China is a great country

China is a large country and the customs and traditions of its people vary by geography and ethnicity
1 billion people live in China according to the Asia Society representing 56 ethnic minority groups. The largest group is the Han Chinese with about 900 million people. Other groups include the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Manchas, the Naxi, and the Hezhen which is smallest group with fewer than 2,000 people. Significantly, individuals within communities create their own culture said Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London. Culture includes religion, food, style, language, marriage, music, morals and many other things that make up how a group acts and interacts. Here is a brief overview of some elements of the Chinese.

Religion

The Chinese Communist Party that rules the nation is officially atheist, though it is gradually becoming more tolerant of religions according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Currently there are only five official religions. Any religion other than Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism are illegal, even though the Chinese constitution states that people are allowed freedom of religion. The gradual tolerance of religion has only started to progress in the past few decades. About a quarter of the people practice Taoism and Confucianism and other traditional religions. There are also small numbers of Buddhists, Muslims and Christians. Although numerous Protestant and Catholic ministries have been active in the country since the early 19th century, they have made little progress in converting Chinese to these religions.

Language
There are seven major groups of dialects of the Chinese language, which each have their own variations, according to Mount Holyoke College. Mandarin dialects are spoken by 71.5 percent of the population, followed by Wu (8.5 percent), Yue (also called Cantonese; 5 percent), Xiang (4.8 percent), Min (4.1 percent), Hakka (3.7 percent) and Gan (2.4 percent).Chinese dialects are very different, according to Jerry Norman, a former professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and author of "Chinese (Cambridge Language Surveys)" (Cambridge University Press, 1988). "Chinese is rather more like a language family than a single language made up of a number of regional forms, he wrote. "The Chinese dialectal complex is in many ways analogous to the Romance language family in Europe. To take an extreme example there is probably as much difference between the dialects of Peking and Chaozhou as there is between Italian and French”. The official national language of China is Mandarain , a type of Mandarin spoken in the capital Beijing, according to the Order of the President of the People's Republic of China. Many Chinese are also fluent in English.