More established city-dwellers often blame the migrants for the rise in urban crime (although most countries would envy China’s low crime figures), but complain when the services they provide vanish at CNY due to the workers returning home for the holiday.
8 out of 10 of the parents of the current generation of 20-year-olds had their spouses chosen and approved by their work unit. Divorce, unheard of until the end of the last century, is now common.
There’s been a tendency to treat these minorities as unpredictable pets, and their mostly colorful costumes and traditional festivals have been put at the forefront of tourism promotion in recent years. It may not be ideal but it is a great improvement on the forced assimilation of past times.
Almost everyone is educated in Mandarin, but there are 5 completely different regional versions of Chinese, and a strong sense of local culture and tradition goes with them.
Running west to east, China’s landscape is said to form a series of 3 steppes. The first is the Tibetan Plateau, most of it over 4,000m. This spans a third of the width of China’s territory. Next, at between 1,500-3,000m, come the mountains of Sichuan and central China. Lastly come the fertile lowlands, running from 1,500m down to the coast.
Chinese typewriters were very difficult to use. The typist had to find each character in a tray of thousands. Computers have made typing Simplified script much easier — the user types in the Pinyin and gets a sub-menu of several possible characters.
Confucianism, the first to gain real influence, can be seen as a manifestation of the public, socially responsible self. Daoism represents a personal and wilder side; its emphasis on the relativity of things contrasts with Confucian concern for approved roles. Buddhism, a foreign import, is spiritual and otherworldly, offering an alternative to Chinese pragmatism.
For over 2K years, the Chinese have used the same architectural model for both imperial and religious buildings. This has 3 elements: a platform, post-and-beam timber frames, and non-loadbearing walls.
In the 13th century it became a minor county seat and so it remained until the mid-19th century when British commercial ambitions led to war with China. The ensuing Treaty of Nanking allowed the British to trade freely from certain ports, including Shanghai. The city soon became an outpost of glamor, high living, and ultimately decadence.
Given its long-standing contacts with the outside world, it is not surprising that Guangdong was only fully integrated into China in the 12th century, when large numbers of Han settlers migrated here from the north.
Through much of the Ming and Qing eras, the area that is now Yunna, Guizhou, and Guangxi was ruled as a colonized outpost, dominated by tribal chieftains.