China

The word "China" has been used in English since the 16th century; however, it was not used by the Chinese themselves during this period. Its origin has been traced through Portuguese, Malay, and Persian back to the Sanskrit word Cīna (चिन), used in ancient India. Cīna was first used in early Hindu scriptures dating from the 3rd century BCE to 4th century CE, including the Mahabharata and the Laws of Manu. In 1655, the missionary Martino Martini suggested that the word China is derived ultimately from the ancient state of Qin. This remains a common etymology. Another possible source is the ancient Guizhou polity of Yelang, known as ʐina in Loloish languages.

The official name of the modern state is the "People's Republic of China" (中华人民共和国; Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó). The shorter form of this name is 中国; Zhōngguó, from zhōng ('central' or 'middle') and guó ('state'), a term first used for the demesne of the Western Zhou dynasty. The names of ruling imperial dynasties were typically used to refer to the state and its territories. In the 1800s, Zhongguo was officially adopted as the name of the country by the Qing dynasty.

=== Prehistory ===

Evidence of early humans such as Homo erectus in China dates to the Paleolithic, around 1.7 million years ago, with unconfirmed sites as old as 2 million years ago. Modern Homo sapiens are attested from around 50,000 years ago. Following the end of the Last Glacial Period, in about 8,000 BCE, pottery-making Neolithic cultures emerged. By the 6000s BCE, sedentary agricultural societies had spread across the lower Yellow River basin. These societies became increasingly complex, urbanized, and stratified, but many experienced a population collapse in the late 2000s BCE for unclear reasons.

After 2000 BCE, a Bronze Age culture emerged in the Central Plain, dubbed the Erlitou culture after its main site. Erlitou has been controversially identified with the Xia, the traditionally-accepted first dynasty, but no written records exist to confirm this. The Shang dynasty purportedly succeeded the Xia around 1600 BCE, with its early stages tentatively identified with an expansionist state known archaeologically as the Erligang culture. The historicity of the Late Shang is attested through divinational writings in the oracle bone script. These are the earliest known form of writing in China and the ancestor of modern Chinese characters.

The Shang were overthrown by the Zhou c. 1046 BCE. The Zhou ruled over a vast and loose confederation of vassal states across central China, which was gradually weakened by regional lords. Centralized authority collapsed in 771 BCE, giving way to constant regional warfare. During the Eastern Zhou, the multitude of small polities of the Spring and Autumn period evolved into seven territorial Warring States. Literary and philosophical developments of this period include the emergence of various schools of thought, such as Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and Legalism, alongside Chinese classics like the Confucian Analects and the Daoist Dao De Jing.

==== Classical period ====

In the 220s BCE, Qin rapidly conquered the other warring states. In 221, its ruler Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the first emperor (皇帝; Huángdì) and founded the Qin dynasty. He led an autocratic Legalist state organized in a system of commanderies and counties. The dynasty lasted only fifteen years, falling soon after his death from revolts and civil war.

After the collapse, the Han dynasty emerged to rule China between 206 BCE and 220 CE. The Han gradually reinstated centralized control, legitimizing their rule through Confucian scholarship. Military expeditions against the Xiongnu, a confederation of nomadic steppe tribes, expanded Han influence into parts of Central Asia and helped to establish the Silk Road, allowing for trade connections between China and western Eurasia. Contemporaneously, merchants established maritime trade routes linking China, Southeast Asia, and India.

The Han faced widespread uprisings and the emergence of local warlords in the 100s and 200s CE. By 220, the empire was split into the Three Kingdoms. These were briefly united by the Jin dynasty in 280, which fell into civil war. Sinicized formerly nomadic peoples who had settled in Northern China, such as the Xiongnu, rebelled and founded new dynasties. These coalesced into the Northern and Southern dynasties in the 400s. During these conflicts, Buddhism was introduced to China via the Silk Road.

China was reunited under the Sui dynasty in 589, which constructed the Grand Canal to link Northern and Southern China. The Sui collapsed in the 610s, and was succeeded by the Tang. The Tang dynasty centralized the state and dispatched military expeditions to pacify the surrounding regions. It promoted Buddhism, but through expanding international trade built a heavily cosmopolitan society centered on its capital of Chang'an. It reformed the civil service examinations and oversaw a flourishing of art, poetry, architecture, and scholarship. The 755–763 An Lushan rebellion weakened the Tang, which gradually fragmented before collapsing completely in 907, resulting in another period of war and division.

The Song dynasty rose to power in 960. It faced military crises, unable to subdue its Sinicized non-Han neighbors, the Khitan-led Liao dynasty and the Tangut-led Western Xia. The Song's consistent focus on defense resulted in a heavily centralized state and military, which made the first military application of gunpowder. Books became widely available by the proliferation of printing technology, while the elite class of scholar-officials grew increasingly powerful. Production, population, and trade expanded massively, alongside innovations such as industrial metallurgy and hydraulic machinery. The Song capital Kaifeng was overrun by the Jurchen-led Jin in 1127, forcing the Song to retreat to Southern China. During this period, the revivalist philosophical movement of Neo-Confucianism emerged.

