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                                                     Evening pickup basketball game in a Beijing neighborhood.

China has one of the oldest sporting cultures in the world, spanning the course of several millennia. There is, in fact, evidence that a form of football was first played in China around 1000 AD, leading many historians to believe that the popular sport originated from China.[107] Besides soccer,[108] some of the most popular sports in the country include martial arts, table tennis, badminton, swimming, basketball, and more recently, golf and rugby. Board games such as Go (Weiqi), and Xiangqi (Chinese chess) and recently Chess are also commonly played and have organised competitions.

Physical fitness is widely emphasized in Chinese culture. Morning exercises are a common activity and often one can find the elderly practicing qigong and Tai Chi Chuan in parks or students doing stretches on school campuses. Young people are especially keen on basketball, especially in urban centres with limited space and grass areas. The NBA has a huge following among Chinese youths, with Yao Ming being the idol of many.[109] The 2008 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, will be held in Beijing, and as a result the country has put even more emphasis on sports.

Many traditional sports are also played. The popular Chinese dragon boat racing (??) occurs during the Duan Wu festival. In Inner Mongolia, sports such as Mongolian-style wrestling and horse racing are popular. In Tibet, archery and equestrian sports are a part of traditional festivals.

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Most Chinese - 59% of the population, or about 767 million people - identify themselves as non-religious.[102] However, rituals and religion - especially the traditional beliefs of Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism - play a significant part in the lives of many. About 33% of the population follow a mixture of beliefs usually referred to by statisticians as “Traditional Beliefs” or just “Other”.

About 8% of the Chinese population are avowed Buddhists, with Mahayana Buddhism (??, Dacheng) and its subsets Pure Land (Amidism), Tiantai and Zen being the most widely practiced. With an estimated 100 million adherents, Buddhism is the country’s largest organized religion. Other forms of Buddhism, such as Theravada Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism, are practiced largely by ethnic minorities along the geographic fringes of the Chinese mainland.[103] A government official recently suggested that there are 16 million Christians.[104] However, an independent survey by East China Normal University estimated the Christian population at 40 million, much higher than the government’s numbers but much lower than numbers favored by some Western observers.[105] Official figures also indicate that there are about 20 million Muslims.

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                          Museum patrons viewing ancient Chinese scroll paintings at the Shanghai Museum.

                        A Cold Fairyland concert performance. The band combines traditional Chinese instruments and musical elements with rock music.

For centuries, opportunity for economic and social advancement in China could be provided by high performance on Imperial examinations. The literary emphasis of the exams affected the general perception of cultural refinement in China, such as the view that calligraphy and literati painting were higher forms of art than dancing or drama. China’s traditional values were derived from various versions of Confucianism and conservatism. A number of more authoritarian and rational strains of thought have also been influential, such as Legalism. There was often conflict between the philosophies, such as the individualistic Song Dynasty neo-Confucians, who believed Legalism departed from the original spirit of Confucianism. Examinations and a culture of merit remain greatly valued in China today. In recent years, a number of New Confucians have advocated that democratic ideals and human rights are quite compatible with traditional Confucian “Asian values.”[100]

The first leaders of the People’s Republic of China were born in the old society but were influenced by the May Fourth Movement and reformist ideals. They sought to change some traditional aspects of Chinese culture, such as rural land tenure, sexism, and a Confucian education, while preserving others, such as the family structure and obedience to the state. Many observers believe that the period following 1949 is a continuation of traditional Chinese dynastic history, while others say that the CPC’s rule has damaged the foundations of Chinese culture, especially through political movements such as the Cultural Revolution, where many aspects of traditional culture were labeled ‘regressive and harmful’ or ‘vestiges of feudalism’ by the regime. They further argue that many important aspects of traditional Chinese morals and culture, such as Confucianism, Chinese art, literature, and performing arts like Beijing opera, were altered to conform to government policies and propaganda. One example being Chinese character simplification, since traditional characters were blamed for the country’s low literacy rate at the time.[101] However, simplified Chinese characters are not used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.[101]

Today, the PRC government has accepted a great deal of traditional Chinese culture as an integral part of Chinese society, lauding it as an important achievement of the Chinese civilization and emphasizing it as vital to a Chinese national identity. Modern Chinese art, literature, music, film, fashion and architecture have become increasingly ready to incorporate various degrees of traditional Chinese culture into their works.

