Talk:Chin people

The collection name is Zo people or hill tribe never known Chin People
The chin hill vol 1 descrided as the chin hill, the lushai hill, the sadar hill and the chitagong hill are all hill tribe. In this because in 1891 burma census the chin are dismissed due to the hill tribe. The relation between the chin and the lushai is culculated only both the hill tribe. Never called Chin. The chin and lushai are both hill tribe or Zo people. http://www.WordPress.com › files › nikonghong › the chin hill volume 1 pg 12. You are requested this the chin people article to modified more correction. Thanks you

Mr Well Naulak 21:47, 20 February 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrwellnaulak (talk • contribs)

This article should not be merged with "Kuki"
Chins in Chin State, Kuki, Mizo, Zomi are one people who share the same ethnicity, cultures and language similarities. The creation of Mizoram and Chin State left the peoples scattered in Burma, India and Bangladesh. Though the respective names for their identifications are respected among them, only 'Chin' and 'Mizo' terms adhere to geographically defined boundaries -- that are Chin State and Mizoram. With respect to 'Kuki', they live mainly Churachandpur district, Manipur state, India. The term Kuki in Manipur may include the Thado-Kuki peoples and Zomi peoples akin to the peoples living in the northern Chin State. 'Chin' can be traced back to ancient Burma in ancient inscriptions and records. The book called "The Burmese empire a hundred year ago", in paragraph 40, 41, 44 in Chapter IV mentioned about Chin peoples and their partially independent land. It was written as 'Chien' not as Chin. Therefore, 'Chien' is the first etymology ever written in modern western literature. The Kuki and Chins are ethnically correlated as they are one people, however how the two identities emerged in history is important to be mentioned and studied disconnectedly, especially on the matter of literature. --Ralliantu (talk) 06:28, 24 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Agree with this! It is not possible to merge. Template removed. Rockrangoon (talk) 08:53, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

Religious "colonization"
The word "colonization" refers to an active, voluntary movement of people or groups of people from one place or region to another. Historically, this is often without the consent of the original inhabitants of the area.

Thus, the compound phrase "religious colonization" is factually incorrect. It treats religions as if such ideas were people, improperly attaching a conceptual system as the object of a verb which can only be carried out by cognizant, choosing individuals. Religions, not being cognizant

More importantly, however, religious tensions in India have turned Christian missionary work into a highly politicized local issue. It is eminently clear that the original inventor of the phrase forced this marriage of two incompatible words in order to give Baptist missionaries the rhetorical overtones of purposeful and premeditated invasion currently ascribed to colonialism.

Given that this chimeric notion of religious colonialism is particularly inflammatory in the context of a post-colonial state currently undergoing a political battle questioning whether missionaries have the right to profess and preach their opinions, any continued use whatsoever by Wikipedia of the incorrect and incongruous phrase "religious colonization," would constitute a subtle yet effective and therefore decidedly underhanded violation of Wikipedia's heretofore well-recognized policy of Neutral Point of View. I therefore submit with utmost vehemence that the passage be changed to reflect only the current predominant religious makeup of the Chin people, instead of decreeing that the user ought to believe that the Chin were colonized by Baptists.

But even should anyone disagree, even should the majority opinion demand that the introductory passage in particular recognize more than simply the current state of Chin beliefs... even then, propriety and plain English grammar would dictate that the already-extant phrase, "missionary work," be used to describe Baptist activities among the Chin, and that inflammatory ideological inventions like "religious colonialism" should be left far from the encyclopedists, among the politicians.

