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China, is a country in East Asia. It is the most populous state in the world with over 1.3 billion people. China is ruled by the Communist Party of China under a single-party system.. It has jurisdiction over 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four directly administered municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing), and two highly autonomous special administrative regions (SARs) - Hong Kong and Macau. The capital of Chnina is Beijing.

At about 9.6 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles), China is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by total area, and the second largest by land area. Its landscape is diverse, with forest steppes and deserts (the Gobi and Taklamakan) in the dry north near Mongolia and Russia Siberia, and subtropical forests in the wet south close to Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. The terrain in the west is rugged and at high altitude, with the Himalayas and the Tian Shan mountain ranges forming Chinas natural borders with India and Central Asia. In contrast, mainland China eastern seaboard is low-lying and has a 14,500-kilometre long coastline bounded on the southeast by the South China Sea and on the east by the East China Sea beyond which lies Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

The ancient Chinese civilization one of the worlds earliest flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River which flows through the North China Plain. For more than 4,000 years, China political system was based on hereditary monarchies also known as dynasties. The first of these dynasties was the Xia (approx 2000BC) but it was the later Qin Dynasty that first unified China in 221 BC. The last dynasty, the Qing, ended in 1911 with the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) by the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party. The first half of the 20th century saw China plunged into a period of disunity and civil wars that divided the country into two main political camps the Kuomintang and the communists. Major hostilities ended in 1949, when the communists won the civil war and established the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China. The KMT-led Republic of China government retreated to Taipei, its jurisdiction now limited to Taiwan and several outlying islands. Since then, the PRC has been involved in disputes with the ROC over issues of sovereignty and the political status of Taiwan.

Since the introduction of market-based economic reforms in 1978, China has become the world's fastest growing major economy, the worlds largest exporter and second largest importer of goods. Rapid industrialization has reduced its poverty rate from 53% in 1981 to 8% in 2001. However, China is now faced with a number of other problems including a rapidly aging population due to the one-child policy, a widening rural-urban income gap, and environmental degradation.

China is a major power and the worlds third largest economy and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, as well as being a member of multilateral organizations including the WTO, APEC, G-20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. China is a recognized nuclear weapons state and has the worlds largest standing army with the second-largest defense budget.