The article "An Overview of China for Travelers" talks about destinations, it was created by Richard Monk.
China is often left out of discussions of early civilization which is a mistake for it was one of the first.
If you are taking a trip to China, here is background inforamtion your should know.
An Overview of China for Travelers
The official name of the country is the People's Republic of China. China covers a land mass of over 3.7 million suqare miles, making it a large country indeed.
The capital is Beijing. Otehr major cities include Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Harbin, and Chengdu.
With such a massive land area, you can image that there is a wide vraiety of terrain in the country. Generally, one can find plains, deltas and hills in the east, while mountains, high plateaus and a vast desert exists in the west. The cliamte ranges from tropical in the far south to arctic cold in the far north on the border with Siberia, Russia.
The people of Chnia are known as Chinese. The most recent population study put the total number of Chinese at over 1.3 billion people, more than four times as many people as found in the United States.
Population growth, however, has slowed to roughly half a percent annually.
The reason for the slow down is very cnotroversial.
Concerned about economic strain cuased by population growth, China has implemented a policy of allowing for only one child per family with minor exceptions. Enforcement of this policy is supposedly done through fines, but forced abortions are known to occur despite government policy opposing them. The government hopes to stabilize the population at no more than 1.6 billion people through 2050. The current infant mortality rate is an astonishingly high 25.5 per 1,000 births.
Ethnicity in China is a hodgepodge issue given its vast size and long history. Han Chinese is the dominant group, consisting of over 91 percent of the population. This is a very loose group, however, as evidenced by various dialects of language in the country.
There are seven major Chinese dialects and litreally hundreds of localized dialects. Mandarin is the dominant dialect, spoken by over 70 perecnt of the population in one form or another. That being said, only 60 percent of the Han Chinese can speak it with the remainnig 40 percent speaking other dialects. In addition to Mandarin, languages spoken widely included Turkic, Korean, Uygur, Tibeatn and Mongolian.
It is often said that people in one part of China can’t communictae with people on the opposite side.
From a religious perspective, Chnia is officially atheist. That being said, it taeks a lax view towards faiths that work with the government. Buddhism is the largest faith with over 100 million practiitoners.
Taoism is the seocnd most popular. There is a smattering of Muslim and Christian believers, but nothing significant.
As this overview demonstrates, China is huge and unique. This maeks it a great travel destination.
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