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Emperor Throne
in Forbidden City, Beijing

China, one of the countries that can boast of an ancient civilization, has a long and mysterious history - almost 5,000 years of it! Like most other great civilizations of the world, China can trace her culture back to a blend of small original tribes which have expanded till they became the great country we have today.

It is recorded that Yuanmou man is the oldest hominoid in China and the oldest dynasty is Xia Dynasty. From the long history of China, there emerge many eminent people that have contributed a lot to the development of the whole country and to the enrichment of her history. Among them, there are emperors like Li Shimin (emperor Taizong of the Tang), philosophers like Confucius, great patriotic poets like Qu Yuan and so on.

Chinese society has progressed through five major stages - Primitive Society, Slave Society, Feudal Society, Semi-feudal and Semi-colonial Society, and Socialist Society. The rise and fall of the great dynasties forms a thread that runs through Chinese history, almost from the beginning. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st, 1949, China has become a socialist society and become stronger and stronger.

Timeline of Chinese History (Click to enlarge)

Dynasty

Period

Founder

Capital

Xia

21st - 17th century BC

Yu the Great

Anyi ( in Yuncheng, Shanxi); Yangcheng (in today's Dengfeng, Zhengzhou, Henan); Yangdi (in today's Yuzhou, Henan); Zhenxun (in Luoyang, Henan)

Qin

221 - 207 BC

Qin Shi Huang
(Ying Zheng / Zhao Zheng)

Xianyang (in today's Xianyang and Xi'an of Shaanxi)

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Emperor Throne in Forbidden City, Beijing China, one of the countries that can boast of an ancient civilization, has a long and mysterious history - almost 5,000 years of it! Like most other great civilizations of the world, China can trace her culture back to a blend of small original tribes which have expanded till they became the great country we have today.

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The air in much of China is so bad the government has repeatedly declared "war" on it. The enemy are tiny particulates which spew forth from countless cars, coal-fired power stations and steel plants to create a dense, putty-coloured smog.

Beijing recently issued its first pollution 'red alert', closing schools, factories and construction sites, and ordering half of all private cars off the road.

But these measures were only temporary. In a country where millions of people still look to industrialisation to lift them from poverty, what can China do to clear the air for good?

Four experts talk to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme.

Dr Jim Zhang: Frustrating that Olympic gains have been lost
Dr Jim Zhang, is a professor of global environmental health at Duke University and works in the US and China.
"You can definitely smell the pollution. Your eyes itch, you cough. It's like a very rich, dense soup when the pollution levels are very high: thousands of chemicals, gases that are irritants, carcinogens.

"We have particles that have a diameter smaller than a virus. Human hair is very big compared to these. The larger ones will be deposited into the lung - that's the biggest worry. But recent scientific evidence shows that when the particles are small enough they go into the bloodstream, they can go directly into the brain.

"It's very hard to get data to show whether the pollution is going to have a long-lasting effect, like a cancer, but there is a reason to believe that, because the pollution soup contains chemicals which can induce cancer.

"It's very frustrating to see pollution get worse after the huge effort which went into cleaning up the air in Beijing for the Olympics.

"I did several studies demonstrating that if you do a temporary intervention to bring the air pollution down, [and] measure cardiovascular and respiratory health indicators in young healthy people, all those indicators significantly improve.

"Women whose pregnancy was during those eight weeks of improved air quality got babies with a significantly higher birth weight, and we have a large database to show that in general if your birth weight is higher, your later life is healthier.

"In 2008 the air quality data was considered a state secret. The government was in a denial stage for years until 2013 when those huge episodes happened, and then they started to say 'This is real now'. Because of [prioritising] economic interest over public health interest, the way they implement the existing air quality regulations is very inefficient.

"Although it's now getting much better - the urgency is there - it's still very challenging."

Hongjun Zhan: Legislation is better; enforcement is still weak
Hongjun Zhan used to write China's air pollution laws and now works for a US law firm advising foreign companies operating in China.
"Back in the late 1980s, people didn't really think about air issues at that time. The pressure [to get the legislation right] was not big at all.

"From the late 1980s to, let's say, the year 2000, just about a dozen years, that air quality has been getting worse and worse.

"In many situations, industry discharges pollutants without meeting standards. And very often they are not penalised by the enforcement officers.

"The law drafters today are doing a much better job than I did. The environmental laws today are more aggressive: [more] detailed, accurate, and comprehensive than the law I wrote.

"Enforcement is still not good enough. It is slightly better, but it's still far from where it should be."

Li Yan: 'Red alerts' represent real progress
Li Yan is the voice of Greenpeace in China.
"Actually what's happening in China right now is quite positive. [The red alert] is a sign of progress in government's understanding of how they should react and respond to these extreme conditions.

"Not only is it responding to 20 million Beijingers' demand for clean air, it's also setting a precedent for many other Chinese cities to follow.

"After the 'airpocalypse' in 2011/2012, the central government responded with a National Air Pollution Action Plan. At the core of that is a scheme to cut back coal use in the big metropolitan regions.

"Beijing's extreme pollution and the 'red alert' are connected to China's addiction to coal burning, and it's very energy intensive way of industrial growth. Coal burning is the biggest single source of air pollution in China, and burning of coal, has for the first time in this century declined in 2014 compared to 2013.

"That's a very significant thing. As a result air quality in the major cities like Beijing and regions in the Yangtze River Delta has seen improvements.

"Greenpeace has been capturing the government-released hour-by-hour data of 190 cities, and only 15% of them have seen an increase of their readings, and all the rest of them are more or less improved.

