Search

Bibliographic entry in Chapter 24: The U…

Jin Taiyuan 119 counties, 22 cities 33.75 million inhabitants 156,300 km2 216 inhabitants/km2 Shanxi province is situated in north China, bounded on the south and west by the Yellow River . In the east, the Taihang Mountain Range separates Shanxi from Hebei. In the north, the Great Wall of the Ming dynasty marks the border to Inner Mongolia. The province is divided into the eastern mountainous region (Wutai Shan, which reaches an altitude of 3058 m), the Loess Plateau in the west, and the central basin in …

Although one apparent characteristic of the reform era in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is the emergence of new middle classes, this notion is almost necessarily contested. The middle class is usually regarded as part of the social structure of capitalism, and Western capitalism at that. Indeed, identification of nascent or realized middle classes is frequently taken as a marker of the homogenizing effect of modernization: some commentators on China started to talk about the emergence of …

Regionalism has always been part of China. Leaving aside considerations of the non-Han Chinese (the 54 national minorities), there is and has always been considerable social and economic variation throughout different parts of China, as it would be reasonable to expect given the large land mass and size of population. The Chinese are divided socially by language; food and styles of cooking (food and drinking culture); domestic customs of birth, death, and marriage; folk beliefs, music, and dance…