China (中国)

China

Society

Demography

Nowadays, China has a population of 1400 millions of people. It's birth rate is higher than its death rate (12.95‰ and 7.06‰), so it has a growth rate of 0.59%.
China has a population density of 151 people per Km2, and its median age is 37.3 years.

Social classes

We could talk about 9 different social classes in Modern China: the Head Honchos, the Bigwigs, the Powerbrokers, the Privilege, the Very Comfortable, the Squeezed, the marginalized, the Underclass, and the Destitute.


Cuisine

Drinks

Some typical Chinese drinks (饮料) are Tieguanyin Tea (铁观音), jiuniang rice wine (酒酿), Soybean Milk (豆浆), Black Tea (红茶) and Green Tea (​绿​茶). It is also very common to drink hot water (热水).Moreover, some popular soft drinks can be Coca-cola (可口可乐), or soda (软饮料).

Food

There are plenty of typical Chinese cuisine dishes. There some bread made recipes: baozi (包子), dumplings (饺子) or steamed bums (馒头). Also, we can find meat foods such as fried chicken (蛋炒饭) or sweet and sour pork (古老肉).
Finally, there are plenty of differents soups (汤), like egg soup (鸡蛋汤) or beef noodle soup (牛肉汤面).


Language

Main characteristics

Chinese (中文) is the oldest written language in the world, it was originated 4000 years ago. Nowadays, it has around 1,3 billions speakers and brings together several dialects, with Mandarin Chinese (普通话) as official language.
There are some important differences between spoken and written Mandarin, which uses characters (汉字). On its vocabulary, it tends not to be formed by more of 3 symbols, and has a great amount of loanwords from English (英文).
Finally, its grammar is quite simple, it follows the SVO sentence structure, and has no verb conjugations.

Dialects

Chinese language family has around 200 dialects, which, though using the same writing systems, can be mutually unintelligible (different number of tones).
Some of the main ones are:

  • Mandarin(普通话)
  • Gan
  • Kejia
  • Min
  • Wu
  • Xiang
  • Cantonese(广东话)


Fernando Vázquez López 2ºJ a 23/04/2019