Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Is China a part of South Asia?
Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of Japan, Korea and China, east of India, west of Papua New Guinea, and north of Australia. Southeast Asia is bordered to the north by East Asia, to the west by South Asia and the Bay of Bengal, to the east by Oceania and the Pacific Ocean, and to the south by Australia and the Indian Ocean. The region is the only part of Asia that lies partly within the Southern Hemisphere, although the majority of it is in the Northern Hemisphere. In contemporary definition, Southeast Asia consists of two geographic regions:
The Himalayan states are a group of countries straddling the Himalayan mountain range in Asia. The area is divided between the Western Himalaya and the Eastern Himalaya. Two sovereign states, Nepal and Bhutan, are located almost entirely within the mountain range. The range also covers the southern Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, the Indian Himalayan states of North and Northeast India and northern Pakistan.
Nepal (; ), officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is located mainly in the Himalayas but also includes parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. With an estimated population of 26.4 million, it is 48th largest country by population and 93rd largest country by area. It borders China in the north and India in the south, east, and west while Bangladesh is located within only 27 km (17 mi) of its southeastern tip and Bhutan is separated from it by the Indian state of Sikkim. Nepal has a diverse geography, including fertile plains, subalpine forested hills, and eight of the world's ten tallest mountains, including Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. Kathmandu is the nation's capital and largest city. Nepal is a multiethnic nation with Nepali as the official language.
Closer to home, China has made efforts to reduce tensions in parts of Asia; its relations with its Asian neighbors have become stable during the last decades of the 20th century. It has contributed to stability on the Korean Peninsula, cultivated a more cooperative relationship with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) (Brunei, Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam), and participated in the ASEAN Regional Forum. In 1997, the ASEAN member nations and China, South Korea and Japan agreed to hold yearly talks to further strengthen regional cooperation, the ASEAN Plus Three meetings. In 2005, the "ASEAN Plus Three" countries together with India, Australia and New Zealand held the inaugural East Asia Summit (EAS). Relations have improved with Vietnam since a border war was fought with the one-time close ally in 1979. A territorial dispute with its Southeast Asian neighbors over islands in the South China Sea remains unresolved, as does another dispute in the East China Sea with Japan. These conflicts have had a negative impact on China's reputation in many parts of the world.
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Although China's agricultural output is the largest in the world, only about 15% of its total land area can be cultivated. About 75% of the cultivated area is used for food crops. Rice is China's most important crop, raised on about 25% of the cultivated area. Most rice is grown south of the Huai River, in the Yangtze valley, the Zhu Jiang delta, and in Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces.
Vietnam (, ; ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (), is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula. With an estimated /1e6 round 1 million inhabitants , it is the 15th most populous country in the world. Vietnam is bordered by China to the north, Laos and Cambodia to the west, part of Thailand to the southwest, and the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia across the South China Sea to the east and southeast. Its capital city has been Hanoi since the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976, while its most populous city is Ho Chi Minh City.
The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), a contiguous block of countries, started in 1985 with seven countriesBangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lankaand added Afghanistan as an eighth member in 2007. China and Myanmar have also applied for the status of full members of SAARC. This bloc of countries include two independent countries that were not part of the British Raj – Nepal, and Bhutan. Afghanistan was a British protectorate from 1878 until 1919, after the Afghans lost to the British in the Second Anglo-Afghan war. The World Factbook, based on geo-politics, people, and economy defines South Asia as comprising Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, British Indian Ocean Territory, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The South Asia Free Trade Agreement incorporated Afghanistan in 2011, and the World Bank grouping of countries in the region also includes all eight members comprising South Asia and SAARC as well, and the same goes for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
The United Nations Statistics Division's scheme of sub-regions include all eight members of the SAARC as part of Southern Asia, along with Iran only for statistical purposes. Population Information Network (POPIN) includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as part of South Asia. Maldives, in view of its characteristics, was admitted as a member Pacific POPIN subregional network only in principle. The Hirschman–Herfindahl index of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific for the region includes only the original seven signatories of SAARC.
