China中国

The first dynasty with written records is the Shang, which ruled the middle Yellow River from about 1600 BCE and left bronze vessels and oracle bones: turtle shells and ox bones inscribed with questions to ancestors, the direct ancestor of today's characters. The Zhou who followed gave China the idea of the Mandate of Heaven, the belief that a ruler governs only while Heaven approves and that disaster and rebellion show the mandate has passed. That idea explained every later change of dynasty.

As Zhou power broke apart, the Warring States fought for two centuries, and in this chaos Confucius, Laozi and other thinkers set out the philosophies that still shape Chinese life. The state of Qin won in 221 BCE, and its king declared himself the First Emperor. He standardised script, weights, coins and axle widths, linked earlier frontier walls and was buried near Xi'an with an army of clay soldiers. The Han dynasty that followed lasted four centuries, opened the Silk Road trade routes and gave the majority ethnic group its name.

Periods of division alternated with great unified dynasties. The Tang (618–907) ruled a cosmopolitan empire from Chang'an, today's Xi'an, where Buddhist monks, Persian merchants and Central Asian musicians mixed. The Song (960–1279) invented movable type, paper money and the compass for navigation and built a scholar-official state chosen by exams. The Mongols conquered all of China in 1279 and founded the Yuan dynasty with Beijing as capital. The Ming (1368–1644) expelled them, built the Forbidden City and most of the brick Great Wall seen today, and sent Zheng He's fleets as far as East Africa.

The Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1912) created the largest territory in Chinese history, including Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan. In the 19th century it was humbled by Britain in the Opium Wars, forced to open treaty ports such as Shanghai, cede Hong Kong and lease Macau's position to Portugal, and shaken by the Taiping rebellion, which killed tens of millions. Chinese history books call the period from 1839 to 1949 the Century of Humiliation, and the phrase still shapes official views of the outside world.

The last emperor abdicated in 1912. The Republic fell into warlord rule, then a struggle between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Zedong's Communists, interrupted by Japan's invasion from 1931 and full-scale war from 1937, which killed millions of Chinese civilians, including at Nanjing. The Communists won the civil war and Mao proclaimed the People's Republic from Tiananmen Gate on 1 October 1949; the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Mao's Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions (1959–61), and his Cultural Revolution (1966–76) turned students against teachers and destroyed temples, books and lives.

After Mao's death Deng Xiaoping launched reform and opening in 1978: farmers could sell surplus crops, special economic zones such as Shenzhen welcomed foreign investment, and hundreds of millions left poverty. Political reform did not follow; protests centred on Tiananmen Square were crushed in June 1989. China joined the WTO in 2001, hosted the Olympics in 2008 and became the world's second-largest economy. Under Xi Jinping, leader since 2012, the party has tightened control over society, the internet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang while pushing technology, infrastructure and a larger global role.

About 1.4 billion people live in China, and the population has been falling since 2022. Most live in the eastern half of the country, on the plains and river valleys; the western plateaus and deserts are thinly settled. Two-thirds now live in cities, up from under a fifth in 1980, in one of the largest migrations ever: hundreds of millions moved from villages to factory and construction jobs. Many still hold a rural household registration, the hukou, which limits their access to city schools and services.

The state recognises 56 ethnic groups. The Han are more than 90% of the population; the largest minorities include the Zhuang of Guangxi, the Hui (Chinese-speaking Muslims), the Manchu, the Uyghur of Xinjiang, the Miao and the Tibetans. Minority areas have nominal autonomy, and their costumes and dances are promoted for tourism, but state policy increasingly stresses a single national identity, with Mandarin schooling and limits on religious practice, most severely in Xinjiang and Tibet.

The one-child policy, enforced from 1980 until 2015, produced a generation of only children, a large surplus of men and a fast-ageing society. Now families are encouraged to have three children, with limited success, because housing, schooling and the long working culture known as 996 (nine to nine, six days a week) make children expensive. Grandparents raise many children while parents work, often in another city.

The state is officially atheist and party members may not practise religion, yet belief runs through daily life. Popular religion blends Buddhism, Taoism and the worship of ancestors, local gods and folk heroes: people burn incense at temples before exams, visit fortune tellers and sweep family graves at Qingming. Buddhist temples are busy again after decades of destruction, and Taoist mountains such as Wudangshan draw pilgrims. Religions must register with state bodies; unregistered churches, mosques and groups face pressure.

