Why 94% of China Lives East of This Line

this video was made possible by hellofresh go to hellofresh.com and use the code real life lure 14 to get 14 free meals including free shipping the colossal population of china is a concept that's difficult for westerners to understand with a population that's nearly 1.4 billion people there are more people who live in china than in the entire continents of europe north america and australia all combined nearly 18 of the entire human population is chinese while china itself is the world's third largest country by territory but despite this titanic population and this enormous territory more than half of china's land is almost empty if you draw a diagonal line across the country from the frozen town of haiha in the northeast across the tropical tengcheng in the southwest you will find that an overwhelming 94 of china's 1.4 billion people live to the east of this line on only 43 percent of china's land while only a mere six percent of china's population lives to the west of the line on 57 of the land china's eastern half is therefore home to more than 1.3 billion people with a population density that's similar to massachusetts throughout while the western half is only home to 84 million people with a population density that's more similar to kansas throughout the difference between these two halves of china is even more abundantly apparent from space where you can see the bright glittering lights of civilization across the east opposed by near complete darkness and emptiness across the west so almost like america in the 19th century 21st century china has a vast undeveloped and sparsely populated western half but unlike america china's western problem has remained unsolved and relatively unsettled for thousands of years now nearly a century ago back in 1935 a man named hu huan yang drew this map with this line across china published in the chinese journal of geography who discovered that 96 of the chinese population lived to the east of his line while only 4 percent lived to the west of it at the time china's population was only a third of what it is today with about 500 million people and her territory was significantly larger with the inclusion of mongolia in the nearly centuries since that map was drawn china has lost mongolia her population has skyrocketed nearly three times from there to 1.4 billion and she has seen the incredible chaos and upheavals of the japanese invasion communism and the economic miracle that saw the nation's gdp per capita increased 17 times in a mere four decades that enabled china to soar into becoming the world's second largest global economy and yet despite all of that change china's population imbalance between east and west has remained pretty much constant throughout and it's been constant for thousands of years even before then and nobody has ever been able to solve it so why has this demographic problem existed throughout time well there's many reasons why but let's take a look at china's geography first the easy answer is to simply say that the land east of the who line is simply better suited for civilization and for sustaining larger populations because it is you've got vast open plains in the north that are flat warm receive tons of rainfall and are easy to farm and develop with two of earth's largest rivers flowing across them and you've got warm gentle rolling plains hills in the south that receive even more rainfall than the north does directly adjacent to these planes are a nearly unbroken chain of mountains that run completely north to south say for a very tiny corridor here along the yangtze river that leads into the sichuan basin a huge hidden flat field that's completely surrounded by mountains on all sides and separated by them from the rest of china's flat plain lands unsurprisingly when looking at a side-by-side map of china's terrain and china's population density the flatlands of the north south and the sichuan basin in the center are where nearly the entirety of china's population resides because flat plains and basins are where it's naturally the easiest to build farms develop cities and grow populations on that eventually evolve into civilizations kingdoms and empires the simple reality is that the plains and flat lands to the east of the line are some of the greatest and richest agricultural land that's found anywhere on the planet while the land to the west of the line is literally the most inhospitable and hostile environment found anywhere on the planet outside of antarctica or greenland in some places this area is even more hostile to human life than the sahara desert the land here is entirely covered with high mountains and vast dry deserts which aren't exactly the most fruitful lands for developing civilization upon to begin with but their environments are even worse than what it seems the massive himalayas in the south are the highest mountain chain in the world and they cast a literal shadow that extends well across the tibetan plateau gobi and taklamakan deserts that blocks all of these regions from receiving the substantial amounts of rainfall that china's east receives air with clouds full of rain bringing wet monsoons from the indian ocean that dump enormous amounts of water across india bangladesh and myanmar but the high mountains of the himalayas block these clouds from climbing above and beyond them like a harsh weather border wall thus rainfall rarely ever gets through and it makes the areas beyond some of the driest found anywhere on the planet which makes traditional agriculture across the plateau and the deserts impossible and if it wasn't for the lack of rainfall making civilization impossible it would be the temperatures the long-range shadow cast by the himalayas is what created both the taclomacon and gobi deserts but their location so close to siberia leads to wild temperature variations harsh cold winds blowing in from the arctic can send temperatures in the deserts during wintertime plunging to as low as minus 40 celsius and during the summer time they can skyrocket up to as high as 45 celsius temperatures within the deserts can literally change by as much as 35 degrees celsius within just a single 24 hour period and to make matters even worse the deserts are expanding just like the nomadic conquerors who have come roaring out from these lands for thousands of years to conquer and pillage china's agricultural land the sands of the deserts themselves are now taking their own turn at a rate of nearly 3 600 square kilometers every single year what that means is that roughly every decade the sands of the gobi alone are conquering nearly one taiwan worth of agricultural land from china the nearby taclomachon desert is located within an area known as the turim basin with brutal temperatures during both summer and winter while also being almost entirely absent of water and surrounded by high mountains on all sides this region is not only incredibly difficult to reach but it's incredibly difficult to survive in once you even get there as a result the terrain basin is believed to have been the final place on the entire asian continent that was settled by humans potentially only as recently as about 1800 bce many centuries after the ancient egyptians constructed the great pyramid at giza as a result of this terrible geography the lands west of the who line within china have pretty much always been essentially a barren wasteland hostile to nearly all human life that's never been able to support much more than nomadic herders while the land east of the line became the birthplace and cradle of chinese civilization and where there are people more will follow and follow throughout time so that's the reason why throughout the eons china's confounding population disparity has persisted but all of that kind of begs another question if more than half of china's land is so worthless why does china even control all of it in the first place the answer is largely because the land isn't really so worthless as it may seem from only looking at one single kind of map to start with