In 1206, Genghis Khan united the nomadic Mongols to the north under the Mongol Empire. Over the following fifty years, they conquered the Western Xia and the Jin, in addition to their other conquests as far west as Europe. The empire split into separate khanates, with Mongol leader Kublai Khan establishing the Yuan dynasty and subjugating the Song in the 1270s. Although Chinese culture remained largely unchanged, the Yuan maintained a Mongol elite culture and established a complex ethnic and occupational hierarchy. Foreign presence increased as China became more connected to Eurasian trade routes.

In the 1340s, central China was devastated by disease, famine, and severe flooding along the Yellow River. Various rebellions erupted, leading to a peasant leader establishing the Ming dynasty in 1368 and declaring himself the Hongwu Emperor. The Ming later moved their capital from Nanjing to Beijing, with the Forbidden City as the imperial palace. However, the lower Yangtze remained the wealthiest region. Trade grew, and the European colonization of the Americas brought new crops and a massive influx of silver to China. The population doubled, and a growing publishing industry began producing works in vernacular Chinese, including the Four Classic Novels.

The Ming state declined, and by the 1600s, became unable to contain peasant rebellions. The Manchus to the north declared the Qing dynasty in 1636 and conquered the Ming, killing their last claimant emperor in 1662 and conquering a Ming rump state on Taiwan in 1683. From the late 1600s to the end of the 1700s, the High Qing era saw economic growth and territorial expansion westward, including the conquest of Tibet and much of Central Asia.

European powers fought various wars against the Qing dynasty during the 19th century. These began with the United Kingdom's First Opium War in 1839–1842, which resulted in the first of the "unequal treaties" imposed on the dynasty. These opened treaty ports, allowed Christian missionary activity, and loosened trade restrictions. China faced an economic crisis and internal unrest, and uprisings such as the 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion resulted in the deaths of millions. Reformist factions of the Qing responded with the Self-Strengthening Movement, seeking to adopt western weapons and technologies, but this had a limited impact for much of the empire.

The Empire of Japan's defeat of the Qing in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) resulted in the loss of Taiwan and the growth of both reformist and revolutionary political movements. An imperial push for reform in 1898 ended after an internal coup, while the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion was defeated by a coalition of foreign powers in 1901. The late Qing dynasty again advanced reforms, but growing revolutionary and anti-Manchu sentiment culminated in the 1911 Revolution. A coalition of revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing and declared the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912.

President Yuan Shikai rose to power in 1912 and crushed his main opposition, the Kuomintang, ruling China as a dictator until his death in 1916, following an abortive attempt to restore the monarchy. During the Warlord Era, feuding regional warlords and governors took power across China, while Tibet and Mongolia declared independence. The nominal republican government had little control outside Beijing. During this period, New Culture intellectuals and students criticized traditional society. A crackdown on a student protest in 1919 led to the May Fourth Movement and further agitation by intellectuals for a cultural and political upheaval, with many embracing Western political ideas such as communism.In the mid-1920s, the Kuomintang allied with the nascent Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, reunified China under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership. Starting with the Shanghai massacre in 1927, the Kuomintang violently purged the CCP and gained the allegiance of the northern warlords, establishing a new government at Nanjing. The CCP was driven into the countryside and repressed, before regrouping in the northwest.

Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, and launched an invasion of the rest of China in 1937. A renewed coalition between the CCP and Kuomintang fought Japan in what became a theater of World War II, as Japanese forces committed numerous war atrocities against the civilian population and occupied most of China's major cities. After the surrender of Japan in 1945, China became a founding member of the United Nations and regained control over Manchuria and Taiwan. The civil war between the CCP and the Kuomintang resumed the following year.

After a string of military victories, CCP chairman Mao Zedong formally proclaimed the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The ROC government retreated to Taiwan and continued to claim legitimacy. The following year, the PRC occupied and annexed Tibet. The PRC, a people's democratic dictatorship under CCP control, enacted many reforms: it restructured the economy under state control, promoted literacy and gender equality, expanded heavy industry, and promoted land collectivization through the Land Reform Movement, which saw state-tolerated violence against landlords by the peasantry and the death of upwards of a million people.

In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, a mass industrialization project which resulted in the Great Chinese Famine and millions of deaths. As the Cold War deepened, China grew politically isolated from its former ally, the Soviet Union, as well as the Western Bloc. It detonated its first atomic bomb in 1964. Attempting to reassert control of the CCP after the Great Leap, Mao and his allies launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, sparking a decade of political violence, crackdowns on perceived counterrevolutionaries, and social upheaval that lasted until Mao's death in 1976.

