CHINA

With the largest population and the third largest land area in the world, China is a major world power. The People's Republic of China was founded as a communist state in 1949. However, since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, it has gradually abandoned socialism in favor of a more open, market-oriented economy. This change has stimulated dramatic economic growth, boosting China's economy to the world's third-largest economy. However, political reform has not matched economic change, creating potential conflict between the two systems. In addition, China's rising economic and military power makes its neighbors uneasy. China's land boundaries with many of its neighbors are often in remote areas and hard to define, leading to border disputes. China also has conflicting claims over island territories with several neighbors. The status of the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan, which is claimed by China as a renegade province, is only the best known of these.

China is the largest country in Asia, a continent which represents well over one-third of the earth's total land surface, and it covers most of the eastern part of the continent. China's land area ranks behind Russia and Canada and only slightly ahead of the United States. Although this land area might seem ample, China's population reached a world record 1.28 billion people in 2001. Still more challenging, almost two-thirds of China's land is sparsely populated desert able to sustain life for only a small portion of its people. The Tibetan Plateau, the Gobi Desert, and China's far west are mostly desert and make up 40 percent of the country. Many people are surprised to learn that so much of China is desert and that there are more camels in China than in the deserts of the Middle East.

Most Chinese live in the eastern and southeastern portion of the country, where there is enough rainfall to grow crops. This means that China must feed almost one-quarter of the world's people with only about 7 percent of the world's land suitable for farming. China has always been a large nation. Measured by the

Population's ability to live off the land under the prevailing farming techniques, it has been crowded almost to the maximum. Even at the time of the Roman Empire, China had the largest population in the world.

China includes not only Chinese people but also more than forty different ethnic groups. The Chinese, or the Han, as the ethnic Chinese are properly called, make up 94 percent of the total population of China. Although small in percentage terms, people in these minority groups number in the tens of millions. These include large numbers of Turkic people in a half dozen different ethnic groups, Tibetans, Mongolians, Manchu, and many groups of native Southeast Asian people.