Figure 1.--Until railroads arrived, rivers wee the highways of China. The same was true of America and Europe. The major rivers are the Yellow anf Yangtze, but are many smaller rivers. This is the Kumming River in Yunan Povinnce (southwetern China). The photograph was taken during World War II. Kunming was a major Chinese military center and an American air base. It was also a transportation hub for the Burma Road, which was used to move supplies into China.

China dominates eastern Asia. Asia is the largest continent and China occupies some one quarter of Asia. This is almost as large an area as all of Europe. As beautifully captured by Chinese artists, the Chinese landscape is marked by dramatic geographical diversity. Topographically, it characterized by the south western Tibetan highlands where the annual snow melt creates inexhaustible rivers. The northwest is arid and deserts like the Gobi meant that the area has played little role in China's long history. These deserts along with Tibetan mountains have helped to isolate China--penetrated only by a trickle of trade over the Sllk Road. China's great rivers flow east carving out the country's dramatic landscape before flowing into into the Pacific Ocean. The two most important of these rivers are the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers--one of the great river valley systems that gave birth to human civilization. These and other rivers provides life creating water and rich alluvial soil needed to support China's prodigious agricultural productivity as Pearl Buck described it--'the good earth'. The land between these two great rivers were the core of China and explain the term Middle Kingdom. The Grand Canal (大运河) built during the medieval created a system of interconnected man-made waterways linking the major rivers (especially the Yellow and Yangtze) connecting the hungry north with the food producing south. The Grand Canal was a vital waterborne transport system through the heart of the Middle Kingdom, a major factor in China's economic success. While China is best known for the Great Wall, the Grand Canal is of far greter significance. It is the longest artificial waterway in the world. The water in the Chinese rivers and feeding the Grand Canal descends as part of a three-step staircase. The first step is the towering Tibetan highland mountainous of the southeast. The second step is the high plateau. The third step is the plains and lowlands in the east and southeast. occupying over 10 percent of China's land. China's climate adds to the east-west disparity. The north and west is extremely dry. The south and east. he warmer highly productive south has tropical monsoons providing additional water to support agriculture. All of this explains why most of the population lives in south and east. China's growing need for water has caused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to dam rivers in the Tibetan Highlands and redirect the water flow from South and Southeast Asia and into arid areas of China. The agriculturist productive created China's huge population, for most of history the most populace country. China incredibly has more than 50 cities with populations of half a million or more and some 25 with a million or more. The capital city, Beijing, is in the north. Coastal Shanghai in central China is China's the largest city and the country industrial and commercial center. It has a population of over 15 million people. The genius of the CCP today is leading China over a population cliff that is placing the future of Han ethnicity in question.

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Created: 4:56 AM 2/10/2025
Last updated: 4:56 AM 2/10/2025