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China: Country & Culture

Facts
A country in eastern Asia, China is officially named the People's Republic of China. China covers an area of 3,696,100 sq mi and has a population of approximately 1,298,848,000. The capital of China is Beijing. The Han, or ethnic Chinese, form more than nine-tenths of the population. Languages spoken are many dialects of Han Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese are the two most broadly spoken languages in China. Religions in China include Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Daoism. The currency in China is the renminbi of which the unit is the Yuan.

Recent History
Peoples from Manchuria overran China in 1644 and established the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. Ever-increasing incursions by Western and Japanese interests led in the 19th century to the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Sino-Japanese War, all of which weakened the Manchu. The dynasty fell in 1911, and a republic was proclaimed in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen. The power struggles of warlords weakened the republic. Under Chiang Kai-shek, some national unification was achieved in the 1920s, but Chiang soon broke with the communists, who then formed their own armies. Japan invaded northern China in 1937; its occupation lasted until 1945. The communists gained support after the Long March (1934–35), in which Mao Zedong emerged as their leader. Upon Japan's surrender at the end of World War II, a fierce civil war began; in 1949 the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, and the communists proclaimed the People's Republic of China. The communists undertook extensive reforms, but pragmatic policies alternated with periods of revolutionary upheaval, most notably in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The anarchy, terror, and economic paralysis of the latter led, after Mao's death in 1976, to a turn to moderation under Deng Xiaoping, who undertook economic reforms and renewed China's ties to the West. The government established diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 1979. Since the late 1970s the economy has been moving from central planning and state-run industries to a mixture of state-owned and private enterprises in manufacturing and services, in the process growing dramatically and transforming Chinese society. The Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 was a challenge to an otherwise increasingly stable political environment after 1980. In 1997 Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule, as did Macau in 1999.

(Source: Encyclopedia Britannica Online)