"We're seeing renewable energy picking up and taking larger share of total power use in China, and then it's actually already eating up the market space of coal.

"New coal power plants are still being proposed and still being invested [in] by local government and state-owned enterprises as if it was still the good old days. However I doubt there will be enough demand to support them, and they will very likely become idle plants."

Mun Ho: Economic slowdown is complicating anti-pollution efforts
Mun Ho is an economist at the Harvard University China project, specialising in Chinese environmental policies, and is a visiting scholar at Resources for the Future in Washington, DC.
"The Chinese system is very decentralised: the provincial and local city authorities have a lot of power. And it is not a simple matter of the central government in Beijing pressing a button and all the laws are enforced.

"All the city environmental protection bureaus are in charge of enforcing [pollution] laws, and you can imagine there is a wide range of enforcement standards across the country.

"For the past 30 years, the main criteria of promotion other than maintaining security, is economic growth, the competition to bring jobs and growth.

"We should align incentives so that the environmental officials have the incentive to enforce the rules throughout the system, not just the central government.

"The unexpected economic slowdown and the prolonged global recession has been a new challenge. It is complicating efforts to convince people to put in costly pollution equipment and to think about energy-saving technologies.

"China is officially growing at about 7%, but that hides quite a big range of experience. In some places - in the 'rust belts' - growth has really decelerated, perhaps even to 2%.

"The priority obviously then is to prevent layoffs and factory shutdowns. They have to worry about social stability if there is high unemployment.

"The issue really is spending a bigger part of the government's budget on pollution control equipment. Governments today are rich enough that this is no longer such a very big issue. We are not talking about building houses versus building pollution control equipment. This is no longer the stark choice facing China today."

The Inquiry is broadcast on the BBC World Service on Tuesdays from 12:05 GMT. Listen online or download the podcast.

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The air in much of China is so bad the government has repeatedly declared "war" on it. The enemy are tiny particulates which spew forth from countless cars, coal-fired power stations and steel plants to create a dense, putty-coloured smog.

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As shadow banking is reined in, the impact on the global economy is already clear

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The Cultural Revolution (文化大革命, Wenhua Dageming, 1966-1976) was a mass campaign of enormous dimensions. Aside from the general revolutionary high-tide that swept China, the period was marked by a large number of sub-campaigns. Indeed, whenever the situation called for a shift in orientation within the larger framework of the Cultural Revolution, this was engineered by setting in motion a new campaign.

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Stratfor examines China's geography as the historical driver of its expanding and contracting national boundaries emanating from the Han core. For more analysis, visit: http://www.Stratfor.com

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Inside Look At Apple's Chinese Sweatshops!

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CLICK TO WATCH FULL DOCUMENTARY ONLINE: http://www.docsonline.tv/documentary/271 THIS FRAGMENT OF THE DOCUMENTARY "CHINA ON CHINA, SUN WIND BUT NO WATER" IS FOR PROMOTION PURPOSES ONLY. WE DO NOT OWN THE MATERIAL EXCLUSIVELY, BUT HAVE A LICENSE CONTRACT FOR INTERNET STREAMING.

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On this page it talked about how China has been cut off from a majority of the world and how it had seen its self many years ago as the only civilization in the world. And the meaning of population growth and how it is estimated.

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Now on this page it went over another plan that leader Mao Zedong had, he planned on keeping China inward and not interacting with other countries and to push for people to be self sufficient and to follow under his command and if you didn't do what he said you would be sent to prison. This, as did his first plan, failed and many people were sent to prison because of it and this high imprisonment sent China into chaos. So after Mao's death, the new leaders of China started to stretch out to foreign countries for business opportunities. Originally they wanted foreign businesses to join them and let China take over the business, but from the out cries of business, they created a new system called the SEZs this would be marked areas were their would be different laws that allowed companies to make their own decisions with marketing and costs this is what started the big exports from China. This burst in marketing also brought jobs making people move to the areas bursting even the population in them. Sadly, even with the growth of jobs, it can't handle all the money. So there seems to be a gap between the rich and poor so it has been causing more crime and not everyone can get a good paying job as well.

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Over the years China has been accumulating a lot of toxic pollution and this pollution sadly has been spreading to other countries around the world and has been possibly giving China's population health problems. So to counteract this toxic pollution from coal burning and to fix it they try to use equipment to clean the air as the coal is being burnt but this has been seen as too expensive so they have tried to us more Hydroelectric power which utilizes dams to produce energy. Now this has been proven to help with the common floods and has been noted at destroying relics and nature in China.

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This page talked about Mao Zedong a leader of China who pushed for families to have more children so that China could have more workers for a push in becoming a more modern type of China. But sadly this plan did not work, because at the time of his plan droughts were going on throughout China, so many people died from starvation. So after Mao's death, the government came up with a plan to keep the countries from another deadly drought. This plan did bring up pro's and cons some of the pros were actually that there's more food and enough jobs for people rather than too many people and few jobs also it seems to create a healthier home with fewer people and giving the family more money to use. Some of the cons through are the strict laws that were put into place that gave people harsh punishments for just having two kids or more. This sadly, has started uproar from people who dont want to be told how many kids they wanted and sons are now seen as superior than daughters because they can keep the family name going and with this their probably won't be enough wives in the future for them.

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In the introduction they introduced us to a famine that had happened in the 1870s presumably because  of a drought that is said to have been based off of a population boom at the time. With this drought almost 10 million people lost their lives to hunger and because of these droughts, population booms and deaths the modern China of today is trying to reach something called a zero population growth were the same numbers of baby's born in a year are some what or identical to how many people died that year.