China (Imperishable Morning)

The Republic of China (ROC; Chinese: 中華民國; pinyin: Zhōnghuá Mínguó), is a sovereign state in East Asia. It is the world's third most populous country, with a population of over 1.19 billion. The ROC is a multi-party state with its seat of government in the capital city of Nanjing. It exercises jurisdiction over 18 provinces, four autonomous regions, and four direct-controlled municipalities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing).

The history of China goes back to the ancient civilization – one of the world's earliest – that flourished in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, China's political system was based on hereditary monarchies, known as dynasties, beginning with the semi-mythological Xia of the Yellow River basin (c. 2000 BCE). Since 221 BCE, when the Qin Dynasty first conquered several states to form a Chinese empire, the country has expanded, fractured and been reformed numerous times. The Republic of China (ROC) overthrew the last dynasty in 1911, and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1947. After China lost to Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Reorganised National Government had came into power on the eighteenth day of the fifth month in 1947 and managed to defeat both Chiang Kai-shek's faction of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists.

China had the largest and most complex economy in the world for most of the past two thousand years, during which it has seen cycles of prosperity and decline. Since the introduction of economic reforms in 1985, China has become one of the world's fastest-growing major economies. As of 2014, it is the world's second-largest economy by both nominal total GDP and purchasing power parity (PPP), and is also the world's second largest exporter and importer of goods behind Japan. China has the world's second largest standing army, with the second-largest defence budget. The ROC has been a founder of the League of Nations, where it serves as one of the five permanent members of the League of Nations Security Council. China is a major power within Asia and has been characterised as a potential superpower by a number of commentators.