The 1991 China map side 2 features:
• Two maps of China, one showing agriculture and industry, the other showing population size and density
• Historical timeline of China
• Six map insets and text detailing Chinas history from evolution to empire
• Special centers of foreign investment, coastal areas targeted for economic development, and potential petroleum production basins
• Major railways, major ports, and air hubs
• Principal energy and mineral resources
• Illustrations of artifacts
* Lesson plan idea - have your students update the information, discuss the political, economic, and environmental situations at time of publication and at date of their research. • maps
CHINA
Mao Zedong's heroes includes a surprising choice: Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China. Two millennia separated imperialist despot from communist revolutionary, yet the pair were cut from the same silk. Both achieved power by force. Both suppressed dissent without scruple. Both conscripted hundreds of thousands for public works.
And both made China whole. No theme recurs more frequently in Chinese history than the drive to preserve-or reassemble–a country threatened by splintering and invasion. China's epic of brilliant dynasties–Han, Tang, Song, Ming–is punctuated by years in which competing warlords clashed or northern attackers prevailed. The last dynasty was cowed by European and Japanese expansionism. China's perennial answer to chaos has been severe, central authority. (All China sets its clocks by Beijing time– a small but telling point.) Today's regime experiments with reform but grips China's time tested formula for cohesion.
Population Size and Distribution - One in five human beings is Chinese, and population growth still vexes leaders in the only country with more than a billion inhabitatants. Some 24 million infants are born each year; the population will double in 50 years if the trend continues.
In 1990 China conducted a census believed to be the most thorough in its history; the final tally was 1,122,682,501. Han Chinese, the predominant ethnic group, account for 92 percent of the population. The remainder comprises 55 recognized minorities, from some 15 million Zhuang, concentrated mainly in Guangxi, to the merely 2,300 Lhoba of Tibet.
Nearly all of China's people inhabit the fertile, humid lowlands of the east; 450 million live along the coast. Dry western highlands make up more than half China's territory yet are home to only 6 percent of the population.
As a whole, China has a population density three times the world average of 35 people per square kilometer (91 people per square mile) of land. Shanghai, the most populous city, pack 34,025 people into each square kilometer. Only 12 cities on Earth, including China's Shenyang, Tianjin, and Chengdu, are more densely populated.
Agriculture and Industry - China must grow food for 20 percent of world's people on scarcely 7 percent of the Earth's arable land. The intense cultivation required is exemplified by fields in Guangdong Province, where farmers plant three times a year: rice twice and legumes once. Plots flooded for rice can double as fishponds, and the dikes between them are often planted with sugarcane and mulberry trees.
Economic modernization has long been a priority for the People's Republic, where agriculture still predominates. Farming employs 60 percent of the work force and makes up 34 percent of GNP.
Mao's economic initiatives–collective farms, central planning, isolationism–have been moifiedsince his death in 1976. Farmers have been allowed to work individual plots, hire up to seven laborers, and sell their surplus.
Industrial output rose 12 percent a year in the 1980s, as managers gained freedom from central, though not local, authority. Small worker-owned firms proliferated; 80 percent of industrial enterprises employ fewer than 75 people. Private enterprise has introduced both inflation and unprecedented consumer choice.
NATIONAL MINORITIES
China takes care not to alienate its 91 million nimority citizens; discontent among ethnic groups stradding internatonal borders could threaten security. Currently exempt from population policies, minorities have a growth rate triple that of the Han Chinese majority.
ONE-CHILD POLICY
Since 1979 China has urged couples to have but a single offspring. Parents who comply receive a “one-child glory certificate,” which entitles them to economic beneits. The government calls the program voluntary but imposes heavy fines for each subsequent child.
POPULATION CENTERS
The Shandong Peninsula and North China Plain form a rough triangle smaller than Texas yet more populous than the U.S. The Sichuan Basin, the size of Michigan, is home to 70 million people. Some 150 million live by the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River).
