Hey everyone, as a reminder: a year ago the Forum Mundialis officially made the switch from "China" to "Hwa-hsia", a term which better reflects the nature of the region (a complex defined mainly by cultural interlinkage, with unstable political unity even at the best of times). It emerged as a neutral compromise between the pan-ethnic terms "Han" and "
Tang", and academics in the field have already used it for years. It's been slow to break into the popular consciousness, but change has to begin somewhere.
Also, regarding the Pai-yueh, the subject I did my Acharya thesis on:
Didn't it become the Zhuang-dominated Baiyue State post-decolonization? The Xi Dynasty's rule over South China resulted in the various non-Han peoples (the various Miao-Yao and Tai-Kadai peoples of the "hill country") becoming a majority in much of Southern China with Guangdong and Fujian being the sole exceptions to the trend of non-Han peoples being a majority in Southern China.
I think so? I cant really remember whose in charge, but since the bourbon fall French colonies have always been a sliding scale of crazy, with France being so unstable. for a time FSC were a Buddhist theocracy, then ten minutes later they were france again. Rn they're a communist puppet till France can get America to bail them out a fourth time.
The question of who "dominates" Pai-yueh isn't so clear-cut as that. Sure, the various hill-peoples increased their demographic share in the countryside (at least, those parts not already settled by the estimated 1.3 million "New Hakka" migrants from the chaotic north) and the French encouraged the use of their tongues by district administrators to fray the bonds of Hwa-hsia, but the culture of the cities have always been defined by the people who, in
Canton and
Fukien, consider themselves "Yueh" as well. Indeed, they think themselves the best of the Yueh, combining Hwa-hsia wisdom with Southern ardor, and the millions of hill-people who assimilated to their ways after the Great Migrations to the industrializing Pearl Delta might well agree.
The hill-peoples combined may be a slim majority (estimated at 52% by the last survey) and the Chuang especially are overrepresented in the military cliques from which so many French-backed postcolonial rulers have been drawn (much to the chagrin of . However, around a third of that 52% have partial Hwa-hsia ancestry, and 80-90% of the total population speaks some variety of Hwa-hsia as a primary or auxiliary language. Even the current Communist government, with its idealization of peasant communes' feudal liberties and insistence on "self-rule" for every ethnic group, has not challenged the use of Cantonese as the language of administration in near any
département with a "complicated" ethnic make-up... which naturally includes nearly every city of note in the whole country, from Meichow Capital District to forlorn Kweiyang.
OOC notes:
1. Acharya is the PhD equivalent offered by the
parisad academies of the State of Hindustan, the latest evolution of the old Scindia tributary network.
2. With the Qing never popularizing Zhongguo as a term for all China, it instead refers to the North China Plain and the British successor state based there.