China

• 1. Introduction

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  China sits in East Asia, home to more than 1.4 billion people, roughly 17 percent of everyone alive. Spread across about 9.6 million square kilometers, it is the second-most populous country after India and the third-largest by area. Beijing serves as its capital, while Shanghai is its most populous city by urban area. The first humans arrived here during the Paleolithic era, and by the 2nd millennium BCE dynastic states had taken shape in the Yellow River basin. From that point the country accumulated a record few places can match. What invention gave it the compass and gunpowder, and why did a civilization that led the world in science fall behind by the 17th century? How did a planned economy become the largest in the world by purchasing power parity? And how does a single ruling party govern a land spanning the equivalent of five time zones on one national clock?

• 2. Two Thousand Years Of Emperors

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  In 221 BCE, the state of Qin conquered its rivals and unified China under a single autocracy. King Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the first emperor, standardizing Chinese characters, measurements, road widths, and currency. His dynasty lasted only fifteen years and fell soon after his death, yet it opened two millennia of imperial rule. The Han dynasty followed, ruling between 206 BCE and 220 CE, and gave its name to the modern Han Chinese. Its campaigns reached Central Asia, Mongolia, Korea, and Yunnan, and helped establish the land route of the Silk Road. Han China became the largest economy of the ancient world.

  Under the Tang dynasty, Chinese economy, technology, and culture entered a golden age. The capital Chang'an grew into a cosmopolitan urban center, and traders traveled as far as Mesopotamia and the Horn of Africa. The Tang produced what many scholars regard as the apogee of classical Chinese poetry, canonical across the Sinosphere, before the An Lushan rebellion in the 8th century weakened it. The Song dynasty ended the chaos in 960 and proved astonishingly inventive. It was the first government in world history to issue paper money and the first Chinese polity to build a permanent navy. Between the 10th and 11th centuries the population doubled to around 100 million, fed by expanding rice cultivation, while Bianjing and Lin'an each surpassed one million inhabitants.

  The Mongol conquest reshaped that world. Beginning in 1205 with Genghis Khan's campaigns against Western Xia, it culminated when Kublai Khan founded the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and crushed the last Song remnant in 1279. The toll was staggering. A Song population of 120 million was reduced to 60 million by the census of 1300. A peasant leader overthrew the Yuan in 1368 and founded the Ming as the Hongwu Emperor, ushering in another golden age. Admiral Zheng He led the Ming treasure voyages across the Indian Ocean, reaching as far as East Africa, before the capital moved from Nanjing to Beijing. In 1644 peasant rebels captured Beijing, and the Manchu-led Qing then seized the city. The Ming-to-Qing transition cost 25 million lives, and the Qing went on to add Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang to the empire.

• 3. The Century Of Unequal Treaties

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  In the mid-19th century, the Opium Wars forced China to pay compensation, open treaty ports, and grant foreign nationals extraterritoriality. Under the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, the British Empire took Hong Kong, the first of what became known as the unequal treaties. The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895 cost China its influence in Korea and the cession of Taiwan to Japan. Internal collapse compounded the losses. Tens of millions died in the White Lotus Rebellion, the failed Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and 1860s, and the Dungan Revolt in the northwest.

  The Northern Chinese Famine of 1876 to 1879 killed between 9 and 13 million people, and the great Chinese diaspora began as people fled conflict and catastrophe. The Guangxu Emperor drafted a reform plan in 1898 to build a modern constitutional monarchy, but the Empress Dowager Cixi thwarted it. The anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion of 1899 to 1901 weakened the dynasty further. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 ended Qing rule, and Puyi, the last emperor, abdicated in 1912.

• 4. Warlords, War, And Revolution

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  On the 1st of January 1912, the Republic of China was established, and Sun Yat-sen of the Kuomintang became provisional president. The presidency soon passed to Yuan Shikai, a former Qing general who proclaimed himself emperor in 1915. Popular opposition and his own Beiyang Army forced him to restore the republic in 1916, and after his death the country fragmented. Its Beijing government was internationally recognized but virtually powerless, while regional warlords held most of the territory. In the late 1920s the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek reunified much of the nation through the Northern Expedition and moved the capital to Nanjing.

  The Kuomintang had formed a First United Front with the Chinese Communist Party, but in 1927 Chiang violently suppressed the CCP and other leftists in Shanghai, beginning the Chinese Civil War. CCP forces in Jiangxi were defeated in 1934, prompting the Long March and a relocation to Yan'an in Shaanxi. Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria in 1931, then struck other parts of China in 1937, opening the Second Sino-Japanese War. The two rivals formed a Second United Front against the invader. As many as 20 million Chinese civilians died, and an estimated 40,000 to over 300,000 people were massacred in Nanjing alone.

  After Japan surrendered in 1945, China emerged victorious but war-ravaged and financially drained. The Republic of China had been recognized alongside the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union as the Allied Big Four. Civil war resumed in 1946 and lasted more than three years. By 1949 the CCP controlled most of mainland China, and the ROC government retreated to Taiwan, where the constitution adopted in 1947 could not be fully implemented on the mainland.

• 5. Mao To Market

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  On the 1st of October 1949, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong formally proclaimed the People's Republic of China. The following year the PRC captured Hainan and began the annexation of Tibet. The Land Reform Movement consolidated the party's popularity among peasants, but it included state-tolerated executions of between 1 and 2 million landlords. The population climbed from 550 million in 1950 to 900 million in 1974. Then came catastrophe. The Great Leap Forward, a massive industrialization project, produced the Great Chinese Famine between 1959 and 1961, causing an estimated 15 to 55 million deaths.

