Yule, Henry (1866). Cathay and the Way Thither. Asian Educational Services. pp.3–7. ISBN 978-81-206-1966-1. See also: List of wars involving the People's Republic of China and Cross-Strait relations Map depicting territorial disputes between the PRC and neighboring states. For a larger map, see here. After Yuan Shikai's death in 1916, China was politically fragmented. Its Beijing-based government was internationally recognized but virtually powerless; regional warlords controlled most of its territory. [90] [91] In the late 1920s, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek was able to reunify the country under its own control with a series of deft military and political maneuverings known collectively as the Northern Expedition. [92] [93] The Kuomintang moved the nation's capital to Nanjing and implemented "political tutelage", an intermediate stage of political development outlined in Sun Yat-sen's San-min program for transforming China into a modern democratic state. [94] [95] The political division in China made it difficult for Chiang to battle the communist-led People's Liberation Army (PLA), against whom the Kuomintang had been warring since 1927 in the Chinese Civil War. This war continued successfully for the Kuomintang, especially after the PLA retreated in the Long March, until Japanese aggression and the 1936 Xi'an Incident forced Chiang to confront Imperial Japan. [96] The CIA World Factbook lists China as the fourth-largest country (after Russia, Canada and the United States) with a total area of 9,596,960 km 2, [14] and the United States as the third-largest at 9,833,517 km 2. [15]

Marquis, Christopher; Qiao, Kunyuan (2022). Mao and markets the communist roots of Chinese enterprise. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-26883-6. See also: Human rights in China, Hukou, Social welfare in China, Elections in China, Censorship in China, and Uyghur genocide March in memory of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo who died of organ failure while in government custody in 2017China's climate is mainly dominated by dry seasons and wet monsoons, which lead to pronounced temperature differences between winter and summer. In the winter, northern winds coming from high-latitude areas are cold and dry; in summer, southern winds from coastal areas at lower latitudes are warm and moist. [146]

Hoopes, Townsend, and Douglas Brinkley FDR and the Creation of the U.N. (Yale University Press, 1997) The United Nations Statistics Division's figure for the United States is 9,833,517km 2 (3,796,742sqmi) and China is 9,596,961km 2 (3,705,407sqmi). These closely match the CIA World Factbook figures and similarly include coastal and territorial waters for the United States, but exclude coastal and territorial waters for China.The Chinese space program started in 1958 with some technology transfers from the Soviet Union. However, it did not launch the nation's first satellite until 1970 with the Dong Fang Hong I, which made China the fifth country to do so independently. [399]