tibet might only have a population of less than 4 million people but it's not the people that's important here to china it's the water and the location owing to the high elevation that towers above the rest of the world tibet is home to tens of thousands of glaciers that collectively contain the world's third largest storage site of fresh water after antarctica in greenland this has led many to label tibet as the third pole of the earth but it's not just glaciers tibet is also referred to as the water tower of asia because many of the world's largest rivers begin across the plateau including both the yellow and yangtze indus mekong brahmaputra and gagara rivers these rivers flow from the almost uninhabited and uninhabitable tibetan plateau down to support hundreds of millions of people downstream across pakistan india nepal bangladesh myanmar thailand cambodia laos vietnam and of course china itself the control of tibet means the control of the sources for all of these rivers and that means the control of the drinking water for hundreds of millions of people that powers the civilizations from india to china therefore from the chinese perspective in order to ensure a continuous and uninterrupted supply of water to her two most critically important rivers and to control the world's third largest source of fresh water to secure a future where fresh water may be more difficult to come by the control of tibet is an imperative policy to guarantee future security of the state regardless of the optics that an invasion and occupation of the territory has had for decades now that explains tibet fairly well but what about the vast deserts of the northwest chinese civilizations have sought to dominate these inhospitable lands for thousands of years now for two massively important reasons the presence of nomads who liked to raid china's prosperous core in the east and lucrative trade flowing to the west first of all china's geography around her rich eastern plains that constitute her core largely guarantees easy security from invaders in nearly every direction to the east and the south is the ocean while to the west and northwest are the inhospitable mountains and deserts that stretch for thousands of kilometers there are only two historical weak points to this natural armor here and here here the core central plane of chinese civilization stretches uninterrupted from beyond the rich yellow river valley into the steps of manchuria and central asia without any natural barriers to slow them down the various nomadic step hordes like the mongols the tatars the huns and many others who lived across these steps throughout history on their horses could always launch raids or conquests into the richer lands of china for loot and plunder for thousands of years across numerous chinese dynasties and even more numerous invaders attempts were made to plug up this gap with fortifications and walls that over time eventually evolved into what we know today as the great wall of china the other weak point in china's armor was much smaller and located across a tiny strip of land here known as the hoshi corridor this is an extremely narrow stretch of land through the western wastelands that's fairly easy to traverse across because it's relatively flat and dotted by oases throughout which pretty much acted almost like ancient gas stations for travelers and invaders alike who were moving across it flanked by mountains to the north and south and surrounded by some of the world's most inhospitable environments the corridor acts like a natural past that leads for nearly a thousand kilometers directly from china's rich core central plain straight to the terima basin in central asia in the west for millennia step nomads from central asia could use the hashi corridor almost like a funnel or a highway to rapidly transport themselves and their horse armies directly into the core open plane of central chinese civilization which gave chinese states a difficult conundrum was it cheaper to bribe the nomads to halt their raids or to lead military campaigns into the west to stop them during the tang dynasty of the 7th century they decided that military campaigns were cheaper and through numerous invasions and conquests expanded tang chinese dominion across the corridor and deep into the tarim basin with the objectives of subduing and neutralizing the nomads and of securing the vital silk road trade route along with being a highway for invaders across both directions the hashi corridor served as a vital transportation route for trade caravans and merchants and was the most important trade route in northwest china across this route traders were linked directly between the rich industrial and agricultural heartland of china and the islamic civilizations of central and western asia which from there linked directly to the civilizations of europe trade across the corridor made china rich while bandit raids upon it from the surrounding wastelands interrupted that wealth and so in order to ensure that the trade continued to flow reliably and to halt the incursions of nomads chyna steadily expanded her dominion across it and towards the west it also doesn't hurt that today the area around the turin basin is pretty rich with oil throughout the 80s and 90s the china national petroleum corporation discovered 26 oil and gas bearing structures across the basin that are estimated to contain approximately 16 billion tons of oil and gas reserves today the basin supplies more than a fifth of china's oil supply and is by far the most significant energy base that china possesses so those are the many reasons why over the past many thousands of years chinese civilization has come to expand from her cradle in the east across the more inhospitable wastelands of the west but there's another factor that the who line divides china by ethnicity overall china is largely very ethnically homogeneous with more than 92 percent of the population being han chinese however nearly the entirety of the han chinese population lives to the east of the huline while the vast majority of the remaining eight percent that make up china's various ethnic minorities live to the west of the line largely in the wastelands including the tibetans in the southwest and the uyghurs around the tarin basin in the northwest gdp per capita is 15 lower on average to the west of the line amongst china's ethnic minorities than it is to the more industrialized east among the ethnic han these are largely the reasons why all of china simply consists of a single gigantic time zone the single whitest and largest in the world which dictates that the time from manchuria to the border of afghanistan is all one and the same because to beijing the 1.3 billion ethnic han chinese who largely live across the same natural time zone in the industrialized east are more important than the 84 million mostly non-han chinese who live across the sparse and wider west all of this however poses a serious internal problem for the chinese state to cope with since they are culturally and economically separated from the east and even separated by literal time the tibetans and the uyghurs have each sustained widespread opposition to china's centralized authority back in the east and china often responds to this opposition with harsh and heavy repression for thousands of years china has enacted its own version of westward expansion and manifests destiny across the central highlands and deserts of asia and now in the modern age millions of han are moving from the east and settling the west across the who line in the name of economic development china is aiming to finally develop its western half with the aid of modern technology but there are extensive fears among the tibetans the uyghurs and others that their ancient ways of life and even their very cultures are being bulldozed over 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 5,720,109

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, china, hu line china, heihe tengchong line

Id: kVaBlat06Sw

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021