Mention China and many people picture one of the famous images above. On the left, is a photograph taken during the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1937, and to the right, a photograph from Tiananmen Square in 1989. In the middle is Mao Zedong (Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 to 1976, when he died) as painted by American artist Andy Warhol in 1972.

These are (perhaps) the most famous images of China from the Twentieth Century and all three share a bleak and detached view. Pictures have power and the absence of positive high-impact images of China is one of the main reasons people today don't understand China.

CHINA IS LAND

How then to get a better picture of China? First, understand China's physical geography.

China is the most populated and third largest country in the world. China is so vast and its geographical, topological, and climatological contrasts are so great that it is a continent rather than its traditional designation of country.

Two of the world's greatest rivers lie entirely within China —the Yellow (Huang He) and Yangtze (Chang Jiang) .

The climate ranges from tropical to subarctic. In the west there are steppes, vast deserts, and high mountain ranges including the Himalayas . In the center there are huge river basins and in the east plains, deltas, and hills.

From east to west China stretches from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to California. It takes most of the Gulf of Mexico and the continental shelf off the eastern seaboard to round out the great landmass of China. All told China is larger than the continental USA plus the giant state of Alaska and other territories combined.

Although not depicted here, China has almost the exact same area as the entire "continent" of Europe. Only Canada and Russia are bigger although large parts of those two countries lie frozen within the Arctic Circle.