Three steps down to the sea
China descends towards the Pacific in three great steps. The highest is the Tibetan Plateau, averaging more than 4,000 metres, and nine of the world's fourteen peaks above 8,000 metres stand in China or on its borders, Mount Everest among them. Below lie middling plateaus and basins, then the low plains and hills of the east. Silt eroded from the Loess Plateau gives the Yellow River both its colour and its name.
People gather at the foot of this staircase. In 1935 the geographer Hu Huanyong imagined a line from Heihe in the north-east to Tengchong in the south-west, with 96 percent of the population on its eastern side. Eighty years later the share was still 94 percent.
The crowded east sets the clock for everyone else. China spans almost five geographical time zones yet follows the single standard of Beijing Time, though in Xinjiang a local time two hours behind runs alongside it.
The 2020 census counted 91 percent of the population as Han, a figure that suggests more uniformity than daily speech delivers. Local varieties of Chinese are often mutually unintelligible, and what binds their speakers is a shared written standard.
Oracle bones, emperors and examinations
Writing is the thread through the whole story. China's written history begins around 1200 BCE with inscriptions on Shang dynasty oracle bones. Political union came about a thousand years later. By 221 BCE the king of Qin had conquered his rivals and taken a title, emperor, that Chinese sovereigns would carry for two millennia. His dynasty lasted only about 15 years, yet its reforms outlived it. Characters, coins, weights and even wagon axles were standardised. He also joined older walls into an early Great Wall. Farmers digging wells in 1974 found the terracotta army near his tomb.
Later emperors governed through learning. Written examinations, introduced under the Sui to weaken the hereditary aristocracy, became the main route into office under the Song. The throne ended the examinations on 2 September 1905, only a few years before the empire itself fell.
Collapse, revolution and reinvention
Defeat in the First Opium War cost the Qing dynasty Hong Kong Island in 1842. A revolt at Wuchang in autumn 1911 then led to the emperor's abdication in February 1912, but the republic that followed failed to unify the country and warlords held many regions. Japan's full-scale invasion from 7 July 1937 brought far worse, with estimates of the war's civilian dead exceeding 12 million. Civil war resumed after Japan's surrender, and on 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong declared the People's Republic as Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists fled to Taiwan.
Communist rule then produced disasters of its own. The famine of 1959 to 1961, which the party in 1981 blamed mainly on the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward, killed an estimated 15 to 46 million people. The Cultural Revolution, launched in 1966, closed schools and universities and left an estimated 1 to 2 million dead. The party later held it responsible for "the most severe setback and the heaviest losses" since the republic's founding.
From December 1978, reforms under Deng Xiaoping divided commune land into household plots and opened special economic zones such as Shenzhen. GDP growth has since averaged over 9 percent a year, and the World Bank says almost 800 million people have left extreme poverty. Political opening did not follow. Overnight on 3 to 4 June 1989, troops in Beijing fired into crowds trying to block their advance on the student-led protest in Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, possibly thousands, are believed to have died, the true toll remains unknown, and the subject is heavily censored.
Contested edges and an ageing giant
Several of Beijing's claims and policies remain in dispute. It views Taiwan as a breakaway territory to be unified, by force if necessary, though the People's Republic has never governed the island, which elects its own government and has official ties with eleven states and the Holy See. In Tibet, a 1951 agreement following a military invasion the previous year spoke of "peaceful liberation". The Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959, says it was imposed by the threat of arms. In Xinjiang, international researchers and US officials estimate that more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslims have been detained since 2017. The UN human rights office said in 2022 that violations there could amount to crimes against humanity. Beijing calls the sites vocational training centres, says they closed in 2019 and rejects the report as false. Hong Kong returned from British rule in 1997 with a fifty-year promise for its capitalist system. After huge protests in 2019 Beijing imposed a national security law, which officials said would restore stability.
At home the pressing change is demographic. The one-child policy, formally implemented in 1980 and enforced in some cases through forced abortion and sterilisation, gave way to a two-child rule in 2016, and to a three-child rule in 2021, when penalties were dropped and limits effectively ended. Births have fallen anyway. In 2025 there were 7.92 million against 11.31 million deaths, and the population dropped for a fourth straight year to about 1.405 billion. A state that remade itself within a single lifetime now faces a slower task: growing old without growing poor.
