TOPOGRAPHY
China's topography is
varied and complicated, with towering mountains,
basins of different sizes, undulating plateaus and
hills, and flat and fertile plains.
A bird's eye view of
China would indicate that China's terrain descends in
four steps from west to east.
The top of this
four-step "staircase" is the Qinhai-Tibet
Plateau. Averaging more than 4,000 m above sea
level, it is often called the "roof of the
world." Rosomg 8,848 m above sea level is
Mt. Qomolangma, the world's highest peak and the main
peak of the Himalayas.
The second step
includes the Inner Mongolia, Loess and Yunnan-Guizhou
plateaus, and the Tarim, Junggar and Sichuan basins,
with an average elevation of between 1,000 m and 2,000
m.
The third step, about
500 - 1,000 m in elevation, begins at a line drawn
around the Greater Hinggan, Taihang, Wushan and
Xuefeng mountain ranges and extends eastward to the
coast. Here, from north to south are the
Northeast Plain, the North China Plain and the
Middle-Lower Yangtze Plain. Interspersed amongst
the plains are hills and foothills.
To the east, the land
extends out into the ocean, in a continental shelf,
the fourth step of the staircase. The water here
is less than 200 m deep.
RIVERS
China
abounds in rivers. More than 1,500 rivers each
drain 1,000 sq km or larger areas. More than
2,700 billion cu m of water flow along these rivers,
5.8 percent of the world's total. Most of the
large rivers find their source in the Qinghai-Tibet
Plateau, and as a result China is rich in waterpower
resources, leading the world in hydropower potential,
with reserves of 680 million kw.
China's
rivers can be categorized as exterior and interior
systems. The catchment area for the exterior
rivers that empty into the oceans accounts for 64
percent of the country's total land area. The
Yangtze, Tello, Heilongjiang, Peal, Liaohe, Haihe,
Huaihe, and Lancang rivers flow east, and empty into
the Pacific Ocean. The Yarlungzangbo River in
Tibet, which flows first east and then south into the
Indian Ocean, boasts the Grand Yarlungzangbo Canyon,
the largest canyon in the world, 504.6 km long and
6.009 m deep.
The Ertix
River flows from the Xingjiang Uygur Autonomous Region
to the Artic Ocean. The catchment area for the
interior rivers that flow into inland lakes or
disappear into deserts or salt marshes makes up 36
percent of China's total land area. Its 2,179 km
make the Tarim River in southern Xinjiang Chian's
longest interior river.
The
Yangtze is the largest river in China, and the
third-longest in the world, next only to the Nile in
northeast Africa and the Amazon in South America.
It is 6.300 km long and has a catchment area of 1.809
million sq km. The middle and lower Yangtze
River's warm and humid climate, plentiful rainfall and
fertile soil make the area an important agricultural
region.
Known as
the "golden waterway," the Yangtze is a
transportation artery linking west and east. The
Yellow River is the second-largest river in China,
5,464 km in length, with a catchment area of 752,000
sq km. The Yellow River valley was one of the
birthplaces of ancient Chinese civilization. It
has lush pastureland and abundant mineral deposits.
The Heilongjiang River is north China's largest.
It has a
total length of 4.350 km, of which 3,101 km are within
China. The Pearl River is the largest river in
south China, with a total length of 2.214 km. In
addition to those endowed by nature, China has a
famous man-made river - the Grand Canal, running from
Beijing in the north to Hangzhou in the south.
Work first began on the Grand Canal as early as in the
fifth century B.C.
It links
five major rivers - the Haihe, Yellow, Huaihe, Yangtze
and Qiantang. With a total length of 1,801 km,
the Grand Canal is the longest as well as the oldest
man-made waterway in the world.
CLIMATE
China has
a marked continental monsoonal climate characterized
by great variety. Northerly winds prevail in
winter, while southerly winds reign in summer.
The four seasons are quite distinct. The rainy
season coincides with the hot season.
From
September to April the following year, the dry and
cold winter monsoons from Siberia and Mongolia in the
north gradually become weak as they reach the southern
part of the country, resulting in cold and dry winters
and great differences in temperature. The cold
summer monsoons last from April to September.
