II. Population

Total population: 22.37 million (2008)

Ethnicity:

Gansu is inhabited by 20,515,000 Han people and 2,275,900 people of ethnic minority groups, who make up 91.7 percent and 8.3 percent of the province’s population respectively. Other minority groups each with a population of more than 1,000 are the Hui, Tibetan, Dongxiang, Tu, Manchu, Yugur, Bonan, Mongolian, Salar, and Kazak.

Literacy:

The enrollment of school-aged children has reached 98.2 percent. At the end of 1998, 47.5 percent of the population had completed the nine years of compulsory education and 91.6 percent had completed lower primary school. The number of illiterate or semi-illiterate people at the age of 15 and older made up of 28.65 percent of the total of their age group. Students in institutes of higher learning were 54,014 and those who graduated from the institutes of higher learning were 13,251. The students in secondary specialized schools were 68,654 and those who graduated from the secondary specialized schools were 20,790.