China Cultural Awareness

China Cultural Awareness

China Cultural Awareness

Introduction

China is the third largest country in the world and it has land area of 9,600,000 square kilometers. Simply 13 per cent of Chinese land is plains and approximately one-third is mountainous, 27 % plateau, and 17 per cent basin as well as desert. Mountain consist the majority of the country. Its main ranges are the Tien Shan, the Kunlun chain, plus the Trans-Himalaya.

Geography

In the southwest, there is Tibet, which China annexed in 1950. to the north there is Gobi Desert. China proper consists of three huge river systems: the Yellow River (Huang He), 2,109 mi (5,464 km) long; the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang), which is the third-longest river in the world at 2,432 mi (6,300 km); plus the Pearl River (Zhu Jiang), 848 mi (2,197 km) long.

Population

China has the largest population in the world. The resident population based on the 2000 census was 1,242,612,226. China's average annual growth rate between 1990 and 2000 was .96 %, which is low qualified to the rates of other Asian countries. The government wanted to accomplish zero population growth by the year 2000.

More than 95 per cent of the people live in China good, where the average population solidity goes beyond 555 persons per square mile (217 per km 2 ). In level to rolling areas of good agricultural land, densities run far higher. The most greatly populated large areas are the Manchurian simple, the North China Plain, the lower Yangtze Valley, and the Sichuan Basin.

Lots of China's cities, especially those chosen for fast industrial development, have grown rapidly under the Communists. It is believed that as lots of as 30 municipalities (shihs) might have populations of more than 1,000,000. Lots of them cover very large areas—the Shanghai municipality, for instance, has an area of 2,388 square miles (6,185 km 2 )—and involve, in addition to the central city, small cities plus towns, much farmland, and huge numbers of people living in communes.

Language

Chinese, Sino-Tibetan language are being used by most people in China. There are a large number of dialects, the chief be Cantonese, Fukienese and Wu. The official language is Mandarin, officially known as Mandarin (common speech), which is understood about 70 percent of the people. Other languages: Tibetan, which is spoken in Tibet and parts of China proper, Turkic, in Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, as well as Thai, in some areas of southern China.

Previously, written Chinese was a classic, literary language, in which construction and much of the vocabulary were different from spoken language. This is a classical Chinese can be read and understood only by those trained for years in the literature. The script itself consisted of thousands of characters; many of them are very complicated. The difficulty of the written Chinese was the main obstacle to people becoming literate.

In 1920 PAI hua, written by Chinese approximating everyday speech, began replacing the classical form, can now be had to learn to read in a few months instead ...