Dear Editor:
I misspoke for the number of Hmong in China.
While China has the largest population of Hmong people, an exact figure is hard to determine. According to the 1990 census, of the 7.4 million Miao people, 5.4 million were recorded as speaking a Miao language. Of these, around 2 million spoke a dialect of the Hmong language. Currently, based on projected growth rates, along with the inclusion of previously overlooked dialects, the number of speakers of the Hmong language in China has been estimated to be around 2.8 million.
Although, the exact number was never clear because there are a lot of bi-racials back to several thousands years ago due to the fact that Hmong comingled with Han (over 90% of the Chinese population) for many thousand years with no fixed boundaries in mostly southern China.
Wenbin Yuan