The warm
and moist summer monsoons from the oceans bring
abundant rainfall and high temperatures, with little
difference in temperature between the south and the
north. China's complex and varied climate
results in a great variety of temperature belts, and
dry and moist zones.
In terms
of temperature, the nation can be sectored from the
south to north into equatorial, tropical,
sub-tropical, warm-temperate, temperate, and
cold-temperate zones; in terms of moisture, it can be
sectored from southeast to northwest into humid (32
percent of land area), semi0humid (15 percent),
semi-arid (22 percent) and arid zones (31 percent).
LAND
AND MINERAL RESOURCES
The
composition and distribution of China's land resources
have three major characteristics: (1) variety in type-
cultivated land, forests, grasslands, deserts and
tide-land; (2) many more mountains and plateaus than
flatlands and basins; (3) unbalanced distribution:
farmland mainly concentrated in the east, grasslands
largely in the west and north, and forests mostly in
the far northeast and southwest.
In China
today, 108 million ha of land are cultivated, mainly
in the Northeast Plain, the North China Plain, the
Middle-Lower Yangtze Plain, the Pearl River Delta
Plain and the Sichuan Basin. The fertile black
soil of the Northeast Plain is ideal for growing
wheat, corn, sorghum, soybeans, flax and sugar beets.
The deep,
brown topsoil of the North China Plain in planted with
wheat, corn, millet, sorghum and cotton. The
Middle-Lower Yangtze Plain's many lakes and rivers
make is particularly suitable for paddy rice and
freshwater fish, hence its designation of "land
of fish and rice." This area also produces
large quantities of tea and silkworms. The
purplish soil of the warm and humid Sichuan Basin is
green with crops in all four seasons, including paddy
rice, rapeseed and tangerines.
Forests
blanket 128,63 million ha of China. The Greater
Hinggan, the Lesser Hinggan and the Changbai mountain
ranges in the northeast are China's largest natural
forest areas. Major tree species found here
include conifers, such as Korea pine, larch and Olga
Bay larch, and the broadleaves such as white birch,
oak, willow, elm and Northeast China ash.
Major tree
species of the southwest include the dragon spruce,
fir and Yunnan pine, as well as precious teak trees,
red sandalwood, camphor trees, manmu and padauk.
Often called a "kingdom of plants,"
Xishuangbanna is southern Yunnan Province is a rarity
in that it is a tropical broadleaf forest playing host
to more than 5,000 plant species.
Grasslands
in China cover an area of 400 million ha, stretching
more than 3,000 km from the northeast to the
southwest. They are the centers of animal
husbandry. The Inner Mongolian Prairie is
China's largest natural pastureland, and home to Sanhe
horses, Sanhe cattle and Mongolian sheep.
The
famous natural pasturelands north and south of the
Tianshan Mountains in Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang
are ideal for stock breeding. The famous Ili
horses and Xinjiang fine-wool sheep are raised here.
China's
cultivated lands, forest and grasslands are among the
world's largest in terms of sheer area. But due
to China's large population, the areas of cultivated
land, forest and grassland per capita are small,
especially in the case of cultivated land--less than
0.08 ha per capita, or only one third of the world's
average.
China is
rich in mineral resources, and all the world's known
minerals can be found here. To date, geologists
have confirmed reserves of 151 different minerals,
putting China third in the world in total reserves.
Proven reserves of energy sources include coal,
petroleum, natural gas, and oil shale; and radioactive
minerals include uranium and thorium.
China's coal reserves total 1,002.49 billion tons,
mainly distributed in north China, with Shanxi and the
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region taking the lead.
Petroleum reserves are mainly in northwest and also in
northeast China, north China and the continental
shelves in east China. Proven reserves of
ferrous metals include iron, manganese, vanadium and
titanium.
China's
46.35 billion tons of iron ore are mainly distributed
in northeast, north and southwest China. The
Anshan-Benxi Area in Liaoning, east Hebei and
Panzhihua in Sichuan are major iron producers.
China has the world's largest reserves of tungsten,
tin, antimony, zinc, molybdenum, lead, mercury and
other nonferrous metals; its reserves of rare earth
metals far exceed the total for the rest of the world.
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