Cordially, and to All of Those Whom it may Concern: Anonymous Crane 24.218.138.0 (talk) 06:34, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Seems to be full of propaganda
The fact that it constantly states that it Chin are not an ethnic group with no language or culture of their own (which is false) and is written in broken English makes it seem like propaganda to me. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jukkuj (talk • contribs) 11:59, 2 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree. That is why I read this talk page. It is obvious to me that the Burmese government is making a concerted effort to deny the existence of an ethnicity that they have spent decades trying to destroy. If the ethnic group does not exist, then the suppression does not exist. But respected international organizations, who monitor such things, believe that the Chin are a distinct ethnic group. Nick Beeson (talk) 17:57, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

NPOV in lead-in
While I don't disagree that the Chin are oppressed (they certainly are), it seems that an undue portion of the lead-in and first section are devoted to this fact. A separate section for this info, as well as a mention in the intro, might be in order. I've added the POV tag, though please correct me if this isn't the correct tag to use. Auvon (talk) 01:20, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

How are they related to Chinese people?
Is it a coincidence that the Chin people have names that are like in Chinese name convention? Are they related to the Chinese from way back? 31.53.28.24 (talk) 02:33, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

They are indeed related to the Chinese. They probably came to Myanmar in the 9th to 10th century AD and were originally of Chinese descent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:800:C004:6F30:308C:6220:D14F:AF95 (talk) 00:52, 6 December 2019 (UTC)


 * No, that's not true. They are Tibeto-Burman-speaking indigenous peoples who have been in Chin Hills for thousands of years. Their ancestors would have migrated from elsewhere during the Neolithic, just like the ancestors of all other modern-day Southeast Asians, but that's another story. Lingnanhua (talk) 20:34, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

External links modified
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Long-term POV warring at this article; rewrite may be required
There has been long-term POV-based warring at this article, partly (but not solely) involves wholesale replacement of the term Zomi with Chin—and vice versa. It's not clear if this is reparable, due to the length of time this has been going on, and the wholesale lack of observance of WP:Verifiability over the years.

I'm still coming on board with the true scope of the problem, which I think may go back to its very earliest days. The fact that there have been Chin/Zomi warring is visible all over the article. In one example, we have the absurd repetition "" in the lead, added in this edit on 9 April 2021 by a POV-warring IPv6, who simply changed all occurrences of "Zomi" to "Chin", causing that repetition, and mangling dozens of sentences all over the article, including changing the title of a book inside a citation from the correct "History of Zomi" (Gougin-1984) to " History of Chin " as well as altering the quotation which was double-quoted from the book, from "to renounce the term Chin in favour of Zomi" to "" (the former is a verified excerpt from the book).

Previous to that edit, the text in the lead was no better, and read: "", added here on 17 March 2021, by a registered editor who simply changed everything in the opposite direction, from "Chin" to "Zomi" regardless of sourcing or consequences, with equally absurd results, including changing a BBC quotation from the accurate "abused Chin need help" found in the BBC article, to ", and altering language names in the Infobox to favor their preferred point of view, all of it unsourced, of course. It's probably not by accident that that statement about identity in the lead has six citations (overlinking being one clue to possible pov-warring), not that anybody was checking the sources while pushing their view.

The contribution history is littered with back-and-forth reversions, and the struck-out ids of numerous editors who have edited here, been reverted, and eventually blocked (I didn't verify whether because of their activity here, or something else). It seems to go back for many years, requiring attention from good faith users such as Doug Weller, who in this edit in December 2017 summarized his edit as, "Reverted to revision 817546591 by ClueBot NG (talk): Pov edits trying to deny that Chin and Zomi denote the same people" and who was active here as far back as 2009. As far as I can tell, the Pov warring regarding the Chin and Zomi have never stopped since then.

After years of this, and warring back and forth, it's very unclear to me if there is still a well-sourced, verifiable kernel to this article at all, or whether it has been so polluted by unsourced POV edits interlaced throughout, that it's now impossible to disentangle the sequence of endless pov edits completely ignoring adjacent sourcing, and even changing the titles of the sources themselves. This might require blowing it all up and starting from scratch, using a core of impeccable sources from the article, or new ones. If we go that route, note that there are articles on 25 other Wikipedias that we could check for sourcing; for example, the fr-wiki article is called fr:Khyang and has 23 references including many in English; the German one has ten; the Dutch one twenty-three, nearly all in English.

