Making sense: what is 'China'?

China is more a continent than a country. In terms of geography, population, and ethnic diversity, China corresponds to no other country on the planet other than India. It is simply vast, with a wide range of geographic areas, an immense population, and a dizzying variety of ethnic communities and identities. While the modern state of India corresponds in many ways to the geographic and ethnic diversity of China, it does not carry China's long heritage of political unity or recent experience as a Leninist state. What, then, is China? In our preface we noted that it is not helpful to think of 'the Chinese' as a unitary group. How shall we look at the land, the people, the society, and the political entity we call 'China'?

If China were placed over the northwest corner of Eurasia, it would stretch from Dublin to Damascus and from Moscow to Marrakesh: hugely different physiographic regions with independent sub-histories. We have to ask: why is it one country and not at least a half-dozen? A first answer is history. One way to make sense of this tension between geographic diversity and political unity in China is to imagine that the Roman Empire had recovered from Germanic attacks and reconstituted itself as an effective, stable, and powerful regime in the sixth century CE, comprising the lands not only of Augustus's empire but what became the Byzantine Empire – all under the central control of Rome – and that this Roman Empire lasted (with Mongol invasions and interregnums) until 1912. History matters, but it does not predetermine current choices. Life in the social, economic, and political systems that define the People's Republic of China (PRC) knits a diverse range of people together and makes the 'idea of China' real and compelling to them despite immense differences in their personal circumstances.

This is a fundamental dialectic in Chinese life and thought today: the contrast between the unity of 'China' widely felt by the majority Han population (not to mention the government) and the actual physical, economic, and social diversity of life in the PRC and among 'Cultural China' (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and more than 100 million Chinese in Southeast Asia and across the world). The purpose of the chapter is to suggest how we can make sense of these forces of integration and diversity by focusing on how the system works and contrasting how different major social actors experience their place in that system. Thus we move from geography, to demography, to economic activity, to political order.

If we are to understand how living with reform in China today operates and what it means for those in it (as well as for those of us outside China), then we must understand some of these basic facts of life, of social order and experience. We need this detail to begin to answer the questions of reform: why does privatization look so different to workers in northeast China and farmers in southwest China? Why do some women complain that life since the end of Mao's rule is worse, while other women cheer the changes of the past three decades? Is the CCP getting stronger or weaker? The context of China's systems will help us answer these questions.

China's systems

Like any polity, China is built on land, climate, people and their social organizations, economic activity, and political order. Within these systems different groups and individuals have a wide range of experiences and thus divergent interests. It is this complex, but functioning, set of systems which organizes life in China today.

The land China's land mass is about equal to that of the United States: 9.6 million square kilometers, and only slightly smaller than Europe's 10.15 million. China's population, however, clocking in at 1.26 billion in the 2000 census, is four times greater that the USA's at slightly less than 300 million and well over twice the size of Europe's population of some 480 million. One in every five persons on the planet lives in China. This huge population is not spread evenly over the area of the PRC. Population density for China as a whole is 622 persons per square kilometer, but rises to three times that (1,800/sq. km) in the eastern coastal regions and falls to a tenth of that (60/sq. km) in the western regions. And, as one would expect in an area the size of Europe, geography and climate vary widely across China, contributing to different local economics and lifeways.

Geographic China can be envisioned in two parts, north to south, and three layers, east to west. The biggest divide in China is the separation of warm, wet, rice-growing south China and hot/cold, dry, wheat-growing north China. In the south, wet-rice agriculture defines the landscape with flooded paddy fields and the intensive cultivation of two and in the far south three crops of rice a year. Temperatures are moderate and rain fairly regular. In the north, the land looks yellow from the dominant soil, loess, the wind- and water-borne soil from the northwest that gives the Yellow River its eponymous colour. The weather is more continental with freezing winters and hot, dry summers. Rains are not reliable enough to sustain wet-field agriculture, so dry farming of wheat, barley, and other grains predominates. One simple and obvious difference in lifeways that stems from the geographical and climatic differences between north and south China is that traditionally southerners eat rice more often, while northerners claim noodles and breads as their traditional fare.

In the western regions this separation is erased by altitude. The three layers of China from west to east begin with the Tibet/Qinghai plateau, which lies some 4,000 meters above sea level and occupies fully 20 percent of China's landmass. This huge western region is sparsely populated and is home to several non-Chinese 'minorities' (i.e. peoples that claim the area as their own, such as the Tibetans, but which count as minorities in the PRC). Radiating out from this plateau are the major rivers of China, as well as of South and Southeast Asia: the Yangzi, the Yellow, the Mekong, the Red, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra. Moving east from the Tibet/Qinghai plateau there is a series of lower plateaus descending to the major plains of coastal China, in particular the North China plain that runs from Beijing to nearly the Yangzi, and the Northeast or Manchurian plain (in the provinces just north of Korea). Population density increases as one goes east and to lower altitudes. Land in China thus ranges from sea-level plains to alpine parks, from zero to 4,000 meters. On the globe it stretches from 50 degrees north to under 20 degrees, with Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, as well as Hong Kong, and Hainan Island in the tropics, while winter lows in China's northeast regularly reach minus 25–30 degrees Centigrade.

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