Immigration, affirmative action, multilingualism, ethnic diversity—my state of California pioneered these controversial policies, and it is now pioneering a backlash against them. A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public schools, where my sons are being educated, fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children. Those pupils speak more than 80 languages in their homes; English-speaking whites are in the minority. Every single one of my sons' playmates has at least one parent or grandparent who was born outside the United States. That's true of my sons also—three of their four grandparents were immigrants to this country. But the diversity that results from such immigration isn't new to America. In fact, immigration is simply restoring the diversity that existed here for thousands of years and that diminished only recently; the area that now makes up the mainland United States, once home to hundreds of Native American tribes and languages, did not come under the control of a single government until the late nineteenth century.
In these respects, ours is a thoroughly “normal” country. Like the United States, all but one of the world's six most populous nations are melting pots that achieved political unification recently and that still support hundreds of languages and ethnic groups. Russia, for example, once a small Slavic state centered on Moscow did not even begin its expansion beyond the Ural Mountains until 1582. From then until the late nineteenth century, Russia swallowed up dozens of non-Slavic peoples, many of whom, like the people of Chechnya today, retain their original language and cultural identity. India, Indonesia, and Brazil are also recent political creations (or re-creations, in the case of India) and are home to about 850, 703, and 209 languages, respectively.
The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world's most populous nation, China. Today China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic. (For the purposes of this article, I exclude the linguistically and culturally distinct Tibet, which was also politically separate until recently.) China was already unified politically in 221 B.C. and has remained so for most of the centuries since then. From the beginnings of literacy in China over 3,000 years ago, it has had only a single writing system, unlike the dozens in use in modern Europe. Of China's billion-plus people, over 700 million speak Mandarin, the language with by far the largest number of native speakers in the world. Some 250 million other Chinese speak seven languages as similar to Mandarin and to each other as Spanish is to Italian. Thus, while modern American history is the story of how our continent's expanse became American, and Russia's history is the story of how Russia became Russian, China's history appears to be entirely different. It seems absurd to ask how China became Chinese. China has been Chinese almost from the beginning of its recorded history.
China's linguistic near-unity is also puzzling in comparison with the linguistic disunity of other parts of the world.At one extreme, Mandarin and its relatives, which constitute the Chinese subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan language family, are distributed continuously from the top of the country to the bottom. One distinctive feature of all Sino-Tibetan languages is that most words consist of a single syllable, like English it or book; long, polysyllabic words are unthinkable. One could walk through China, from Manchuria in the north to the Gulf of Tonkin in the south, without ever stepping off land occupied by native speakers of Chinese.
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