MALE/FEMALE RATIO
Men outnumber women in China, as in much of the Third World. Parents traditionally prefer boys for economic reasons. Girls may be neglected, even killed. Officials have softened the one-child policy in rural areas where infanticide appears widespread.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
Vigorous efforts at improving medical care have boosted life expectancy from 32 years in 1949, when communist rule began, to 68 in 1990. Infant mortality has plummeted.
MUSLIMS
China's estimated 25 million Muslims are most numerous in the northwest. A third are Hui: Han Chinese whose ancestors converted to Islam. As members of a minority, Muslims have largely been accorded cultural–and thus religious–freedom.
TIBETAN SEPARATISM
Tibetan rebelled in 1959 against China's tightening grip. Beijing quashed the revolt and set out to eliminate Tibetan culture. China began reopening Buddhist shrines in the early 1980s but imposed martial law in 1989 to end political protests.
URBANIZATION
Only a quarter of China's population is urban, partly because authorities have discouraged migration to cities. Yet greater urbanization seems inevitable as mechanized farming creates a labor surplus in the countryside.
ENERGY
The world's leading producer of coal endures an energy crisis. Coal and oil exports–for foreign currency–impede efforts to meet growing power needs. Hydroelectric generation supplies 20 percent of China's power and could, if expanded, do much more.
MINERALS
China is a key producer of many minerals and leads the world in output of barite (used in flares, paint, and medicine) and tungsten. It is the third largest producer of iron ore. Much of China's mineral potential is unexploited because of inadequate technology.
RAILWAYS
Expanding and upgrading its 53,000 kilometers (33,000 miles) of track, China has become the world's major railroad builder. It is adding 6,000 kilometers to the network and electrifying older lines, where steam locomotives reign.
IMPORTANT INDUSTRIES
Chinese industrialization began with textiles, and China remains the leading producer of woven fabrics. Other major industries are cement, steel, chemicals, electronics, and armaments. China produced 41 million bicycles and 25 million televisions in 1988.
FOREIGN INVESTMENT
In 1979 China created Special Economic Zones (SEZ), whose low taxes, cheap land and labor, and comparative economic freedom were designed to lure foreign capital. Nearly 22,000 joint ventures, 952 with American firms, had begun by 1989.
ENVIRONMENT
China conducted its first survey of industrial pollution in 1988 and concluded that 60 cities have unhealthy air. Alarmed further by millions of tons of waste in its rivers, the nation has begun enacting environmental regulations–strict but widely evaded.
MAJOR CROPS
China produces more than a third of the world's rice; 1989 output was 179 million metric tons. The premier source of raw cotton, China is also a leading exporter of wheat and oilseeds (crushed to make cooking oil) and grows corn for food, fodder, and export.
TAIWAN
Four-fifths of the iland's 20 million people descend from Chinese settlers of the 1600s. Two million fled the mainland for Taiwan after Mao took power in 1949.
HONG KONG
Scheduled to return to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong has 5.8 millin people, who inhabit only a tenth of the colony's 1,070 square kilometers. They have a per capita income of $11,500–compared with $300 on the mainland.
SICHUAN BASIN
A long growing season and a mild, humid climate make the Sichuan Basin one of China's most productive farming regions. Abundant rice crops are supplemented by wheat, corn, sugarcane, and soybeans. The basin is also a significant silk producer.
CHANG JIANG DELTA
Thirty million people live near the mouth of the Chang Jiang. Fertile soil–supplying a tenth of China's rice crop– and the industrial might of Shanghai make this China's most prosperous region.
Evolution to empire 5000 to 221 B.C. -
Millet and rice were first cultivated 7,000 years ago, along Chinese rivers. Hunter-farmers at Banpo, Yangshao, and other sites in the Huang (Yellow) watershed built carefully laid out villages and produced intricately painted pottery. A different culture took root simulataneously along the coast, where villagers grew rice and carved jade. By 2500 B.C. both cultures had evolved into hierarchial societies who members employed full-time artisans and engaged in rudimentary metalworking.
