontier aspects. This is a region of clashing cultures in various stages of peaceful or compulsory Sinicization. Today the acculturation process is being greatly accelerated by the
Chang Hu, T'eng-yueh pien-ti chuang-k'uang chi chih-nien ch'u-yin (A discussion of the situation in the T'eng-yueh frontiers and of their control), Yunnan Frontier Research, Kunming, 1933, 321-322.