Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0081/00819.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 38KB | 607 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00819}
$Pretitle{260}
$Title{China
Chapter 2A.   Physical Environment and Population}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Michael L. Waddle}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{population
china
areas
chinese
area
census
control
birth
mountains
urban}
$Date{1989}
$Log{Bogda Peak*0081902.scf
}
Country:     China
Book:        China, A Country Study
Author:      Michael L. Waddle
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1989

Chapter 2A.   Physical Environment and Population

[See Bogda Peak: Courtesy Embassy of China, Washington DC]

     In a remarkably varied landscapes suggest the disparate climate and broad
reach of China, the third largest country in the world in terms of area. China's
climate ranges from subarctic to tropical. Its topography includes the world's
highest peaks, tortuous but picturesque river valleys, and vast plains subject
to life-threatening but soil-enriching flooding. These characteristics have
dictated where the Chinese people live and how they make their livelihood.

     The majority of China's people live in the eastern segment of the country, the
traditional China Proper. Most are peasants living, as did their forebears, in
the low-lying hills and central plains that stretch from the highlands eastward
and southward to the sea. Agriculture predominates in this vast area, generally
favored by a temperate or subtropical climate. The meticulously tilled fields
are evidence in part of the government's continuing concern over farm output and
the food supply.

     Although migration to urban areas has been restricted since the late 1950s,
as of the end of 1985 about 37 percent of the population was urban. An urban and
industrial corridor formed a broad arc stretching from Harbin in the northeast
through the Beijing area and south to China's largest city, the huge industrial
metropolitan complex of Shanghai.

     The uneven pattern of internal development, so strongly weighted toward the
eastern part of the country, doubtless will change little even with developing
interest in exploiting the mineral-rich and agriculturally productive portions
of the vast northwest and southwest regions. The adverse terrain and climate of
most of those regions have discouraged dense population. For the most part, only
ethnic minority groups have settled there.

     The "minority nationalities" are an important element of Chinese society.
In 1987 there were 55 recognized minority groups, comprising nearly 7 percent of
the total population. Because some of the groups were located in militarily
sensitive border areas and in regions with strategic minerals, the government
tried to maintain benevolent relations with the minorities. But the minorities
played only a superficial role in the major affairs of the nation.

     China's ethnically diverse population is the largest in the world, and the
Chinese Communist Party and the government work strenuously to count, control,
and care for their people. In 1982 China conducted its first population census
since 1964. It was by far the most thorough and accurate census taken under
Communist rule and confirmed that China was a nation of more than 1 billion
people, or about one-fifth of the world's population. The census provided
demographers with a wealth of accurate data on China's age-sex structure,
fertility and mortality rates, and population density and distribution. Useful
information also was gathered on minority ethnic groups, urban population, and
marital status. For the first time since the People's Republic of China was
founded, demographers had reliable information on the size and composition of
the Chinese work force.

     Beginning in the mid-1950s, the Chinese government introduced, with varying
degrees of enthusiasm and success, a number of family planning, or population
control, campaigns and programs. The most radical and controversial was the
one-child policy publicly announced in 1979. Under this policy, which had
different guidelines for national minorities, married couples were officially
permitted only one child. Enforcement of the program, however, varied
considerably from place to place, depending on the vigilance of local population
control workers.

 Health care has improved dramatically in China since 1949. Major diseases such
as cholera, typhoid, and scarlet fever have been brought under control. Life
expectancy has more than doubled, and infant mortality has dropped
significantly. On the negative side, the incidence of cancer, cerebrovascular
disease, and heart disease has increased to the extent that these have become
the leading causes of death. Economic reforms initiated in the late 1970s
fundamentally altered methods of providing health care; the collective medical
care system was gradually replaced by a more individual-oriented approach.

     More liberalized emigration policies enacted in the 1980s facilitated the
legal departure of increasing numbers of Chinese who joined their overseas
Chinese relatives and friends. The Four Modernizations program (see Glossary),
which required access of Chinese students and scholars, particularly scientists,
to foreign education and research institutions, brought about increased contact
with the outside world, particularly the industrialized nations. Thus, as China
moved toward the twenty-first century, the diverse resources and immense
population that it had committed to a comprehensive process of modernization
became ever more important in the interdependent world.

Physical Environment

     China stretches some 5,000 kilometers across the East Asian landmass in an
erratically changing configuration of broad plains, expansive deserts, and lofty
mountain ranges, including vast areas of inhospitable terrain. The eastern half
of the country, its seacoast fringed with offshore islands, is a region of
fertile lowlands, foothills and mountains, desert, steppes, and subtropical
areas. The western half of China is a region of sunken basins, rolling plateaus,
and towering massifs, including a portion of the highest tableland on earth. The
vastness of the country and the barrenness of the western hinterland have
important implications for defense strategy (see Doctrine, Strategy, and
Tactics, ch. 14). In spite of many good harbors along the approximately
18,000-kilometer coastline, the nation has traditionally oriented itself not
toward the sea but inland, developing as an imperial power whose center lay in
the middle and lower reaches of the Huang He (Yellow River) on the northern
plains.

 Figures for the size of China differ slightly depending on where one draws a
number of ill-defined boundaries. The official Chinese figure is 9.6 million
square kilometers, making the country substantially smaller than the Soviet
Union, slightly smaller than Canada, and somewhat larger than the United States.
China's contour is reasonably comparable to that of the United States and lies
largely at the same latitudes.

Boundaries

     In 1987 China's borders, more than 20,000 kilometers of land frontier
shared with nearly all the nations of mainland East Asia, were disputed at a
number of points. In the western sector, China claimed portions of the
41,000-square-kilometer Pamir Mountains area, a region of soaring mountain peaks
and glacial valleys where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Soviet
Union, and China meet in Central Asia. North and east of this region, some
sections of the border remained undemarcated in 1987. The 6,542-kilometer
frontier with the Soviet Union has been a source of continual friction. In 1954
China published maps showing substantial portions of Soviet Siberian territory
as its own. In the northeast, border friction with the Soviet Union produced a
tense situation in remote regions of Nei Monggol Autonomous Region (Inner
Mongolia) and Heilongjiang Province along segments of the Ergun He (Argun
River), Heilong Jiang (Amur River), and Wusuli Jiang (Ussuri River)(see fig. 3).
Each side had massed troops and had exchanged charges of border prov