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The Ministry of Health, together with its counterparts in the provincial health bureaus, oversees the health needs of the Chinese population.[90] An emphasis on public health and preventative treatment characterized health policy since the early 1950s. At that time, the party started the Patriotic Health Campaign, which was aimed at improving sanitation and hygiene, as well as attacking several diseases. This has shown major results as diseases like cholera, typhoid, and scarlet fever were nearly eradicated.

With economic reform after 1978, the health of the Chinese public improved rapidly because of better nutrition despite the disappearance, along with the People’s Communes, of much of the free public health services provided in the countryside. Health care in China became largely private fee-for-service. By 2000, when the World Health Organization made a large study of public health systems throughout the world, The World Health Report 2000 Health Systems: Improving Performance the Chinese public health system ranked 144 of the 191 UN member states ranked.

The country’s life expectancy jumped from about 32 years in 1950, from 41 years to almost 73 years in 2006,[91] and infant mortality went down from 300 per thousand in the 1950s to about 23 per thousand in 2006.[74][92] Malnutrition as of 2002 stood at 12 percent of the population according to United Nations FAO sources.[93]

Despite significant improvements in health and the introduction of western style medical facilities, the PRC has several emerging public health problems, which include respiratory problems as a result of widespread air pollution[94] and millions of cigarette smokers,[95] a possible future HIV/AIDS epidemic, and an increase in obesity among urban youths.[96][97] Estimates of excess deaths in China from environmental pollution (apart from smoking) are placed at 760,000 people per annum from air and water pollution (including indoor air pollution)[98] China’s large population and close living quarters has led to some serious disease outbreaks in recent years, such as the 2003 outbreak of SARS (a pneumonia-like disease) which has since been largely contained.[99]

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                                       A public school classroom in the western region of Xinjiang.

In 1986, China set the long-term goal of providing compulsory nine-year basic education to every child. As of 1997, there were 628,840 primary schools, 78,642 secondary schools and 1,020 higher education institutions in the PRC.[83] In February 2006, the government advanced its basic education goal by pledging to provide completely free nine-year education, including textbooks and fees, in the poorer western provinces.[84] As of 2002, 90.9% (male: 95.1%; female: 86.5%) of the population over age 15 are literate.[74] China’s youth (age 15 to 24) literacy rate is 98.9% (99.2% for males and 98.5% for females) in 2000.[85] In March 2007, China announced the decision of making education a national “strategic priority”, the central budget of the national scholarships will be tripled in two years and 223.5 billion Yuan (28.65 billion US dollars) extra funding will be allocated from the central government in the next 5 years to improve the compulsory education in rural areas.[86]

The quality of Chinese colleges and universities varies considerably across the country. The consistently top-ranked universities in mainland China are Peking and Tsinghua in Beijing; Fudan and Shanghai Jiaotong University in Shanghai; Tianjin(Peiyang) and Nankai in Tianjin;Nanjing University in Nanjing; the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei; and Wuhan University in Wuhan; and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.[87][88]

Many parents are highly committed to their children’s education, often investing large portions of the family’s income on education. Private lessons and recreational activities, such as in foreign languages or music, are popular among the middle-class families who can afford them.[89]

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As of July 2006, there are 1,313,973,713 people in the PRC. About 20.8% (male 145,461,833; female 128,445,739) are 14 years old or younger, 71.4% (male 482,439,115; female 455,960,489) are between 15 and 64 years old, and 7.7% (male 48,562,635; female 53,103,902) are over 65 years old. The population growth rate for 2006 is 0.59%.[74] The PRC officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are the Han Chinese, who constitute about 91.9% of the total population.[75] Large ethnic minorities include the Zhuang (16 million), Manchu (10 million), Hui (9 million), Miao (8 million), Uyghur (7 million), Yi (7 million), Tujia (5.75 million), Mongolians (5 million), Tibetans (5 million), Buyi (3 million), and Koreans (2 million).[76]

In the past decade, China’s cities expanded at an average rate of 10% annually. The country’s urbanization rate increased from 17.4% to 41.8% between 1978 and 2005, a scale unprecedented in human history.[77] 80 to 120 million migrant workers work part-time in the major cities and return home to the countryside periodically with their earnings.[78]

Today, the People’s Republic of China has dozens of major cities with one million or more long-term residents, including the three global cities of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Major cities in China play key roles in national and regional identity, culture and economics.

