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Peoples & World Cultures

Case Study III: China (East Asia)Scaffolded Reading: Geography of East Asia (Area)

Sea - a large body of salt water that is surrounded to some degree by land

Physical Features

The first and most important feature of East Asia is that it is a region on the Pacific Ocean. The parts of the Pacific Ocean that separate the peoples of East Asia are divided into seas. The East China Sea and South China Sea are off the east coast of China. The Yellow Sea divides North China from Korea. The Sea of Japan separates Korea from Japan. The Koreans call this same sea the

Archipelago - a group of islands

Peninsula - a piece of land surrounded by water on three sides

Steppes - broad grasslands

Silt - dirt carried by the waters of a river

Climate - the average of weather conditions in a place over a

East Sea.

East Asia dominates the eastern end of the continent of Asia. Important islands off the coast are part of the region. Taiwan is in the East China Sea. Japan is an archipelago, made up of 6852 islands. An important peninsula, Korea, sits between China and Japan.

East Asia is a region dominated by high elevations. Roughly speaking, the land gets higher the further inland to the West that one goes. The highest mountains in the world, the Himalaya, divide China from India. The largest (and highest) plateau in the world, the Tibetan Plateau, dominates much of western China. High mountains divide China and Mongolia from central Asia: the Altay Mountains, the Tien Shan, and the Kunlun Mountains. The northern end of the Korean Peninsula is mountainous, as are the islands of Japan and Taiwan. East Asia includes some important plains. Large sections of Mongolia are dominated by steppes. The North China Plain is one of the most fertile agricultural regions in the world, and is home to hundreds of millions of Chinese people.

East Asia is a land of rivers. Generally, these begin in the higher elevations in the west and empty eastwards into the Pacific Ocean. Two rivers are of particular note. The Huang He (Yellow River) waters the North China Plain and is the birthplace of Chinese civilization. The river gets its name from the fertile yellow silt (called loess) it deposits in annual floods. The Chiang Jiang (Yangtze River), starts in the Tibetan Plateau and empties into the East China Sea near Shanghai. The river is the longest in Asia, and has the sixth largest volume of water in the world. Much of the river is broad and deep. It is navigable, so ships can use it as a highway.

East Asia is a land of diverse climates. Roughly speaking, the northeast of the region has a humid continental climate. That

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long period of time

Illegitimate - not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules.

Armistice - an agreement between warring parties to stop fighting. An armistice is not a peace treaty, but only a pause in the fighting.

Megacity - a

means it has four seasons and sufficient rain. The southeast of the region is humid subtropical climate. That means it has a hot and humid rainy season, and a warm dry season. Inland, towards central Asia, is the Gobi desert, the largest desert in Asia. The Gobi occupies large parts of Mongolia, and northern China. This large desert has high temperatures during the day, low temperatures at night, and little rainfall. Parts of the desert are rocky, or hard packed earth. Other parts are sandy. The Taklamakan, a desert sometimes considered part of the Gobi, is a gigantic sand-dune sea nearly as far from any ocean as one can be on earth.

Human Characteristics

The core of East Asia is made up of six political entities: China, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. This is complicated by two long-standing conflicts.

China and Taiwan agree that they are both part of one country called China. This is called the One China Principle. However, the government of China (the People’s Republic of China) views Taiwan as a rebel province. The government of Taiwan (the Republic of China) views China’s communist leadership as illegitimate. This situation began when a civil war ended in 1949, and the losing side retreated to Taiwan. This situation has persisted to today.

Korea was divided in the early years of the Cold War (1945-1950). In the North, a communist regime was installed by the Soviet Union, and in the South, a republic was installed by the United States. The Korean War (1950-53) brought the two sides into conflict. The United States and twenty other countries supported South Korea, while China supported North Korea. The war ended in an armistice, which remains in place to this day. Each Korea claims

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city with a population of over 10M people.

Languages - are not mutually intelligible. E.g. a German speaker cannot understand Spanish

Dialects - varieties of one language that are mutually intelligible, to a degree. A speaker of American English can understand a speaker of Australian English, if sometimes with difficulty.

Diaspora - the term for the scattering of an ethnic group that lives away from their native land

Ethnicity - an identifiable group of people with shared ancestry or cultural traits, like language, cuisine, religion, or customs

to be the legitimate government of the entirety of Korea.

East Asia is home to about 20% of the entire population of the world. Most of these people live in a narrow band along the east coast of China, the west coast of the Korean Peninsula, the south of Japan, and the west coast of Taiwan. While much of China, Korea, and Japan are densely populated, much of Mongolia is sparsely populated. East Asia has some of the highest population density in the world; many people live in a small area. East Asia is home to a number of megacities. In China, Shenzhen has a population of 11M, Guangzhou 14M, Beijing 21.5M, Shanghai 24M, Chongqing 30M. In South Korea, Seoul has a population of 10M. In Japan, Tokyo has a population of 13M. However, Ulaanbataar in Mongolia has only 1M people.

Partially due to high population density, and partially due to heavy industrialization, East Asia suffers with serious pollution. The East and South China seas are overfished. According to Chinese government reports, about 20% of the farmland, and nearly 80% of the groundwater is too polluted for human use. Air pollution levels in the northeast of the region regularly exceeds 10x the amount safe for humans.

There are about 1.2 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. Chinese is not a single single language. Linguists debate whether Chinese languages are a language family, or a set of very diverse dialects, since several are not mutually intelligible. The most widely spoken variety of Chinese is Mandarin, which is the native language of some 960M people. Another important Chinese language is Cantonese (Chinese Yue) spoken by 90M people. It is common in the South, and has been the traditional language of the Chinese diaspora. Chinese has two characteristics that set it apart from many other global languages. Firstly, it is tonal, which means that it derives meaning from the tone of the spoken word, as much as its form. Secondly, Chinese use a logographic script, rather than an alphabetic script. Characters represent a symbol for a word, a sound, or a concept, as opposed to a letter representing a sound. To read, a Chinese speaker needs to learn 3-4,000 characters. Mongols, Koreans, and

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Japanese people all speak different languages.

East Asia is home to many different ethnicities. China alone is home to 56 different officially-recognized ethnicities. For examples, Central Asian Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighurs are Chinese citizens, as are Mandarin speakers. In the northern islands of Japan, the Ainu people continue to live, an indigenous people with ancient origins different from the Japanese. On Taiwan, the Negrito people’s origins are mysterious. They have darker skin than other Taiwanese and have physical features in common with Africans. One should not make the mistake that peoples in Asian countries are all alike!

Discussion Questions

___ 1) East Asia has very diverse physical features. Identify at least one unique physical feature each for China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan that makes them unique from one another.

___2) It is sometimes challenging to answer the question “how many countries are in East Asia?” Give two reasons why.

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___3) Compare this region (East Asia) with the previous regions (Russia, Latin America) that we have studied. Identify and explain two similarities and two differences.

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