Confucian ideas shape social life more than any religion: respect for parents and elders, the importance of education and exams, and a sense that harmony and hierarchy come before individual rights. Face (mianzi), the social standing that must not be lost in public, and guanxi, the network of personal connections and favours, explain much everyday behaviour, from banquet seating to how problems get solved. The gaokao, the national university entrance exam each June, is the single biggest event in many family lives.

Traditional Chinese buildings are timber frames on stone platforms, with walls that carry no weight and heavy tiled roofs held up by interlocking brackets called dougong. Their size, the number of bays, the colour of roof tiles and the figures on the ridges followed strict rank: yellow tiles for the emperor, green for princes, grey for everyone else. Halls line up on a north–south axis facing south, and cities, palaces, temples and ordinary courtyard houses all follow the same plan of walls and enclosed yards.

The Forbidden City is the fullest expression of that order: nearly a thousand buildings behind a moat and walls, with the throne halls on the central axis. The siheyuan, the courtyard house of Beijing's hutong lanes, is its domestic version, with rooms facing inward on four sides. Gardens were the opposite: the classical gardens of Suzhou compress mountains, lakes and forests into a few hectares with rockeries, pavilions and framed views, designed as landscapes to walk through like a scroll painting.

Painting and calligraphy were the arts of the scholar class. Calligraphy with brush and ink was considered the highest art, and landscape painting in ink on silk or paper, showing mountains and water (shanshui), expressed ideas about nature and the self rather than a real place. Poetry, painting and calligraphy were often combined on one scroll, stamped with the red seals of owners and admirers. The Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Museum hold the largest collections on the mainland.

China gave the world porcelain. Kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi perfected blue-and-white ware under the Yuan and Ming and exported it across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, which is why English calls it china. Jade carving, lacquer, silk weaving and bronze casting each have lineages of thousands of years. Performing arts include Peking opera, with painted faces that mark character types and acrobatic fighting, and many regional operas such as Kunqu and Sichuan opera with its face-changing masks.

The 20th century brought new layers: socialist realist posters and monuments, the Soviet-style buildings around Tiananmen Square, and since the 1990s an art scene that moved from Beijing's 798 factory district to auction houses worldwide. Architecture since 2000 has been a laboratory: the Bird's Nest stadium, the CCTV tower and Shanghai's Pudong skyline, as well as whole new cities. The state has also rebuilt old towns and temples at scale, so many 'ancient' streets are recent reconstructions on old plans.

Food sits at the centre of Chinese social life; a common greeting translates as 'have you eaten?'. A meal is shared: dishes arrive at the table for everyone, balanced between meat and vegetables, dry and soupy, spicy and mild, and staple starch comes at the end rather than the start at banquets. Ordering for a group is a skill, and the host's job is to order too much. Round tables with a lazy Susan put everything within reach.

The basic divide is between the wheat-eating north and the rice-eating south. Northerners eat noodles, dumplings, steamed buns and flatbreads, and in winter families make jiaozi together for the New Year. The Yangtze delta and south grow rice, and the south-east coast adds seafood. The classic list of eight great cuisines names Shandong, Sichuan, Cantonese, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Hunan and Anhui, but each province and many cities claim dishes of their own.

Sichuan cooking is known for mala, the combination of chilli heat with the tingling numbness of Sichuan pepper, though it also includes sweet, sour and mild dishes. Chillies arrived from the Americas only in the 16th century and took over the cooking of Sichuan, Hunan and Guizhou. Cantonese cooking values freshness and the natural taste of ingredients, and gave the world dim sum, the brunch of small plates with tea called yum cha, and roast meats hanging in shop windows.

Street food and breakfast show daily life best: jianbing crêpes in the north, soy milk with fried dough sticks, steamed buns, rice-noodle soups in the south. Hui Muslim cooks run noodle shops with hand-pulled noodles in every city, and Xinjiang lamb skewers and flatbreads have spread nationwide. Cities have food streets and night markets, while food delivery apps bring almost any dish to the door in half an hour.