Deng Xiaoping served as paramount leader from 1978 to 1989. The reform and opening up policies of the 1980s and 1990s saw economic liberalization towards a socialist market economy, rapid economic growth and, friendlier relations with the West. Political dissent culminated in crackdowns, such as in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. China shifted away from an agricultural economy and rapidly urbanized, although this led to stark economic inequality between urban and rural areas, as well as environmental deterioration. Since the 1990s, market forces have become China's main economic driver. Under the general secretaryship of Xi Jinping since 2012, he has launched a far-reaching anti-corruption campaign, expanded Chinese economic influence through the Belt and Road Initiative, and abolished term limits for himself as state president.

China's geography is highly varied, featuring a dry and mountainous west, alongside both mountains and wide river valleys in the east. Chinese civilization was traditionally centered in the lowlands around its two largest rivers: the Yangtze and the Yellow River, both originating on the Tibetan Plateau. This temperate region is bordered by forest and steppe to the north, alongside the mountainous and subtropical south. China's shoreline spans the Bohai Sea, Yellow Sea, East China Sea, and South China Sea, all part of the Pacific Ocean. Its largest island is Taiwan, while the largest governed by the PRC is Hainan. Poyang Lake is the largest of the country's many freshwater lakes.

Large mountain ranges in the west, including the Himalayas and Tian Shan, separate China from South and Central Asia. It features both the Turpan Depression, among the deepest points on land, and the high Tibetan Plateau. The world's highest point, Mount Everest (8,848 metres or 29,029 feet), lies on the border with Nepal. China has a wide variety of ore and mineral resources.

China's climate is mainly dominated by dry seasons and wet monsoons, which lead to pronounced seasonal temperature differences. In the winter, northern winds coming from high-latitude areas are cold and dry; in summer, southern winds from coastal areas at lower latitudes are warm and moist. The northwestern deserts receive as little as 50 mm (2.0 in) of rainfall annually, while much of southern China exceeds 1,000 mm (39 in). Eastern China is well-suited for agriculture, with two or three crops able to be harvested per year. The south is dominated by rice farming, while the north grows crops such as wheat and maize.

China frequently faces natural disasters. Its adjacency to both the Pacific Ring of Fire and the Alpide belt (tectonic belts) result in frequent earthquakes, the cause of the majority of China's natural disaster deaths. Severe quakes such as the 1976 Tangshan earthquake can cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. Severe rainstorms and flooding are common hazards, with the Yellow River's perennial floods devastating the surrounding plains throughout recorded history. Damaging typhoons frequently impact southeastern China.

China is one of 17 megadiverse countries, containing a wide variety of forests, shrublands, wetlands, steppes, and deserts, which host (as of 2018) 92,300 known species of plants, animals, and fungi. According to government surveys, China's forest coverage grew from 10% of the overall territory in 1949 to 25% in 2024. The far north contains taiga, which to the south transitions into deciduous forest. South of the Yangtze, mixed conifer and deciduous forest is common, with tropical and subtropical forests farther south.

In the 21st century, China has suffered from environmental deterioration and pollution due to rapid development, alongside the broader effects of climate change. About 11% of its plant species and 21% of its vertebrate species are threatened or endangered due to habitat loss, pollution, and poaching. "Flagship" endangered species such as the giant panda and tiger have received additional funding and protection.

Although China ranks as the highest CO2 emitting country, it only emits 8 tons of CO2 per capita as of 2020, significantly lower than many developed countries. Total greenhouse gas emissions by China are the world's largest. The PRC has prioritized clamping down on pollution, announcing its aims to reach its peak emissions levels before 2030, and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Water pollution in China has improved since the 2000s, but river pollution remains a severe issue, especially in the east.

China is the world's leading investor in renewable energy and its commercialization, investing CN¥3.6 trillion in 2022 alone. Traditionally reliant on non-renewable energy sources such as coal, China's adaptation of renewable energy has increased significantly in recent years. In 2025, 54.4% of China's electricity came from coal, while 41.6% came from clean energy. Despite its emphasis on renewables, China remains dependent on global oil markets.

China is the second-largest country by land area after Russia, and the third- or fourth-largest by total area. Total area figures range from 9,572,900 km2 (3,696,100 sq mi) to 9,596,961 km2 (3,705,407 sq mi). China borders 14 nations, with a combined land border length of 22,117 km (13,743 mi). Its coastline spans approximately 14,500 km (9,000 mi).

The PRC has engaged in 23 border disputes since 1949, of which six remain unsettled. It actively disputes several portions of its Himalayan border with India, including the Aksai Chin in Kashmir and most of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which led to military skirmishes in 2020. It maintains maritime disputes with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and with various countries over the South China Sea Islands, including the Spratlys and Paracels, which has led to skirmishes with Vietnam and the Philippines.

