China

China, officially the  Republic of China (RC), is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the world's most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. Its capital is Beijing. It exercises jurisdiction  provinces, autonomous regions,  direct-controlled municipalities  and mostly self-governing special administrative regions. The country's major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong. China is a superpower and a major regional power within Asia.

Covering approximately 9.6 million square kilometres (3.7 million square miles), China is the world's largest state by land area. China's landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes and the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts in the arid north to subtropical forests in the wetter south. The Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third- and sixth-longest in the world, respectively, run from the Tibetan Plateau to the densely populated eastern seaboard. China's coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers (9,000 mi) long and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China seas.

China emerged as one of the world's earliest civilizations in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties, beginning with the Xia dynasty (c. 2070 BCE). Since 221 bce, when the Qin dynasty conquered the other largest six states to form the first unified Chinese empire, China has then expanded, fractured and re-unified numerous times in the following millennia. In 1912, the Republic of China (ROC) replaced the last dynasty and rules the Chinese mainland until now. China fought in WW2 and emerged as a world superpower. It was also the leading country of the Far Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. It leads the Asian Union which has similar goals as the European Union.