Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
China is only somewhat less of a continent than the United States. The United States,
bounded by two oceans and the Canadian Arctic, is threatened only by the specter of Mex-
ican demography to its south. The threat to China came mainly over the millennia from
the Eurasian steppe-land to the north and northwest, the same steppe-land that threatened
Russia from the opposite direction: so that the interplay between the indigenous Chinese
and the Manchurians, Mongols, and Turkic peoples of the high desert has formed one of
the central themes of Chinese history. That is why the capital cities of early Chinese dyn-
asties were often built on the Wei River, upstream from its meeting with the Yellow, where
there was enough rainfall for sedentary agriculture, yet safe from the nomadism of the Inner
Mongolian plateau just to the north.
Whereas the “neat” sequence of forest, prairie, high desert, mountain, and
coast—crossed in the middle by the north-south flowing Mississippi and Missouri
rivers—defines American geography, in China the great rivers—the Wei, Han, Yellow, and
Yangzi—run from west to east, from the high and dry uplands of the Eurasian interior to the
divided between the comparatively dry wheat-millet area of northern China, with its short
growing season, akin to the northern Midwest of America, and the wet, double-cropping
