A varied landscape, countless dialects, and traces of a "decadent" past
Ever since the first Yankee clipper set sail for Canton in 1784, China has held a compelling fascination for Americans. Traders and other early visitors to the Celestial Kingdom returned home with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder; opium dens and Buddhist pagodas; the imperturbable mandarin sage and the fanatical archcriminal Dr. Fu Manchu.
As China opens up again after 30 years of isolation, thousands of American visitors will have the opportunity of testing some of these timeworn images against the reality.
China's numbers defy the imagination: one-fourth of the world's people inhabit a mere 7% of its land area, a country 76,400 sq. mi. larger than the U.S. Although no accurate census has been taken in 25 years, demographers think that sometime around the middle of 1978 the total population surpassed 1 billion. Approximately 85% of these people live in rural areas. Nonetheless, China still has 13 of the 50 most populous cities in the world. Metropolitan Shanghai, with an estimated 12 million inhabitants, has about half a million more people than Tokyo.
The great majority of the people are ethnic Chinese, or Han, as they have termed themselves since the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220). In addition, there are 54 separate national minorities, totaling 40 million. These include 1.7 million Mongols, who were once ruled by Genghis Khan, 1.3 million mountain-dwelling Tibetans, 500,000 Kazakh and 65,000 Kirgiz nomads, 7 million Thai-speaking Chuang, a scattering of Miao and Puyi peasants in the southwestern provinces, and caste-conscious Yi clans in Szechwan. Despite Peking's efforts to promote Mandarin as China's common language, the country still has countless spoken dialects.
Most of China's varied landscape is inhospitable to human life. The three largest border regions (Sinkiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia) that constitute nearly 40% of China's land mass support only 2% of the population. In the west and northwest are immense stretches of desolation, including the sere, uninhabited stretches of desert and the frozen reaches of Tibet. To the north is the wheat and millet zone, a land of brown, eroded hills, broad turbulent rivers, and tens of thousands of dusty mud-walled villages. Rainfall is so irregular and water so scarce that for thousands of years peasants of these villages, armed with picks and shovels, have fought one another over rights to the flow of a tiny stream or canal. Summers bring searing heat; the harsh winds of fall and winter spread stinging particles of yellow dust from the Gobi, a desert as empty as Africa's Sahara.