Tea has been drunk in China for about two thousand years. Green tea from Hangzhou's Longjing hills, oolongs from Fujian, pressed pu'er from Yunnan and jasmine tea in the north each have their own rituals, and teahouses remain places to talk, play cards and do business, above all in Chengdu. Baijiu, a strong sorghum spirit, dominates banquets, where repeated toasts of ganbei ('dry the cup') build relationships. Food is also medicine: many people follow ideas of hot and cold foods from traditional Chinese medicine.

China uses the Gregorian calendar for work and government, but the traditional festivals follow the lunisolar calendar, so their dates move each year between late January and October. Public holidays are set each year by the State Council, often with weekend 'make-up' working days that shift the weekly rhythm; visitors should check the official schedule for their dates. Two holidays, Spring Festival and National Day, last about a week and move hundreds of millions of people.

Spring Festival, the Lunar New Year, is the biggest. In the weeks before, the chunyun travel season sees billions of trips as migrant workers go home. On New Year's Eve families eat a reunion dinner, northerners make dumplings, and the evening ends with the state television gala and fireworks where they are allowed. Red couplets go on doorframes, children receive money in red envelopes (now often sent by WeChat), and temple fairs run for days. The season ends with the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day.

Qingming, the tomb-sweeping festival in early April, is for cleaning family graves and making offerings, including paper money and paper models of phones and cars burned for the dead. The Dragon Boat Festival in early summer commemorates the poet Qu Yuan with boat races and zongzi, sticky rice wrapped in leaves. The Mid-Autumn Festival in September or early October brings families together to eat mooncakes under the full moon.

National Day on 1 October marks the founding of the People's Republic and opens Golden Week, the peak of domestic tourism, when the Great Wall, West Lake and the Bund reach capacity. May Day (Labour Day) is a second, five-day travel peak. Newer, commercial dates also matter: Singles' Day on 11 November grew from a student joke into the world's biggest online shopping event.

Minority and local festivals keep other calendars. Tibetans celebrate Losar, their new year, and the Shoton yogurt festival in Lhasa with the display of giant thangka paintings. The Dai people of Xishuangbanna splash water at their April new year, and Muslims mark Eid at mosques across the northwest. Harbin's ice and snow festival fills winter with lit ice buildings, and Zigong in Sichuan is known for its lantern shows at New Year.

In 1978 China was poorer than most of sub-Saharan Africa. Four decades of growth, often near 10% a year, made it the world's largest manufacturer and exporter and its second-largest economy. Special economic zones, cheap labour from the countryside, huge state investment in roads, rail and ports, and entry into the WTO in 2001 drove the rise. The state still owns the big banks, energy firms and telecoms, while private companies dominate technology, retail and exports.

Infrastructure is what visitors notice first. The high-speed rail network, begun in 2008, now passes 45,000 km, more than the rest of the world combined, and ties every provincial capital together. Metros run in about fifty cities. Airports, bridges and expressways are new and busy. China also leads in electric cars, batteries, solar panels and wind turbines, and electric scooters and cars are now the majority of new vehicles in many cities.

Daily life runs through the phone. WeChat is messaging, social media, payments, government services and mini-programmes for everything from restaurants to hospitals; Alipay does much the same. Cash use collapsed in the 2010s, which is why the state now pushes shops to accept cash and foreign cards again for visitors. Food delivery, ride-hailing and e-commerce are cheap and fast because of a huge workforce of couriers and drivers.

Control is part of the same system. The Great Firewall blocks foreign platforms and filters domestic ones; real names are required for phone numbers, train tickets, hotel stays and social media. Cameras with face recognition cover cities and transport. Many residents accept this as the price of order and convenience; others use VPNs quietly. For visitors it means carrying the passport always and assuming online activity is visible.

Growth has slowed. A property slump since 2021 has hurt household wealth, since most savings are in flats, and youth unemployment has been high. Young people talk of 'lying flat' (tangping) and 'involution' (neijuan), the sense of competing ever harder for the same rewards. The population is ageing and shrinking, and the gap between coastal cities and the interior remains wide. Inbound tourism, which collapsed during the pandemic closures, is being courted again through visa-free entry and easier payments.