Geography of China and Its Neighbors
This river, also called the Yangtze, helps divide land use in China, with wetter rice-growing areas generally south of it.
What is the Chang River?
This emperor of the Qin dynasty created a uniform written language and standardized currency, weights, and measures in China.
Who is Shi Huangdi?
Since the 1980s, this island government moved away from one-party rule and now allows multiple political parties to compete in elections.
What is Taiwan?
These giant sea waves, often caused by undersea earthquakes, can slam into towns along the shore of Japan.
What are tsunamis?
This Korean kingdom conquered the other Korean kingdoms in a.d. 668 and created a strong government on the peninsula.
What is Silla?
This style of South Korean popular music has spread around the world in recent years.
What is K-Pop?
Because a ridge of mountains runs along this side of Taiwan, most cities and farms are found on the opposite coast.
What is the east coast?
This structure, extended to more than 4,000 miles, was built to help protect Chinese farmers from nomadic invaders.
What is the Great Wall of China?
This Chinese ruling party continues to control the government in China, even though the economy has become less strictly communist.
What is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?
This mountain, Japan’s highest peak, is a volcano that has not erupted since the early 1700s.
What is Mount Fuji?
This writing system, created under Emperor Sejong in the 1400s, is still used in Korea today.
What is Hangul?
This North Korean leader, the third member of his family to rule the country, came to power after his father died in 2011.
Who is Kim Jong Un?
This desert stretches from southern Mongolia toward the Huang River and sends windblown loess into China.
What is the Gobi Desert?
Led by Genghis Khan, this group conquered China in the a.d. 1200s and created the largest empire the world had yet seen.
Who are the Mongols?
Because this country is landlocked, transporting goods is costly and manufacturing has not fueled growth there the way it did in Taiwan.
What is Mongolia?
Because flat land is scarce in Japan and the Koreas, farmers use these step-like fields on hillsides to grow rice.
What are terraces?
In Japan, these powerful military leaders controlled the government for much of the country’s history, often more than the emperors did.
What are shoguns?
This type of government, in which a dictator may take any action it wants by law, describes North Korea’s political system.
What is an unlimited government?
Since only about 15 percent of China’s land is arable, more than nine-tenths of its people live in this part of the country.
What is eastern China?
This Han dynasty emperor helped spread Confucianism by using it in government about 300 years after Confucius’s death.
Who is Emperor Wudi?
This term describes the more than 140 million migrants in China who move to cities for work without local registration.
What is the floating population?
This type of storm, the regional name for a tropical cyclone or hurricane, can strike Japan and the Koreas during the summer monsoon season.
What is a typhoon?
This 1868 turning point in Japanese history restored the emperor to power after the Tokugawa shogun was pushed out.
What is the Meiji Restoration?
Because Japanese people live long lives and have fewer children, Japan faces this population challenge, with fewer young workers supporting more retirees.
What is an aging population?
This historical development helps explain why many minority groups in China live near the borders rather than in the east.
What is the expansion of Chinese empires into non-Han regions?
This 1958 policy under Mao Zedong aimed to rapidly increase steel production but helped cause a famine that killed millions.
What is the Great Leap Forward?
Built on the Chang River, this massive project produces hydroelectricity, controls floods, and improved transport, but displaced more than a million people.
What is the Three Gorges Dam?
After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, this nuclear power plant was badly damaged and leaked radioactive water.
What is the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant?
After World War II, this type of government was established in Japan, where the constitution limits the emperor’s power.
What is a constitutional monarchy?
This traditional Japanese religion teaches that kami, or spirits, may live in animals, trees, rocks, and other natural objects.
What is Shinto?
Without this mountain range along China’s southwest border, western China and Mongolia might receive more moisture and support larger populations.
What are the Himalayas?
After losing the civil war in 1949, this group fled to Taiwan and maintained the rival government known as the Republic of China.
Who are the Nationalists?
This economic shift helped Taiwan keep growing after wages rose by focusing on advanced exports such as electronics, medicines, and chemicals.
What is improving education and moving into high-tech manufacturing?
This economic idea explains why Japan and South Korea import many farm goods while focusing their exports on manufactured products instead.
What is comparative advantage?
This conflict began in 1950 when North Korea invaded South Korea and ended with the peninsula divided by a demilitarized zone.
What is the Korean War?
This combination of poor bank practices and a downturn in the early 1990s helped push Japan into a long period of weak economic growth.
What is a recession following the collapse of Japan’s economic boom?