民 mín is a pictograph and serves as its own radical: it does not decompose into a meaning-part plus a sound-part the way most characters do. The simplified and traditional forms are identical, five strokes that have stayed remarkably stable across the script's history. In the standard dictionary system 民 heads its own small radical group, so a learner meets it not as a component assembled from others but as a primitive sign in its own right.

The early graph is sobering. On bronze and seal forms 民 is usually read as a figure pierced or marked at the eye, an image many paleographers connect to the branding or blinding of captives reduced to servitude. From that harsh origin the word generalised: from the subjugated, to the governed, to the ordinary mass of people set below the ruler, and finally to the people as such. The trajectory matters, because the political weight of 民 in later Chinese thought, the idea that a ruler holds power only so long as the people consent, sits on top of a word that once meant the lowliest of subjects.

Three semantic lives grow out of this core of the governed mass: 民 as the populace and the people (人民, 民众); 民 as the individual member of a polity, the citizen or resident (公民, 居民, 农民); and 民 as folk and nation, the people considered as a culture and a stock (民族, 民间, 民俗). A fourth, narrower sense pairs 民 against the military: 民用 civilian-use, 民航 civil aviation. And in modern coinage the word anchors two great political abstractions, 民主 mínzhǔ (democracy, the people as master) and 民生 mínshēng (the people's livelihood).

Hold 民 mín as the people set below the ruler, the broad mass on whom every state finally rests. The graph's dark beginning, a captive marked at the eye, became over the centuries the most weighted political word in the language: not a number, but a subject with a will. Whoever holds power holds it on loan from the 民.

From that one idea the whole vocabulary unfolds. The collective is 人民 the people and 民众 the masses; the individual member is the 公民 citizen, the 居民 resident, the 农民 farmer; the people as a culture and a stock is the 民族 nation, living in the 民间 folk realm and singing its 民歌. And the great modern coinages keep the same root: 民主, the people as master, and 民生, the people's livelihood. Remember the proverbs and the politics follow: 国泰民安 when the state is sound the people are at peace, and 民以食为天, that to the people, food itself is heaven.