Although a relatively large amount of literature dealing with the demography of the People's Republic of China has been published in recent decades, few sociologists and demographers have engaged in comparative studies of China's ethnic minority populations. In fact, one of the major problems associated with China's attempts at modernization today has been the uneven development of the Han majority, and its 55 different minority nationalities. This paper is an attempt to fill this void. I focus on the residential segregation of China's minority populations from the Han majority in 2000. I calculate dissimilarity indexes of the degree of residential segregation from the majority Han for each of the 55 minority groups. I conduct my analyses at both the provincial and county levels. I then analyze the variation in residential segregation with independent variables, measuring for each minority group its levels of socioeconomic and demographic development and women's status. Major contributions of my paper are advancing our understanding of the patterns of residential segregation of China's minority nationalities from the Han majority and rethinking some of the possible causes of ethnic conflict in China today.
ETD Chair
Poston, Dudley George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts
