When looking up China the first thing that
interested me was how populace of a country China was. I was shocked to find
that there are 1.351 billion people as reported in 2012. I also discovered that
the population density of China is 134 people per sq km which is around four
times greater than that of the United States. It is hard to imagine that many
people all living in one place at the same time. I get the feeling sometimes
that the United States is crowded so I can not imagine what it must be like in
China. Another issue with so many people is where they all live. China was
forced into creating a move west plan because so many people lived in the middle and lower reaches of the
Yellow River, Yangtze River and Pearl River valleys, and the Northeast Plain.
Dealing with such a large population has to be hard on the government and
causing constant issues within the country.
The next thing I took a look at was religion, and what I
found was pretty astonishing. The website I found stated that there are
estimated at well over 100 million religious worshipers. Most of the worshipers
follow Buddhism yet there are other religions such as Taoism, Islam,
Confucianism and Christianity. For being such a large country, I expected there
to be a lot of different religions and be several followers for each as the
population is so vast, and yet most of the information was on Buddhism. When it
comes to religion Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism are referred to as the “three
teachings.” By being named under these teachings, it refers back to 6th
century Chinese scholars of the time and the teachings they began with.
After taking a look at the population and religions of China,
I stumbled upon a site that had interesting facts about China. I am not sure
how credible the source is or how accurate the facts are, but what I found was
very interesting. The very first fact stated that over 100 million people live
on less than one American dollar. If that fact is true, that is a crazy amount
of people living in poverty and I wonder how so many people can survive.
Another fact I found is that China executes four times as many convicts as the
rest of the world combined. Now this is a touchy subject, but should the United
States do more of this? While I understand this is a tough topic for anyone to
talk about, how does China get away with this? While looking at facts I
happened to stumble upon social media and the control that China has over its
people. What I found is that since 2009 Facebook, Twitter, and The New York
Times have been banned for the Chinese people to view. The facts continued on
to get more interesting as I found one that talked about 35 million people
still living in caves in China. I found this interesting because maybe this is
part of the people living on under a dollar a day, but also could be totally
misleading and nowhere near true.
While the website I got these interesting facts from may
have not been true or totally factual, I used these facts because I find it
interesting how secretive China is and I could not find much information
pertaining to these interesting facts. I will see if others found interesting
facts similar to this and I can confirm that some of these facts are true or
have some truth behind them.
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