Since the beginning of written records, China has been a multi-ethnic country. After the unification of the Qin and Han Dynasties, it became a unified multi-ethnic state. In the long and uninterrupted process of national history and culture, the integration between various ethnic groups is manifested in: on the one hand, a large number of ethnic minorities have integrated into the Han nationality, and the result is that the Han nationality is like a "snowball" rolling bigger and bigger.
The Xiongnu, the Huns, the Xianbei, the Qiang, and later the Turks, Mongols, Jurchens, Manchus, etc., were all greatly absorbed into the Han nationality, on the other hand, a large number of Han people were integrated into the ethnic minorities.
Mainly due to the migration of Han Chinese, and the establishment of central political power by ethnic minorities, such as during the Yuan and Qing dynasties, or the establishment of long-term local political power by ethnic minorities in certain Han-inhabited areas, Han Chinese have integrated into the minorities in power.
This integration not only increased the population of ethnic minorities and strengthened the strength of the tribes, but also promoted the economic and cultural development of many ethnic minorities.
In the territory of Central Chinese, the Han people refer to both the Han people, and the Han people are the largest ethnic group in the world. Nationality is not the concept of race, many of China's ethnic groups are multi-ethnic, different blood relations are fused, the Same is true of the Han nationality, it is the fusion of many ethnic groups.
In the 11th century BC, King Wu of Zhou destroyed the Shang and established the Zhou Dynasty, the Zhou people were a branch of the Western Qiang people, the Zhou Dynasty caused a great fusion of the Zhou people, the Xia people, and the merchants, and the Western Zhou Dynasty appeared the Chinese clan name, which was different from the Yi, Barbarian, Rong, Di and other ethnic groups.
Qin Shi Huang established the monarchical system of central power, unified the local administrative system and "books with the same text", "the same track as the car", unified weights and measures, etc., thus laying the historical foundation for the development of the Chinese nation into the Han nation in the subsequent historical period.
As one of the oldest languages in the world, Chinese characters evolved from the Shang and Zhou oracle bones and jin scripts, which played a very important role in the development of the Han society and the cultural exchanges of various ethnic groups, as well as the development of the Chinese nation.
Historically, Han Chinese who migrated to ethnic minority areas were voluntary in some cases, such as those who engaged in business, those who fled, and those who surrendered and were annexed in war.
The other was forced, such as slave owners and armies captured by the Xiongnu, Turks, Western Qiang, Tubo, Khitan and Jurchen, especially women and children, and soldiers sent by the Central Plains Dynasty to garrison ethnic minority areas, soldiers and civilians who were reclaimed, and handmaidens, handmaidens, craftsmen, etc. who accompanied and loved princesses who moved to ethnic minority areas.
During the Qin and Han dynasties, many Han civilians fled to the nomadic areas of the Xiongnu, which can be found in the "Book of Han and the Biography of the Xiongnu", and the "Sui Book of Turks" also records that in the last years of the Sui Dynasty, a large number of Han people fled to the Turkic pastoral areas, and the ethnic biographies in the Twenty-Four Histories record that the slave owners and feudal lords of the ethnic minorities frequently went to the Han agricultural areas to plunder the population.
Xiongnu, Western Qiang, Turkic, Tubo and other ethnic groups in a certain period of great power, although the jurisdiction is vast, but the population is much smaller than the Han population, for example, the Xiongnu had about 300,000 slaves when the population of two million, the ethnic composition of these slaves is mainly Han, accounting for about one-sixth or seventh of the total population.
During the Tang Dynasty, Emperor Taizong of Tang once redeemed 80,000 Han Chinese from the Eastern Turks. As an institutional arrangement of the Central Plains Dynasty, many of the garrison troops sent to ethnic minority areas also settled in the local areas, intermarried with ethnic minorities, and multiplied from generation to generation.
For example, in the Turpan Basin and neighboring areas of Xinjiang, the Koji Gaochang state was founded by the Han people, which existed for more than 140 years from 499 to 640 AD, some of these Han people were descendants of Han and Wei soldiers, and some were civilians who fled from the Jin Dynasty.
They eventually all integrated into ethnic groups such as the Uighurs. In 640 AD, when the Tang Dynasty destroyed the Koji clan Gaochangguo, it recorded that there were 8,000 households and 30,000 people at that time.
After the Anshi Rebellion, the Tang Dynasty troops originally stationed in the Hexi, Longyou, and Hehuang areas were transferred internally, and Tubo took advantage of the situation to occupy this area, with a Han population of up to one million, of which there were nearly 35,000 households and 178,000 people in the Hexi region alone.
After this, most of the Han people gradually integrated into Tubo, and by the time of the Northern Song Dynasty, they had basically tuboized and evolved into today's Tibetan, Turk and other ethnic minorities.
In the third century BC, there are records of the Central Plains Han people moving into Yunnan, before the Ming Dynasty, most of the Han people in Yunnan were integrated into various ethnic minorities.
The Manchus were even more of a cultural community, nurhaci unified the Jurchen tribes and established the Jin dynasty, and Emperor Taiji announced the establishment of the Manchurian political alliance to consolidate the national community, the main trunk of which was the Jurchens accounted for about 20%, 40% were Han, including the Han people in the northeast during the "Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures" ruled by the Liao Dynasty; and 40% were Mongols, Koreans, etc.
A large number of Han Chinese were assimilated into the Eight Banners of Manchuria, and even the "Three Banners" of Yellow, Zhenghuang and Zhengbai became veritable Manchurians, such as cao yinjiaqi. The integration of the Han into the Manchus greatly strengthened the cultural strength of the Manchus.