Facts about China
Capital Beijing · Asia
10 topics · about 20 minutes
China is the world’s second most populous country and its largest manufacturer, with a continuous written civilisation reaching back more than three thousand years. The economic transformation since 1978 moved several hundred million people out of poverty in a single generation, the fastest such shift ever recorded.
China divides into 23 provinces, five autonomous regions and four municipalities reporting straight to Beijing. Population and wealth concentrate overwhelmingly in the east, where the North China Plain around Beijing, the Yangtze delta around Shanghai and the Pearl River delta behind Hong Kong together produce a large share of national output on a small fraction of the land. Head west and density collapses, through the loess plateaus and the Sichuan basin to the deserts of Xinjiang and the Tibetan Plateau, where whole provinces hold fewer people than a single eastern city.
Beijing is the imperial and political capital, Shanghai the financial one, and Shenzhen went from a cluster of fishing towns to a manufacturing metropolis inside forty years. Xi’an anchors the historic northwest as the eastern end of the Silk Road, Chengdu is the way into Sichuan and its pandas, and Guangzhou has traded with the outside world for over a thousand years. Visitors usually build a trip around some combination of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army and the karst peaks along the Li River.
- Population
- 1.4 billion
- Area
- 9,596,961 km²
- Currency
- Renminbi (¥)
- Official language
- Standard Chinese
- Divisions
- 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions
- Highest point
- Mount Everest, 8,849 m
The China course
Geography of China
Three great steps down from the roof of the world, and two rivers that organize everything.
History of China
Four thousand years of dynasties, and paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass well before Europe.
Language of China
More native speakers than any language on Earth, and a script that unites dialects sounding nothing alike.
Culture of China
Confucian order, an exam system that ran 1,300 years, and the largest annual migration on the planet.
Economy of China
Roughly a third of global industrial output, and a state that steers the market far more than most.
Politics of China
One party since 1949, with its structures running parallel to the state at every level.
Nature & Wildlife of China
Rainforest to alpine desert, and the giant panda’s move off the endangered list in 2016.
Food & Cuisine of China
Eight regional traditions, the wheat and rice divide, and the numbing tingle the Sichuanese call málà.
Landmarks of China
Not one wall but a network, plus 980 buildings in the Forbidden City and 8,000 clay soldiers.
People & Society of China
1.4 billion people, shrinking since 2022, and 55 recognized minorities beyond the Han majority.
Geography of China
China covers about 9.6 million square kilometers and borders 14 countries, more than almost any other state. The land descends in three great steps from the Tibetan Plateau in the west, often called the roof of the world, through the basins and plateaus of the center, to the fertile eastern plains where most people live.
Two rivers organize the country. The Yangtze, the longest in Asia at around 6,300 kilometers, splits north from south, and the Yellow River carries so much silt through the northern plain that it earned the name China’s Sorrow for its historic floods. The far west holds the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts, and China shares the Himalayan border that includes Mount Everest.
History of China
Dynastic rule began with the Shang and continued through the Zhou, when Confucius set out the ethical system that shaped Chinese government for two millennia. Qin Shi Huang unified the warring states in 221 BC, standardising script, currency and measurement, and the Han dynasty that followed opened the Silk Road trade routes westward.
Later dynasties produced the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing well before Europe. The Qing dynasty fell in 1911 after a century of foreign encroachment beginning with the Opium Wars, and civil war and Japanese invasion followed. The People’s Republic was founded in 1949 under Mao Zedong, and after his death Deng Xiaoping launched the market reforms of 1978 that reshaped the country.
Language of China
Mandarin has more native speakers than any other language, around 940 million, and Standard Chinese based on the Beijing dialect is the official spoken form. What are usually called Chinese dialects, including Cantonese, Hokkien and Shanghainese, are mutually unintelligible and function as separate languages in speech.