China's first known dynasty began in the 18th century B.C., when the Shang tribe overpowered others. By 1100 B.C. Shang rulers had succumbed to the state of Zhou.
After three centuries of tranquillity feudal states began vying for dominance. Battles marked are from this era of Warring States. The state of Qin–bolstered by surplus grain from fields irrigated from the Min River and Zheng Gua Canal–mastered all others by 221 B.C. Its king declared himself “first emperor” and initiated tremendous public works, notably the consolidation of fortifications into the Great Wall.
Han expansion and collapse 206 B.C. to A.D. 220 -
The Western han peiod ended in A.D. 9, when the throne was usurped. The Eastern han era began in A.D. 25.
Western Han armies set up command districts in Korea and much of Central Asia. Expansion beyond the Jade Gate, then the wesern end of the Great Wall, secured a route to markets eager to silk. The Silk Road became a conduit for Buddhism and, much later, Islam.
To the north, the Xiongnu people created a tribal federation and repeatedly raided China. Corruption so weakened the Eastern Han dynasty that its generals clashed at Red Cliff in 208 and later divided China into Three Kingdoms.
An Asian empire - Seventh century -
At its territorial height about 670, the Tang dynasty directly administered a vast area (China proper) and exerted control over or received tribute from nearly a dozen kingdoms and territories. Tang rule extended far beyond China's modern western boundary.
Tang China was a cultural watershed. Buddhism had permeated the nation and reinvigorated the arts; Buddhist texts were spread by the invention of block printing, as were dictionaries and calenars.
Tang imperialism waned in the late seventh century. Turkeic strength checked Chinese advances in the northwest and menaced China for another century. Arab invaders reached the Amu Darya River by 651 and slowly converted their subjects.
A Tang defeat at Talas (751) opened Central Asia to Islam.
Northern invaders 1100 to 1300 -
Northerners called the Jurchen (ancestors to the Manchu) took Bianjing, the Song capital, in 1126 and captured the emperor. His son continued the dynasty at Linan.
The Jurchen themselves faced a northern threat: the Mongols, who obliterated their Jin empire by 1234. Kublai Khan reached Linan in 1276 and extablished the Yuan dynasty. Kublai's Empire of the Great Khan was one of four Mongol khanates.
The Mongols also vanquished the Kingdom of Western Xia–the Tangut's Buddhist state, which was named for China's mythical first dynasty.
The last empire, 1760-1912 -
The Qing dynasty expanded briskly into the west, doubling the population and providing a buffer for the heartland. Yet Qing authority was fatally challenged in the east–by Europe.
Western resentment of the restrictive trading permitted them at Guangzhou (Canton) grew into the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856. Each time, China involuntarily opened new “treaty ports.” Qing rulers acquiesced as European powers carved “spheres of influence” and posted troops.
The Qing were also weak within. A series of rebellions led in 1912 to a republic.
World war, civil war, 1916 to present -
The absence of a clear central authority after 1916 made China easy prey for Japan, which set up a puppet state in Manchuria in 1932 and held it through World War II .soviet tropps ended Japan's advance at Nomonhan in 1939.
Nationalist forces initially held the upper hand, driving Chinese communists on their Long March form Jiangxi Soviet to Shaan-Gan-Ning.
A “unified front” against Japan evaporated in 1945. Decisive defeat at Huaihai pushed the Nationalists to Taiwan, where they remain. Under Mao Zedong, China reannexed Xi-zang (Tibet) in 1951 and in 1964 exploded its first atomic device, at Lop Nur.
HISTORY OF CHINA -
5000 B.C. - Farmers along the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) are the first to grow rice.
4000 B.C. - YANGSHAO AND EAST COAST NEOLITHIC CULTURES - Agricultural villages develop along the Huang (Yellow) and Wei Rivers. Artisans craft stone tools. Harpoons and hooks made of bone are used for fishing, as are nets.