Vietnam – sovereign country located on the eastern extent of the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea to the east. With a population of over 86 million, Vietnam is the 13th most populous country in the world.
The Climate of Asia is wet across southeast sections, and dry across much of the interior. Some of the largest daily temperature ranges on Earth occur in western sections of Asia. The monsoon circulation dominates across southern and eastern sections, due to the presence of the Himalayas forcing the formation of a thermal low which draws in moisture during the summer. Southwestern sections of the continent experience low relief as a result of the subtropical high pressure belt; they are hot in the summer, warm to cool in winter, and may snow at higher altitudes. Siberia is one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere, and can act as a source of arctic air masses for North America. The most active place on Earth for tropical cyclone activity lies northeast of the Philippines and south of Japan, and the phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation modulates where in Asia landfall is more likely to occur.
In China, both Beijing and Tianjin are independent of the surrounding province of Hebei, of which they were formerly a part. Similarly, Shanghai is now independent from Jiangsu and Chongqing from Sichuan. Hong Kong and Macao have the status of special administrative regions, separated from their original province Guangdong. The People's Republic of China regards Taiwan as its 23rd province, with Taipei as its capital. However, in practice, the non-recognized Republic of China administers six cities, formerly part of the Republic of China's Taiwan Province, as special municipalities: Kaohsiung, New Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, Taipei and Taoyuan. The People's Republic of China continues to recognize these territories as an integral part of Taiwan Province.
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local language varieties or dialects, many of which are not mutually intelligible. The differences are similar to those within the Romance languages, with variation particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast. A widely quoted classification divides these varieties into seven groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Hakka and Yue, though a more recent classification splits some of these to obtain ten groups, and some varieties remain unclassified.
China has four times the population of the U.S., within roughly the same area. With 1.3 billion inhabitants, 20% of the world’s population lives in China. While the rate of population growth has been declining for decades, the total number of inhabitants has been growing and is expected to do so through 2030. China’s urban population is growing rapidly; between 1950 and 2009, the percentage of the population living in urban areas quadrupled from 14% to 48%. Meanwhile, the rural population is declining, opening the landscape in areas that are not urbanized. The forests and farming land of eastern China support far more people and major cities than do the grasslands, deserts, and high mountain regions of the west.
In South America, a phenomenon known as the El Nino Oscillation Cycle, between floods and drought on the Pacific Coast has made as much as a 35% difference in Global yields of wheat and grain.
Kazakhstan is located in Central Asia and Eastern Europe at . With an area of about 2,724,800 square kilometers, Kazakhstan is more than twice the combined size of the other four Central Asian states and 60% larger than Alaska. The country borders Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan to the south; Russia to the north; Russia and the Caspian Sea to the west; and China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region to the east.
The term "Taiwan, Province of China" also appears in the International Organization for Standardization's ISO 3166-1 country codes because its information source, the publication "UN Terminology Bulletin-Country Names", lists Taiwan as "Taiwan, Province of China" due to the PRC's political influence in the United Nations as a member of the UN Security Council. Since the ISO 3166-1 code is commonly used as the data source for a complete list of country and territory names for computer programs and websites, "Taiwan, Province of China" is sometimes seen on dropdown menus instead of "Taiwan" for this reason.
China's official 55 minorities are located primarily in the south, west, and north of China. Only Tibet Autonomous Region and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have a majority population of official minorities, while all other provinces, municipalities and regions of China have a Han majority. In Beijing itself, the Han ethnic composition makes up nearly 96% of the total population, while the ethnic minority total is 4.31%, or a population of 584,692 (as of 2008).
About 75% of China's cultivated area is used for food crops. Rice is China's most important crop, raised on about 25% of the cultivated area. The majority of rice is grown south of the Huai River, in the Zhu Jiang delta, and in the Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces.
