lesson 2

• China is becoming more integrated within the network of the global economy.
• Multinational corporations are dependent on China for low-cost manufactured goods.
• China is becoming dependent on the outside world for oil, raw materials, and technology.
• China is the world’s largest Communist country, isolated from Europeans and Central Asians by the Himalayas and other high mountain ranges, with a culture that has endured for thousands of years.
• China is rich in history, adventure, and intrigue, with a people who have a deep, longstanding love of the land, traditions as old as recorded history, and a spirit of commerce and hard work that sustains them to this day.
• China is about the same land size as the United States, although technically it is slightly smaller than the United States in total area, depending on how land and water areas are calculated.
• China only has an eastern coast, whereas the United States has both an eastern and a western coast.
• The form of Communism promoted by Mao Zedong was not the same as the type of Communism practiced in the Soviet Union, with various Communist experiments forced upon the Chinese people, resulting in disastrous results.
• In 1958, the Great Leap Forward was announced, a program where people were divided into communes and peasant armies were to work the land while citizens were asked to donate their pots and pans to produce scrap metal and increase the country’s industrial output.
• The goal of the Great Leap Forward was to improve production and increase efficiency, but the opposite occurred, and millions of Chinese died of starvation during this era.
• Another disaster began in 1966 and continued until Mao died in 1976, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which wreaked havoc on four thousand years of Chinese traditional culture in a purge of elitism and a drive toward total loyalty to the Communist Party.
• The Communist government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is made up of a number of types of political units.
• Four of China’s cities have governance structures that are roughly on par with that of the provinces.
• These five autonomous regions are Tibet, Guangxi, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia.
• All but Taiwan are included in the region called mainland China, except the SARs Hong Kong and Macau.
• Armies of indoctrinated students were released into the countryside and the cities to report anyone opposing the party line, schools were closed, universities were attacked, and intellectuals were killed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
• Mainland China includes five autonomous regions, each with a designated minority group; four municipalities; and two special administrative regions (SARs) that hold considerable autonomy.
• The island formerly known as Formosa, now called Taiwan, is considered by China to be its twenty-third province but in actuality remains under its own government — the Republic of China (ROC).
• During the next decade, China experienced an enormous growth in its economy.
• In reality, the autonomous regions have very little legal ability to govern themselves and, in fact, have in some ways less autonomy than the provinces to pass their own legislation.
• China’s political leaders indicated that socialism and poverty should not be considered synonymous and that the country was ready to turn its attention to increasing the wealth and quality of life of its citizens.
• The autonomous regions exist as a kind of a compromise between China and the regions that would prefer to be totally independent and that have large non-Han or ethnic minority populations.
• At the beginning of this century, China was ranked in the top five of the world’s largest trading nations, joining ranks with the United States, Germany, Japan, and France.
• The main region of China Proper includes twenty-two provinces, including the island province of Hainan in the south.
• The sheer size of China’s population contributes to the magnitude of its economy.
• China can be divided into regions utilizing various criteria: political regions, economic regions, natural regions, and climatic regions to name a few.
• A series of statements by China’s political leaders suggested that in order for China to enjoy a more mature form of socialism, greater national wealth was needed.
• Anyone suspected of subversion might be tortured into signing a confession during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
• China is also economically disproportionately reliant on its ability to maintain a high level of export manufacturing as its method of gaining wealth.
• On one hand, the eastern coast is the most geopolitically vulnerable side of China, but on the other hand, it is where the most extensive economic gains have been made in recent years.
• These three geopolitical directives were designed before the postindustrial economy emerged with the information age, but the main themes of securing and protecting China remain.
• As a Communist country, this was one of the basic foundational principles within a socialist society — the even distribution of wealth.
• China’s Bamboo Curtain has disappeared ; the country is no longer isolated from the rest of the world.
• Economic development has created a strong degree of dependency on other countries through the doorways of China’s coastal cities.
• China has additional political issues within the core region of China Proper.
• Factory workers can earn the equivalent of fifty cents an hour, while their counterparts working in the fields in agriculture are only making the equivalent of a few dollars per day.
• Manufacturing has rapidly increased in the coastal cities of the SEZs and other development areas.
• To maintain a unified Han Chinese powerbase, there should not be uneven levels of equity in the standards of living within the core region.
• China’s eastern coast development is a risk that China is forced to take.
• The third component of China’s geopolitical strategy is to protect and secure its vulnerable coastal region.