Just now am at my mother's in Yorkshire finishing off my copy of Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' I started when I was last back.

Just last night got to the Pacific languages bit where Diamond identifies the Miao as "known in the US as the Hmong". Maybe we should build this little fact into the intelligent-cat question-and-answer joke I heard last week....

Regarding ethnonyms/glossonyms issues, one would usually tend to consider that sticking to the people's self-designation in their own language is always better than alleged scholarly "tradition", which is all-too often based on ages-old misinterpretations of the colonial/missionary period.
However, Enkwall gives a rather convincing argument why this is not as easy to apply as an ideological viewpoint falsly assumes (the 'Miao' who call themselves 'Hmong' being actually 'Baimiao' according to the colour-coded chinese terminology). As a point of comparison, this reminds me of the now usual designation of Greek-Russian immigrants as "Rossopontii" (Pontic Russians), although only part of them are Pontics (and an even smaller part actually speak the dialect). As a matter of fact, politics is strongly present in the background of such issues: popsci books and travel guides rarely indicate that 'Tibetans' are only known as 'Zang' for the average Chinese.
As an aside, famous writer Shen Congwen, son of a Hmong (Baimiao) mother, has some beautiful descriptions and somehow literary analysis of this nation's epics (the absence of any Han epics is one of those "unsolved mysteries" of human science, quite usefull to stop hasty eurocentric systematizations).

Correction: Of course, it's "Russian Pontics". By the way, sorry for using such broken english on a language blog: this is actually the only foreign language I had to learn all by myself, in a pretty chaotical way.

Jimmy: Don't apologize; reading your first comment I didn't have any idea you weren't a native English speaker. And you make some very interesting points; I hope you'll drop me a line one of these days (at languagehat at yahoo dot com) so we can discuss them. I'm quite interested in the Pontic Greeks, and the nonexistence of Chinese epic is something I hadn't thought of.

Perhaps Chinese epics were among the books that Qin Shi Huangdi burned.

It is a bittersweet when talking about the terms Miao and Hmong. Either term is acceptable at the time being. However, there is another push for a new term--Mong. Actually, the term Hmong and Mong existed at about the same time in the early 1950s, in Laos, of course. But then Mong was less used then Hmong. How these two terms derived from remain silent still. I agree with Joakim Enwall and you that let the term Miao be the universal term when referring to this group of people, and Hmong and Mong be in use in the western countries, especially the United States.

It is a bittersweet when talking about the terms Miao and Hmong. Either term is acceptable at the time being. However, there is another push for a new term--Mong. Actually, the term Hmong and Mong existed at about the same time in the early 1950s, in Laos, of course. But then Mong was less used then Hmong. How these two terms derived from remain silent still. I agree with Joakim Enwall and you that let the term Miao be the universal term when referring to this group of people, and Hmong and Mong be in use in the western countries, especially the United States.