China's culture: one script read in many languages

Who the census counts as Chinese

The state recognises 56 ethnic groups. The seventh national census, taken in 2020, counted 1,286.31 million Han and 125.47 million people of the 55 minorities. The minorities grew faster over the decade: by 10.26% against 4.93% for the Han, so their share rose by 0.40 percentage points.

The Zhuang of the south-west are the most populous minority. The Uyghurs, Hui, Mongols and Tibetans are the other large groups, and most minorities live in the western and border regions. In parts of the south-west, Britannica notes, many groups are intermixed, among them the Buyi, Miao and Dong.

The name of the majority is itself a piece of history. The term Han people first appeared in the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties, taken from the Han dynasty of 206 BC to AD 220, and the Han trace their descent to the Huaxia, farming peoples of the middle and lower Yellow River. A wider term, Zhonghua minzu, the Chinese nation, was coined by the reformer Liang Qichao between 1902 and 1905; he first used it for the Han alone, and it is now used for all of the country's peoples together.

How one script holds many languages together

Britannica puts it plainly: even among the Han there are regional differences in language, and the only thing two people from different parts of China may have in common linguistically is the written language. Most Han speak a form of Mandarin. Wu, Yue (Cantonese), Min, Gan, Hakka and Xiang, the main other branches, are spoken mostly in the south, are written with the same characters and are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or with each other.

The standard is recent. At the start of the twentieth century most of the population could not read, and Classical Chinese, the written standard for millennia, was the preserve of an educated class. Reformers chose Beijing-based Mandarin as the national spoken language, and after the May Fourth Movement of 1919 written vernacular replaced Classical Chinese. The People's Republic standardised simplified characters in the 1950s and adopted Hanyu Pinyin as the official romanisation. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan still write traditional characters.

The census measured the result. The illiteracy rate fell from 4.08% in 2010 to 2.67% in 2020, and average schooling for people aged 15 and over rose from 9.08 years to 9.91.

Other language families are spoken inside the borders: Tibeto-Burman languages in the west and south-west, Hmong-Mien and Kra-Dai languages among minorities of the south-west, Turkic languages such as Uyghur and Mongolic languages in the north and north-west, Tungusic languages in the north-east and north-west, and two Indo-European ones, Russian and Tajik. Article 4 of the constitution gives every nationality the freedom to use and develop its own language. Since the 2010s the government has generally required schools to teach in Standard Chinese.

How the classics shaped the examinations

Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 BC, presented himself as transmitting the values of the early Zhou. His teaching became the state's official philosophy under the Han, and mastery of the Confucian texts was the main route into the imperial bureaucracy through the examinations that began under the Sui. Taoism, by contrast, puts little weight on ritual and social order and stresses living in harmony with the Dao, the way, and teaches effortless action and simplicity. Both came out of the Hundred Schools of Thought of the sixth to third centuries BC, the same ferment that produced Legalism, the doctrine of the Qin.

The examination habit outlived the empire. Children have nine years of free compulsory schooling, six of primary and three of junior high, and as of 2022 about 95% of junior high students went on to senior high school, choosing an academic or a vocational track. Entry to university depends on the national examination, the gaokao. In 2022 China had 158 million pupils in compulsory schooling and 46.5 million students in higher education, and the enrolment rate in higher education was 59.6%. Foreign languages, usually English, are compulsory from the third year of primary school.

What people believe and how the state manages it

Chinese religious practice is syncretic. Folk religion has long run together with the three teachings, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and many people follow religious practices without calling themselves adherents of anything, which makes affiliation hard to count. Mahayana Buddhism arrived during the Han dynasty and spread quickly over the following centuries, and Taoism took shape as a religion, as distinct from a philosophy, in the second century AD. Local deities are worshipped beside widely known ones such as Guan Yu and Mazu; UNESCO inscribed Mazu belief and customs as intangible heritage in 2009.

Article 36 of the constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief and protects what it calls normal religious activities, and it forbids using religion to disrupt public order or interfere with state education. The Communist Party is officially atheist. The state recognises five religions, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, each managed by a patriotic association overseen by the party's United Front Work Department.

Most religious activity takes place outside those registered bodies, and the state has acted against some of it, such as Protestant house churches. Islam among the Uyghurs and Tibetan Buddhism are under particular scrutiny and regulation over the government's fears of separatism.

Why the calendar still follows the moon

China adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1912. Before that it kept a twelve-month lunisolar calendar. Days and years were counted in a sixty-part cycle beside the twelve-year zodiac. The main festivals still follow it. The Spring Festival, the new year, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2024 as the social practices of the Chinese people in celebration of the traditional new year. The Dragon Boat Festival was inscribed in 2009.