Both the PRC and the ROC on Taiwan claim legitimacy as the government of China, leading to cross-strait tensions. Taiwan is a de jure province of the PRC, with the ROC-controlled islands of Kinmen and Matsu as a part of Fujian Province.

The PRC is a unitary state under the absolute leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Since the 1980s, the CCP has called its guiding theories and policies socialism with Chinese characteristics, which it considers an adapted form of Marxism–Leninism that emphasizes a market economy as the primary stage of socialism. The PRC describes itself as a socialist state, and a people's democratic dictatorship. Many academic sources describe it as an authoritarian state, although others dispute this label.

The National People's Congress (NPC) holds the unified powers of the state and oversight over all state organs, with its NPC Standing Committee elected to meet between the annual NPC meetings. Its elections are indirect and the CCP controls nominations. The NPC elects positions such as the president, vice president, military chairman, and chief justice, and approves the president's nomination for premier (the head of government). In practice, the CCP leadership chooses candidates for these posts. The premier heads the State Council, which includes 26 ministers, including the heads of ministries and commissions. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference is an advisory body that formally leads the CCP's united front system, which aims to gain support from non-CCP intellectuals, eight minor parties, and people's organizations.

The PRC's current constitution dates to 1982, succeeding two earlier constitutions. The governance of China is characterized by a high degree of political centralization but significant economic decentralization. Policy instruments or processes are often tested locally before being adapted and applied more widely. Surveys have generally shown that the Chinese public has a high level of support for the government.

The CCP is the founding and sole ruling party of the PRC, organized along Leninist principles as a vanguard party. The party's highest body is its National Congress, which mainly consists of members elected by party membership and meets every five years. The National Congress elects the Central Committee, which convenes yearly as the highest party organ between congresses. The Central Committee ostensibly elects the party's top leadership, the Politburo, Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) and the general secretary. In practice, the committee typically approves a slate of candidates created by existing party leadership.

The Politburo usually gathers once a month, while the smaller PSC is thought to meet weekly. The general secretary holds ultimate power and authority over party and state and serves as the paramount leader of China. The current general secretary is Xi Jinping, who took office on 15 November 2012. The National Congress also elects the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party's main disciplinary and anti-corruption organ.

As the CCP and the government itself are closely intertwined, disputes within the party represent the main form of political contention in China. The CCP controls government appointments, with most senior officials being CCP members. The appointment of CCP cadres and the leadership of major state-owned enterprises and institutions is managed by the party's Organization Department. The CCP maintains national and local committees, with about 5.1 million committees at the lowest level. The Leninist principle of democratic centralism mandates that party decisions are binding on all members.

The PRC is constitutionally a unitary state divided into 23 provinces, five autonomous regions (each with a designated minority group), four direct-administered municipalities, as well as the autonomous special administrative regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau. Provinces and their equivalents are divided into prefectures and prefecture-level cities. These are divided into counties, county-level cities, and districts. Under these, townships are the basic form of local government. Direct elections occur only at the township and county levels.

China is one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and the second largest contributor to the United Nations. China has the largest diplomatic network of any country: It has diplomatic relations with 179 United Nations member states and embassies in 174. China is a member of the G20, BRICS, East Asia Summit, APEC, and other intergovernmental organizations.

China is widely described as a superpower due to its influence in geopolitics, technology, manufacturing, economics and culture. Although China moderated its relations with the West during the reform era, its rise in power has brought political tensions with many of its neighbors in Asia and with the United States, the current dominant superpower. Although China is among the United States' largest trade partners, their relationship is tempered by a trade war and disagreements over the political status of Taiwan.

China's foreign policy is based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which include a principle of non-intervention in other countries' domestic affairs. Per its policy of non-alignment, China has no defense pacts except for its 1961 treaty with North Korea, although it maintains close relationships with neighbors such as Pakistan and Russia. The PRC has invested heavily in developing countries across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, creating a system of development banks and loans through the Belt and Road Initiative.

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the main armed forces of China, under the direct control of the CCP. It consists of four services: the Ground Force, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Rocket Force, and four arms: the Aerospace Force, the Cyberspace Force, the Information Support Force, and the Joint Logistics Support Force. It has around 2 million active soldiers, alongside the world's third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, and the world's largest navy by ship count.

The PLA is considered one of the world's most powerful militaries and has rapidly modernized in the recent decades. A 2026 study estimates that its 2025 expenditure was 2.27 trillion yuan (US$336 billion), 12% of global military spending and 1.7% of China's GDP. The PLA, the People's Armed Police and the Militia are commanded by the Central Military Commission (CMC). Due to the chairman responsibility system, the chairman of the CMC, currently Xi Jinping, is the commander-in-chief of the PLA.