Peace be upon you, and welcome. How are you? I hope you are well. God willing, today’s subject is China. I believe most people have heard of it and know something about it. I do not know who has visited, but we have heard a great deal. Let us look carefully at what specialists have written.
China, rendered in the source as Zhonghua, is officially the People’s Republic of China, Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo. In the account reproduced here, it is described as the world’s most populous country, with more than 1.338 billion people. It lies in East Asia and is governed by the Chinese Communist Party under a one-party system. [8] China consists of more than 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four directly administered municipalities—Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing—and two highly autonomous regions, [9] Hong Kong and Macau. Its capital is Beijing. [10]
The country covers 9.6 million square kilometers, or 3.7 million square miles, making it the world’s third- or fourth-largest country by total area, depending on what is included, [11] and the second-largest by land area. [12] Its landscapes range from forests, steppes, and the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in the dry north near Mongolia and Russian Siberia to subtropical forests in the humid south near Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. Western terrain is rugged and high, with the Himalayas and Tian Shan forming natural borders with India and Central Asia. By contrast, the eastern mainland is low-lying, with a 14,500-kilometer coastline bordered by the South China Sea to the southeast and the East China Sea to the east, beyond which lie Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.