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                   G030 northbound in Hebei province. There are 45,000 km (28,000 mi) of expressways in China. This is the second-longest total in the world, and half that of the United States.

Transportation in the mainland of the People’s Republic of China has improved remarkably since the late 1990s as part of a government effort to link the entire nation through a series of expressways known as the National Trunk Highway System (NTHS). The total length of expressway is 45,000 km at the end of 2006, second only to the United States.

Private car ownership is increasing at an annual rate of 15%, though it is still uncommon because of government policies that make car ownership expensive, such as taxes and toll roads.[73]

Air travel has increased, but remains too expensive for most. Long distance transportation is still dominated by railways and charter bus systems. The railways are still the vital carrier in China, and until this year steam locomotives were still a common sight. It is thought that some are still in use, especially on industrial networks.

Cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are building subways or light rail systems. Hong Kong has one of the most developed transport systems in the world. Shanghai already has a Maglev system connecting downtown Shanghai to Pudong International Airport

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                       Windmill generators in Xinjiang. The Dabancheng project is Asia’s largest wind power plant.

After the Sino-Soviet split, China started to develop its own indigenous nuclear weapons and delivery systems, successfully detonating its first surface nuclear test in 1964 at Lop Nor. A natural outgrowth of this was a satellite launching program, which culminated in 1970 with the launching of Dongfang Hong I, the first Chinese satellite. This made the PRC the fifth nation to independently launch a satellite. In 1992, the Shenzhou manned spaceflight program was authorized.[66] After four tests, Shenzhou 5 was launched on October 15, 2003, using a Long March 2F rocket and carrying Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei, making the PRC the third country to put a human being into space through its own endeavors.[67] With the successful completion of the second manned mission, Shenzhou 6 in October 2005, the country plans to build a Chinese Space Station in the near future and achieve a lunar landing in the next decade.[68]

China has the world’s second largest research and development budget, and is expected to invest over $136 billion this year after growing more than 20% in the past year.[69] The Chinese government continues to place heavy emphasis on research and development by creating greater public awareness of innovation, and reforming financial and tax systems to promote growth in cutting-edge industries. President Hu Jintao in January 2006 called for China to make the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to an innovation-based one, and this year’s National People’s Congress has approved large increases in research funding. Stem-cell research and gene therapy, which some in the Western world see as controversial, face minimal regulation in China. China has an estimated 926,000 researchers, second in number only to the 1.3 million in the United States.[70]

China is also actively developing its software, semiconductor and energy industries, including renewable energies such as hydro, wind and solar power.[71] In an effort to reduce pollution from coal-burning power plants, China has been pioneering the deployment of pebble bed nuclear reactors, which run cooler and safer, and have potential applications for the hydrogen economy.[72]

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                            The Shanghai Stock Exchange. China’s SSEC index surged 130 percent in 2006.

Beginning in late 1978, the Chinese leadership has been reforming the economy from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented economy that is still within a rigid political framework under Party control. The reforms replaced collectivization of Chinese agriculture with privatization of farmlands, increased the responsibility of local authorities and industry managers, allowed a wide variety of small-scale enterprises to flourish, and promoted foreign investment. Price controls were also relaxed. These changes resulted in mainland China’s shift from a planned economy to a mixed economy.

