What Groups of People Make Up the Asians?

Three out of five people on earth live in Asia.

Demographers estimate that about 60 percent of human beings live in Asia. In addition to China's 1.3 billion people and India's nearly 1.2 billion, Asia's nine next most populous countries --- Indonesia; Pakistan; Bangladesh; Japan; the Philippines; Vietnam; Iran; Turkey; and Thailand --- contain over 85 percent of the continent's inhabitants. Despite such figures, however, identifying the groups that make up "Asians" remains a slippery exercise.

Asia

Asia encompasses over 17 million square miles.

The question implies a more basic question: what exactly does Asia encompass? Presenting maps of the world online, Graphic Maps shows Asia as covering an area of over 17 million square miles stretching from north of the Arctic Circle to almost as far south as Australia, from the Mediterranean Sea to out over the Pacific Ocean to include the Philippines, Japan, and the Indonesian part of New Guinea. This sprawling expanse is subdivided into three regions---the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Asia. The name "Asian" might be applied to any group of people living within any of these three regions.

"Asian"

Although living in Asia, Arabs are usually considered Middle Easterners, not Asians.

However, the American Heritage Dictionary points out that the term "Asian" is in practice applied almost exclusively to the peoples of East, Southeast, and South Asia; peoples of Southwest Asia, such as Arabs, Turks, Iranians, and Kurds, are usually designated as Middle or Near Easterners. Moreover, the dictionary notes, Indonesians and Filipinos are properly termed Asian, since their island groups are considered part of the Asian continent, whereas the Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians of the central and southern Pacific are often labeled Pacific Islanders.

Census Data

Referring to data from the United Nations Statistical Division for the year 2003, Professor Ann Morning of New York University notes that about 65 percent of Asian countries subdivided their populations by national or ethnic group. This implies that the inhabitants of a country -- say, Japan -- might be categorized as "Japanese" or, alternatively, subdivided into smaller groups. In fact, the Japanese have long distinguished their Ainu minority from the general population, notes Donald Macintyre. The practice of subcategorizing, conspicuous in the UN data, suggests that the groups composing Asians may vary dramatically, in both kind and number, depending on whether, or how, general populations are subdivided.

Genetics

Like colors continually blending, human groups defy easy categorization.

You might suppose that science, pegging Asian identities to genetic make-ups, could distinguish Asian from non-Asian and one Asian group from another. Actually, human groups are neither genetically discrete nor genetically stable. So long as genes flow between groups --- as they do between human populations --- not only will their genetic constitutions greatly overlap but the boundaries between groups will fluctuate unceasingly, observe the academic scholars Pigliucci and Kaplan. Hence, far from resolving the matter, genetics offers little support for any fixed determination of what, and how many, groups make up the people of Asia.

References

• World Atlas: Asia
• Yahoo! Education - American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Asian
• United Nations Statistics Division: Ethnic Classification in Global Perspective; Ann Morning, Ph.D.; 2005
• "Time"; On the Road from Sapporo to Surabaya; Donald Macintyre; 2002
• Oregon State University; On the Concept of Biological Race and Its Applicability to Humans; Massimo Pigliucci et al.; 2003

Resources

• University of Texas at Austin: Asia Maps
• China-Profile: The Twenty Most Populous Countries in 1950, 2009 and 2050