3000 B.C. - Change Jiang settlements produce silk and carved jade.
2000 B.C. -
SHANG DYNASTY -
Priest-kings preside over ancestor cults in villages on the North China Plain.
Artisans cast elaborate bronze ritual vessels.
ZHOU DYNASTY
1000 B.C. -
551 Confucius is born.
QIN DYNASTY
221 China unified by Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor.
220 Qin orders consolidation of fortifications into a Great Wall.
HAN DYNASTY
126 Explorers return from the first Chinese forayinto Central Asia.
B.C. -
A.D -
2 China counts 57,671,400 people in its first recorded census.
200
220 Han dynasty generals carve southern China into kingdoms.
Buddhism spreads.
400
SUI DYNASTY
584 Grand Canal begun (By 610 it links Tianjin and Hangzhou.)
600
TANG DYNASTY
690 Empress Wu, the only female ruler in Chinese history, usurps the throne; she is deposed in 705.
755 An Lushan, a powerful general, revolts and frives the Tang emperor from the capital. Though An is killed in 757, the rebellion surivies until 763 and gravely weakens the Tan dynasty.
800
907 Northern invaders destroy the Tang dynasty; China remains fragmented until 960.
SONG DYNASTY
1000
1086 Census conducted; China has 108 million citizens. This vast population is governed by an elite bureaucracy, chosen through competitive examinations in classic Confucian texts.
1200
1215 Genghis Khan takes Yanjing (Beijing); his grandson Kublai rules all China by 1279.
1271 Marco Polo sets out from Venice; his travels account of China later astounds European readers.
YUAN (MONGOL) DYNASTY
1368 Rebellion by Han Chinese ends Mongol occupation.
MING DYNASTY
1400
1405 Zheng He, Muslim court eunuch turned explorer, departs on his first voyage, commanding 62 ships and 27,800 sailors. He eventually visits the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, and Southeast Asia.
1557 Portugal colonizes Macau.
1600
1618 Manchu begin invading.
1644 Last Ming emperor kills himself rather than be taken.
QING (MANCHU) DYNASTY
1762 China as some 200 million people, according to census.
1800
1830 Census conducted; population has nearly doubled–to 395 million–in less than 70 years.
1839 Qing resistance to British opium trade leads to war. China loses.
1842 China cedes island of Hong Kong to Britain, opens five ports to European trade, and agrees to pay a sizable cash indemnity. Further concessions come in 1860, after the second Opium War.
1851 Members of the Taiping sect rebel and set up an independent utopian society in southern China. It lasts 11 years before Qingarmes, with European aid, invade.
1852 Armed bands known as Nian rebel in northern China until they are suppressed in 1868; their struggle is called the Nian Rebellion.
1862 Muslims in western China revolt against discrimination; they are quelled in 1875.
1900
1900 Anti-Western rebels called Boxers besiege foreign legations. Western powers occupy and plunder Beijingand force Qing to accept foreign armies posted in China.
1911 The Wuchang Uprising in southeastern China spurs 17 provinces to form a provisional government in Nanjing.
1912 Emperor Pu Yi abdicates.
REPUBLIC OF CHINA
1921 Chinese Communist Party formed in Shanghai.
1926 General Chiang Kai-shek dominates nationlist party; he attempts to eradicate communism but accepts United Front during World War II.
1949 Chiang flees to Taiwan.
PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
1950
1953 Mao Zedong launches first five-year plan; it boosts heavy industry but fails to increase farm productivity.
1958 China takes it Great Leap Forward, a disastrous attempt at a collectivized agriculture.
1966 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution seeks to purge “revisionist” thought. Education suffers as schools are closed and intellectuals sent to labor communes.
1976 Mao dies; his cronies, the Gang of Four, are arested.
1977-78 Deng Xiaoping, a moderated, consolidates power and emerges as China's de facto leader.
1979 United States establishes diplomatic relations with People's Republic of China.
1982 Population exceeds one billion.
1989 Protest for democracy in Tiananmen Square pain global attention; the army fires on demonstrators, killing hundreds.
