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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 latitude or comparable as far north as Edmonton of Alberta in Canada and as far south as Miami of Florida in the United States and the climate varies between different parts of China throughout the four seasons. Therefore, China is not a tropical country with hot weather throughout the year. And there are four seasons of course just like what we find in the United States and Canada. Of course, at the height of summer season, everywhere in China is hot just like the tropics, but in the winter time, temperature in the north could be as low as 40 degrees below zero.
The 1.3 billion population is mostly concentrated along the eastern and south-east part of China. The north is relatively lower 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 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 part, central part and south are fertile land for agriculture production. There are huge areas of forest and in northeast and Norwest provinces but they are in danger of over cutting and need to be protected. There is an imbalance of income distribution between the city and countryside. The city dwellers annual income is several times higher than the people in the agriculture sectors.
China is relatively free from volcanoes, the collisions and plate tectonics but so far several of the earth’s largest earthquakes took place in China in as recently as 1976 in Tangshan, China. There may be as many as four different time zones across Canada and the Untied States but China has only one time zone which in someway is a matter of inconvenience.
Traditionally, the minorities and the farmers in China’s northwest have been raising goats. Goats are devastating to the land. Over the course of many years, they could transform good land into desert, and such deserts are vulnerable to strong winds from Mongolia and Siberia. They become sand-storms in the northern part of China. The sand storm situation is getting worse and worse. The immediate ways to stop the sand-storm is to stop grazing goats. Although goats are easy to grow, they bring more disasters then profit; another way is to grow Alfalfa in the sands which has already been successfully experimented.
In the north where the grassland of Mongolia and inner Mongolia is, the Silk Road starts from the city of Xian and going through Gansu Province into Xinjiang Province passing through Turpan through Urumqi into Asian minor. Along the entire Silk Road, traders of old days had crossed the endless desert until they reach Damascus. The nomadic Mongols and the Uygurs still retain their way of life but increasingly becoming agricultural. So are the people in Tibet which are increasingly agricultural. The snow capped mountain of Himalayas with the melting snow supplies water into 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 migrating from farmland into the cities where jobs are more available. Although on paper 70% of the population are still agricultural but in effect, perhaps only half of them are still connected with land based agriculture. The movement from agriculture to industry and trade is a crisis in today’s China which makes the land and the natural resources less sustainable. At one time Zhejiang Province was the smallest province in China with the highest population density, but today the highest population regions in China perhaps are Bejing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
According to Chinese official sources, China has a total of 171 kinds of minerals, of which 158 proven reserves. These include 10 kinds of energy mineral recourses 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, the supply of 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 comes from mineral resources.
Mention must be made of China’s energy resources. It is estimated that China has as much as 15% of coal reserve in the world and one of the ten countries in the world with more than 15 billion tons of exploitable oil reserves. The coal reserve is concentrated in north China while oil reserve is found throughout China including shore resources. Until recently, China has been exporting oil to other countries but because of increasing consumption, specially the expanding economies, China has become a net importer of oil these days.
On metallic mineral reserves, of these, the proven reserves of tungsten, tin, antimony, rare earth, tantalum and titanium rank first in the world; those of vanadium, molybdenum, niobium, beryllium and lithium rank second; those of zinc rank fourth; and 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 be the world largest, but because of increasing population, construction and consumption power supply shortage is increasing seriously. China uses ½ 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 draught in many parts of country. Plus the industry and agriculture use of water recourses, the ground water level in China is sinking. With the industrial pollution and the contamination of agricultural chemicals and the sinking of water level, drinking water in China has become a problem. One cannot live without water. Although southern China has relatively higher water resources than the north and west region, China has been attempting to divert water from the south to the north to redistribute the water supplies. This is the life and dead resource development confronting China today.