noted homogenous country China
Is it not? I was taught that China is 99% han Chinese
It’s about 91% officially but “Han” is a term that has a lot of history and baggage associated with it especially since it’s a label that’s used for people from vastly different areas speaking entirely different mutually unintelligible languages and with different cultural practices. The history of the development of “Han” as a term for people is complicated but it’s does definitely derive from the Han dynasty and a funfact is that in languages like Cantonese the equivalent term is actually “Tang” after the later Tang dynasty and the role of dynastic names in all of this is a major clue for what “Han” means
Anyway a good example of cultural diversity of China is simply looking at the wide linguistic diversity even in places where the population is considered “Han” . In Shanghai which is the most populated in China and people traditionally speak what’s called “Shanghaiese”, a dialect of the Wu language which is mutually unintelligible with Mandarin and which is still fluently understood by about 81% of the population of the city (there’s been worry in recent years about a possible steep decline but that’s another topic). Hakka people In Guangdong province most people speak varieties of Yue most notably Cantonese but tens of millions also speak languages such as Hokkien and Hakka which are all quite different languages with their own histories
yeah the idea of a “chinese language” of which mandarin, cantonese, etc are “dialects” would be like if we decided french, spanish, etc. are dialects of latin
actually even worse than that, didn’t the min “dialects” split from chinese a few centuries before vulgar latin started to diverge into the romance languages
mm I mean, it’s plausible that bc of Eurocentrism, etc Westerners think of China as less diverse than it really is, but also I think it’s true that it’s unusually non-diverse given its population size
like if you measure genetic and linguistic diversity I’d guess a reasonable analogy for China is something like northern China = France, southern China = Spain, Guangdong = Romania or something idk. which might be more diversity than people often give it credit for, but also it has a similar amount of diversity to that set of countries with 10x the population
(see eg PCA of Indian vs Chinese genetic variation: India otoh is very diverse)