China became a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001.[53] China’s accession into the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a goal achieved after nearly fifteen years of exhausting negotiations carrying many legal, political and social implications for all parties. China was finally able to convince WTO members that without China, the WTO is only partially a worldwide trade organization. The road to the signature of the final agreement of accession was long, but these difficulties pale in comparison to the problems that have not yet been tackled in terms of achieving real implementation of its provisions throughout the territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). China’s accession surely presents the world trading system with opportunities, but also poses the challenge of integrating a market with strong structural, behavioural and cultural constraints.[54]

The government emphasizes personal income and consumption by introducing new management systems to help increase productivity. The government also focuses on foreign trade as a major vehicle for economic growth, which led to 5 Special Economic Zones (SEZ: Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, Xiamen, Hainan Province) where investment laws are relaxed so as to attract foreign capital. Since the 1990s, SEZs and similar concepts have been expanded to major Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Beijing. The result has been a 6-fold increase of GDP since 1978. Chinese economic development is among the fastest in the world, and has been growing at an average annual GDP rate of 9.4% for the past 25 years.[55] At the end of 2005, the PRC became the fourth largest economy in the world by exchange rate, and the second largest in the world after the United States by purchasing power parity at US$8,158 trillion.[56] But with its large population this still gives an average GDP per person of only an estimated US$8,000 (2006), about 1/5th that of the United States.

Mainland China has a reputation as being a low-cost manufacturer, which caused notable disputes in global markets. This is largely because Chinese corporations can produce many products far more cheaply than other parts of Asia or Latin America, and because expensive products produced in developed countries like the United States are in large part uncompetitive compared to European or Asian goods. Another factor is the unfavorable exchange rate between the Chinese yuan and the United States dollar to which it was pegged.

On July 21, 2005 the People’s Bank of China announced that it would move to a floating peg, allowing its currency to move against the United States dollar by 0.5% (effective 18 May 2007, which was earlier 0.3%) a day, while 3% a day against other currencies.[57] Many high-tech American companies have difficulty exporting to China because of U.S. federal government restrictions, which exacerbated the trade gap between the PRC and the US, widespread software piracy and illegal copying of intellectual property (a major US export), and perceived low quality of US goods. On the other hand, China runs a trade deficit with Taiwan and South Korea, importing more from those nations than exports. China runs a large but diminishing trade surplus with Japan[58] (slight deficit if Hong Kong is included).[59][60]

There has been a significant rise in the Chinese standard of living in recent years. Today, a rapidly declining 10 percent of the Chinese population is below the poverty line. 90.9% of the population is literate,[61] compared to 20% in 1950.[62] The life expectancy in China is the third highest in East Asia, after Japan and South Korea. There is a large wealth disparity between the coastal regions and the remainder of the country. To counter this potentially destabilizing problem, the government has initiated the China Western Development strategy (2000), the Revitalize Northeast China initiative (2003), and the Rise of Central China policy (2004), which are all aimed at helping the interior of China to catch up.

China is undergoing major reforms in its financial sector, which has been plagued by nonperforming loans made in the 1980s and early 1990s to inefficient state-owned enterprises. The government has spent five years and more than US$400 billion cleaning bad loans off the books of the big four state-owned banks, helping prepare them to become shareholder corporations.[63] By the end of 2006, China had restructured three of its four largest banks and listed them publicly. China’s largest bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) in October 2006 raised US$21.6 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering (IPO) in history. ICBC is now the world’s second largest bank in market value, after only Citibank.[64] These highly successful IPOs have helped ease the government’s burden and spur further structural reforms in China’s nascent banking industry.[65]

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With 2.3 million active troops, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is the largest military in the world.[47] The PLA consists of an army, navy, air force, and strategic nuclear force. The official announced budget of the PLA for 2007 was $45 billion. However, the United States claims China does not report its real military spending. The DIA estimates that the real Chinese military budget for 2007 could be anywhere from US$85 to US$125 billion.[48]

The PRC, despite possession of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, is widely seen by military researchers both within and outside of China as having only limited power projection capability; this is, among other things, because of the limited effectiveness of its navy. It is considered a major regional power and possibly an emerging superpower.[49]

Much progress has been made in the last decade and the PRC continues to make efforts to modernize its military. It has purchased state-of-the-art fighter jets from Russia, such as the Su-30s, and has also produced its own modern fighters, specifically the Chinese J-10s and the J-11s.[50] It has also acquired and improved upon the Russian S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, which are considered to be among the best aircraft-intercepting systems in the world,[51] albeit Russia has since produced the new generation S-400 Triumf. The PRC’s armoured and rapid-reaction forces have been updated with enhanced electronics and targeting capabilities. In recent years, much attention has been focused on building a navy with blue-water capability.[52]

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