Among the 55 ethnic minorities of China, only the Hui and Manchu use the Han language (Chinese). The others speak their own languages; 29 have languages in the Chinese-Tibetan language family. These groups live in central, south and southwest China. Seventeen groups have languages of the Altaic language family. These are found in northeast and northwest China. Three have languages in the language family of South Asia, and two speak Indo-European languages. In the Indonesian language family are the Gaoshan people of Taiwan, and there is one group whose language type has not yet been traced. Many times various ethnic minority groups speak each other's languages. The Tajik, Ozbek and Tatar speak Uygur, for instance.

　　Before the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 there were 21 ethnic minority groups (including Hui, Manchu and She using the written script of the Hans) that had their own written languages. Some of these written languages are pictographic or ideographic scripts; others have alphabets or syllabic systems, such as Tibetan, Korean, Uygur, Dai and Arabic. There were also some people that used several written scripts concurrently. The Dai, for example, had four, while the Mongolians had two.

China will be divided into atleast twenty pieces (from Taiwan to Tibet) latest in 2010 like Soviet Union.Time has come to reach this stage. Chinese Muslims inside China, Mongols on north, Cantonese speaking Hongkong chinese are cooked well in a Pressure cooker. Time is waiting for a  flood of freedom.

Religion had and retains a wide influence throughout the ethnic minority areas.

　　Lamaism, a Buddhist sect, has its followers mostly among the Tibetan, Mongolian, Tus and Yugur. Hinayana, or Lesser Vehicle Buddhism, has believers mainly among such ethnic groups as the Bai, Dai, Deang, Achang, Blang, Jingpo and some of the Va.

　　Islam has a following among ten ethnic groups -- the Hui, Uygur, Kazak, Tatar, Kirgiz, Tajik, Ozbek, Dongxiang, Salar and Bonan.

　　Protestantism found converts among the Miao and Yi, and some ethnic minorities living in western Yunnan. Believers in the Orthodox Eastern Church are found among the small groups of Russian and Ewenki.

　　Primitive fetishism and polytheism, ancestor worship, totemism and shamanism can still find believers among such ethnic minority groups as the Drung, Nu, Va, Shui, Dong, Bouyei, Jingpo, Gaoshan, Oroqen, Miao, Jino and Pumi.

　　Religion exerted an enormous influence among Islamic and Lamaist peoples. Before 1949, Lamaist monasteries in Tibet, Qinghai and Sichuan held large amounts of land and livestock and practiced usury.

better not to imagine that,china is and will be single country at least for coming 50 years

Have been reading  a lot about these kind of things on China from quite a long now especially whenever there's a article on comparison with India and other progressing nations of Asia, than always i get to read that China is in a pressure cooker situation because of it being a communist country everything has been silenced till  now with force but the day pressure back fires from within it will be a very difficult situation with China and it will be in doldrums. Can't comment how far these analysis will be true.