  In 1964 China detonated its first atomic bomb. Two years later Mao and his allies launched the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political recrimination and social upheaval that lasted until his death in 1976. After he died, the Gang of Four were arrested by Hua Guofeng, the Cultural Revolution was rebuked, and millions were rehabilitated. Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978 and began the reform and opening up, moving the country away from a planned economy. A movement for political liberalization stalled after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

  Jiang Zemin rose to become CCP general secretary and paramount leader, and China's economy grew sevenfold during his tenure. British Hong Kong and Portuguese Macau returned in 1997 and 1999 as special administrative regions. Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang in 2002, and under him China became the world's second-largest economy, though growth strained resources and the environment. Xi Jinping became paramount leader in 2012 and launched an anti-corruption crackdown that prosecuted more than 2 million officials by 2022.

• 6. Party And State

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  Xi Jinping took office as general secretary on the 15th of November 2012, and that post holds ultimate power and authority over party and state. The People's Republic is a communist state under the absolute leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, officially guided by socialism with Chinese characteristics. The party's highest body is the National Congress, held every five years, which elects the Central Committee. The Central Committee in turn elects the Politburo, its Standing Committee, and the general secretary. The Politburo usually meets once a month, while the smaller Standing Committee is thought to meet weekly.

  The National People's Congress, with nearly 3,000 members, is the supreme organ of state power, though observers often describe it as a rubber-stamp body. It elects the president, a ceremonial role also held by Xi Jinping, who chairs the Central Military Commission as well. The premier, currently Li Qiang, heads the government and presides over the State Council, China's cabinet. Eight minor parties hold seats in the congress on the condition that they uphold CCP leadership. Governance combines a high degree of political centralization with significant economic decentralization, and policies are often tested locally before being applied widely.

  International bodies rank China poorly on democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index placed it 141st out of 167 countries in 2025, classifying it as an authoritarian regime. The V-Dem indices rank it among the lowest as a closed autocracy. Censorship of political speech is among the harshest in the world, and the state runs a vast surveillance network of cameras, facial recognition software, and sensors. Since 2017 the government has detained around one million Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang internment camps, which some external observers have described as a genocide or crimes against humanity.

• 7. From Poverty To Superpower

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  Between 1978 and 2018, China lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, more than any country in history, and the average standard of living multiplied by a factor of twenty-six. According to the World Bank, GDP grew from $150 billion in 1978 to $18.74 trillion by 2024. The economy is now the world's second-largest by nominal GDP and the largest by purchasing power parity, accounting for around 17 percent of the global economy. Growth has been almost consistently above 5 percent since reform began. The share of the population living on less than $1.90 a day fell from 66.3 percent in 1990 to 0.3 percent in 2018.

  China is the world's leading manufacturing power, accounting for 30 percent of global manufacturing, a position it has held since overtaking the United States in 2010. It is the leading producer of steel and rare earths, the dominant shipbuilder, and the world's leader in electric vehicle production and consumption. It became the world's largest trading nation in 2013, and its trade surplus reached a record $1.2 trillion in 2025. Its foreign exchange reserves of $3.246 trillion are by far the world's largest. The country has had the world's largest middle-class population since 2015, growing to 500 million by 2024.

  Military strength has grown alongside wealth. The People's Liberation Army fields 2 million active-duty personnel, the largest force in the world, the third-largest nuclear stockpile, and the second-largest navy by tonnage. China's official 2025 military budget reached US$246 billion, the second-largest globally. Since the 2020s, China has been described as a superpower for its influence in geopolitics, science, manufacturing, economics, and culture. It maintains diplomatic relations with 179 UN member states and the largest diplomatic network of any country, and in 2013 it launched the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building effort.

• 8. Reaching The Moon

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  Historical China led the world in science and technology until the Ming dynasty, giving the world papermaking, printing, the compass, and gunpowder, the Four Great Inventions. Chinese mathematicians were the first to use negative numbers. By the 17th century the Western world had surpassed China, a shift scholars still debate as the early modern Great Divergence. After the Communists took power in 1949, science was organized on the Soviet model of central planning, and after Mao's death in 1976 it became one of the Four Modernizations. China spent around 2.8 percent of its GDP on research and development in 2025, and in 2022 it overtook the United States in the Nature Index of leading-journal articles.

  The space program began in 1958 with technology transfers from the Soviet Union, but it did not launch the nation's first satellite until 1970, with Dong Fang Hong I, making China the fifth country to do so independently. In 2003, Yang Liwei's flight aboard Shenzhou 5 made China the third country to send humans into space on its own. In 2019 it became the first country to land a probe, Chang'e 4, on the far side of the Moon. China completed its modular space station, the Tiangong, in low Earth orbit on the 3rd of November 2022, and announced a plan to land humans on the Moon by 2030.

  The ground beneath that ambition is just as engineered. China has the largest high-speed rail network, which reached 50,400 kilometers of dedicated lines by the end of 2025, with services running up to 350 kilometers per hour. It hosts the largest power plant, the Three Gorges Dam, the most supertall skyscrapers, and over 1.83 billion mobile subscribers. Its own satellite navigation system, BeiDou, began offering global services by the end of 2018, joining GPS and GLONASS as the third completed global network. The Port of Shanghai stands as the busiest port in the world, one node in a country with over 2,000 river and sea ports.