Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: How provinces are there in China?
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.
Group D
Mongolia is divided into 21 provinces (aimags) and subdivided into 329 districts (sums). The capital Ulaanbaatar is administrated separately as a capital city (municipality) with provincial status. The "aimags" are:
The provinces of Peru () are the second-level administrative subdivisions of the country. They are divided into districts (). There are 196 provinces in Peru, grouped into 25 regions except for the Lima Province which does not belong to any region. This makes an average of seven provinces per region. The region with the fewest provinces is Callao (one) and the region with the most is Ancash (twenty).
China Proper is divided by the Qinling range into highly dissimilar north and south agricultural areas. In semitropical south China, rainfall is relatively abundant and the growing season long. Rice has been the predominant grain crop. The paddies can generally be irrigated with water from rivers or other sources. Although much of the soil is acid red clay, the heavy use of fertilizer (at one time organic but by the mid-1980s also including a large proportion of chemical nutrients) supports high yields. Frequently two or even three crops a year are cultivated on the same land. Food crops other than rice are also grown, most frequently in hilly areas or during the winter. These include potatoes and winter wheat. The highest grain yields in the country in the mid-1980s were generally found in the Sichuan Basin, the lower Yangtze River Valley, and Guangdong and Fujian provinces, where multiple cropping of rice and other crops was the typical pattern. Cotton, tea, and industrial crops were also produced there.
China has the longest combined land border in the world, measuring from the mouth of the Yalu River to the Gulf of Tonkin. China borders 14 nations, more than any other country except Russia, which also borders 14. China extends across much of East Asia, bordering Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar (Burma) in Southeast Asia; India, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in South Asia; Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan in Central Asia; and Russia, Mongolia, and North Korea in Inner Asia and Northeast Asia. Additionally, China shares maritime boundaries with South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
The country of Mongolia is divided into 21 provinces (, "aimag") and the capital (нийслэл, "niislel") Ulaanbaatar.
Punjab (Urdu, Punjabi: , "panj-āb", "five waters": ) is Pakistan's second largest province by area, after Balochistan, and it is the most populated province, with an estimated population of 110,012,442 as of 2017. Forming the bulk of the transnational Punjab region, it is bordered by the Pakistan provinces of Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the enclave of Islamabad, and Azad Kashmir. It also shares borders with the Indian states of Punjab, Rajasthan and Jammu and Kashmir. The provincial capital of Punjab is the city Lahore, a cultural, historical, economic and cosmopolitan centre of Pakistan where the country's cinema industry, and much of its fashion industry, are based.
Shandong is one of the richer provinces of China, and its economic development focuses on large enterprises with well-known brand names. Shandong is the biggest industrial producer and one of the top manufacturing provinces in China. Shandong has also benefited from South Korean and Japanese investment and tourism, due to its geographical proximity to those countries. The richest part of the province is the Shandong Peninsula, where the city of Qingdao is home to three of the most well-known brand names of China: Tsingtao Beer, Haier and Hisense. In addition, Dongying's oil fields and petroleum industries form an important component of Shandong's economy. Despite the primacy of Shandong's energy sector, the province has also been plagued with problems of inefficiency and ranks as the largest consumer of fossil fuels in all of China.
Sichuan has been historically known as the "Province of Abundance". It is one of the major agricultural production bases of China. Grain, including rice and wheat, is the major product with output that ranked first in China in 1999. Commercial crops include citrus fruits, sugar cane, sweet potatoes, peaches and grapes. Sichuan also had the largest output of pork among all the provinces and the second largest output of silkworm cocoons in 1999. Sichuan is rich in mineral resources. It has more than 132 kinds of proven underground mineral resources including vanadium, titanium, and lithium being the largest in China. The Panxi region alone possesses 13.3% of the reserves of iron, 93% of titanium, 69% of vanadium, and 83% of the cobalt of the whole country. Sichuan also possesses China's largest proven natural gas reserves, the majority of which is transported to more developed eastern regions.
China is the most populated country in the world and its national population density (137/km) is similar to those of Switzerland and the Czech Republic. The overall population density of China conceals major regional variations, the western and northern part have a few million people, while eastern half has about 1.3 billion. The vast majority of China's population lives near the east in major cities.
In the 11 provinces, special municipalities, and autonomous regions along the southeast coast, population density was 320.6 people per km.
Tibet, the homeland of 7 million Tibetans, about half of whom live in the Tibetan Autonomous Region ("Tibet") and slightly more in the neighboring provinces of Qinghai, Yunnan, Gansu and Sichuan, lies for the most part within the People's Republic of China. For centuries Tibet resisted Chinese influence and control, with varying effectiveness. During periods when China was dominant, little more was involved than a Chinese governor and a garrison in Lhasa and Chinese administration in border areas such as Amdo and Kham with mixed populations of Tibetans and Chinese; no attempt was made by the Chinese to displace the Tibetan aristocracy or political and religious institutions of Tibet. From 1912 until 1950, Tibet experienced a period of "de facto" independence from Chinese rule, following the fall of the Qing dynasty. However, in 1950 the Chinese successfully incorporated Tibet and its outlying areas, occupied it, displaced Tibetan political and religious institutions, and assumed governance of the nation. Tibetan resistance since 1950 has taken a variety of forms, including instances of armed resistance that has been described as terrorism by Chinese authorities.
