Government attempts to favor the minorities have included the establishment of "autonomous" minority adminstrative units at three levels: the region (comparable to a province and of which five have been designated), the prefecture (zhou), and the county (xian). The Muslim-inhabited areas that have been designated as autonomous regions, prefectures, and counties are shown in the following table.

To a great extent these territories are autonomous in name only. While the minority after which they are named does have considerable representation in local government and party organs, the Han generally retain ultimate control and pursue various colonising strategies designed to sinify the minorities and establish a strong Han presence. In no case is the "autonomous" unit inhabited only by the minority (or minorities) for which it is named and in some cases Han are in fact the majority. (This is even true, for example, of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region whose population is approximately only one-third Hui but two-thirds Han.)

As noted above, ten minorities have now been officially identified for which Islam has been the dominant religious tradition. As also noted, not all members of the ten minorities actually practice Islam. But Islam is so much a part of each of the ten ethnic identities that individual members of each group who, for one reason or another, do not practice Islam are still considered Muslim "by birth" or "by blood"; in nearly all cases, if members of any of these ten minorities do not practice Islam, then they do not practice any religion.

Each of China's ten Muslim minorities traces its descent to ancestors who were absorbed into China by Chinese territorial expansion or who migrated to China either for commercial purposes, as refugees from conflicts outside China, or to assist the Chinese court. Islam was not carried to China "by the sword" and, with minor exceptions, Muslims did not engage in proselytisation in China.

Nine of the ten Muslim minorities are of Central Asian derivation; they are the Uighur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Kyrgyz, Salar, Tajik, Uzbek, Bonan, and Tatar. Six of these nine live in what has traditionally been known as Eastern (or Chinese) Turkestan, territory that became a province of China (Xinjiang) only in 1884 but which constitutes one sixth of China's total land area; until only very recently these six Muslim groups made up well over ninety percent of Xinjiang's population.

Each of the nine Central Asian Muslim minorities still speaks its own native languages, all of which belong to the Altaic language family and are thus as different from Chinese as is English. Of the nine minorities, six (the Uighur, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Salar, Uzbek, and Tatar) speak Turkic languages which are similar to that spoken in Turkey and to those used throughout much of the former Soviet Union. Traditionally, when written, Arabic script was used for these peoples' languages although over the years both the former Soviet and Chinese governments have launched numerous campaigns to replace Arabic with other scripts. Four of the Turkic-speaking Muslim minorities represented in China - the Kazak, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tatar - have, in fact, greater numbers of their members living in the former Soviet Union than in China and the first three of them also extend into Afghanistan. Two of China's six Turkic-speaking minorities (the Kazak and Kyrgyz), still maintain a pastoral nomadic herding mode of subsistence while four of the six (the Uighur, Uzbek, Tatar, and Salar), have long been sedentarised and are either agriculturists or urban oasis dwellers. Also in Xinjiang, and farthest away from China proper, are the Persian-speaking Tajik, a minority whose greatest numbers live across the border in Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union.

The two remaining Muslim groups of Central Asian origin are the Dongxiang and Bonan (also spelled Tunghsiang and Paoan respectively) of Gansu province, both of whom speak their own separate Mongolian language. Unlike other Mongols, who are pastoral herders, both the Dongxiang and Bonan have adopted sedentary agricultural patterns characteristic of the Han-influenced areas in which they live. The Dongxiang, like the Turkic Salar who also live in a more Han-influenced area than Xinjiang, have a long-standing reputation among Han for daring, fiercencess, and solidarity and played active parts in the Muslim rebellions that occurred up through the early twentieth century.

By an analysis of the mosque congregations in China we arrive at a higher total for the Chinese Muslim population. On the mainland of China according to the China Islamic Association there are 40,000 mosques. Traditionally a mosque is built by Muslim localities on demand, under the supervision of local Muslims. Conservatively speaking a mosque cannot be built and maintained by less than 500 Muslims in one locality; if we multiply the total number of mosques by 500 persons per mosque we arrive at a total of 20,000,000 Muslims in China in 1955, when this number of mosques are said to have existed. Yet we cannot use the 500 person per mosque as a mean average because in Peking, there are 42 mosques among a population of 80,000 Muslims which averages 2,000 Muslims under the jurisdiction of each mosque. This estimate of mosque do not even include the mosque used primarily by women who in many communities have their own mosques due to Islamic traditions. Taking these estimates into consideration the total Muslim population in China should not be less than 40 million.