ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief historical background and a description of major events in China. It also provides basic political, economic, and social data arranged in the following categories: polity, economy, population, purchasing power parities, life expectancy, ethnic groups, capital, political rights, civil liberties, and status. The chapter discusses the progress and decline of political rights and civil liberties in China. China's leaders prepared in 2001 for a party congress in late 2002 that is likely to usher in a younger generation of rulers. The government has also tried to crush independence movements among the seven million ethnic Uighurs and other, smaller Turkic-speaking groups in China's northwestern Xinjiang province. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) runs China as a single- party state, prohibiting opposition parties, controlling the judiciary, and restricting sharply most basic rights. China's one-child family planning policy is applied fairly strictly in the cities and less so in the countryside, where 70 percent of the population lives.