The writing system unites them, since characters carry meaning rather than sound and can be read across varieties that sound nothing alike. Mandarin uses four tones, so pitch changes the word rather than the emotion. Simplified characters were introduced on the mainland in the 1950s to raise literacy, while Taiwan and Hong Kong kept traditional forms, and pinyin provides the standard romanisation.
Culture of China
Confucian thought shaped the social order around family obligation, education and respect for hierarchy, and it coexisted with Daoism and Buddhism rather than displacing them. The imperial examination system, running for over 1,300 years, tied social advancement to classical scholarship and left a lasting cultural weight on academic achievement.
Chinese New Year triggers the largest annual human migration on the planet, as hundreds of millions travel home for the holiday. Calligraphy is treated as a fine art on a level with painting, traditional Chinese medicine remains in wide use alongside modern healthcare, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 attacked much of this inheritance before later decades brought a deliberate revival.
Economy of China
China is the largest economy in the world measured at purchasing power parity and the second largest at market exchange rates. It manufactures roughly a third of global industrial output and dominates supply chains in electronics, batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles.
The state directs the economy far more than in other large market systems, through state-owned enterprises, industrial policy and control of the banking sector. The Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013 financed infrastructure across dozens of countries. Growth has slowed from the double-digit rates of the 2000s under the weight of a property sector downturn, high local government debt and a shrinking workforce.
Politics of China
The Chinese Communist Party has held a monopoly on power since 1949 and its structures run parallel to those of the state at every level. The party general secretary, currently Xi Jinping, is the paramount leader, and a 2018 constitutional change removed the two-term limit on the presidency.
The National People’s Congress is formally the highest state body, though it functions largely to ratify decisions taken within the party. Hong Kong and Macau are special administrative regions under a one country, two systems framework, and Beijing claims Taiwan as a province while Taiwan has governed itself separately since 1949.
Nature & Wildlife of China
China ranks among the most biodiverse countries in the world, with habitats running from tropical rainforest in Yunnan to alpine desert on the Tibetan Plateau. It holds more than 30,000 plant species and a long list of animals found nowhere else.
The giant panda, confined to bamboo forests in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, was moved from endangered to vulnerable in 2016 after decades of habitat protection. Other endemic species include the golden snub-nosed monkey, the Chinese alligator and the South China tiger, which is likely extinct in the wild. Air quality in northern cities improved substantially after the aggressive pollution controls of the 2010s.
Food & Cuisine of China
Chinese cooking is usually grouped into eight regional traditions, of which Cantonese, Sichuan, Shandong and Jiangsu are the most influential. The split between wheat in the north, giving noodles and dumplings, and rice in the south is the oldest dividing line in the national diet.
Sichuan cooking pairs chilli with the numbing tingle of Sichuan pepper for the sensation called málà, while Cantonese cooking prizes freshness and light steaming and gave the world dim sum. Tea was first cultivated here, and the country remains the largest producer. Chopsticks, soy sauce and the wok all spread from China across East and Southeast Asia.
Landmarks of China
The Great Wall is not one wall but a network of fortifications built and rebuilt over two thousand years, with the surviving Ming sections running more than 8,800 kilometers. Contrary to a persistent myth, it cannot be seen from space with the naked eye.
The Forbidden City in Beijing served as the imperial palace for nearly 500 years and holds around 980 surviving buildings, making it the largest such complex in the world. The Terracotta Army near Xi’an, discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974, contains over 8,000 individually modelled soldiers guarding the tomb of the first emperor. The karst peaks along the Li River near Guilin are the most painted landscape in Chinese art.
People & Society of China
China has roughly 1.4 billion residents and began shrinking in 2022 for the first time since the famine years of the early 1960s. The one-child policy in force from 1980 to 2015 accelerated a fertility decline that was already under way, and later moves to two and then three children have done little to reverse it.
Han Chinese make up about 91 percent of the population, with 55 recognized minority groups including Zhuang, Uyghur, Tibetan and Mongol peoples concentrated in the border regions. Urbanisation passed 65 percent after the largest rural-to-urban migration in history, though the hukou household registration system still limits migrants’ access to services in the cities where they work.
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