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.
The People's Republic of China (PRC) officially recognizes 56 distinct ethnic groups, the largest of which are Han, who constitute 91.51% of the total population in 2010. Ethnic minorities constitute 8.49% or 113.8 million of China's population in 2010. During the past decades ethnic minorities have experienced higher growth rates than the majority Han population, because they are not under the one-child policy. Their proportion of the population in China has grown from 6.1% in 1953, to 8.04% in 1990, 8.41% in 2000, and 8.49% in 2010. Large ethnic minorities (data according to the 2000 census) include the Zhuang (16 million, 1.28%), Manchu (10 million, 0.84%), Uyghur (9 million, 0.78%), Hui (9 million, 0.71%), Miao (8 million, 0.71%), Yi (7 million, 0.61%), Tujia (5.75 million, 0.63%), Mongols (5 million, 0.46%), Tibetan (5 million, 0.43%), Buyei (3 million, 0.23%), and Korean (2 million, 0.15%).
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.
The country of Belgium is divided into three regions. Two of these regions, the Flemish Region or Flanders, and Walloon Region, or Wallonia, are each subdivided into five provinces. The third region, the Brussels-Capital Region, is not divided into provinces, as it was originally only a small part of a province itself.
Mongolia is divided into 21 Provinces (, often translated as aimags) and one provincial municipality. Each aimag is subdivided into several districts.
The modern provinces have been established since 1921. The capital, Ulaanbaatar, is governed as an independent provincial municipality separate from Töv Province, inside which it is situated.
Belgium, a federalized state, geographically consists of 3 regions, of which only the Flemish Region and the Walloon Region are subdivided into five provinces each; the Brussels-Capital Region is neither a province nor is it part of one.
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.
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.
Internal migration in the People's Republic of China is one of the most extensive in the world according to the International Labour Organization. In fact, research done by Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington suggests that "In the 30 years since 1979, China's urban population has grown by about 440 million to 622 million in 2009. Of the 440 million increase, about 340 million was attributable to net migration and urban reclassification. Even if only half of that increase was migration, the volume of rural-urban migration in such a short period is likely the largest in human history." Migrants in China are commonly members of a floating population, which refers primarily to migrants in China without local household registration status through the Chinese Hukou system. In general, rural-urban migrant workers are most excluded from local educational resources, citywide social welfare programs and many jobs because of their lack of hukou status. Migrant workers are not necessarily rural workers; they can simply be people living in urban areas with rural household registration.
Pereira's manuscript starts in the style of a geographical overview. Like most later geographical works on China, he starts with listing China's provinces ("shires", in Willis' translation), stating that there are 13 of them, giving names of 11 of them and a brief information about some, and concluding that for "Confu", Yunnan and Sichuan, "how many towns [those] three shires have, we are ignorant as yet, as also of the proper names of the twelfth and thirteenth shires, and the towns therein". This shows that Pereira (or his early Jesuit editors) were not in possession of the information that the Lisbon historian João de Barros had when writing the Third of his "Décadas da Ásia" (published 1563, but written much earlier), which correctly lists all fifteen provinces of the Ming China.
Since the 17th century, provincial boundaries in China have remained largely static. Major changes since then have been the reorganization of provinces in the northeast after the establishment of the People's Republic of China and the formation of autonomous regions, based on Soviet ethnic policies. The provinces serve an important cultural role in China, as people tend to identify with their native province.
Near the end of the Qing Dynasty, there was an effort to extend the province system of China proper to the rest of the empire. Taiwan was made into a separate province in 1885, but was ceded to Japan in 1895. Xinjiang was reorganized into a province in 1884. Manchuria was split into the three provinces of Fengtian, Jilin and Heilongjiang in 1907. There was discussion to do the same in Tibet, Kokonor, Inner Mongolia, and Outer Mongolia, but these proposals were not put to practice, and these areas were outside the province system of China proper when the Qing Dynasty fell in 1912.
The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) kept the province system set up by the Yuan Dynasty, however, it divided the original 10 provinces into 16 provinces, later 2 capital metropolitan areas and 13 provinces () within China proper and 5 additional military ruled regions.
By the time of the establishment of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) in 1644 there were 18 provinces, all of them in China proper ().Each province had a "xunfu" (; translated as "governor"), a political overseer on behalf of the emperor, and a "tidu" (; translated as "captain general"), a military governor. In addition, there was a "zongdu" (), a general military inspector or governor general, for every two to three provinces.