Having just read When a Billion Chinese Jump, and learned a whole lot in the process, I thought I’d do a special China edition. Perhaps the most striking thing about China is how big it is. Coming from a small country, it’s just a whole other dimension.
- The three gorges dam reservoir is the length of England
- China has 200-300 million migrant workers, just short of the entire population of the USA.
- Changtan nature reserve is 50% bigger than Britain
- China has 120 cities over a million-strong
- Half the new buildings built worldwide between now and 2050 will be built in China.
- China has half the world’s 45,000 large dams, and president Hu Jintao is a hydro engineer. Not that water projects are anything new in the country – the Dujiangyan irrigation system is over 2,000 years old and still working beautifully.
The Earthbound Report 