China (traditional Chinese: 中國; simplified Chinese: 中国; Hanyu Pinyin: Zhōngguó (help·info); Tongyong Pinyin: Jhongguó; Wade-Giles (Mandarin): Chung¹kuo²) is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity occupying a large portion of land in East Asia.
China has one of the world's oldest people and continuous civilizations, consisting of states and cultures dating back more than six millennia. It has the world's longest continuously used written language system, and is the source of such major inventions as what the British scholar and biochemist Joseph Needham called the "four great inventions of Ancient China": paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing. Historically China's cultural sphere has been very influential in East Asia as a whole, with Chinese religion, customs, and writing system being adopted, to varying degrees, by its neighbors Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
The stalemate of the last Chinese Civil War has resulted in two political entities using the name China: the People's Republic of China (PRC), commonly known as China, which controls mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau; and the Republic of China (ROC), commonly known as Taiwan, which controls the island of Taiwan and some nearby islands.
Etymology
Main article: Names of China
China is called 'Zhongguo' (中國 or 中国) in Chinese. The character zhōng means "middle" or central, the latter, guo', means land, or kingdom.
The name "Zhongguo" appeared first in the Classic of History (6th Century BCE), and was used to refer to the late Zhou Dynasty, as they believed that they were the "center of civilization" [1], while peoples in the four cardinals were called Eastern Yi, Southern Man, Western Rong and Northern Di respectively. Some texts imply that "Zhongguo" was originally meant to refer to the capital of the sovereign, to differ from the capital of his vassals.[2] The use of "Zhongguo" implied a claim of political legitimacy. "Zhongguo" was often used by states who saw themselves as the sole legitimate successor to previous Chinese dynasties; for example, in the era of the Southern Song Dynasty, both the Jin Dynasty and the Southern Song state claimed to be "Zhongguo".[3]
"Zhongguo" came to official use as an abbreviation for the Republic of China (Zhonghua Minguo) after the government's establishment in 1912. Since the People's Republic of China, established in 1949, now controls the great majority of area encompassed within the traditional concept of "China", the People's Republic is the political unit most commonly identified with the abbreviated name "Zhongguo". [4]
English and many other languages use various forms of the name "China" and the prefix "Sino-" or "Sin-". These forms are thought to derive from the name of the Qin Dynasty that first unified the country (221–206 BCE). The pronunciation of "Qin" is similar to the phonetic "cheen", which is considered the possible root of the word "China"[5].
Main article: Languages of China
Most languages in China belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken by 29 ethnicities. There are also several major dialects within the Chinese language itself. The most spoken dialects are Mandarin (spoken by over 70% of the population), Wu (Shanghainese), Yue (Cantonese), Min, Xiang, Gan, and Hakka. Non-Sinitic languages spoken widely by ethnic minorities include Zhuang (Thai), Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur (Turkic), Hmong and Korean.[21]
Classical Chinese was the written standard used for thousands of years in China before the 20th century and allowed for written communication between speakers of various unintelligible languages and dialects in China. Vernacular Chinese or baihua is the written standard based on the Mandarin dialect first popularized in Ming dynasty novels and was adopted (with significant modifications) during the early 20th century as the national vernacular. Classical Chinese is still part of the high school curriculum and is thus intelligible to some degree to many Chinese.
