Nearly 18 of the entire human population is Chinese while China itself is the world's third-largest country by territory There are more people who live in China than in the entire continents of Europe North America and Australia all combined.
But despite this titanic population and this enormous territory more than half of china's land is almost empty if you draw a diagonal line across the country from the frozen town of Haifa in the northeast across the\ tropical Fengcheng in the southwest you will find that an overwhelming 94% of china's 1.4 billion people live to the east of this line on only 43 percent of china's land while only a mere six percent of china's population lives to the west of the line on 57 of the land.
China's eastern half is, therefore, home to more than 1.3 billion people while the western half is only home to 84 million.
China's population imbalance between east and west has remained pretty much constant throughout and it's been constant for thousands of years even before then and nobody has ever been able to solve it so why has this.
The land east of the line is simply better suited for civilization and for sustaining larger populations because the vast open plains in the north that are flat warm receive tons of rainfall and are easy to farm and develop with two of earth's largest rivers flowing across them and there are warm gentle rolling plains.
Hills in the south that receive even more rainfall than the north does directly adjacent to these planes is a nearly unbroken chain of mountains that run completely north to south.
Unsurprisingly when looking at a side-by-side map of china's terrain and china's population density the flatlands of the north-south and the Sichuan basin in the center are where nearly the entirety of china's population resides because flat plains and basins are where it's naturally the easiest to build.
Farms develop cities and grow populations that eventually evolve into civilizations.
The plains and flat lands to the east of the line are some of the greatest and richest agricultural lands that are found anywhere on the planet while the land to the west of the line is literally the most inhospitable and hostile environment found anywhere on the planet. This area is even more hostile to human life than the Sahara desert. The land here is entirely covered with high mountains and vast deserts.
The massive Himalayas in the south are the highest mountain chain in the world and they cast a literal shadow that extends well across the Tibetan plateau gobi and Taklamakan deserts that blocks all of these regions from receiving the substantial amounts of rainfall that china's east receives
Air with clouds full of rain bringing wet monsoons from the Indian ocean that dumps enormous amounts of water across India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar but the high mountains of the Himalayas block these clouds from climbing above and beyond them like a harsh weather border wall thus rainfall rarely ever gets through and it makes the areas beyond some of the driest found anywhere on the planet which makes traditional agriculture across the plateau and the deserts impossible.
Harsh cold winds blowing in from the arctic can send temperatures in the deserts during wintertime plunging to as low as minus 40 Celsius and during the summertime they can skyrocket up to as high as 45 celsius.
Temperatures within the deserts can change by as much as 35 degrees Celsius within just a single 24 hour period and these deserts are expanding.
With brutal temperatures during both summer and winter while also being almost absent of water and surrounded by high mountains on all sides this region is not only incredibly difficult to reach but it's incredibly difficult to survive in.
As a result of this terrible geography the lands west of the who line within china have pretty much always been essentially a barren wasteland hostile to nearly all human life that's never been able to support\ much more than nomadic herders while the land east of the line became the birthplace and cradle of Chinese civilization.
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