China is the largest of all Asian countries. Occupying nearly the entire East Asian landmass, it covers approximately one-fourteenth of the land area of Earth, and it is almost as big as the whole of Europe.

China is also one of the most populous countries in the world, rivaled only by India, which, according to United Nations estimates, surpassed it in population in 2023.

With more than 4,000 years of recorded history, China is one of the few countries that have flourished economically and culturally in the earliest stages of world civilization.

Despite the political and social upheavals that frequently have ravaged the country, China is unique among nations in its longevity as a politico-cultural unit.

Much of China’s cultural development has been accomplished with relatively little outside influence, the introduction of Buddhism from India being a major exception. Even when such foreign powers as the Manchu penetrated the country, these groups soon became largely absorbed into the fabric of the Chinese culture.

China has been a socialist country since 1949, and, for nearly all of that time, the government has played the top role in the economy.

In the industrial sector, for instance, the state long owned outright nearly all of the firms producing China's manufacturing output, and even though the proportion of overall industrial capacity controlled by the government has gradually declined, heavy industries have remained largely state-owned.

In the urban sectors, the government sets the prices for key commodities, determines the level and general distribution of investment funds, prescribes output targets for major enterprises and branches, allocates energy resources, sets wage levels and employment targets, runs the wholesale and retail networks, and controls financial policy and the banking system. The foreign trade system became a government monopoly in the early 1950s. In the countryside from the mid-1950s, the government has prescribed cropping patterns, set the level of prices, and fixed output targets for all major crops.

By the early 21st century, the system was changing, as the role of the central government in managing the economy was reduced and the role of both private initiative and market forces increased. Nevertheless, the government has continued to play a dominant role in the urban economy, and its policies on such issues as agricultural procurement still exerted a major influence on performance in the rural sector.

Such control over the economy requires an army of bureaucrats and a highly complicated chain of command, so the Chinese Communist Party reserves the right to make broad decisions on economic priorities and policies, and the government apparatus headed by the State Council assumes the major burden of running the economy. The State Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance also are concerned with the functioning of virtually the entire economy.

According to Amnesty International, China's national security continues to be used as a pretext to prevent the exercise of rights including freedoms of expression, association, and assembly. Both on- and offline discussion of many topics are subject to strict censorship. Human rights defenders are among those subjected to arbitrary detention and unfair trials. The human rights situation in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region remains grave and there's no accountability for grave human rights violations committed against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in the region. UN experts raise new concerns that government policies and programs are contributing to the destruction of the language and culture of ethnic groups, including Tibetans.

Furthermore, women’s rights activists are subjected to harassment, intimidation, arbitrary detention, and unfair trials. Civic space in Hong Kong has become ever more curtailed as the authorities maintain wide-ranging bans on peaceful protests and imprison pro-democracy activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and others on national security-related charges. They also seek out the arrest of opposition activists who are fleeing overseas.