Superlative Facts About China

By Paul Chong

The Ancient Great Wall of China

The Sleeping Dragon which Napoleon feared to rouse has finally emerged on the world stage & these facts will astound you:

The People’s Republic of China (comprises China, Hong Kong & Macau) with a teeming population of 1.3 billion is made up of 55 ethnic groups. Tibet is included as represented by one of the stars in the National Flag. It’s an ancient civilization & now

an ultra modern economy.

• If the Chinese were to march past you 8-abreast, the line of parade will never end (because of reproduction).

• For every living person on earth, one lives in China.

• Never in the recorded history of mankind has the world seen such phenomenal industrial growth – an average of 8% over the last 30 years.

• Coupled with this, growing simultaneously is the rate of urbanization never before happened in Europe or America or anywhere else. China is building a city of equivalent size to Sydney or Birmingham every 60- days.

  Pudong-Shanghai Skyline

• A China with virtually no phone now possesses the single largest mobile network in the world. By the end of 2007, China had 370 million fixed-line subscribers and 530 million mobile subscribers.

• Mandarin is by far the single largest spoken language & will supercede English globally. It is the official & unifying language.

• The number of Chinese millionaires & the expanding middle class is swelling each day & fleeing the countryside for the big cities pushing up demand for everything . . . from American food . . . to modern housing . . . to Rolls-Royce Phantoms through the roof!

• China is building at a frenzy speed . . . unstoppable despite the global economic downturn – perhaps now at a slower pace. Now China has the biggest, tallest, speediest of whatever nameable.

• China is a unified, multi-national country, comprising 55 other minorities. The Han people make up 91.02 percent of the total population, leaving 8.98 percent for the other 55 ethnic minorities.

• The yearly average net increase of population: 12.79 million.

• Total Number of Military Service Personnel: 2.5 million.

• The most populated administrative region: Henan Province (92.56 million).

• The least populated administrative region: Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region (2.62 million).

• It’s claimed that the only man-made structure visible from outer space is The Great Wall of China.

• China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million (February 2009), helping China overtake the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market.

• China is not communist – except for the political system.

• China is BIG & there are 6,536 islands larger than 500 square meters, the largest is Taiwan, with a total area of about 36,000 square kilometers, and the second, Hainan. The South China Sea Islands are the southernmost island group of China.

• The Chinese are known to be most assiduous in their economic pursuits, innovative & inventive – just that many went by unpublicised.

For example: a flush toilet was found in a tomb of a Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 24) king — and they invented toilet paper in the 6th century.

Paul Chong

A Chinese by Descent

An Australian by Consent