THEME - 11 CHINA JAPAN The dominant ethnic group are the Han and the major language is Chinese (Putonghua) but there are many other nationalities such as the Uighur, Hui, Manchu and Tibetan, and aside from dialects such as Cantonese (Yue) and Shanghainese (Wu) there are other minority languages spoken as well CHINESE (language and People) JAPAN POLITICAL SYSTEM An Emperor has ruled Japan from Kyoto but by the twelfth century the imperial court lost power to shoguns, who ruled in the name of Emperor From 1603 to 1867, members of the Tokugawa family held the position of shogun The country was divided into over two hundred and fifty domains under the rule of lords called daimyo When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the Guomindang retreated. The long and exhausting war weakened China. Prices rose 30 percent per month between 1945 and 1949, and utterly destroyed the lives of ordinary people Rural China faced two crises Economical : with soil exhaustion, deforestation and floods Socio economic crises caused by exploitative land tenure systems, indebtedness, primitive technology and poor communications Chiang Kai-shek, defeated by the CCP fled in 1949 to Taiwan with over US $ 300 million in gold reserves and crates of priceless art treasures and established the Republic of China Taiwan had been a Japanese colony since the Chinese ceded it after the war with Japan The Cairo Declaration (1943) and the Potsdan Proclamation (1949) restored sovereignty to China THE STORY OF TAIWAN CONTACT US