Country Information on China 

Terrain

China's countryside is very varied. There is a basin with large mountains, such as the Himalayas in Tibet, which is where Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world at 8,848 metres, is located. China also has seemingly endless plains, such as the Inner Mongolian Plateau or the plains of the Yangtze River valley. Inland China is characterized by various depressions, such as the Tarim, the Taklamakan desert (the country's driest desert) and the Turfan Depression, which is 154 metres below sea level. Melting snow from the mountains of western and southern China provides the headwaters of the country's major rivers: the Mekong, the Yellow River and the Yangtze.

Climate

Temperatures in China range from bitterly cold to unbearably hot. In the south, summers are hot and humid and last from April to September. Typhoons often hit the south-east coast of China between July and September; summers are hot and dry in the north west, which is where Turpan is located. There, temperatures reach a maximum of around 47°C. Winters are cold, as in the rest of northern China.

Fauna/Flora

As a result of the agricultural use of the land, the steady increase in the population and environmental pollution, many species of animals and plants are now extinct or have become endangered species.

Some of the species that are rare are pandas, snow leopards, wild yaks, reindeer, moose, musk deer and sables. China's largest areas of forest are in the north east of the country, near to border with Russia; there are rainforests in the south. There are more than 300 national parks in China.

History/Politics

The Shang Dynasty (17th-11th century BC) is the first documented era of ancient China. There was a succession of dynasties over the decades that followed and China developed significantly. In the middle of the 13th century AD, the Mongols, at the command of Kublai Khan, invaded China's territory and soon afterwards they created the first "foreign" dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty.

Over the course of the dynasty a great cultural exchange developed with Europe. A century later, in the middle of the 14th century, internal dynastic conflicts, natural disasters and revolts in the countryside brought the Yuan Dynasty to an end. The Ming Dynasty followed. It was under this dynasty that the Portuguese reached China, where they set up commercial ports.

Towards the end of the 18th century, the British brought opium from India to China. The opium trade was declared to be illegal by the Chinese government in 1839, which caused the First Opium War. The British defeated the Chinese in 1842 thanks to their modern armaments and immediately demanded that five commercial ports should be opened and that Hong Kong should be handed over.

In 1898, the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion took place, which was suppressed effectively by a German, North American, French, Russian, British and Japanese expedition. This led to the Chinese developing nationalist and xenophobic feelings and finally culminated in a revolution, the declaration of the Republic in 1911 and in a civil war.

The civil war came about as a result of various generals aspiring to gain power and only stopped temporarily between 1937 and 1945 when Japan occupied China. Despite the fact that the national government and the Communists had joined forces to fight the Japanese during the Second World War, at the end of the war they fought for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists gained victory, led by Mao Tse Tung.

Some of the first steps that the Chinese Communist government took were to expel foreign Catholic missionaries, remove the opposition, introduce collective agriculture, nationalize the private economy and incorporate Tibet into China. Conflicts with the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics and its subversive strategy meant that China became politically isolated from the 1960s onwards and that Mao was able to carry out the Cultural Revolution, so as to eradicate all that remained of the old bourgeois ideas.

After the death of Mao in 1976, there were various successors, who have gradually introduced a new economic policy since the 1980s which tends towards capitalism. Since the middle of the 1980s, there have been demonstrations for more democracy; the most significant took place in 1989 on Tiananmen Square, which was brutally suppressed. At the 1997 Communist Party Congress an agreement was made to adhere to the "Marxist Liberal" policy and further promote Jiang Zemin's image as the country's leader.

In 1998, the flooding of the River Yangtze caused the worst flood that the country had seen in recent decades and took the lives of around 4,000 people. Despite the government's efforts to strengthen and modernize dykes, sluices and dams, a state of emergency was declared again a year later. In March 2005, China accused Japan of making light of the atrocities that Japan had carried out during the years it occupied China in its school books. The Japanese government then expressed its profound remorse at the outrages that had been committed.

Economy

Until 1949, China's economy was mainly rural. After the rise to power of the Communist Party, the country was subject to an industrialization programme which led to an increase in its industrial capacity. Since the 1980s, there have been a series of small changes, such as the gradual introduction of a market economy, the relatively rapid growth of the private sector and the replacement of collective agriculture with a system in which each unit is responsible for its own administration.

The marked difference between the urban and rural areas has led the government to create infrastructure in rural areas so as to make these regions attractive to foreign investors. The unemployment rate was 10.2% in 2003 and the inflation rate was 0.6%.

Culture

Chinese opera is famous across the world and has made arts such as acrobatics, Asian martial arts and dance known to a wider public. The palaces in Beijing reflect its past of feudal rule; there are colonial buildings in Shanghai and in many cities there are Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist temples. The world's first porcelain was produced in China around the 6th century AD and reached its artistic peak in the 10th century during the Song Dynasty.