China

China's eastern edge runs along the Pacific Ocean for roughly 14,500 kilometers, touching the Yellow Sea, the East China Sea, and the South China Sea. The country covers about 9.6 million square kilometers, among the largest in the world, and shares land borders with 14 countries, more combined border length than any nation on Earth. A trip across China covers roughly the same distance as a trip across the continental United States.

Thousands of dramatic limestone peaks rise straight up out of the flat land around Guilin's Li River, carved over millions of years as mildly acidic rainwater slowly dissolved limestone left behind by an ancient seabed. The scenery is so distinctive it's printed on China's 20-yuan banknote, and it has inspired Chinese landscape painters and poets for over a thousand years.

The Yellow River's fertile floodplains, built from wind-blown silt, gave rise to Chinese civilization more than 4,000 years ago, though catastrophic floods over the centuries earned it the nickname "China's Sorrow." Farther south, the Yangtze, Asia's longest river at 6,300 kilometers, now powers the Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station of any kind on Earth.

China spans roughly the same range of latitude as the continental United States, and its climate shows it: the northern city of Harbin regularly drops below -20°F in January, while the tropical island of Hainan in the far south stays warm enough for swimming year-round. In between lies the Gobi Desert, where spring windstorms can lift enough dust into the air to reach Beijing, Korea, and Japan.

China is home to about 1.4 billion people, roughly one in five humans alive, but they are extraordinarily unevenly distributed. A diagonal line across the map, from Heihe in the northeast to Tengchong in the southwest, marks a divide first identified by geographer Hu Huanyong in 1935: even today, roughly 94% of the population lives east of that line, on just 43% of the country's land.

For the first time in more than 60 years, China's population began shrinking in 2022, the delayed result of the One-Child Policy (1980–2015), which for over three decades limited most urban families to a single child and left the country with a rapidly aging population. A separate system called hukou ties school and healthcare access to a person's birthplace, which is why more than 100 million migrant workers now live in cities apart from children left behind in home villages.

Mandarin is China's official spoken language, but the country has dozens of regional dialects — Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien — so different that speakers often can't understand each other's speech at all. Written Chinese solves this in a unique way: because characters represent meaning rather than sound, someone who can't follow spoken Cantonese can often still read a newspaper printed in standard characters.

China has one of the world's oldest continuous artistic traditions, from calligraphy and classical poetry to porcelain so prized abroad that the material itself came to be called "china" in English. Jingdezhen, a city that has produced fine porcelain for more than a thousand years, is still known as China's porcelain capital today. Regional cuisines are just as distinct — Sichuan's numbing spice, Cantonese dim sum, and Beijing's roast duck are only three of dozens.

China is the world's second-largest economy and by far its largest manufacturer. This transformation began in 1978, when leader Deng Xiaoping opened the economy to foreign investment and private business — nowhere more dramatically than in Shenzhen, a fishing village of about 30,000 people in 1980 that Deng designated a special economic zone and that has since grown into a tech-manufacturing hub of more than 17 million people.

WeChat, launched in 2011, has grown into what's often called China's "everything app" — with more than 1.4 billion monthly users, it combines messaging, mobile payment, and ride-hailing into a single platform, so that many city-dwellers rarely carry cash or even a wallet. That scale shows up in shopping too: the annual Singles' Day event each November now generates tens of billions of dollars in sales in a single day, more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

China holds more than 80% of the world's known reserves of rare earth minerals — the elements essential to smartphones, electric motors, and defense electronics — and processes an even larger share of the global supply. That gives it real leverage: in recent trade disputes, China has restricted rare earth exports to pressure trading partners, a reminder of how much of the world's technology depends on minerals mined and processed in one country.

China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, giving it veto power over major international decisions, and it has become the world's largest creditor to developing nations. Since 2013, its Belt and Road Initiative has financed ports, railways, and roads across more than 100 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, though several borrowers have struggled to repay their loans, occasionally handing Chinese state companies long-term control over the infrastructure they helped build.