In the short-to-medium term, the article may benefit from semi-protection, but the most urgent task is to remove the tangle of content which has been battered by the Pov warring for years and is either entirely unsourced, or has nearby citations that bear no relation whatever to the content. Mathglot (talk) 22:13, 20 February 2023 (UTC)


 * I remember trying to cleanup some poorly written additions to this article a while back and realising it was a huge mess, for the exact reasons you mentioned. I support rewriting the article and protecting it temporarily so such a project can be undertaken. Personally I do not have the time to contribute, so that would be the main concern – how many editors are able to contribute to such an endeavour? Yue 🌙 01:43, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * @Mathglot@Yue Blow it up. I took it off my watchlist a while ago. I'd help but cancer is going to kill me soon and I have more important projects, sorry. But I'm semi-protecting it for, well until someone decides to unprotect it. I see no other option which will stop all this warring.  Doug Weller  talk 08:04, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * @Doug, thanks; semi-protection will definitely help give us some breathing room. (I realize your priorities; it was a courtesy ping as I'm aware that you have worked on this article off and on over a period of many years, trying to hold the line on the POV warring problems here; thanks for all your efforts!) @Yue, let's wait a bit to see if we get more feedback about starting from scratch, or other options, as I've listed this discussion at a couple of WikiProjects. If there's no objection after a decent interval, I'll cull all the good references (maybe some from the French/German/Dutch articles, too) and copy them here to the Talk page, and we can use that as a basis for creating a new article. Mathglot (talk) 08:54, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree that it's a big mess, as with most articles about ethnic groups in South Asia. Definitely do something like semi-protection. Chin and Zomi should be separate because they're used by completely different groups of people. Zomi is a neologism that some speakers of certain northern Kuki-Chin languages promote, particularly in Churachandpur District, Manipur. Chin is a generic exonym primarily used in Myanmar (kind of like Zhuang, Miao, or Yi in China), but Kuki-Chin speakers in India don't really have a Chin identity. Rather, they're just Mizo, Kuki, Hmar, or whatever ethnic group they are, and their overarching identity is just "Northeast Indian" as opposed to "mainland Indian." In Myanmar, Mizo, Kuki, and even Anu-Hkongso speakers are all grouped as "Chin." In Manipur, the Zomi Literature Society there is even trying to promote a standardized "Zomi" language that is essentially a tweaked version of Paite that no one really uses apart from the people running the society. In short, "Zomi" is the result of a novel pan-ethnic movement and should not be replacing "Chin" in the Chin people article. Keep in mind that before British colonial times, there was definitely no pan-Chin, pan-Zomi, or pan-Naga identity at all. It's almost like barging into the Miao people article to change everything to "Hmong" when not all Miao people are Hmong. Lingnanhua (talk) 20:15, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Almost all Chin people also refer to themselves as "Chin." There's nothing offensive about using that term, so what's up with trying to replace everything with "Zomi"? Kuki/Thadou and Mizo certainly would not consider themselves to be "Zomi," and definitely not Southern Kuki-Chin speakers like the Daai Chin. When you use "Zomi," you're only referring to a certain subset of Chin people that would willingly identify themselves as Zomi. Plus, Paite/Tedim Chin people forcing their Zomi identity onto the Kuki/Thadou people, who are also classified as Chin in Myanmar, is definitely not recommended. We certainly wouldn't want to see the Paite-Kuki conflict of Manipur spilling over onto Wikipedia, or God forbid, vice versa. So Chin should be Chin, and Zomi should be contained as a POV pan-ethnic invention on a separate article. Lingnanhua (talk) 20:18, 21 February 2023 (UTC)
 * , this is great feedback. Hoping to get more as well from some of the project notifications. In the meantime, are you aware of any other editors we could ping who could help out either at the article, or just with comments and feedback here? (And a hat tip to as well for looping you in.)  Do you have any thoughts about the best way forward for this article?  I'm leaning towards saving all the references, reducing the article to a one-sentence or one-paragraph stub, and then building it back up using the references we have, or new ones we can find. What do you think? (P.S. Doug has already semi-protected the article.) Mathglot (talk) 01:10, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately I'm not aware of any other specialists in this area. I think, who regularly watches for fringe theories and vandalism, would be the best person for the job. Lingnanhua (talk) 23:03, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Lingnanhua. Mathglot (talk) 00:38, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Pinging German contributors to de:Chin (Volk), and French User:Fanfwah to the fr:Khyang article. French/Dutch User:Kohirgabr was a major contributor to both the French and Dutch articles, but appears to have been inactive for years.) Welcome, users from German and French wikipedias! If you're willing and able, your feedback about this article would be appreciated. The basic question in my mind is this: should we blank the article and rewrite it from zero, or should we try to fix it? In my view, because of the warring history, it would be easier to create a good article starting from nothing; the current state of the article is, in my view, irreparable. For your convenience, here are automatic translation links for the English article:  into German, and in into French (Translation may hide errors in the English version, and all the usual caveats about machine translation apply. In particular, the French translation starts right off at the top with a hysterically funny translation for the article title itself. I think that that tribe might live not too far south of the Gens du nez.) If you feel like commenting, you're welcome to address any issue at the article, of course; also, feel free to respond in the language that is easiest for you. Mathglot (talk) 00:38, 24 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you for pinging me, but I only had corrected a grammatical error some years ago when I had read the text accidentally, and I have no special knowledge or opinion on the subject. Karl432 (talk) 09:20, 24 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you too for pinging me, but in fact my contribution to fr:Khyang was dedicated to its section about tattooed women; apart from that, I have no particular knowledge on Chin people. From a purely formal point of view, I am not sure that the current state of the article, taken as a whole, would justify a restart-from-scratch process. The most problematic part seems to me the section about human rights violations, which is clearly out of proportion and widely out of matter: theoretically this kind of issue can be solved, at least partly, by redispatching contents in other articles. But I admit I did not dive deeply into the problems created by conflicts about names and I understand they may have make things too complex to be fixed point by point. Fanfwah (talk) 17:28, 24 February 2023 (UTC)


