Hakka population

[Lau Chunfat <96981339r@polyu.edu.hk>]

Dear Yoon-ngan,

I want to correct your figures:

>I guess the Hakka population in Mainland China by now 
>it must be around 35 million. 
>Don't forget the approximate 2 million in Hong Kong and Macau.

My estimation of Hakka people, according to the tradition definition of Luo
Xianglin, should be by now a bit more than 40 Million in the "Greater China":

About 18M in live Guangdong,
7 million in Jiangxi,
6 Million in Fujian,
4 Million in Guangxi,
4 Million in Taiwan,
1 million in Sichuan, 
Plus a few thousand in Hainan.

According to the estimation of Chung Ching association, Hong Kong has about
2 Million Hakka. By this is obviously a careless estimation. According to a
linguistic, Prof Zou Jiayan, who made a statistics of the place of orgin
and dialect spoken by the Hong Kong people around 1966, he found that about
52% were from Standard Cantonese speaking region, 19% Siyi (represented by
Toishan) speakers, 10% Chaozhou speaking, and he estimated that only 0.25
million of the then 3.7 million Hong Kong citizens were of Hakka origin
(Zou, 1997, in: JCL, 25:290). My calculation was a bit higher than his, but
Hakka was about 0.33 million. Other scholars got a figure between 8 and 12%
of the population. Goverment census aslo revealed that Hakka speakers had a
historical maximun of 15.1% in 1911, but  of the population, but after the
civil war when "refugees" massively immigrated from China came to Hong
Kong, Hakka percentage falled. 

If the figures are given in terms of no. of speakers, we see a sad story:

Year                      1961       1971       1991       1996
No. of Hakka speakers* 128,432    104,284     82,703     70,326
% of population            4.8        2.7        1.6        1.2
(Source: HK Government Census, no census was done for dialect usage in 1981)
* defined by using Hakka as their "usual language"

Hakka speakers are dying off, not because Hakka genes are more susceptible
to diseases, but their children have shifted to Cantonese. 

I speak both Hakka and Cantonese, and talk to my family in Hakka. I have no
bad experience from the Cantonese speakers, but from Hakka speakers! People
of Hakka origin laugh at me when I talk in the public in Hakka, thinking
that I am not so civilized as them! They say that it is impolite to talk in
Hakka when non-Hakka speakers are nearby. I think it is the only dumm gene
we have leading to our downfall and extinction. This is a millennium-virus
in our brain, and I am afraid that it is spreading to other hakka speaking
areas.

The only solution I see to solve this problem: a Jiaying Province for you,
for me and for China.

If you really love Hakka, support our Province. If you really think your
are a real Hakka, talk to your child in Hakka. Don't tell me that your
ancestor is Hakka but your talk to your child otherwise. It is a piece of
bad news anyway.

Liu Zinfad