Geography and Natural Resources
The common perception of China's geography and climate is that China is a tropical country and everywhere in China the climate is hot throughout the year. Actually, it is not so. China is situated between 55 and 25 degrees north latitude, as far north as Edmonton of Alberta in Canada and as far south as Miami of Florida in the United States. The climate varies between different parts of China throughout the four seasons, so China is not a tropical country with hot weather throughout the year. There are the four seasons just like what we find in the United States and Canada. Of course, at the height of summer season, everywhere in China is hot like the tropics, but in the winter time, temperatures in the north can be as low as 40 degrees below zero.
The 1.3 billion population is concentrated in the eastern and south-east part of China. The north is relatively low in population density. In terms of land area, China ranks number four in the world with about 9.6 million square kilometres in area, right behind Russia, Canada and the United States. All of China's coastlines are adjacent to the Pacific Ocean. Of the longest rivers in the world, the third longest river is China's Yangze River and the fifth is Huang River (Yellow River). One third of China consists of desert, but the north-eastern, central part and southern parts are fertile land suitable for agriculture production. There are huge areas of forest in the northeastern and northwestern provinces, but they are in danger of being over-cut and need to be protected. There is an imbalance of income distribution between the city and countryside. The annual income of the city dwellers is several times higher than that of the people in the agriculture sectors.
Although China is relatively free of volcanoes and the collisions of plate tectonics, several of the earth's largest earthquakes have taken place in China, one as recently as 1976, in Tangshan.
There may be six different time zones across Canada and the Untied States, but China has only one time zone, which in some ways is a matter of inconvenience.
Traditionally, the minorities and the farmers in China's northwest have raised goats. Goats are devastating to the land. Over the course of many years, they can transform good land into desert. Such deserts are vulnerable to strong winds from Mongolia and Siberia, and they become sand-storms in the northern part of China. The sand storm situation is getting worse and worse. The immediate way to stop the sand-storms is to stop grazing goats. Although goats are easy to grow, they bring more disaster than profit. Another way is to grow Alfalfa in the sands, which has already been successfully experimented.
In the north in the grassland of Mongolia and inner Mongolia, the Silk Road starts from the city of Xian and goes through Gansu Province into Xinjiang Province, passing through Turpan and through Urumqi into Asian minor. Along the entire Silk Road, traders of old crossed the endless desert until they reached Damascus. The nomadic Mongols and the Uygurs still retain their ancient way of life but are becoming increasingly agricultural, as are the people of Tibet. The snow-capped Himalayan mountains supply water to the Yellow River and Yangzi River.
China has many important border countries, such as Afghanistan, India, North Korea, the former Russian Republics, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia and Vietnam.
Today people throughout China are increasingly migrate from farmland into the cities, where jobs are more available. Although on paper 70% of the population are still agricultural, in fact perhaps only half of those are still connected with land-based agriculture. The movement from agriculture to industry and trade is a crisis in today's China which endangers the land and the natural resources. At one time Zhejiang Province was the smallest province in China with the highest population density, but today the regions of higher population density are Bejing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
According to official Chinese sources, China has a total of 171 kinds of minerals, with proven reserves of 158. These include: 10 kinds of mineral energy resources, such as petroleum, natural gas, coal and uranium; 54 kinds of metallic mineral resources such as iron, manganese, copper, aluminums, lead and zinc; 91 kinds of non-metallic mineral resources such as graphite, phosphorus, and sulphur. Currently, over 92 percent of China's primary energy, 80 percent of its industrial raw materials and more than 70 percent of its agricultural means of production come from mineral resources.
Mention must be made of China's energy resources. It is estimated that China has as much as 15% of the world's coal reserves and one of the ten countries with more than 15 billion tons of exploitable oil reserves. The coal reserves are concentrated in north China, while oil reserves are found throughout China, including off-shore resources. Until recently, China has been exporting oil to other countries, but because of increasing domestic consumption by specially the expanding economy, China has become a net importer of oil these days.
Of metallic mineral reserves, the proven reserves of tungsten, tin, antimony, rare earths, tantalum and titanium rank first in the world; those of vanadium, molybdenum, niobium, beryllium and lithium rank second; those of zinc rank fourth; those of iron, lead, gold and silver rank fifth.
Perhaps the most important natural resources are the natural and underground water resources. In terms of hydro electric power potential, China is supposed to have the world's largest, but because of increasing population, construction and consumption, power supply shortage is increasing seriously. China uses one half of the world cement and chemical fertilizers, which release tremendous amount of CO2 into the air and which directly cause localized global warming. The average temperature is higher than the world as a whole. This causes wide-spread drought in many parts of country. Because of the industrial and agricultural use of water resources, the ground water level in China is sinking. With the industrial pollution and contamination by agricultural chemicals and the sinking water level, drinking water in China has become a problem. One cannot live without water. Southern China has more water resources than the north and west region, so China has been attempting to divert water from the south to the north to redistribute the water supplies. This is the life and death resource development confronting China today.