The people of China

In China there are about 1.4 billion people. In the cities most people live very close to each other in high rise buildings. About 55% of the population live in cities.

Life in the countryside is very simple. Usually people cook over an open fire and don't have any electricity or running water in every house.

A lot of the Chinese kids go to school for five or six years. In the cities, and if you have money in the family, you can continue going to school even after this. The schools are quite traditional, and you need to learn stuff by heart and prove what you know in tests. In the countryside, a larger part of the population are illiterate (analfabeter) than in the cities. This is also true for the older people, compared to the younger. In 2009, an estimated 85 million people were illiterate. In this, and many other respects, China is a third world country.

The average life span of Chinese women is 78 years, and for men 73.

When the Chinese government realised that there were going to be too many people in the country, they decided that every husband and wife could have only one child (the so called one child policy). As a consequence of this, a lot of families only wanted boys, as it's the son that takes care of his parents when they get old. The daughter often moves to her husband's family and takes care of his parents together with him. No, there are too many boys and too few girls in China, and the government has allowed people to have two children instead of one.