The calendar also carries agricultural knowledge. The Twenty-Four Solar Terms, which divide the year by the sun's annual motion, were inscribed in 2016.

Family is the frame. Confucian ethics made filial piety and the veneration of ancestors duties, and family relations were highly patriarchal before the twentieth century, with arranged marriages common. The party set up the All-China Women's Federation after 1949 to push for equality; women still face lower employment rates and occupational segregation.

What a meal is built on

A Chinese meal pairs a grain, fan, with dishes of meat or vegetables, cai. The grain changes at roughly the line the geography draws: wheat flour as steamed buns, dumplings, pancakes and noodles in the north, rice, steamed or as congee and noodles, in the south. Pork and chicken are the commonest meats, followed by fish and duck, and soybeans become tofu and soy sauce everywhere.

Stir-frying in a wok is the usual method, with deep-frying, steaming and hot pot, where food is cooked at the table in simmering broth. Dishes are shared, chopsticks are the main utensil and hot tea comes with almost every meal; rice wines and the distilled spirit baijiu are served with food. Tradition divides the cuisine into four great schools, Lu from Shandong, Yang from Jiangsu, Chuan from Sichuan and Yue from Guangdong. Buddhists keep a meatless cuisine and Chinese Muslims one without pork or alcohol. UNESCO inscribed traditional tea processing and its social practices in 2022.

What the written and painted arts kept

Calligraphy, which emerged in the third and fourth centuries, was traditionally the most prestigious art in China and is still widely practised. Painting in ink on paper or silk, on handscrolls and hanging scrolls, shares its brushes and its techniques. Porcelain became a common ceramic in the seventh century, and blue-and-white decoration took hold in the fourteenth; UNESCO inscribed the Jingdezhen porcelain industry sites as World Heritage in 2026.

UNESCO's lists held 45 Chinese elements in 2026, several of them minority traditions: Uyghur Muqam and Meshrep from Xinjiang, the Tibetan Gesar epic and Tibetan opera, Mongolian long song and khoomei singing, and the Manas epic.

Literature began, as far as the record shows, with the oracle bone inscriptions of the late Shang. The canon was organised around the Five Classics and the Four Books, poetry of the Tang was prized above most other writing, and printing spread the vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing, among them Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin. In the twentieth century writers of the New Culture Movement including Lu Xun promoted fiction and the vernacular against the classical tradition, which had treated fiction as useless.

Peking opera reached national popularity under the Qing, drawing on the earlier kunqu. The traditional instruments include the dizi flute, the two-stringed erhu, the guqin and guzheng zithers, the pipa lute and the sheng mouth organ.

What houses and clothes were made of

Traditional buildings are timber-framed, with hipped roofs of ceramic tile on important buildings, and they are laid out around courtyards and gates and oriented to the cardinal directions, often by the principles of feng shui. Pagodas came with Buddhism and are among the oldest buildings that survive. UNESCO inscribed the craftsmanship of timber-framed structures as intangible heritage in 2009 and the building of wooden arch bridges in 2024, and the earthen Fujian tulou became World Heritage in 2008. The skyscrapers of the reform era have largely replaced traditional building in the cities.

Robes of silk, hemp and later cotton were the main clothing for both sexes for most of Chinese history. The qipao, a Manchu-derived dress, became popular among women in the early twentieth century and is now mostly worn on formal occasions. In the twenty-first century a Hanfu movement has promoted reconstructed forms of earlier Han dress. Sericulture and silk craftsmanship were inscribed by UNESCO in 2009.

How sport and the media work

China first competed at the Olympic Games in 1932. The state began investing heavily in elite sport in the 1990s, and the government provides most of its funding through the General Administration of Sport. Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics in 2008 and the Winter Olympics in 2022. Table tennis is often called the national sport. Older games remain common: weiqi, known abroad as Go, xiangqi, and mahjong, which emerged in the nineteenth century. Taijiquan grew out of the martial arts in the Qing period.

The media are state-run or state-supervised. As of 2023 all of China's more than 2,600 radio stations were state-owned, and cities generally have one newspaper published by the local government and another by the local party committee. Content critical of the government is censored and foreign Chinese-language news outlets are blocked. Cinema is mainly a domestic business: by state figures there were more than 90,000 screens in 2025, and 98% of the film industry's box office that year came from the home market. WeChat is the most used social platform, beside Weibo and Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok.