The Chinese Communist Party ( CCP ) launched a nationwide census and voter registration campaign in the summer of 1953 .After debating which questions should be posed to their nearly six hundred million respondents , officials ultimately decided upon only five .The first four of these involved the most basic of demographic infor-mation, including name , age, gender , and rela-tionship to the head of one ’ s household .The fifth one was settled upon a question:that of nationality or minzu.The outcome of the census proved shock-ing to Communist authorities and ultimately precip-itated the Ethnic Classification Project . Why the Communists wished to include minzu on the census schedule? The author argues that there were three reasons .The first reason is the deeply historical problem of maintaining the territo-rial integrity of a highly diverse empire .The sec-ond problem is more proximate , and originates in the ongoing rivalry between the Communists and the Nationalists during the first half of the twentieth century.Third, with regards to categorization , the advent of the Classification is attributable to a po-litical crisis prompted by the failure of the state ’ s initial experiment with a highly noninterventionist policy of self-categorization . To understand each of these questions , the author brings the readers to explore the history of the term minzu itself, and suggests that the very in-clusion of minzu in the 1953-54 census schedule was itself the culmination of a complex history dat-ing back to the fall of the Qing dynasty ( 1644 -1911 ) and the formation of the first Chinese repub-lic.