 * There are also many Chin people in the Burmese government and Tatmadaw (Burmese military), and many Chin also assimilate quite well into Bamar society. Same goes for Uyghurs in China. Lingnanhua (talk) 20:13, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Chin people
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Chin people's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Ethnologue": From Yaw people:  From Ethnologue:  From Meitei people:  From India:  From Kuki-Chin–Naga languages: SIL Ethnologue From Bishnupriya Manipuri people:  

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 10:57, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

The biased negative painting of Mizoram and YMA images without citing reasons
The statememt "India is the most common destination for Chin refugees, given its close proximity, yet Mizoram (the state in India with the largest Chin population) does not give them full refugee protection and they have no legal status there." does not state why Mizoram doesn't give them full refugee status. It may be added that Mizoram is a state of the Union of India, and doesn't have the right or capacity to grant refugee status, only the Union Government of India can do that. In fact, despite the Central Government's order to send back all 'immigrants', the state government of Mizoram has stood by them and is assisting them as it can, while neighbouring states have followed the central government's instructions.

The statements "Initially, Mizoram welcomed the Chins. However, as the persecution worsened in Myanmar, the Mizoram population became less generous in terms of the protection it gave and its attitude towards Chins." and "The Young Mizo Association (YMA) is a voluntary association in Mizoram whose mandate is to provide community service, which includes "conservation of Mizo culture and heritage". In the past, it has issued orders forcing Chins to leave Mizoram because they do not want foreigners in their country.". These actions are attributed to the rise in crimes and drug trafficking from across the border which involved and associated with the refugees from Myanmar, which may be stated as well. Imasseu (talk) 05:14, 23 May 2023 (UTC)