Major cities
- Shanghai(with 20 million inhabitants), an important industrial, financial and port center at the mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang River;
- Beijing(capital, with 16 million inhabitants), financial center (mainly concentrated in the central area of Guomao), commercial and industrial and main cultural center in China;
- Guangzhou or Guangzhou (with approximately 13 million inhabitants), a large industrial center (the largest in the Zhu Jiang or Sikiang or Xun Jiang region), commercial, port and financial, with a modern bullet train transport system;
- Tianjin(with 12 million inhabitants), industrial center;
- Nanjing or Nanqu m (with 10 million inhabitants), a large industrial, commercial and historical-cultural center; located in one of the largest economic zones in China, the Yangtze River Delta, the city was occupied in World War II by the Japanese army, which committed numerous atrocities, such as looting, arson and the execution of thousands of prisoners of war , mainly civilians;
- Wuhan(with 8 million inhabitants), industrial and port center (Yang-tse-Kiang River);
- Shenzhen(with 10 million inhabitants), an industrial and financial center;
- Hong Kong(with 7.2 million inhabitants), Special Administrative Region that stands out as the Asian Tiger .
China’s economy
The Chinese economy is highly diversified, but it is dominated by the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, although its other sectors are quite significant.
Learn also: Development of the Chinese economy
Agriculture
According to Intershippingrates.com, agriculture is still an important agricultural activity for the Chinese economy and occupies a large part of the active population. Until the economic reforms of the 1970s, agriculture was based on production on collective properties (communes), which maintained a traditional production system with a large use of labor.
Agricultural modernization is recent and still has interference from the authorities, as there is great fear from the government with excessive migration to cities – an additional 182 million migrants are estimated to move to urban regions by 2020.
- In the western portion of the territory, the production of cotton and wheat depends on the action of the state, through large irrigation projects, with 60 million irrigated hectares.
- In the eastern portion, especially in Manchuria and the Huang-ho River Basin (Yellow), the presence of fertile soils of alluvial origin favors the cultivation of wheat, sorghum, beets and soybeans.
- In the southeastern portion, the monsoon climate has a stronger influence on the cultivation of tropical products such as rice, sugar cane, tobacco, blackberries, tea and corn, with emphasis on the Yang-tse-Kiang River Basin (Blue) .
Chinese livestock is characterized by a large herd of pigs (the world’s largest herd with a number of more than 430 million), of sheep and cattle, with numbers exceeding 100 million respectively, in addition to the creation of chickens and ducks.
Although agricultural activity has a large production capacity, in many cases it is insufficient to meet domestic demand, thus generating the need to import agricultural products – eg, soybeans and beef and poultry from Brazil.
In 2014, the country was classified as the world’s leading producer of foods such as pork and rice. Grain production exceeds 450 million tons per year. Among milk, chicken and beef producers, China is in third place.
Another fundamental aspect is its permanence among the seven largest agricultural exporters in the world, with maize and rice being the main products exported, mainly to Japan and South Korea.
Mechanization and private property are advancing on the fields, expanding production, however there are still 150 million Chinese suffering from hunger.
Industries
China has important basic conditions for the development of industrial activity: raw materials (iron, tungsten, antimony, tin, manganese, mercury, rare earths, phosphates, etc.), cheap labor, consumer market and energy sources (coal , oil, shale, hydroelectric power and huge potential in solar energy) in abundance.
Before the Chinese Revolution of 1949, exploration of the territory was reserved for large international companies, especially European and Japanese companies, which produced consumer goods and were located predominantly close to large reserves of raw materials, for example in Manchuria, and in areas with easy access to the coast, such as Tientsin and Shanghai.
With the transformation of the country into a socialist republic, multinationals were banned and state investments converged to basic industries such as steel, heavy machinery, transport material and metallurgy.
The great change experienced by the industry occurred with the introduction of the Great Four Great Modernizations policy , since the industrial sector was the most privileged with the entry of international capital in the 1970s, revolutionizing its productive system and modernizing the country.
To give you an idea, China was the 23rd GDP in the world in 1979, going to ninth, in 1995, and second in 2010; its foreign trade, which was inexpressive before the economic opening in the 1970s, jumped to 1st place in 2013, which allowed the country successive trade surpluses and the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves.