India is a country located in southern Asia. With over 1.3 billion people, India is the most populous democracy in the world. It is a federal constitutional republic governed under a parliamentary system consisting of 29
states and 7 union territories. All states, as well as the union territories of Puducherry and the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have elected legislatures and governments, both patterned on the Westminster model. The remaining five union territories are directly ruled by the centre through appointed administrators. In 1956, under the States Reorganisation Act, states were reorganised on a linguistic basis. Since then, their structure has remained largely unchanged. Each state or union territory is further divided into administrative districts..
Guangdong (; formerly romanised as Kwangtung or Canton Province) is a province in South China, on the South China Sea coast. Guangdong surpassed Henan and Shandong to become the most populous province in China in January 2005, registering 79.1 million permanent residents and 31 million migrants who lived in the province for at least six months of the year; the total population was 104,303,132 in the 2010 census, accounting for 7.79 percent of Mainland China's population. This also makes it the most populous first-level administrative subdivision of any country outside of South Asia, as its population is surpassed only by those of the Pakistani province of Punjab and the Indian states of Bihar, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. The provincial capital Guangzhou and economic hub Shenzhen are among the most populous and important cities in China. The population increase since the census has been modest, the province registering 108,500,000 people in 2015.
When Pannotia disintegrated 550 million years ago, South China (and North China) became part of and remained with Eastern Gondwana for millions of years. Late in the Silurian (175 million years later after Pannotia's disintegration), South China (and North China), rifted away from Gondwana and moved across the ancient, shrinking Proto-Tethys Ocean. A new ocean was forming , Paleo-Tethys Ocean. By the Late Carboniferous (300 million years ago), while North China collided with Siberia and Kazakhstania, completely closing the Proto-Tethys Ocean, South China became an independent continent. For much of the Permian Period, South China remained in the tropical latitudes. And also, while most of the giant lycopods of the Carboniferous disappeared, giant lycopods remained in South China, since its isolation from the now formed Pangaea. Cimmeria, a microcontinent that consisted of today's Tibet, Iran, Turkey, and parts of Southeast Asia rifted away from Gondwana (just as North and South China did earlier), and was heading towards Laurasia. Paleo-Tethys Ocean started to shrink, while the new Tethys Ocean expanded. In the Middle Triassic, the eastern portion of Cimmeria collided with South China, and together drew northwards, towards Laurasia.
The South China Sea is a marginal sea that is part of the Pacific Ocean, encompassing an area from the Karimata and Malacca Straits to the Strait of Taiwan of around . The sea carries tremendous strategic importance; one-third of the world's shipping passes through it carrying over $3 trillion in trade each year, it contains lucrative fisheries that are crucial for the food security of millions in Southeast Asia, and huge oil and gas reserves are believed to lie beneath its seabed.
In 2003, China acknowledged Sikkim as a part of India while India recognized Tibet as part of China. The Dalai Lama has often asserted that Tibet should be given meaningful autonomy within China, not independence. In 2005, the King of Nepal imposed direct rule, which led to the monarchy's overthrow, the end of the civil war, and the creation of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal in 2008. Bhutan held its first general election in 2008.
China and Japan are more humid and temperate than adjacent Siberia and Central Asia, and are home to rich temperate coniferous, broadleaf, and mixed forests, which are now mostly limited to mountainous areas, as the densely populated lowlands and river basins have been converted to intensive agricultural and urban use. East Asia was not much affected by glaciation in the ice ages. In the subtropical southern parts of China and Japan, the Palearctic temperate forests transition to the subtropical and tropical forests of Indomalaya, creating a rich and diverse mix of plant and animal species. The mountains of southwest China are also designated as a biodiversity hotspot, the Himalayas containing for example about 8% of the world’s bird species. In Southeastern Asia, high mountain ranges form tongues of Palearctic flora and fauna in northern Myanmar and southern China. Isolated small outposts (sky islands) occur as far south as central Myanmar, northernmost Vietnam and the high mountains of Taiwan.