LAND & PEOPLE

"For millennia ... Chinese civilization stretched over an area larger than any European state. Chinese language and culture ... extended to every known terrain: steppes and pine forests in the north, shading into Siberia, tropical jungles and terraced rice farms in the south; from the coast with its canals, ports, and fishing villages, to the stark deserts of Central Asia and the ice capped peaks of the Himalayan frontier."

Henry Kissinger, On China, 2011

TERRAIN AND CLIMATE

China has a total landmass of 3.7 million square miles (9.6 million sq. km), next in size only to Russia and Canada. At its maximum, it measures approximately 3,100 miles (5,000 km) north–south, and 3,230 miles (5,200 km) east–west. Its land border is 14,168 miles (22,800 km) long. Apart from the mainland, there are more than 5,400 islands, some just bare rocks that only appear at low tide. Technically speaking, it encompasses five time zones from the east coast across to the Russian border in the west.

Most rivers flow west to east into the Pacific Ocean. The Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) is the longest at 3,915 miles (6,300 km) — and third longest in the world after the Nile and the Amazon — followed by the Yellow River (Huang He) at 3,395 miles (5,464 km), the birthplace of Chinese civilization. However, in recent years, the Yellow River has been shortened by several hundred miles for months on end, due to having dried up near its delta.

China is a land of extremes, and temperatures vary widely. In northern China, summers are hot and short, winters long and cold. The humidity in the north in summer is unpleasant — around 60–70 percent — and the lack of moisture in the winter, when humidity falls to about 2 percent, is even worse, as are the dust storms caused by sand blowing in from the Gobi Desert.

To the north of the capital, Beijing, lie the vast empty grasslands of the Inner Mongolian Plateau. Mongolia is swept by winds from Siberia and is bitterly cold in winter, sometimes as low as minus 35°C (-31°F), but with fine, sunny days. The northeastern Mongolian town of Harbin is famous for its annual winter display of huge sculptures made of ice blocks, taken from the Songhua River, and lit from inside by colored lanterns; starting around January 5, the festival lasts for about a month, until its sculptures start to melt away with the coming of spring. The south of China is more temperate, and in recent years northerners have started retiring there to enjoy the milder climate.

China is a country of superlatives. The world's highest mountain, Mount Everest (Zhumulangma Feng in Chinese), forms China's western border with Nepal and India. It is part of the Himalayan range of mountains, forty of whose peaks rise to over 22,900 feet (7,000 m). In the northwest is the Tarim Basin, the largest inland basin in the world. To the east of the Tarim Basin is the low-lying Turpan depression, called the "Oasis of Fire," the hottest place in China, with temperatures of up to 120°F (49°C) in summer. Xinjiang, where an ethnic minority called the Uigurs live, is also home to the Taklamakan, the largest desert in China. The oasis towns of the vast empty desert areas were used for two thousand years as stopovers on the Silk Route — from the time of the Romans, caravans of camels would carry silk to the West. Salt from China's largest salt lake, Lop Nur, also went this way. Whoever controlled the oases could tax this traffic, so despite its arid deserts, Xinjiang was an attractive prize.

In the south, vegetation remains green all year-round. The coastal regions are warm and humid, with four distinct seasons. The south and southwest of China have a much more agreeable climate, with lush green vegetation and beautiful wooded mountains wreathed in mists. The southwest is the home of bamboo forests and the panda; also of many plants familiar in the West, such as rhododendrons, some of which were brought over to Europe by nineteenth-century botanists.

Only about 20 percent of the terrain is suitable for agriculture. The majority of the Han population has for centuries lived mainly on the fertile floodplains at the lower reaches of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. These two rivers deposit silt, which makes the flood plain the richest agricultural area in China. This is where the main cities have grown up, along with key industries. So much of China is uninhabitable that around 90 percent of the people, mainly Han Chinese, are squeezed into about half of the area. The government has tried to resettle people in more sparsely populated areas, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, but the Han do not really want to live there and the locals are not keen to have them.

Nowadays China's ambitions are much more futuristic: they are creating huge new cities, and then filling them with people. There are nearly 600 more cities now than when the Communists took over in 1949. Some have been labelled "ghost towns," because the buildings stand empty, seemingly for years, waiting for the population to arrive; but though building a new city is quite quick, putting in place the infrastructure and services for anything up to 30 million people takes time. The Chinese traditionally take a long-term view of things, and these new cities, for all their eerie emptiness, are part of that vision.

HAN CHINESE AND MINORITY NATIONALITIES

Ninety-two percent of the population of China are of the Han race, or what the West calls Chinese. Minority nationalities generally live in the northwestern and southwestern extremities of the country. Fifty-five minority nationalities are officially recognized, totalling just over 100 million people. They have their own customs, languages, dress, and religions. Many in the northwest, near the borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Russia, follow Islam. Tibetans, Mongolians, Lobas, Moinbas, Tus, and Yugurs are Lamaists. The Dai, Blang, and Deang people are Buddhists, while many of the Miao, Yao, and Yi people are Christian. Official attitudes toward them are a complex mixture of tolerance and control.

Mandarin is promoted as the official language and all minority peoples learn it. The government has also helped to create written languages for ten minority nationalities, including the Zhuang, Bouyei, Miao, Dong, Hani, and Li, which prior to 1949 had only spoken languages. The minority nationalities have a geopolitical importance far beyond their numbers because of the strategic territories they occupy along China's sparsely populated and porous frontiers; partly due to this, they were exempted from the One Child policy (see page 35).

A BRIEF HISTORY

The fertile floodplains of the Yellow River were the cradle of Chinese civilization. Thousands of years ago the Chinese were already weaving silk, carving jade, casting bronze, growing wheat, millet, and rice, and recording events in a written language. The...