Summer in Shanghai: Chinese Language
Host Country & City
Everything about China is big. Its population, 1.3 billion, is the largest in
the world. Its area 3,705,405 square miles (9,596,960 square kilometers) is the
fourth largest, after that of Russia, Canada, and the US, while it also has the
world's largest labor force, with 803,300,000 workers.
China has one of the world's oldest
people and continuous civilizations, consisting of states and cultures
dating back more than six millennia. It has the world's longest
continuously used written language system, and is the source of such
major inventions like paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
Historically China's cultural sphere has been very influential in East
Asia as a whole, with Chinese religion, customs, and writing system
being adapted, to varying degrees, by its neighbors Japan, Korea, and
Vietnam. It is a multi-religious country where Buddhism, Taoism, Islam,
Catholicism and Protestantism co-exist, with the first three being more
wide spread.
The People's Republic of China is a unified,
multi-national country, comprising 56 nationalities. The Han people
make up 91.02 percent of the total population, leaving 8.98 percent for
the other 55 ethnic minorities.
Undoubtedly, as China grows and
develops it becomes more and more influential, while with its human
resources and development rate it will soon became one of the dominant
players in the world scene. By becoming acquainted with the Chinese
language and culture you will be a step forward in embracing the forces
that will be shaping the future.
Shanghai
Shanghai
is the largest city in China in terms of population and one of the
largest urban areas in the world, with over 20 million people in its
extended metropolitan area.
Located on China's central eastern coast at the mouth of the Yangtze River it
developed from a fishing and textiles town in the 19th century to a center of
commerce between east and west, and became a multinational hub of finance and
business by the 1930s. After the 1949 Communist takeover and the cessation of
foreign investment, the city's prosperity halted only to boom once more with intense
development and financing after the 1990 economic reforms. In 2005 Shanghai became
the world's largest port.
The city is an
up-and-coming tourist destination well-known for its historical
landmarks such as the Xintiandi and the Bund, its modern and
ever-expanding Pudong skyline including the Oriental Pearl Tower, and
its new reputation as a cosmopolitan center of culture and design.
Today, the city is recognized as China's most important centre of
commerce and finance, and is widely regarded as a future global city.
Because
of Shanghai's status as the cultural and economic center of East Asia
for the first half of the twentieth century, it is generally seen as
the birthplace of everything considered modern in China. The city has
also been the intellectual battleground between socialist writers who
concentrated on critical realism and the more "bourgeois", more
romantic and aesthetically inclined writers. Besides literature,
Shanghai was also the birthplace of Chinese cinema & theater.
The
city hosts several museums of national and regional importance, like
the Shanghai Museum of Art and History, the Shanghai Art Museum, and
the Shanghai Natural History Museum. In addition, there are many
smaller, specialized museums, some housed in important historical sites
such as the site of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea
and the site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of
China.
The city of Shanghai has hosted a number of world events,
including the 2007 Summer Special Olympics and a Live Earth concert.
The city will be the host of the Expo 2010 World's Fair between May and
October 2010.
All in all, Shanghai combines the best that a
modern global metropolis has to offer with the old-time, traditional
flavor of a great Far East civilization.
